July 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Katherine Mansfield Would Approve By Ashleigh Young On Katherine Mansfield’s birthday, I walked up the edge of a long driveway in gale-force winds. I walked for a long time, with cars passing me. “The wind—the wind.” I was walking to Government House, which is at the top of a hill, where there would be a party. Katherine Mansfield was 125 years old today. The driveway to Government House has bushes and trees on either side, and these were beaten and pushed about by the wind. I thought about turning around and just going home, but that would mean walking past the guard at the entrance again. Every time someone drove past me, I felt more self-conscious. Finally, a hybrid car stopped, and a woman wound down the window. “Are you going to the Katherine Mansfield party?” I was. “That’s a long way, dear. Do you want to hop in?” As we zoomed up the hill between the trees, we should’ve talked about the end of Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party,” in which a big dog runs by like a shadow and Laura walks down that smoky dark lane, because that driveway recalled it to us. But instead, we talked about whether we’d been to Government House before. The woman had been many times. I hadn’t been. Read More
July 3, 2018 Arts & Culture A Summer Reading List for Misfits By Yelena Moskovich The sun is out, the shoes are off, the legs are sprawled upon the color-blocked terry cloth, and your vacation book is open. It’s not my intention to be the black spider crawling across your beach towel. Every summer, seasonal reading lists hail the “fun” page-turner and use their ease to jeer at the “challenging” read—how dare a book do something freaky with language, structure, or content in the midst of so much natural light? Listen, I know the stakes: to denounce a plot-driven summertime read is to announce oneself too loudly as a serious person. In my case, a serious Slavic, lesbian, now-French woman with—way to ruin the vibe—short hair. All right, I partake in recreational seriousness in the warm climate (my favorite melon is melancholia), but I will not apologize. I crave untraditional texts for my leisure, and I have a feeling (despite my existential leanings) that I am not alone. A pleasure read is there to help us take pleasure, and the pleasures of summertime include: the lushness of loneliness, the daze of our flesh, the ease of nature, the horniness of an afternoon, the carefree blur of warming temperatures, the rhythm that slows and flirts with the long hours. I understand that some prefer their seasonal delights within the undemanding pages of a well-cued story line, where love is closer than you think, journeys are life lessons, the murderer is one you should have guessed, and good defeats evil with magical accessories. Blessed be your joy, but it is not mine. The books that bring me true pleasure are the weirdly formatted ones, the rhythmic ones, the ones that feel too much, that behave oddly within the chapters, that are soft-spoken or stutter and have an accent—and whose stories feel like other ways of being. Read More
July 2, 2018 Look City Dreams By Bodys Isek Kingelez Bodys Isek Kingelex with Étoile Rouge Congolaise in Nantes, 1993. Photo: André Magnin. In the thirty-minute documentary that accompanies the first U.S. retrospective of his work, Bodys Isek Kingelez notes that “a building without color is like a person without clothes.” Kingelez, who began his artistic career restoring tribal masks at the National Museum in Kinshasa, designed buildings of a multitude of colors. When then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) won independence from Belgium in 1960, Kingelez began imagining the rehabilitative possibilities of architecture. With colored paper, commercial packaging, plastic, soda cans, and bottle caps, he built models of individual buildings and then, eventually, entire African megacities. From now through January 1, the Museum of Modern Art is showing work spanning his full career, from early single-building sculptures to his futuristic late works, which incorporate increasingly unorthodox materials. “Thanks to my deep hope for a happy tomorrow,” Kingelez said, “I strive to better my quality, and the better becomes the wonderful.” Read More
July 2, 2018 At Work We Speak About Violence: Abdellah Taïa and Edouard Louis in Conversation By The Paris Review In 2013, the French writer Edouard Louis organized a symposium on autofiction at the École Normale Superieure, in Paris, where he was studying. The symposium was titled “Je vois écrit: Ecriture de soi et politique du récit” (“I Write You: Writing of the Self and the Politics of Narration”). The subject was of urgent interest to Louis: he was only months away from publishing his first novel, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (published in the United States, in 2017, as The End of Eddy), an autobiographical novel about growing up gay and poor in a conservative, working-class town in France. Among the day’s panelists was the writer Abdellah Taïa. