February 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Twelve Illustrated Dust Jackets By The Paris Review From the collection of Martin Salisbury. Photograph: Simon Pask We’ve all been told told not to judge a book by its cover, but what about judging a decade, an artistic moment, or a society? In his latest collection, The Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920–1970, illustration professor Martin Salisbury traces the history of the book jacket from its origins as a simple dust guard for expensive bound books to its evolution as a promotional tool meant to catch the eye. The middle of the twentieth century marked a high point for the medium, as the period’s leading illustrators brought contemporary visual styles into readers’ hands. A selection of these covers, in chronological order, appears below along with Salisbury’s captions. Aubrey Hammond, 1927. One of the standout dust jackets of the twentieth century, Hammond’s design juxtaposes delicate color harmony with nightmarish vision. Read More
February 22, 2018 On Music The Agony and the XTC By David Yaffe On Andy Partridge, punk, beauty, madness, and our secret sounds. There was a time when you thought you could bury your secrets in a music collection. You were young, you were sensitive to judgment, and you weren’t sure how all of it would stack up in the eyes of a potential romantic partner or in the eyes of the mature, sophisticated self you aspired to become. Were you really that needy? That desperate? And would you be crushed if someone else didn’t get it? Music got to places that were so private and strange, it was hard to put them into words, at least until you got older. You supposedly now live in a less lonely world. Now you could find refuge in social media, on a fan site, and discover that your little aural secret belongs to other people too. And if the repressed is returned and you reexamine where those sounds came from, you could find that some of those grown-ups who made the music you hoarded were even less stable and sure of themselves than you were. The band I am speaking of is XTC, who are now, despite their general absence from the conversation, the subject of the recently aired Showtime documentary XTC: This Is Pop. They were perhaps best known for their accidental 1986 hit, “Dear God,” a manifesto of unbelief initially buried on a B side before disc jockeys at college radio stations flipped the record and discovered something that hit a nerve among the young. And yet what was truly terrifying about the song was its harmonic beauty, the way those descending notes and glorious extended vocal lines followed the chords and made its blasphemy somehow numinous and sublime. By the time the record came out, those of us who were following its singer and author, Andy Partridge, knew that while he sounded invincible on the record, he had in fact stopped performing a few years earlier, in 1982, due to a kind of incurable stage fright. This was long before the Internet, and we had to search hard for the information. That voice, filled with angst or tenderness or both, just couldn’t make it to the concert stage anymore. The music that was the most precious to Partridge was also somehow unbearable. A few years ago, he appeared on a BBC documentary singing the praises of another head case, the mighty Judee Sill. But when he began to play her song, “The Kiss,” he had to stop it. “Those notes climbing under her voice … Sorry; I can’t do it … It’s just too beautiful.” Read More
February 22, 2018 At Work Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey By Lauren Kane Nicole Sealey’s debut collection, Ordinary Beast, is a stunning compendium of poems in which she reveals herself to be a poet who can move from the deeply personal to the mythic and historic without losing the impact of either. Her poetry belies passionate dedication, executed with grace and a quiet, simmering power. Sealey was born in Saint Thomas, of the United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She decided to commit to a career as a poet at age thirty-two, when she began an M.F.A. at NYU. While one should not understate the achievement of Sealey’s first full-length collection with a major publisher, her presence as a formidable poetic voice has been percolating for some time. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and her accolades beyond that are many. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and others. I met Sealey at her office in Brooklyn, where she works as the Executive Director of the Cave Canem Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has for over two decades been committed to supporting African American poets through fellowships, workshops, and a national community hundreds strong. When I arrived, the clean, modern office space was mostly cleared in preparation to host an event the next night, Walking the Walk: Poetry, Equity & Anti-Racism in the Literary Arts, as a part of their ongoing antiracism workshop series. Warm and graceful, she offered me water and we found a quiet conference room to delve into the nuances of Ordinary Beast. Over the course of an hour, we discussed sonnets, love, and how buying an orchid can sometimes be just the thing to complete a poem. She showed me photos of her dining-room table covered in clippings of poetry that she had used to construct one piece in her collection, “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You.’ ” As the pictures suggest, Nicole Sealey is a poet ardently devoted to the craft of poetry, as committed to the organization of a workshop series as she is to the literal construction a masterful cento. Read More
February 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Yvan Alagbé’s “Dyaa” By Yvan Alagbé The French Beninese cartoonist Yvan Alagbé has been an influential player in the French avant-garde comics scene since the early nineties, when he copublished the anthology Le cheval sans tête. In 1994, his first book, Yellow Negroes, became an instant cult classic. It tells the story of the romance between Claire, a white Frenchwoman, and Alain, a Beninese immigrant in the country illegally. Alain lives with his sister Martine, who makes a living doing housework for well-to-do families. In 1997, Alagbé released “Dyaa,” a short story exploring Martine’s tragic romantic involvement with another immigrant. The story is published in full below. In 2012, in France, the two stories were collected, along with other work, into a single volume. This April, they will be released for the first time in English, under the title Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. Read More
February 21, 2018 On Photography Here for the Ride: Andre D. Wagner’s Subway Photographs By Andrew Boryga All photos: © Andre D. Wagner I spent my first twenty-three years on this planet living in the same apartment building in the Bronx. I felt ownership over those gum-stained concrete blocks. I dreamed of scattering my ashes on them when I died, like Miguel Piñero scattered his around the Lower East Side. (I still might.) Then, two years ago, when I was twenty-five, I left New York. I left because I was tired. I started working at thirteen to contribute to my household. I busted my ass in public schools, got a scholarship to a Catholic high school, and graduated college with an Ivy League degree. Despite all this, I still lived check to check, just like everyone else I knew. I wanted to do the things my single mom had never had the chance to, like own property or save for retirement. But I saw the money flowing into New York City. I saw neglected neighborhoods regurgitate cocktail bars and cycling studios. I saw the rents skyrocket as fast as the property values. I knew, at best, I could only hope to maintain. I was fucking tired of maintaining. Read More
February 21, 2018 Arts & Culture The Night in My Hair: Henna, Syria, and the Muslim Ban By Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar The night the United States launches fifty Tomahawk missiles on the Syrian Shayrat airbase near Homs, I am washing henna and indigo out of my hair. The tub is splashed with tourmaline blue, speckled like the delicate markings on a sparrow’s egg, and from the living room I can hear the newscasters referring to margin of error, airpower, and the “perils of the region.” The water runs down the drain. When I was little, I used to pore over the photo albums of my parents’ wedding and their honeymoon in Syria, tracing the shots of my cousins and aunts and great-grandparents lined up in the courtyard for family photos, dozens of demitasses of Turkish coffee and laughter over backgammon. How young and strong my father still looked in the eighties, fifteen years before the doctors saw a constellation of powdered glass strewn across the wide basin of his lungs. The reporter drones on, and the night bursts open on the other side of the world. I squeeze the last of the muddy water from my hair, riming my fingernails with blue. Read More