July 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Why All the Books About Motherhood? By Lauren Elkin No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces. A question from the inside. —Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts I As the summer heats up and my due date approaches, I’ve been reading Pamela Druckerman’s cult book about French parenting Bringing Up Bébé. It’s a book people have been telling me about for years, I guess because I live in France and they want to know if they really serve Camembert in the crèches (from what I’ve heard, they do). But I had put off reading it until it felt, well, more relevant. If you don’t have a kid and have no immediate plans to have kids, reading about how to raise one isn’t going to be a top priority. This is not the case for readers of the spate of new books about motherhood that have been hitting the shelves over the past few months. Motherhood is the new friendship, you might say. These are books that are putting motherhood on the map, literarily speaking, arguing forcefully, through their very existence, that it is a state worth reading about for anyone, parent or not. There is no more relevant subject to every person in the world than motherhood. “All human life on the planet is born of woman,” as Adrienne Rich begins her landmark book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Or as my friend A. N. Devers paraphrased Rich recently on Twitter: “Moms are not a niche – they literally make ALL THE PEOPLE.” This is one thing I keep marveling over as pregnancy has its way with my body: for every single person you see and have ever seen in your life, some poor woman went through what I am going through now. It seems too extraordinary to be true. My friend Jean, who is due in December, put it similarly in her TinyLetter (to which you must subscribe; she is a genius): “On some of the worst days of the sickness I would look at people on the street and think: All of you did this to someone, every single one of you.” How could I ever have thought of parenting, or motherhood, as a niche concern? I find myself urgently needing to talk to other women about how incredibly momentous it feels, and yet how banal, and about the weight of the decision we’ve made—about what it all means. Read More
July 17, 2018 Arts & Culture On Stanley Kunitz and the Fine Arts Work Center By Geoffrey Hilsabeck The Fine Arts Work Center. When my wife and I first started dating, the poet Stanley Kunitz, one of the founders of the Fine Arts Work Center, visited her in a dream. She told him about our budding romance, and he said, with all the brightness and benevolence one would expect, “That’s wonderful! Wonderful!” (We later named our spaniel after him, though he turned out to be more like Stan Laurel than Stanley Kunitz.) That Stanley Kunitz might travel through the weird ether of dreams seems not wholly far-fetched. He believed in the necessary work done by the secret, sleeping self, busy “tunneling the purple sea,” as he puts it in an early poem. That belief was at the bedrock of his poetry and his teaching, and it continues to shape the institutions that he helped create, Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in particular. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Fine Arts Work Center. At its heart is its fellowship program, which from October to May each year hosts ten artists and ten writers in the early stages of their careers. Fellows are given a monthly stipend and a place to live and work. The Work Center also holds a robust summer program of workshops, readings, and artist talks, as well as online classes all year round. It is, as the name suggests, a place to work and was built, fittingly, on the site of a former lumberyard. Read More
July 16, 2018 On Dance How Like the Mind It Is By Ellen O’Connell Whittet When Martha Graham was a child, she often visited her father’s office after work hours. One such day, she climbed on a pile of books so she could see the top of her father’s desk, where he was looking at a drop of water on a glass slide. When he asked her what she saw, she described it as “pure water.” He slipped the slide under the lens of a microscope, and she peered once more through the lens. “But there are wriggles in it,” she said in horror. “Yes, it is impure,” he replied. “Just remember this all your life, Martha. You must look for the truth—good, bad, or unsettling.” “Movement,” he taught her, “never lies.” It was a lesson she would recall years later, as she dictated her memoir, Blood Memory, at age ninety-six. “In a curious way, this was my first dance lesson,” Graham writes, “a gesture toward the truth. Each of us tells our own story even without speaking.” Read More
