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The Daily

November 10, 2020
Re-Covered

Re-Covered: Living Through History

By Lucy Scholes

A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940

Since the beginning of lockdown, I’ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it’s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It’s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we’re living through right now.

Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939–1945—a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown—has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthropologist and polymath Tom Harrison, painter and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, and poet and journalist Charles Madge. It’s aim, Brown explains, was “to tell a truer, fuller version of events than was available in the newspapers or recorded in the history books,” or, as the founders themselves put it, to collate an “anthropology of ourselves.” Central to the project was the five-hundred-strong National Panel of Diarists, volunteers from all walks of life living across the UK, who kept a daily personal journal that they then submitted each month. So many of the films and books from or about this period are, Brown explains, “bathed in the golden glow of ‘Blitz Spirit’,” yet this is nowhere near the full story. “This alleged wartime phenomenon has little space for twenty-first-century human frailties such as succumbing to unnecessary trips to the shops, or hugging your grandmother,” she continues, invoking the deprivations of the current pandemic. “We are used to hearing about ‘Blitz Spirit’ as psychological bunting that festooned the national mind, a one-size-fits-all utility suit that the nation donned for The Duration, allowing every person to dig their way to victory with a song and a smile.” Instead, she argues, what makes the MO Archive “so valuable and so poignant,” is that these are accounts written in real time and by real people, thus “riddled with fear and defeat.” Take, for example, this entry written by a widowed housewife and voluntary worker from London on September 1, 1941:

Life at present offers for my taste a damn sight too little active pleasure to set against the unaccustomed displeasure of work—what with friends scattered & busy, & the lack of petrol, & the shortage & monotony of food & drink, & now the beastly long blackouts creeping in again. Everything seems reduced to a vast, drab boringness.

Change a few minor details—swap rationing for quarantine and isolation, for example—and this could have been written only yesterday.

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November 9, 2020
The Art of Distance

The Art of Distance No. 33

By The Paris Review

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive selection below.

“In his Art of Poetry interview, Henri Cole said: ‘I think it would be rather narrow—and moralistic—to say that poetry must comfort us and point to what is good. I don’t think that is the function of art, though sometimes it is a happy result.’ The Paris Review has never aspired to narrowness, or moralism, in its acquisitions—we publish literature, and embrace the wide-open range of emotions that capital-A Art can evoke. But sometimes, in some weeks, we could use a few ‘happy results,’ whether by happenstance or otherwise. Below, we’ve assembled the literary equivalent of comfort food, poems and stories that bring us some solace time and again—for their artfulness, for their assured craft, for their steady (or strange) hand and kind touch. May they offer some gladdening to you, too.” —EN

Image courtesy of the British Library, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This week, I’ve found comfort in cheese puffs and Robert Walser, whose “Snowdrops” (translated by Tom Whalen and Trudi Anderegg) seems to predict both the changing seasons and the bright future a winter might bring: “Little snowdrops, of what do you speak? They speak still of winter, but also already of spring; they speak of the past, but also saucily and merrily of the new.” —EN Read More
November 9, 2020
Arts & Culture

The Brilliance of Ann Quin

By Joshua Cohen

Ann Quin. Photo: Oswald Jones. From the Larry Goodell Collection. Courtesy of And Other Stories.

Three is the second of the four brilliant and enigma-ridden novels that Ann Quin published before drowning off the coast of Brighton in 1973 at the age of thirty-seven. The mysterious character S—the absent protagonist or antiheroine hypotenuse of this love-triangle tale—dies in similar fashion … or perhaps she’s stabbed to death by a gang of nameless, faceless men before her body washes up onshore … or perhaps the stabbed dead body that washes up onshore is someone else… It’s difficult to tell. And the telling is difficult, too. And I would submit that it’s precisely these difficulties that make this gory story normal.

A British married couple, a dyad of faux-boho normies, provide the other two points of Three’s ménage. Their names are Ruth (sometimes Ruthey, sometimes just R) and Leonard (sometimes Leon, sometimes just L). They take up with this young woman referred to only as S, who comes to share their summer-vacation cottage and their lives, her family role ever-shifting from boarder-daughter to sister to lover.