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1973, Taïa moved to Paris in 1998; he published his first story collection in 2000 and another in 2004. Two years later, he came out as gay in the Moroccan daily TelQuel, making him the first openly homosexual Arab writer. In the aftermath, he wrote the bildungsroman L’Armée du salut (Salvation Army, 2009), an autobiographical novel whose publication in English was introduced by Edmund White. (He also directed a film adaption of the book in 2013.) Since then, he has published five other novels, including Le jour du Roi, which won the Prix de Flore in 2010. Last year, Semiotext(e) published Another Morocco, a translated selection of stories from Taïa’s first two collections; Louis’s second novel, History of Violence, a best seller in France, was published last month in an English translation. In between these two events, Taïa and Louis, who have become friends, conducted a conversation over email—on recognizing similar concerns in one another’s work, resisting victimhood, and the effect of shame on writing. Our appreciation to Noura Wedell for her translation from the French. —Nicole Rudick TAÏA How can I disappear from a world that doesn’t like me, a world that brutalizes and rapes me because I am a homosexual and an effeminate Moroccan adolescent? How can I die in the eyes of others but stay alive elsewhere, in some dream place, some true fiction, while I prepare my vengeance to come? Those two questions were my obsession when I was still in Morocco. How to flee the system in order to realize myself? How to hide in order to see better, to love better, to better transgress? But I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where to learn how to protect myself. The world was very clearly dominated by the most powerful, by the most rich, by the dictators, the rapists, or by the parents who simply followed what they were told and sometimes killed their own children rather than give them guidance. One day I understood the first thing I had to do in order to become a little strong, a little rebellious. I had to change my name. I had to stop being Abdellah Taïa. But in order to be what? To be whom? And where exactly? I chose this new name, Azzedine Matar. The first name was the name of one of my favorite Egyptian actors. As for the family name, in Arabic it means “rain.” The rain that washes and purifies, the rain that would allow me to be born again, that would allow me to resist. Since my adolescence, that’s been my name. Not my writer’s name but my secret name, my unsullied name, my name between the sky and me, between Allah and me. When I met you for the first time, Edouard, I felt immediate fraternity. Recognition. A tie that was so precise. A way of walking and trembling. It was during the symposium you organized at the École Normale Supérieure. The theme was “I Write You: Writing of the Self and Politics of Narration.” And when I discovered the title of your first book, The End of Eddy, I understood the nature of my feelings for you, of my intuition. You’d also thought about changing your name. To flee with a new name, to write anew, naked and more than naked … You are the first person to whom I’ve told this secret. Read More
July 2, 2018 Arts & Culture The Burning House By Hanya Yanagihara David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz (detail), 1983–84, acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 60″ × 40″. I I was reading Close to the Knives in Mexico, where David Wojnarowicz spent significant amounts of time—Oaxaca, mainly, and Mexico City and the border towns—though I didn’t know that then. I was staying at an expensive resort, which was in a state of constant repair, as those kinds of resorts always are: stucco was being smoothed and repainted, bright clouds of bougainvillea were being trimmed, concrete was being resurfaced. It was an ultimately futile tussle between man and nature, one frustrating and poignant to watch; it took teams of people, and their collective diligence, to try to undo what nature would keep doing. One day, the resort would close, and within months or weeks or days, all of those years of vigilance would mean nothing—the rains would rust the metal lanterns, the sun would leach the color from the walls, the hibiscus would grow stalky and shaggy. I mention this because we tend to associate Wojnarowicz with a specific moment in the culture, with a particular movement of art, and with a brief span of years. On one hand, you can’t not: His art was inextricable from his own biography. It was art that swept up the entirety of who the artist was and what he had experienced—and had seen and felt—into a single image and spat it back out at the viewer; there is a shimmering present-tenseness to it. My life flashed before my eyes, we say when we fear we have just only escaped death, and to look at his work is to realize how charged, how exhausting it must have been to live when your life was always flashing before your eyes, and not just your life but your friends’ lives, and to be so overwhelmed by that constant blur of images, that whir that both never ended and that you prayed would never end. Read More
June 29, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Trick Mirrors, Summer Beers, and Bedazzled Pianos By The Paris Review Photo: M. Sharkey All of the essays in Alexander Chee’s marvelous collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel are striking, but I found the shortest essay, simply titled “1989,” the most arresting. In four pages, he describes his participation in an AIDS protest in San Francisco—his first protest. As the procession moves into an intersection, the protesters block traffic; they are immediately surrounded by riot police, who begin to brutally drive them off. Chee climbs atop a newspaper box, with a view to the scene, and describes the rise and fall of batons with dispassionate shock, eventually climbing down from his perch to rescue a beaten friend. “This is the country I live in,” he realizes in closing. And I thought instantly of Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace, atop a knoll, observing the horrors of the Battle of Borodino. In shock and fear, he plunges down the slope and thinks, “Now they will be horrified at what they have done!” They aren’t, of course, and this seems to be the same conclusion Chee comes to: the feeling of incredulousness that violence and death are served up so openly—in a field, in a street—before so many watching eyes. Chee’s essay takes place during an AIDS protest but with other details it could easily be about the Holocaust, the Syrian war, or the United States, ca. 2018. —Nicole Rudick Read More