February 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Real Scandal in Academia By EJ Levy Collage of pulp-fiction covers. My first tenure-track job out of grad school was in Washington, D.C., a dozen years ago, when it was common for Washingtonians to claim that D.C. was Hollywood for ugly people (both towns being focused on power, prestige, social ascendance, and its attendant glamour—basically, high school for grown-ups). So I wasn’t surprised to see that the sexual harassment allegations sweeping Hollywood are also common to D.C. More surprising is the relative lack of attention thus far to such harassment in academia, where—to judge by the content of literary fiction—sexual harassment has been a staple for decades. (J. M. Coetzee’s brilliant Disgrace comes to mind, as does Roth’s The Dying Animal, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World, Malamud’s A New Life, to name a few, and of course Nabokov’s Lolita, whose predatory narrator is a professor of literature, if not preying on a student.) Some of the male writers whose work I most admire are famous both for their books and for their famously bad behavior. My ex-girlfriend grew up with John Gardner’s family—the novelist and mentor to Raymond Carver—and told me stories of climbing trees to watch him fuck his grad students. These used to be war stories that men told with a certain pride. A professor once told me, without irony, that there were undergrads who considered sleeping with a prof part of completing a liberal arts degree. He actually believed this. Read More
February 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Tattoos, Death Grips, and Love Letters By The Paris Review I’ve long admired Eddie Martinez’s wild, colorful abstractions, but until now, I’d never seen them in person. This week, I saw half of a show at two New York locations of the gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash. In Chelsea, a block from our office, is a suite of big paintings called “Love Letters.” Each of the roughly half dozen canvases are painted on oversize reproductions of personal letterhead: “Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez” lines the top of each “page,” and their address runs along the bottom. Moyer is Martinez’s wife, so these paintings could be playful messages to her, as though doodled in a moment of affection on a handy piece of paper. Humor runs throughout Martinez’s work: the pun “fine ants” appears in one painting, and his last show at the gallery was titled “Samoneye.” (Get it? “Sam and I”? I love puns.) Drawing is also an essential part of his work. These paintings are based on Sharpie drawings (some five hundred such drawings fill a wall in Martinez’s studio) blown up in size and then rendered in layers of form and color. Floral and cartoon figures and bulbous, Guston-y shapes are camouflaged behind scribbles of brushwork and slashes of spray paint in gray-blue, vivid red, and mustard yellow. Admiring the lines and dripping fields of color almost feels like watching Martinez in action. —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 16, 2018 At Work Different Forms of Illumination: An Interview with Hermione Hoby By Emma Cline I ran into Hermione Hoby recently at a studio party in an old Greenwich Village brownstone. It was the last party before the occupants had to move out, the building already sold to its new owner. The windows were open to the January air, prosecco sloshed in plastic cups, everyone kept getting too hot so they’d go out to stand in the hallway. People seemed a little sad, a little manic, after a strange winter. There had been a vintage-clothing sale earlier that day, the unsold stock still in the studio. Hoby disappeared to try on a green silk dress in the bathroom. She emerged in the dress, looking uncertain—there was no full-length mirror, she said, so she didn’t know how it looked. We told her the dress looked great. I don’t know if Hoby did, in fact, get the green dress, but the party—someone trying on someone else’s silk dress, a strange elegiac ripple in the air—felt like a scene from Hoby’s own novel, a kind of New York night that seems to happen less and less often the longer you stay here. There are so many moments like that in Neon in Daylight, so many acutely observed interactions that kept reminding me of the dizzying stretch of time after I first moved to the city—how the streets, familiar to me only from movies, seemed to call forth a strange self-consciousness, how every interaction was colored with an intensity that was almost physically exhausting. Hoby is acutely aware of the way lives and desires overlap in this city, how selves are tried on and discarded, and she tracks the minutest shifts of feeling and mood with intelligence and hypersensitivity. Her novel follows Kate, a grad student newly arrived from England, and her relationships with Bill, a washed-up writer still coasting on the success of his first book, and his daughter, Inez, a brash nineteen-year-old who hustles odd jobs off the miscellaneous-romance section of Craigslist. It takes place over the summer and fall of 2012, though the passing of time, as filtered through the consciousness of Kate, takes on the quality of a fever. Life in the city is a kind of welcome sickness. This interview took place over email. Read More