The novel opens with the couple talking over the news of her recent death, in a conversation that flows unimpeded into the one-sided conversation of surveillance. S’s most salient remains are her journals and sundry recordings, both audio and film, which document her relationships with and impressions of R and L, who greedily read and listen to and binge-watch these artifacts in the dark and dreary mourning season that follows. In addition to these artifacts, whose contents seem constantly to rise toward narrative or plot, and then, like the tide, recede, R and L pore over their own diaries and compare their scribbled confessions with S’s: S had an abortion; R and L are trying, or claim they’re trying, to get pregnant. S had, or might have had, a drug habit; R and L prefer to lose themselves in drink, and so on. As this posthumous surveillance of S continues, R and L are themselves surveilled by stranger-neighbors, who are constantly poking their blossomed noses up against the glass. Read More
November 6, 2020
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: People, Places, and Poems

By The Paris Review

Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea.

The making of history is on everyone’s mind this week. And while it’s hard to look away from that history as it unfolds in real time on our screens, in Delaware and Washington and vote-counting centers around the country, I’ve been glad to have at hand another kind of history, recently made: a new anthology of American poetry. African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young, is a doorstop at north of a thousand pages, but with Library of America’s signature bible-thin paper stock, this inspiring span of American poetics—from Phillis Wheatley to Jamila Woods to Juneteenth of this year—can somehow still fit comfortably in one’s hand. Because I am a stubbornly linear person, my impulse is to start at the beginning and move steadily toward the end, and the thoughtful chronological delineations of Struggle & Song encourage that impulse. But during weeks like this week, in years like this year, being able to enter this volume midstream and explore it in smaller sessions is a welcome thing. Particularly, I’ve found myself reading the sixth section, Blue Light Sutras (1976–1989), and a group of poets whom Young describes as writing “in personal ways about history and its many musics.” Here are Rita Dove and Cornelius Eady, Yusef Komunyakaa and Nathaniel Mackey. And in the Mackey selection—from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 31”—I found a moment that felt like it could be speaking to this moment. There, Myth “wondered where the we we / were after would come / from, awaited what rush / we were told awaited / us.” —Emily Nemens Read More
November 5, 2020
On Photography

Our Interminable Election Eve

By Jonah Goldman Kay

William Eggleston, Mississippi, 1976 © Eggleston Artistic Trust

On the eve of the 1976 election, William Eggleston traveled to Plains, Georgia, to photograph the hometown of Jimmy Carter. The landscapes he captured were overgrown yet restrained, rusting shacks and crooked tombstones. As he travels along the road from Mississippi to Georgia, the quiet buzz of anticipation grows. In Sumter, a car driving down the highway emerges from behind a small shack with advertisements painted on the side. In front, stalks of ryegrass bend with the wind. Every piece of the landscape, from its residents to the trees, is both fluid and static. The photographs in Election Eve emit an eerie quiet—a town on the precipice of transforming from a provincial backcountry to a presidential hometown.

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November 4, 2020
Look

The Sky Above, the Field Below

By Hanif Abdurraqib

An afternoon practice under the West Texas sun. Photo: Robert Clark.

My introduction to Texas came well before I ever set foot in the state itself. I found H. G. Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights at a used bookstore when I was a teenager in the early aughts, drifting in the dog days of summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I had just gotten my first car, a brown Nissan Maxima with a faulty alarm and inconsistent shades of window tint. Despite the ways that an engine and four wheels can expand a geographical radius, there are only so many places you can go when you are sixteen years old. And so I spent many of my days simply driving around Columbus, Ohio, popping into stores I couldn’t afford until I worked my way down to the stores I could.

On the cover of that edition of Friday Night Lights was the now iconic black-and-white photo taken by Robert Clark: Odessa Permian football players Brian Chavez, Mike Winchell, and Ivory Christian linking hands together and walking along the sideline of a football field. I was drawn to the book because of this image first. I was a high school athlete, preparing to become a college athlete. I was still young and eager enough to buy into all of the mythologies about brotherhood and family that sports sold me. The captains on my own soccer team would walk out to the middle of the pitch before the game in this same manner: hands clasped together, forming a single chain of movement. Read More