March 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cucumbers, Chiropractors, and Kleptocrats By The Paris Review Kathleen Collins Ever since Nicole first handed me “Scapegoat Child,” the gorgeous yet harrowing piece of short fiction by the late Kathleen Collins in our Spring issue, I’ve found myself returning, time and time again, to the writer’s first posthumous collection of stories, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? The book’s cover, which features a collage by Lorna Simpson of a young woman with a wash of purple ink for hair, sets the tone, and the stories that follow are just as arresting. In them, we hear from people of all shades, each of whom experience torment and love in equal measure. Collins writes of an uncle who can’t keep himself from crying (“I began to weep for him, weep tears of pride and joy that he should have so soaked his life in sorrow and gone back to some ancient ritual beyond the blunt humiliation of his skin”); of a girl who cuts her hair (making her look, in her father’s words, “just like any other colored girl”) and later falls for her professor; of interracial love (“I want to be a Negro for you,” says a white boy to his girlfriend). Put simply, Collins is a marvel, her prose ethereal and haunting and sharp. As Elizabeth Alexander writes in the book’s introduction, “She flinches from nothing.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
March 16, 2018 On Art Zoe Leonard: Archivist of Feeling By Yevgeniya Traps Zoe Leonard, TV Wheelbarrow, 2001, dye transfer print, 20 in. × 16 in. Collection of the New York Public Library; Funds from the Estate of Leroy A. Moses, 2005. Never have I wanted to touch a photograph as badly as I wanted to touch Zoe Leonard’s Red Wall 2001/2003 (Leonard typically includes two dates with each photograph, the first signaling when the photo was taken, the second when it was printed). It’s an image of such saturated—such tactile—redness that it was, for a beat, difficult to accept that it was only a representation of a wall, flat and smooth and framed. Red Wall is a minimalist monochrome wet dream that inspires a maximalist yearning—an outsized, outrageous need. Read More
March 16, 2018 On Art The Original Little Mermaid By Amber Sparks On Kay Nielsen, Disney, and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale. A concept drawing by Kay Nielsen for The Little Mermaid. The mermaid in the illustration was lithe, mysterious, sylphlike. She perched on a rock, inscrutable. For years, I’d been bombarded with the images, books, merchandise, and endless one-offs of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Disney’s Ariel was redheaded, cheerful, an open book—voluptuous in that squeaky-clean cartoon way. She was certainly not the mermaid Hans Christian Andersen envisioned when he wrote his tragic tale. But here was a sad water sprite who was the perfect embodiment of the ambiguous virtues of folklore. I’d stumbled across her online, in a series of concept drawings for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. They had been drawn in the fifties and shelved for thirty years. Read More
March 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Alexandre Dumas By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. If the lavish feasts and epic drinking sessions of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), are any indication, seventeenth-century France was the era of the gourmand. The musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and their young friend d’Artagnan, the Gascon nobleman who is the book’s hero, are frat boys of a different era, men for whom an ordinary evening at home is thus: Porthos was in bed, and was playing a game of lansquenet with Mousqueton [his servant], to keep his hand in; while a spit loaded with partridges was turning before the fire, and on each side of a large chimney-piece, over two chafing dishes, were boiling two stew-pans, from which exhaled a double odour of rabbit and fish stews, rejoicing to the smell. In addition to this … the top of a wardrobe and the marble of a commode were covered with empty bottles. The musketeers know no moderation. They order multiple bottles of wine for a quick drink, and at one point, one of them consumes an entire wine cellar. When Aramis plans to eat an omelet with a side of spinach, his friends ultimately convince him to say to the waiter, “Return from whence you came; take back these horrible vegetables … Order a larded hare, a fat capon, mutton leg dressed with garlic, and four bottles of old Burgundy.” Read More
March 15, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Queer Addiction and “America First” Jingoism By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Dear Poets, I am currently experiencing a strange period. My husband passed away last year, on the day before Thanksgiving. We held a small family memorial in November, a public memorial in February, and will inter his ashes at a small ceremony in April. I am dreading the end of these memorials because I have read that after the final ceremony, usually the burial, the spirit of the recently departed will know that all is well and they will leave to allow the family to move on. We have received many signs that he is here with us, and I don’t want that to end. I dread it so much. Is there a poem for me? Thank you, Don’t Let Him Leave Read More