July 16, 2018 Arts & Culture How Finland Rebranded Itself as a Literary Country By Kalle Oskari Mattila The Finnish writers Johanna Sinisalo, Sofi Oksanen, and Laura Lindstedt. Here’s the thing about us Finns: we haven’t traditionally been very good at branding. In fact, seeing the brand-led global success stories originating from Sweden (IKEA, H&M, Spotify, Skype, Absolut Vodka, ABBA, Stieg Larsson, etc.), we’ve been overcome with jealousy. In Finland, we’ve been known only for Nokia phones. Engaging in excessive promotion doesn’t suit the quiet, self-effacing Finnish spirit; in Finland, you’re expected to do your job well and then let the work do the talking. In some cases, that’s worked for us: you bought a Nokia phone not because it made you cool but because you could drop it in the toilet or throw it across your apartment and somehow, miraculously, it still worked. But then Nokia went down the drain. Nokia’s undoing dovetails with the rise of the iPhone in 2007. The dwindling of Nokia, our biggest export, left an enormous dent in the Finnish economy. At the turn of the millennium, a staggering 4 percent of the Finnish GDP came from the company, and Nokia represented 21 percent of Finland’s total exports and 14 percent of corporate tax revenues. “It was and still is unprecedented,” Gordon Kelly writes in Wired. Nokia’s downfall left an even bigger dent on Finnish self-confidence. We were getting run over by Americans who were louder than we were. Around the time of the global recession, the Finns set out as a nation to find the “next Nokia.” It was all we talked about. In a small socially democratic nation like ours, where so much is shared, we felt a common responsibility over our exports. Anything and everything could be the next Nokia, we said, so long as we figure out how to brand it. Tech start-ups were the obvious choice, but cultural products emerged as a strong contender. Could we sell even more great design? Leverage our architecture? Finnish heavy metal started to do well in Germany and the Anglo American world. Then something decisive happened in Finnish literature. Read More
July 16, 2018 Arts & Culture Robin Williams’s Best Role By Chantel Tattoli Original art by Ellis Rosen. Last summer, the documentarian Marina Zenovich joined some friends for a beachside lunch in Saint-Tropez. She was on holiday from editing her film Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, which airs on HBO on July 16. The crudités basket arrived, and I—brave from the sun and the rosé—blurted, “Marina! Williams’s best animated container was Batty, not Genie.” Zenovich dragged endive through vinaigrette. “Who’s Batty?” she asked. And then, with the flawless patience of a master interviewer, she said, “Okay. Tell me.” This story takes place over a span of eight months in 1992. Robin Williams appeared in theaters for two animated feature films. First, he lent his voice to a lab-tortured bat in the indie environmental flick FernGully, about a tribe of fairies living in endangered nature; then, he voiced a high-octane jinni on retainer for three wishes in the Disney blockbuster Aladdin. The characters share traits, namely a deep-seated distrust of people. In the one case, people had experimented on him until his sonar failed, and in the other, they’d enslaved him on a wish-fulfillment circuit. Where Batty Koda’s head sprouted wires, Genie had passed ten thousand years in a common oil lamp because humans, it seemed, were real jerks. “They’re numb from the brain down,” Batty claims. Read More
July 13, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sexy Pulp, Blockheaded Heroines, and Terrifying Trees By The Paris Review Virginie Despentes’s ‘90s feminist punk pulp fiction makes for the best summer reading—all of her sparkling rage goes incandescent in the sunshine with a glass of something effervescent. Luckily, Feminist Press will be publishing Pretty Things (translated by Emma Ramadan) on August 14th. First published in France in 1998, it’s the story two identical twins: Claudine, the hyper-sexualized man-eating “pretty one,” and Pauline, the bitter reclusive “smart one,” who dresses in baggy sweaters and has never before shaved her legs. Beyond a body, the only thing the sisters seem to share is an explosive anger at men and a complete disdain for each other. When Pauline decides to impersonate Claudine, she pulls on the trappings of femininity like a heavy high camp drag routine, taking shaky steps through Paris’s 18th arrondissement in Claudine’s high heels. She never thought it was possible to go out like that without someone shouting, “Where’s the costume party?” Her appearance, legs on display, silhouette transformed. And no one realizes that she’s not at all like that. For the first time she understands: No girl is like that. It’s pulp in every sense: propulsively readable, violent, sexy, with all the satisfaction of an inevitable ending. And yet it’s also a feminist parable, blunt and unrelenting in its wrath, and it feels as fresh now as it would have ten years ago. Despentes—who is also a cultural critic and filmmaker—was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International for Vernon Subutex, which will be coming out from FSG this fall. If you haven’t read her yet, it’s time to start at the beginning. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More