August 2, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Listen I Love You Joy Is Coming By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I’m in the closet for the sake of my parents. We come from a society where it’s impossible to be gay or queer. They have already faced a lot of disappointment, and though I feel alienated from them at times, I want to spare them any further heartache. They probably wouldn’t disown me, but I know they could never be happy. You might say I have a duty to myself to pursue my own happiness, but I feel as if any happiness I could get would still be bitter and pale. Unlike in Hollywood, there’s no tearful reconciliation to be had here, just endless recriminations and seeing them beaten and bewildered. Do you have a poem for this thorny feeling? Call it love or filial obligation or resentment or pity for my poor, flawed, all-too-human parents. Yours, A Wayward Son Read More
August 1, 2018 Look Images from Louisiana’s Black Trail-Riding Clubs By Jeremiah Ariaz Black trail-riding clubs have their roots in Creole culture, formed in South Louisiana in the eighteenth century. Today trail rides are an opportunity for generations of people to gather, celebrate, and ride horseback. The riders form a distinctive yet little-known subculture in Southwest Louisiana, one that exists in stark contrast to most depictions of cowboys and serves as a reminder that black equestrian culture stems from a time when the Louisiana Territory was in fact the American West. In addition to sharing an important aspect of Louisiana’s cultural heritage, these photographs assert a counternarrative to historic representations of the cowboy and prevailing images of despair in black America. I embarked on this project around the fiftieth anniversary of many of the achievements of the civil rights era, and in the wake of the murder of Alton Sterling in 2016. In the context of this national backdrop, my photographs depict joy, pride, and familial intimacy, particularly between fathers and sons who are taught to care for and ride horses from an early age. The photographs reflect the Creole culture and the celebratory spirit of the rides while sharing one of the many histories in the American story that have largely remained untold. An exhibition of the photographs is currently on view at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and runs through September 22. Louisiana Trail Riders is available for preorder and will be released on August 28 from UL Press. Read More
August 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Is Nanette? By Matilda Douglas-Henry Still from Nanette. When I look at Hannah Gadsby, I see myself. The stand-up comedian from Tasmania holds her body like a tall woman is wont to do: chest puffed out, shoulders turned inward, weathered from years of hunching. I know this because I am a tall woman. I have hovered around the six-foot mark since I was twelve. Then there are her delightful inflections: the thick, broad Australian accent that clicks between tongue and teeth, the dips in cadence (it can be squeaks or muffled growls depending on the level of immersive impersonation). I am most endeared to her deployment of slang, the familiar turns of phrase I didn’t even realize were locale specific until I moved from Melbourne to New York. “Aw, it’s a bit much, really,” she says as a default response to anything she finds inappropriate, bespectacled eyes squinting, eyebrows jumping up above the frames. She is comfortable in her awkwardness: mouth close to the microphone, hands slipped in pockets, a stutter that peaks and breaks in its proclivity. The charm here is in the “bit”; the crucial dip in register falls on this syllable, turning a throwaway sentence into a charged moment of linguistic intimacy. I am in the SoHo Playhouse theater on Vandam Street, sitting on a brown leather chair that doesn’t quite accommodate my height. The set is pleasant and simple: the trademark glass of water on the wooden stool, the microphone, and a backdrop of leafless trees against a watercolor blue. It seems as if everyone in the audience feels a certain kinship to Gadsby, even if they themselves aren’t Australian, tall, and queer, and perhaps that is one of the reasons her Off-Broadway debut, Nanette, has had its run extended by two months. Read More
August 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Vanishing of Reality By Michiko Kakutani Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. —Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant” Surreal and chaos have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, when artificial-intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN. Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the sixties, when society began fragmenting and official narratives—purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites—started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth writes of American reality: “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complains, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise … ” Read More
July 31, 2018 Redux Redux: On Trial By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Janet Malcolm’s 2011 Writers at Work interview, Dante Troisi’s short story “Diary of a Judge,” and Devin Johnston’s poem “Means of Escape.” Read More
July 31, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings By Katy Kelleher Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Czardas dancers, 1908. Inside an old brick building in Somerville’s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as the Museum of Bad Art. “You won’t ever see this stuff in the Museum of Fine Arts,” the curator Michael Frank says. Frank is the kind of guy who can’t pass a yard sale or a flea market without stopping to browse. He loves ugly things, but for him, ugly is a problematic word. “When I read your email, I thought, Uh-oh,” he admits. “Calling something ugly is like calling something beautiful. The minute you say it, you’re in a difficult spot, trying to define what that really means.” Frank prefers to think of these paintings as “badart,” one word, no hyphen. Badart is not the inverse of “good art”; it’s the inverse of “important art.” Some might call these pieces outsider art, and in the past, many of them could have been termed primitive or art brut. I prefer to think of them as ugly. Charming—like the dancing dog wearing a tutu or the nineties eyebrows on one particularly serene Virgin Mary—but ugly nonetheless. However, I understand where Frank is coming from. For Frank, ugly is a word that suffocates, depriving his favorite paintings of their rightful playful air. Ugly is also a word that carries hard moral implications; for centuries, ugliness has been associated not only with sickness and deformity but also dishonesty, violence, aggression, and bigotry. Consider the term ugly American or the repeated critique of Trump’s “ugly” acts. The word itself comes from the equally discordant-sounding ugga and uggligr, two Old Norse adjectives that mean “dreadful, fearful, aggressive.” (Other words that bloomed from the “dreadful” root include loath and loathsome.) The meaning changed only in the fourteenth century, when uglike stopped meaning “terrifying” and began to mean “unpleasant to look at.” Even though the word ugly is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do not negate each other. Read More