October 5, 2018 Arts & Culture Why Charles Aznavour’s Global Fame Never Reached American Shores By Franz Nicolay When he passed away this week at the age of ninety-four, the singer, songwriter, and actor Charles Aznavour was still touring. He was a living link to the golden age of French chanson. As a young man, he had been maligned as short and ugly, an immigrant with a hoarse voice, but he became a protégée of Édith Piaf, and then a global star in his own right. While his success in the anglophone world never equaled his renown in other countries, he was, by any reckoning, one of the twentieth century’s most popular entertainers, often referred to as the French Sinatra (Aznavour sang with Sinatra on the latter’s Duets record). He sang in five languages, appeared in at least thirty films, wrote somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand songs, and sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide. “I am popular because I am like everybody in France,” he told Lillian Ross in 1963. “My face is the face of anybody. My voice is the voice of anybody. My face is the face of their hope.” That face was a soft inverted triangle, with mournful, wide-set eyes over a pursed, ironic mouth and parenthetical dimples—atop the trim, muscular but miniature frame of a lightweight boxer (he described himself as “short and a bundle of nerves”). He embodied for many devotees of chanson the combination of masculinity and vulnerability, of sincerity and self-conscious drama, that is a hallmark of the style. Read More
October 5, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Richard Brautigan By Valerie Stivers “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” These are the opening lines of In Watermelon Sugar, the third novel by Richard Brautigan (1935–1984), a poet who was published twenty-three times in Rolling Stone between 1968 and 1970 and who has been called the last of the Beats. The next lines read: “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.” Brautigan achieved literary fame after his second novel, 1967’s Trout Fishing in America, captured the hearts of the counterculture and sold two million copies. He went into decline in the late seventies and early eighties and died by suicide in 1984 at age forty-nine. His books had a groovy design, which he controlled, and a kind of Hemingway-influenced minimalism. They’ve sometimes been called lightweight or dated, but his cult status has held nearly forty years after his death, so it seems his work will stand the test of time. In Watermelon Sugar, my favorite of Brautigan’s books, is a funny little dislocated story about people living in a commune called iDEATH. The novel’s plot, such as it is, concerns possessive and materialistic urges leading to tragedy. In this story, the mysterious substance of watermelon sugar makes up shacks, lives, a dress (which “smelled sweet because it was made from watermelon sugar”), a chair, a state of being, and many things besides. Mixed with trout oil, watermelon sugar powers lanterns and other machines. Its definition slips around, but Brautigan is saying that the things we love form an interchangeable currency at the heart of our lives—it’s all watermelon sugar in watermelon sugar. It doesn’t quite make sense, but it feels true. Read More
October 4, 2018 Arts & Culture Five Hundred Faces of Mass Incarceration By Maurice Chammah Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used watercolors and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favorite musicians. His early work features Trey Anastasio and Grace Potter and Snoop Dogg, all smiling and content, deep into their guitars and joints. But then Loughney committed a crime that even now, years later, he can barely explain. In 2012, when he was thirty-five and struggling to make it as an artist, Loughney got into a fight with residents of an apartment building. According to the police, he returned with a gasoline container and set the building on fire, sending multiple people to the hospital. It was big news in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, where Loughney was raised and where his father was serving a term as mayor. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. At sentencing, his lawyer brought up the role of alcohol. But Loughney still has difficulty comprehending his own actions. “It wasn’t as if I was in the midst of an addiction or dealing with clinical anger … It was a fight gone bad,” he wrote in a recent message from the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, thirty miles southwest of his hometown. “The main point I hope you can make for me is that I am very remorseful and contrite for what I did. I don’t often get the opportunity to express my remorse or apologies and I would really like to be able to do that in a public forum.” After Loughney entered prison, his partner left him, and at times he felt catatonic. But listening to an interview with the Australian painter Johnny Romeo on the radio inspired him to return to his passion. “By the end of his interview, I was on my feet, in my cell, working,” he wrote. “I’m able now to actually understand how fragile and fleeting life is.” To make sense of his new surroundings, he began to draw what was around him, but instead of depicting the bars and razor wire, he focused on the people. Read More
October 4, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Pain Will Become Interesting By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, This year, I have seen so much death. Losing the people I love used to be my biggest fear, but now I have lost so many so quickly that I find myself with a new one. I jump into problem-solving zombie mode every time it happens. There’s so much to do and so many people to take care of. Last week, a poet I knew killed himself. I spent the night comforting every friend he had and, in the middle of comforting, I realized how used to this I had become. I know just the right thing to say or not say, just how long to hold the silence before it had to break. I am an expert at helping others deal with the grief death brings. Now, my biggest fear is that I will get too accustomed to tragedy, to suicides, to death. I am scared of getting used to losing. I am scared of losing all this pain. I don’t ever want to stop feeling. I don’t ever want to get used to it. Is there a poem for it, any words that will stop this from happening? Too Used to Death Read More
October 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Silence of Sexual Assault in Literature By Idra Novey Detail from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony last week opened a desperately needed national conversation about the nature of silence in the aftermath of trauma. Why didn’t Blasey Ford tell her “loving parents,” Donald Trump discharged on Twitter. The hashtag #WhyIDidntReport generated thousands of testimonies about the societal forces that push victims into silence in the aftermath of assault. That silence, unheard by anyone else but shatteringly loud inside one’s head, is an open secret in American life. It is also an open secret in American literature, especially in the works of women writers. Brett Kavanaugh’s description of his daughter’s prayers at dinner brought to mind the theatrical piety of the Bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.” That Bible salesman comes off as earnest—at first—as he scopes out a family’s front parlor and decries the absence of the Bible that “good Chrustians” would certainly display there. Once he gets beyond the front parlor and has Hulga, the adult daughter of the household, to himself, he doesn’t bring up anything more about “Chrustian service.” Watching Kavanaugh lose control of his “good country folk” performance and become increasingly overcome with rage, I thought of O’Connor’s salesman absurdly repeating the word “Chrustian,” of the terrible theatrics of our politics. Read More
October 3, 2018 Hue's Hue Hooker’s Green: The Color of Apple Trees and Envy By Katy Kelleher “William Wilson” was published in 1839. It is not one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more popular tales. It is not as fun as “Hop-Frog” or as dread inducing as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But it is my favorite of his stories, because it taps into a narcissistic fear, that of the doppelgänger or “double-goer.” The story is about two men named William Wilson. The nominally linked males talk alike, walk alike, and dress alike. The two Williams grow up in close proximity to each other on the misty outskirts of London, much to William the narrator’s dismay, who hates the sound of his own name (it’s too common, too pedestrian) and resents this upstart William for forcing him to hear those four syllables twice as often. It is dizzying to find someone with your name. I know; I search for them regularly. I befriend fellow Kathryn Kellehers on Facebook, sending out little electronic pings of acknowledgement. For the most part, they refuse my requests and resist my efforts to spy on their social-media accounts. But there is a Katy Kelleher in Wisconsin who allows me to see her images. On late nights, when I feel particularly alienated from myself, I peer into her life, imagining that we share some destiny, linked by consonants and vowels and perhaps a drop or two of Irish-American blood. William Hooker did not have to look far to find another man with his name. It was a common enough appellation. But the tale of two Hookers is a strange one, for both men were not only contemporaries, they were also both wedded to gardens and bewitched by greenery. They lived in tandem, and they are often confused and conflated. But there were two William Hookers, and only one of them was responsible for the most enviable of inventions: Hooker’s green. Read More