August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes on the Death of Oxana Shachko By Jacqueline Feldman From Oxana Shachko’s Instagram (@oksanashachko). Oxana Shachko told me she preferred that spelling, with the x, in 2016, as I was finalizing an essay that would describe, among other things, her life. In news articles about her, which have multiplied since her death by suicide in Paris this July, journalists more typically use the Romanization Oksana. I will stick with the spelling she and I agreed on even though I knew Oxana, an artist who was thirty-one, to take things like this lightly, often changing her mind. My essay deals with the women’s group Femen, which Oxana helped found in Ukraine. Beginning in 2008, it protested corruption in government; the conscription of Ukrainian women into sex work, which Oxana described as an issue of poverty, of globalization, even; and the failings of the hospital in Khmelnytskyi, of the Kiev Zoo. By 2013, the founding members all lived in exile. Oxana and another cofounder, Sasha Shevchenko, had fled to France, where they would become political refugees. The third, Anna Hutsol, went to Switzerland, where she was denied asylum. By the time I met Oxana in Paris, Femen had added activists internationally. The group had attracted attention in the West for its performative topless protests as well as for a certain overreach, taking on issues as far afield as the situation of women in Muslim countries. It would have surprised people I knew in Paris, where Femen was famous, that these women had begun with issues local to Ukraine. My memory is that Oxana left Femen in 2014 and that even then she showed ambivalence. (She’d say, for example, that she affiliated not with Femen France but with Femen International.) In later accounts, the date moves up. A 2016 text published by a gallery says she left the group in 2013. I am wary of making too much of slippages like this, particularly in retrospect. Still, if Oxana’s life did reshape itself on the many occasions she had to tell of it, her death has cluttered the truth further. Web searches turn up the work of artists less accomplished than she was, the photographers and filmmakers who shot her. If you didn’t know her, you might struggle to identify the paintings that were hers. She was born in Khmelnytskyi, which is in western Ukraine, where at the exceptionally young age of eight she apprenticed herself to a Greek man who painted icons. A deeply religious child, she came to identify as an atheist, a materialist, a communist, and, at last, a feminist. In her late paintings, her technique with gold leaf, with the tempera she herself made out of egg yolk, translates into a political vernacular. Madonnas, haloed, wear niqabs. An archangel is gay, as denoted by a rainbow. Jesus and fishermen float in a comfortable boat as hands reach up from below them to break the waves. They are the hands of humans sinking, which the sanctimonious men ignore. Read More
August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich By Sandra M. Gilbert Adrienne Rich. Toward the end of “Diving into the Wreck,” one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth Here, she says, is the imperative of investigation: needful research into “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” Arguably, as she confided that she discovered sometime in the sixties, such research into reality—“the thing itself and not the myth”—was a major aim of her work as a poet. But perhaps it hasn’t yet been clearly enough understood how crucially her writings in prose complemented, supplemented, enriched, and, yes, inspired her writing in verse. For in these writings she was not just one of many contemporary poets illuminating her verse through confessional glosses but a major memoirist, essayist, theorist, and scholar. Read More
August 3, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Jewel Thieves and Drunken Companions By The Paris Review The comedy of the New York girl abroad, exemplified in Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, is high among my favorite genres, followed closely by the tragedy of the New York girl abroad—Daisy Miller is one among many Jamesian examples. Eve Babitz’s Black Swans, originally published in 1993, is both the comedy and the tragedy of the Los Angeles girl on her home coast, and it elevates one of my less-favored genres, the personal essay. These autobiographical “stories” are peopled with sad, handsome men (thus the comedy). The tragedy is the denouement of the preceding decades, which is more readily on display in her interactions with women. Babitz lunches in the L.A. heat, dressed comfortably and mindful of her newly middle-aged metabolism, watching her companion, an effortlessly svelte woman her age, fully made-up and dressed in a fine white pantsuit, devour a hamburger, a bourbon, then a custard, a rare holdout of refined excess. The blinding twilight of a