August 20, 2018 At Work One-Question Interview: Shruti Swamy By The Paris Review Shruti Swamy’s story in the Summer issue, “A House Is a Body,” blazes with the heat of a California wildfire. A mother who has been warned by firefighters to evacuate her home descends into a spiral of thought so intense that you can practically feel the pages singing as you read. There was much we wanted to ask her, but we limited ourselves to a single question. INTERVIEWER Your story is an intense, dark tale of motherhood, grief, and madness. As an expectant mother yourself, how do the acts of creating life and creating art interplay? Are both a certain form of madness? SWAMY For the last few weeks, I’ve thought often about this question, which I had so eagerly volunteered to answer, thinking that as a new mother, I would have suddenly gained the insight I was looking for during the years before I had my baby. In truth, probably because of the sleepless nights, I feel like I have less of an answer now than I did before my daughter arrived, with one exception—her name. All through my pregnancy, I wrote my daughter’s name in my journal like a schoolgirl with a crush. It was a name so strange—singular—to my ear that I couldn’t imagine that anyone else in the world had, in this combination, already worn it. The act of writing again and again this name was like dreaming. Though I could see the changes happening to my body, they felt somehow strangely abstract, not unlike the way a story first feels when it begins inside me. An image, an interaction, an opening, and then the glow of possibility—not of the finished story but of the feeling of listening, following. Pregnancy to me felt like that, a work of the mind as well as of the body, even as the child felt impossible, as stories often feel until they fully arrive. Read More
August 20, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Clark (1941–2018) By Larry Bensky Baseball card of Tom Clark (© 1990 Little Sun). For decades, as his health declined, Tom Clark lived on a busy street in Berkeley in a house with many steep stairs. Crossing, haltingly, one of those streets, he was struck by a car and killed on August 17. One of the last times I saw him, he made fun of himself for his frailty, for the way he had to pause while walking in the neighborhood, and pause even more when he tried to get to his front door. But though he could have, he refused to move. His surroundings—mainly an enormous trove of books, magazines, newspapers, and his own voluminous works and manuscripts—would have been too hard, and time-consuming, to go through alone. And aside from his wife Angelica, he trusted no one to help. I asked Tom if he would be interested in being interviewed. We both knew we didn’t have forever to think about it (I’m eighty-one; he was seventy-seven). My pitch was: “You’re probably the least known person in this country to have written, and published, over forty books. There’s a great diversity in subject and mode in what you’ve written. And you keep up obsessively with the literary and political world around you. Got to be some wisdom to communicate, no?” Tom was polite but obviously totally uninterested. He listened to me and, without responding, said he had to go lie down. Some time later, when he hadn’t returned, Angelica—whom I’d known since their first days together in Bolinas in the late sixties—came and told me he was asleep, and there was no telling when he’d get up. Read More
August 17, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Portraiture, Patriarchy, Public Works By The Paris Review Ilya Repin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin, 1884. It is my habit, wandering through the seemingly logicless branching of the Met’s European painting rooms, to collect body parts from portraits, to take certain striking features and make them a synecdoche of the genius of their painter. Goya, for instance, is a masterful painter of hands; the Dutch painter Frans Hals is one of the great artists of the mouth. The course of this habit, though, always leads me to one painting in particular, featuring the most living, searching, despairing set of eyes I have seen in a portrait: the Russian painter Ilya Yefimovich Repin’s portrait of the author Vsevolod Garshin, in Gallery 827 at the Met. Most of the painting is rendered in the smudgy, conspicuous manner of nineteenth-century Impressionism, but the eyes are almost frighteningly photo-realistic, as if Repin had intentionally blurred the rest of the picture for the shock of the eyes, their bracing directness and incontrovertible sadness. Entirely redundantly, the caption informs us that Garshin would throw himself down a stairwell four years later. Portraiture is usually a contest—the subject wants to modulate, manage what they give away, while the artist wants everything. The eyes, in Repin’s portrait, are where that contest collapses, a tear in the fabric where Garshin’s unadulterated self floods out and buries Repin’s brush. —Matt Levin Read More