February 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin By Valerie Stivers As a not-quite-heterosexual high-school girl, I considered the grand science-fiction gender experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), one of my formative love stories. The book was published in 1969 and won Hugo and Nebula awards, but it was still radical when I devoured it in the eighties and is still radical today. It tells the story of Genly Ai, a human-diaspora interstellar explorer who arrives solo on the planet Winter to convince its citizens to join the Ekumen, a benevolent interplanetary federation. Ai is a human man, but the humanoid people on Winter have no gender and instead go once a month into a kind of estrus called kemmer, in which their bodies are spontaneously inspired to become either male or female, for the purpose of sex. (Sounds fun … right?) As a person who is always a “man,” Ai is considered a pervert on Winter, but in their society—unlike ours—this isn’t a very big deal. More central is how Ai grapples with his relationships with the local people, in particular a government minister named Estraven, who may be an ally or an enemy or a friend … or more than a friend if Ai can expand his categories. Hot beer: the drink of choice for the maybe-lovers Estraven and Ai. Le Guin said that she wrote her science fictions as thought experiments, skewing our world in search of moral insight, and her imagined society on Winter poses questions of how humans would organize themselves if we could all bear children and if we saw ourselves as humans first and sex objects only sometimes. It’s much more than just a love story, but in high school, I took it as one. Genly Ai’s long, slow, dawning appreciation of Estraven—and especially a night when he sees his friend shirtless, by a fire, as “gaunt and scarred … his face burned by cold almost as by fire … a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light”—set my standards for the highest romance. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Watching ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ in Tehran By Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Still from The Phantom of the Opera. On the first Friday of every month, a thin mustached man wearing a trench coat and a pair of dark reflective sunglasses came through our door with a shiny black briefcase packed with VHS tapes. He was a man of few words, and our exchanges were brief. He would place his briefcase on our dining table, unclasp it, and ceremoniously spread open its contents with a gesture that said, I lay it all out before you. His voice, normally stiff and remote, expanded into a high-pitched squeal if I requested a movie he had been chasing after but had not yet acquired. It delighted me to provoke him, not out of malice but because each time his toad voice erupted, I pictured him breathlessly trying to outrun his fellow smugglers through the subterranean corridors of the black market, the tails of his trench coat like wings in the wind, clutching the illegally filmed videos of movies screened in foreign theaters, where the shadowy bare heads of female viewers, sharpening their teeth on Red Vines and popcorn, filled the bottom of the screen. Besides, he was in on the joke. It was all a show. I was matching his performance with a false theater of my own. We both knew that deep down, the only thing I wanted was to rent The Phantom of the Opera over and over again. “Again?” my mother would ask, her voice drawn out, thinly disguising her concern. “Again!” I would command, my eyes wild with pleasure. Read More
February 15, 2018 Arts & Culture In Turn Each Woman Thrust Her Head By Kim Todd Poster for The Penelopiad at the Buddies and Bad Times Theater. In the hot attic bedroom in Minneapolis, my twelve-year-old daughter is reading to me from the Odyssey. Curled in the center of the orange paisley chair, she conjures ship-smashing gales, feasts of roast lamb, a mouth full of salt. The words wash over me as I do leg lifts, building strength after breaking a foot, eager to run again. Sweat sticks skin to the polished wood floor. Sparrows chatter and build nests of junk-mail scraps and dryer lint on beams outside, just above the windows. A lock of dark hair hangs in my daughter’s face as she adopts the goddess Athena’s shocked voice. Odysseus has dared to doubt her, and in her wounded pride, she sounds a bit like an aggrieved mother. Your touching faith! Another man would trust Some villainous mortal, with no brains—and what am I? Your goddess-guardian to the end in all your trials. It’s a story we both love, though this is my daughter’s first encounter with Homer’s original. Athena, in particular, is magnetic. We’ve both dressed up as Zeus’s daughter at different times for Halloween. In the seventies, I went door-to-door in a lacy thrift-store dress that led everyone to ask if I was a fairy princess, and me to answer, through clenched teeth, “No. I’m the goddess of wisdom, weaving, and defensive war.” Two years ago, my daughter held a plastic shield from a knight costume on which she pasted a green foam Medusa’s head. Gray eyes, bronze-tipped spear, strategizing mind: there’s no denying Athena’s appeal. To slip into her golden sandals, even if they are just shiny fabric hot glued to flip-flops, is to slip on a measure of power. Read More