bygone era in Los Angeles is Babitz’s lived experience, distilled here into stories with sweet bite, like sour fruit only just past the point of ripe. —Lauren Kane Porochista Khakpour’s memoir Sick doesn’t need much more hype, but I have focused on almost nothing else the last two weeks, deliberately stretching it into as many days of reading as possible. That a book chronicling year after year of physical agony, misdiagnosis, and serial dating never becomes narcissistic or self-involved is a miracle; instead, reading Khakpour’s memoir is more like a chance meeting with someone you’ve always dreamed of commiserating with. It could easily have been a polemic against the health care industry; you’ll quickly lose count of how many providers fail Khakpour. It took her years to get a Lyme disease diagnosis, which, detected in the late stage, signifies a lifetime of health problems and relapses. Polemic typically necessitates ego, but Khakpour’s is absent in Sick. My favorite part of the book is its structure, each chapter set in a new city at a new gig. She is writer adept at snagging grants and fellowships, and her story as a sick person spreads from her hometown of Tehran, to L.A., to Sarah Lawrence College, to Johns Hopkins, to New Mexico, to Pennsylvania, to Germany, and always back to New York. The constant change in geography, in lovers, and in health are immensely pleasurable to read on every page, despite the author’s uncertain future through it all. The very worst moments—hiding in the bathroom with scissors to her arm in Leipzig while her boyfriend has a psychotic episode—are gravid with her joy at being able to write it. In the end, it’s this joy of writing, however grim the content, that is really the subject of Sick. I love this book. —Ben Shields Read More
August 3, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Buchi Emecheta By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Nigerian expatriate writer Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) in her own words was a “sort of” successful novelist in the London of the 1970s and 1980s. Her books are juicy and plot-gripping, more fun to read than titles like Second Class Citizen, The Slave Girl and The Bride Price might imply. Emecheta’s topic is a difficult one—the grim fate of women in Nigerian and Nigerian emigré society, and the worsening of their already fragile social rights caused by urbanization—but the effect is often oddly consoling. There’s inspiration in her sense of injustice, in her insistence that her character’s lives should be better. Emecheta’s personal story is also inspiring. Many of her books are set in the Ibuza of her youth, but Second Class Citizen in particular is semi-autobiographical, and tells the story of Adah, a young woman who schemes to get an education and— despite being forced into marriage at sixteen years old manages to emigrate to London. Eventually she leaves her husband—single-parenting five small children in conditions of desperate poverty—and becomes a writer. Read More
August 3, 2018 At Work A Conversation Between Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman By Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman Left: photo by John Emerson; Right: photo by Craig Mod Lynne Tillman and Nell Painter can’t remember how they first met. Tillman believes they were introduced at a history conference, while Painter is sure that their first encounter was here, at the Paris Review offices, upon the conduction of this interview. In any case, last spring they convened—either again or for the first time—to discuss their respective new books. Men and Apparitions, Tillman’s sixth novel, tells the story of Zeke, a thirty-eight-year-old cultural anthropologist who belongs to a generation of “new men” and soon becomes the subject of his own research. Old in Art School, Painter’s eighth book of non-fiction, chronicles her decision to leave the world of academic research in pursuit of a B.A. and M.F.A. in visual art. Together they discussed professionalism, the art market, and the personal self-fashioning of writers. Read More
August 2, 2018 Weird Book Room Paradise for Bookworms By Ted Widmer The first and only edition of an extensive monograph on the silkworm by Emilio Cornalia. Bugs are not great from the booklover’s point of view. They eat paper, devouring precious words in the process. They nestle audaciously inside expensive bindings. Without too much difficulty, an entrepreneurial insect can chew through an entire chapter of a well-developed argument. But a recent catalogue from Asher Rare Books in the Netherlands shows that books about insects can be works of great beauty. Stunning close-ups fuse dazzling color with impressive technical achievement in the art of printing. It’s a reminder of just how important the microscope was to the Enlightenment, when writers of natural history were drawn to the study of these tiny coinhabitants of our world. Read More