August 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Dharma Girls By Blair Hurley Still from the 2012 film adaptation of On the Road. Dad gave me a copy of On the Road for Christmas when I was sixteen. At thirteen, it had been The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, then The Catcher in the Rye the year after that. In our house, there was a wall of impressive hardcover books in the den, all the important works of the twentieth century displayed with the curated cool of a record collection: giant tomes like Freedom at Midnight and The Executioner’s Song, great novels like Portnoy’s Complaint and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Naked and the Dead, with glossy white jackets, seventies fonts, and enormous black-and-white photos of authors on the back covers. I was going to work my way through that wall someday, I thought. By my senior year of high school, I was ready for the Beats. I read The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac’s wild romp through American Zen Buddhism, and the great headlong rush of voice swept me along in its current; I read without coming up for air. What drew me in particular was the flirtation with the spiritual. I was a reader endlessly fascinated by how writers used the symbologies and stories of religion to ask existential questions and demand answers of their gods. I was bored by the whiny angst of The Catcher in the Rye, but I read the more spiritual Franny and Zooey over and over, carrying it in my book bag like some sort of talisman. I couldn’t get enough of Frank Herbert’s philosophical, messianic Dune. But with The Dharma Bums, I fell in a new, complicated sort of love. Whenever I encountered a story about religious quests, I went through the same arc of raised hopes and crushing disappointment. In Bums, Ray Smith encounters the Buddhist poet and adventurer Japhy Ryder, a close simulacrum of the real-life Zen scholar and poet Gary Snyder. Ray, an alcoholic, semihomeless wanderer, finds purpose in Ryder’s exhilarating, whirlwind leap through centuries of Zen mystical tradition. They climb the Matterhorn, get drunk, compose poetry, throw wild San Franciscan parties, and eventually part regretfully; Ray Smith still wants to be a lost boy of America, riding the rails, while Ryder is moving to Japan to study his religion in a more serious and authentic way. Read More
August 17, 2018 Arts & Culture My Withered Legs By Sandra Gail Lambert Barbara Stanwyck’s black belt on The Big Valley. Early on in my writing life, which for me was in my forties, I wrote a thinly disguised as fiction piece about a woman who needed to make immense changes in her life and how she was going to build the courage to live through the consequences. The story explored themes of independence and isolation, of disability and desire. The woman used a wheelchair. She was a lesbian. It was unusual for me to have feedback from people whom I thought of as “real” writers, and as I was becoming more serious about writing, this lack of access to knowledge was exasperating. It seemed impossible to make what I wanted to say work on the page. I’d read Dorothy Allison and yearned to write dialogue as effectively. How did Alice Walker structure a story like that? I wanted to twist the reader’s brain like Joanna Russ. And Beloved—it was absurd to think I could ever lift my writing into such rarefied layers of the atmosphere. But I wanted to try. The next step, it seemed to me, was to show my work to people outside of my friendly hometown lesbian writer groups. A writer I knew—who was a college professor and had actually been published—offered to take a look at my story. She read my piece and told me having a character who was both disabled and a lesbian was too messy, too complex for a short story. She thought that since there was no tension or plot development around being a lesbian, I should leave that part out. Here it was, right in my first foray into a wider (straight) writing world: lesbian erasure. My lesbian-feminist self was outraged. I thought, Not enough lesbian content—I’ll show you lesbian content. I added a part about my character noticing the hands of a waitress at Shoney’s. How strong the fingers were, how competently they handled the heavy plates. Her thumb gripped into the sweaty glass of ice water like a rock diverting the flow of a creek. I dyked up that story all over the place. I even gave my character a Barbara Stanwyck obsession and had her fantasize about the thick black leather belt Ms. Stanwyck wore cinched above her jodhpurs on The Big Valley. Read More
August 17, 2018 In Memoriam Lady Soul By Brian Cullman In the end, we’re left with the music: those luminous gospel recordings she made as a young teenager, still under her father’s wing; the halting, if promising, cocktail-blues recordings from the early sixties; those earth-shaking singles and albums she recorded for Atlantic between 1967 and 1973, when the world seemed to spin on her axis. The forays into disco and standards, the comebacks and movie cameos she wandered through in the last forty years, some off-kilter, some wonderful, were all completely beside the point. You get to part the Red Sea only once. Everything after is just … after. When she finally broke through, in 1967, she was a powerhouse and seemed unstoppable. She made salvation sexy and sexuality holy; she made the radio a bigger, wilder, more inclusive place, and she made the whole world dance to her radio. And it wasn’t just her voice. Her keyboard playing was formidable, and the piano intros to “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)” and “Don’t Play That Song” take the history of popular music and shake it by the scruff of the neck before turning it loose. As a musician friend told me the morning her death was announced, “Her playing is thirty percent jazz, fifty percent gospel, and seventy-five percent just plain Aretha. And if those numbers don’t add up, that’s just the way it goes. Aretha was bigger than math.” Read More