September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Responsible Freedom: Patti Smith on ‘Little Women’ By Patti Smith Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy growing up in the gender-defined 1950s. Uninterested in preordained activities, I would take off on my blue bicycle, to a secluded place in the woods, and read the books I had checked out, often over and over again, from the local library. I could hardly be found without book in hand and sacrificed sleep and hours at play to enter wholeheartedly each of their unique worlds. Many wonderful books captured my imagination, but in Little Women something extraordinary happened. I recognized myself, as if in a mirror, the lanky headstrong girl, who raced on foot, ripped her skirts climbing trees, spoke in common slang, and denounced social pretensions. A girl who could be found leaning against a great oak with a book, or at her desk in the attic bowed over a manuscript. She was Josephine March. Even her name breathed freedom, a girl called Jo. Louisa May Alcott had wrapped herself in her glory cloak, labored at her own desk, and penned a new kind of heroine. A stubbornly modern nineteenth-century American girl. A girl who wrote. Like countless girls before me, I found a model in one who was not like everyone else, who possessed a revolutionary soul yet also a sense of responsibility. Her dedication to her craft provided my first window into the process of the writer and I was moved with the desire to embrace this vocation as my own. Her missteps, comic to bold, were enviable, giving permission for my own. Read More
September 21, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Book Festivals, Benefactors, and Broken Buttonholes By The Paris Review Terrance Hayes’s abiding interest in Etheridge Knight has perhaps long been established, but Wave Books just this month published To Float in the Space Between, a multifaceted, multi-genre work that ultimately lands somewhere between biography and criticism. Hayes’s meditation on Knight’s legacy and impact on American poetry and the Black Arts Movement is conveyed dynamically and with emotionally weighted nuance through excerpts, criticism, anecdotes, and illustrations. The true pleasure of this book is the perennial one of being allowed the clearance to standby and listen as a brilliant poet thinks deeply and at length about another brilliant poet. —Lauren Kane Read More
September 21, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Distraction By Amit Chaudhuri This is the final installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment. Last year, I commuted between Oxford and Norwich, where I teach in the autumn. On Mondays, I took a train via London; on Tuesday evening, I took the same route back. It’s a four-hour-journey: you travel south and then go up again. On the trains I read work by students, skimmed through the Guardian, charged my phone (the London-Norwich train is old but is allocated with power sockets), wrote emails, applied finishing touches to pieces I’d written, talked to my wife and a couple of friends, and, when I wasn’t doing any of this, which was a large percentage of the time, ranged over my collection of music on my iPhone. I never listen to music on earphones when I’m at home in Calcutta – or in Oxford, where I play songs on a small Bose Bluetooth dock that I carry with me. But, like many others, when I’m traveling I create a makeshift interiority. The temptation to create a portable archive presented itself with the introduction of the smartphone. I deferred carrying Walkmans and MP3 players for much of my life. The iPhone has changed our existence – as we think we know, though we can’t, really, because none of us can experience what it means to live in history. It has changed our children, those who were born at the end of the last millennium or at the start of this one: indeed, the smartphone has invented them. For a long time, we thought the personal computer was destined to take us over. Phones crept upon us unobtrusively. I can no longer recall when I got a Nokia. At first, odd though it may sound, my wife and I shared it. The idea of the personalised phone was still to grow on us. I came similarly late to the iPhone. I can now hardly recall what the words ‘sharing’ and ‘synhronising’ meant in the twentieth century, or for my parents. I have no idea what my daughter’s life would have been like had not the smartphone remade it completely six years ago. It’s useless to speculate on the nature of reality in that way. Read More
September 20, 2018 Look Deana Lawson: A Preview By Deana Lawson Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has created a landscape of found intimacy. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. A selection of photographs from her first monograph is presented below. Mama Goma, 2014 Read More
September 20, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Poor Deluded Human, You Seek My Heart 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. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am the daughter of two wonderful, loving Chinese parents, and I have a supportive boyfriend and caring friends. But still, I somehow find myself dealing with daily feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. I am a humanities major with an uncertain future and less-than-average academics, and I am faced with continual feelings of shame and embarrassment about the lack of effort I put into my studies. My parents are intellectual giants who came from nothing and worked their way up into high-earning jobs so that they could give me the best possible education and life, and I feel as if I have squandered the opportunities they have worked so hard for me to have. To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices, and are constantly caring and understanding. How do I deal with my fears that I will never be able to honor my parents by becoming more successful than them? Sincerely, Dutiful Daughter Dear DD, “To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices” is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance—I am smiling with affectionate recognition. What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” Read More
September 20, 2018 Arts & Culture Looking for Lorraine By Imani Perry Lorraine Hansberry was a giver. Bitterness never prevailed long enough in her spirit to destroy the “lift” that was a such a large part of her talent, and which comes naturally when human beings are created on stage. Mostly we see shadows being titillated into life, only to fall because their authors had no lover for them. I hate and deplore her death. We cannot afford such losses. As she once said of Baldwin: “We should be grateful we have him.” I say: we should be grateful we had her. Although what the hell all these words give her now, I don’t know. Relieve my chest. A gift given too late. —Camille Skirvanek of Brooklyn, in a letter to the New York Times, published January 21, 1965 In the tradition of Alice Walker, who followed the literary and literal maps of Zora Neale Hurston’s home and life, I find myself wanting to stand in the places Lorraine Hansberry stood. I want to make sense of the world in her spaces and on her terms. And I want to tell you about it. It isn’t so pretty. There is as much hell as heaven on this other—after the movement—side. Much has changed, some for better, some worse. Walking in the aftermath teaches this lesson. In the summer of 2017, I wondered somewhat angrily at the absence of a marker for Lorraine in Greenwich Village. But in October 2017, a red plaque was embedded in the rust-colored brick at 112 Waverly Place, in honor of Lorraine. Still, the Village is no longer hers. The multiracial lesbian bar (the only one that was multiracial in New York in the fifties) was a short walk away from her home, and it is gone. It is now a Mexican restaurant, which I don’t expect will last much longer either. It isn’t highbrow. Although the Village has a queer history and present, Lorraine’s presence is faint at best. She’s not really here. Nor is the Bohemia that once was, nor the poor who were there before that. They have been displaced by cool accumulation and edgy wealth. Read More