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
August 16, 2018 In Memoriam Pray Like Aretha Franklin By Michael Robbins I remember the songs that taught me the human voice is the most powerful instrument on earth. Some are immortal—Billie Holiday’s “I Must Have That Man,” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows in April.” Some, like a-ha’s “Take On Me” and Steve Perry’s “Oh Sherrie,” had an outsize effect on me because they dominated the radio at the right time. Aretha Franklin’s “Baby, Baby, Baby” hit me when I was a teenager. I’d bought I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You on CD because of “Respect.” I knew Aretha only from the hits that circulated on the oldies station—“Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “Dr. Feelgood.” Great songs, but they hadn’t prepared me for this. Nothing could prepare you for “Baby, Baby, Baby.” She starts singing a little off mic, building volume with each “baby,” somehow sounding playful and utterly devastated at once. On the second verse, she blurs the syllables of “Baby, baby, baby,” slurring a little, sultry and sad, barely landing on the consonants. Then she cries out, “I’m bewildered, I’m lonely, and I’m loveless,” and you believe her even though you know you can’t believe a pop song. Later, as if frustrated by the failure of propositional statement to capture the enormity of her emotion, she strings it out: “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby,” the first three barely recognizable as words. She sounds absolutely bewildered, lonely, loveless. Lester Bangs wrote of Van Morrison that he was obsessed with how far he could “spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch.” Aretha Franklin taught me what this meant years before I heard “Madame George.” Later, I would admire her almost as much for her militancy as for her voice—she offered to post Angela Davis’s bail in 1976. “Angela Davis must go free,” she said. “Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up, and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.” May she finally discover the peace that eludes us all, the peace she disturbed in all the right ways. Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex, as well as a collection of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. His poem “Past One O’Clock” appears in the Summer issue.
August 16, 2018 Look Where Do We Go When We Read? By The Paris Review Where do we go when we read? Are we in the room, or have we disappeared between the pages? In her new book, Voyagers, Melissa Catanese compiles anonymous black-and-white found photographs of people lost in that liminal space between this world and a fictional one. Their bodies are left behind, vulnerable to our gaze, while their minds travel to places we cannot imagine. A selection of these photographs appears below. Read More
August 16, 2018 Arts & Culture The Capacity to Be Alone By Anna Moschovakis A lyric essay on shame, shamelessness, and writing a novel under duress. I don’t like novels. I love a few novels and brought some of them with me: The Hour of the Star, Woman at Point Zero, Forever Valley, Maud Martha, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I also brought a few novels, or novel-like books, that I had not yet read but that I thought I might love: Suite for Barbara Loden, Ban en Banlieue, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights. The rest of the reading I planned to do was, directly or indirectly, about shame. * I first heard the term good-enough mother in a conversation with a poet friend who was training to be a psychotherapist. This was years ago; I had just begun to feel what I think is meant by a maternal instinct, or to suspect that my desire to parent might be stronger than my suspicion of that desire—stronger even than my fear of ruining my life. Good-enough seemed possible, seemed right. * I read about the difference between guilt and shame in an essay written about Odysseus by a literary critic long ago. I forget the argument, but I remember the difference, or the fact of there being a difference. Odysseus’s palm tree made an appearance, too—though that might have been in a different essay, one about nostalgia, or was it grief, possibly by someone else. * In my novel, the main character—Eleanor—is a woman who does not want to be a mother. I sent a draft to a new friend, a writer I admired, who said she could relate. I thought of writing back to clarify but was ashamed. The family next door appeared two days ago: a woman and a man, two small children, and an older man, probably a grandfather. Everyone is very busy, coming and going to and from the car, bright clothing and little backpacks, ready for summer adventures. Except the grandfather, who sits on the porch, softly playing the banjo. I think it’s a banjo, though it may be a mandolin. Read More
August 16, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Nevertheless, Live By Claire Schwartz 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, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, Is there a word for the feeling when you know the wise thing to do, but you, always a fool, do the opposite? I wish I knew the word—I would have said it when this boy slept a night by my side. I would have said it when I first lost him, and then six months later, he came back for me. I would have said it, even if only a whisper, when I fell for him all over again, even harder than before. And now I would repeat it to myself, like a benediction, as I face the possibility of him drifting away. That is the feeling for which I need a poem. The feeling when you know that he’s going to leave, and you’re remembering how hard it was to lose him the first time, and this time you’re in deeper, and you know you should cut it off now to reduce the heartache a little, but you foolishly continue to hope. The feeling every lover has, before sadness makes them wise. Sincerely, A Hopeful Fool Dear Hopeful Fool, I love your letter. What you’re seeking—a word for a feeling you know but have no language for—gets exactly at one reason I hold poems close: not necessarily to choose differently but to experience differently. For you, Mary Szybist’s “The Troubadours Etc.”: Just for this evening, let’s not mock them. Not their curtsies or cross-garters or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens promising, promising. At least they had ideas about love. I think one word for what you describe is the one you use: hope. But hope’s wisdom buckles when the vision it was pinned to dissipates. So here is a sturdier word: faith. Faith’s intelligence is not bound to the outcome of any single situation; faith is something surer that you build when you choose the not-knowing. Faith marks an interior constitution, a way of being that says more about the self than it says about any external event. “At least they had ideas about love.” Read More