August 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Ode to Gray By Meghan Flaherty Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust motes dancing in sunbeams), 1900. The color gray is no one’s color. It is the color of cubicles and winter camouflage, of sullage, of inscrutable complexity, of compromise. It is the perfect intermediate, an emissary for both black and white. It lingers, incognito, in this saturated world. It is the color of soldiers and battleships, despite its dullness. It is the color of the death of trees. The death of all life when consumed by fire. The color of industry and uniformity. It is both artless and unsettling, heralding both blandness and doom. It brings bad weather, augurs bleakness. It is the color other colors fade to once drained of themselves. It is the color of old age. Because I have no style, I defer to gray. I find it easier to dress in gray scale than to think. I buy in bulk, on sale, in black and white and shades between—some dishwater desolate, some pleasing winter mist. I own at least five cardigans in grandpa gray. My mother always called me plain. She saw this as a flaw to be corrected. She wanted the whole world dressed in dazzling color—even me. I never quite complied. I have the fashion sense of Vladimir and Estragon and the panache of my New England nana. When left to my devices, I choose to be unobtrusive. I choose gray. It suits my diffidence and soothes my extroversion. It is the color, rather than the sound, of silence. It sits with monkish, folded hands and asks for nothing. It never shouts. It never pushes. As the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres said, “Better gray than garishness.” I’m drawn to gray, as to a dream, but not to any old gray. Not storm-cloud gray or corporate monolith. I prefer tranquil gray: the undyed wool of sheep in rain, the mood inside a Gerhard Richter painting, the mottle of an ancient cairn. I don’t mean any one gray either but the entire underrainbow of the world, the faded rose and sage and caesious. Liard, lovat, perse. The human eye perceives five hundred—not a mere fifty—shades of gray. Paul Klee called it the richest color, “the one that makes all the others speak.” Read More
August 20, 2018 First Person The Most Selfish Choice By Jessie Greengrass Justine Siegmund, Diagram of a Fetus, Lying on Its Side, in an Opened Womb, 1723. I am not by nature a decisive person. Anxiety freights each choice with the potential for disaster, and where possible, I defer. It ought to come as no surprise, then, that I struggled with the decision to have a child—except that even to acknowledge the existence of such a decision is routinely considered a sign of failure. We talk about clocks. We talk about cycles. We talk about diminishing fertility, the prioritization of career over family, the horror of having left it “too late,” as though it were possible that half the population might be suffering a kind of culpable ignorance with regards to their own biology. I was embarrassed at the thought of discussing my uncertainty, as though anyone I confided in would snap back, Who are you, then, to have a child? I was humiliated by how hard it felt. That my future as a mother didn’t seem to me to be a given seemed related to those other ways in which I was not as I should be: my dislike of heels and holidays; my discomfort in dresses; the way my body failed to conform, growing larger than it ought to grow. It was my excess and my lack. The link between childbearing and femininity is such that feeling myself to be deficient in the latter, I felt disqualified from the former—or vice versa. What is a woman who might choose not to have a child? I wanted a child because I wanted a family. Because I wanted to feel secure, a part of a structure. Because I wanted, in some slight way, to be necessary. Because I wanted to be loved. None of this seemed good enough. All of it was about me. I wanted a child because I wanted one. Read More
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