June 8, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mermaids, Wrestlers, and Gawkers By The Paris Review I’ve had Evie Shockley’s latest book, semiautomatic, on my to-be-read pile since last fall and was finally spurred by her Pulitzer nomination to pull it out of the stack. I don’t know that I’ve encountered a poet for whom language is so mutable, a poet so adept at dismantling and reconfiguring it before the reader’s eyes. In the opening poem, she writes, “do i have the rite to write the body ? the right body to remain silent ? habeas corpus, to have the remains dans mes mains, my main man, handy man, unhand me, uncuff me, so i can speak in my sign(nifying) language :: signs, wonders, miracles, temptations.” Each word is a vessel to be drained of meaning and then quickly refilled with fresh essence—emphatically, rhythmically, and sometimes onomatopoeically: “war can’t amass a brass tack. war’s / all bad acts and lack, scandal // and graft. watch flags clash and tanks // attack camps. arms crack—rat-a- / tat-tat!—and ban calm.” Shockley’s punctuation acts like an electric current, shaping the flow of her lines: she uses colons, which suggest correlation; double colons, which imply analogous relationships; and tildes or swung dashes, perhaps indicating omissions (or, when stacked in pairs, making approximations). From “cogito ergo loquor”: “Unmentionables once were underwear : where / were the worst brutalities then?: buried under / under in the most vulnerable organs and held / down by that busy muscle the tongue :: in / silence unspeakable becomes unthinkable : a word / like numberless that runs can’t into won’t … thinkable : unthinkable.” Form is dictated by what the poem has to say and how Shockley chooses to say it. The poem “what’s not to liken,” for instance, is written as a multiple-choice questionnaire about the pool-party incident in McKinney, Texas, in June 2015, each question offering twinned options. Each choice is at once true and inaccurate, a remarkably sly blend of metaphor, fact, and anger. Was the girl shackled like “(a) a criminal” or “(b) a runaway slave”? In this case, was there a difference? —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Ode to the Dinkus By Daisy Alioto The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit … a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space —James Joyce, Ulysses Three months ago, I was a normal person. Now all I think about 24-7 is the dinkus. Did you know that dinkuses is an anagram of unkissed? I did. For the uninitiated, the dinkus is a line of three asterisks (* * *) used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars. The dinkus has none of the asterism’s linguistic association with the cosmos, but that’s why I love it. Due to its proximity to the word dingus, which means, to define one ridiculous word with another, “doodad,” dinkus likely evolved from the Dutch and German ding, meaning “thing.” To the less continental ear, dinkus sounds slightly dirty, and I can confirm that it’s brought serious academics to giggles. For me, a writer and reader, its crumbiness is its appeal. I need some crumbs to lure me down the page. This is especially true when I read online, where the chance of distraction is high. Fortunately, plenty of websites have filled their text breaks with a unique dinkus of their own. At The Awl (now defunct), text was broken up by a tiny awl. (At The Awl’s sister site The Billfold, it’s a billfold.) Over at The Outline, squiggles guide the eye from section to section like rubbery fishing lures. Hazlitt and Lit Hub employ a single asterisk aligned to the left margin. Read More
June 8, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Fyodor Dostoyevsky By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. “An Onion” is one of the most famous chapter headings in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and refers not to Russian cuisine, in which onions are a staple ingredient, but to a story the character Grushenka tells about a wicked old woman being pulled up from the fires of hell by holding onto an onion proffered by her guardian angel. The woman lived a bad life but once gave an onion to a beggar, and it’s this single good deed that might save her. The anecdote is meant to demonstrate the possibility of God’s forgiveness, and its teller, Grushenka, says of herself in one of the book’s climactic scenes, “Though I am bad, I did give away an onion,” indicating her readiness to be saved. (As for the old woman, the other dammed souls try to grab her feet and be pulled up too, and she selfishly starts kicking them away. The onion breaks, “and the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day.”) Read More
June 7, 2018 Look Your Problems Have One Answer By Lorna Simpson These collages draw on found images of black women and men from vintage Ebony and Jet magazines. A selection is presented below, along with Simpson’s selection of advertising phrases. Lorna Simpson, A Friend, 2012. A SELECTION OF PHRASES CULLED FROM THE ADVERTISING THAT ORIGINALLY ACCOMPANIED MANY OF THE IMAGES THAT APPEAR WITHIN THE COLLAGES Put on your Afro Pony-Tail and swish those superflies away! Be the Huntress Not for everywoman Cool One Freedom Afro Puffs Pepper and Salt Face Framing Style Every woman should have the touch of the soft life at her finger tips From a plain before to a beautiful after Pussy cat look Light as a feather A girl should have nine lives too The Afro: keep it full, keep it classic Braids of Heaven Boss Lady Private Secretary Show Stopper Upkeep Double Take Super Dutch Boy Naturally difficult hair Don’t kid yourself Be Beautiful everyday The Duke Director The Duke Swahilian The Duke Playboy The Duke Professional The Duke Maestro The Duke Sportsman The Duke Junior Afro The Duke Globetrotter The Duke Reporter A beautiful head of hair is never an accident day after day after wonderful day Anyway you desire Strong feelings about naturalness Butter yourself up Show It Like It Is When we say long we mean long King Size It’s an Art! It’s a Mood! It’s a Feeling! One Puff Two Puffs You’re the Judge As old as 900b.c. – 200 a.d. and as Brand New as Today! Off Black Jet Black Mixed Grey Dark Brown Semi Afro Supreme Freedom Supreme beauty where your hair begins The only thing inflated will be your ego Change your mood Have no fear Anyway you choose Around-the-clock Loveliness But don’t tell You can Totally different Add a new twist to your charm and personality It took a Black company to come up with Georgia Brown Love Knot Society Queen Darling New You Afro American Heavenly Beauty Boy-Cut Curly Girly Dome of Curls Kiss Me Now Instant beauty Daisy Jones Star Glow Linda Linda Linda Afrialon Kool-N-Light Lioness Corn-row Cutie Corn-row Darling Free and Easy Liberté Flirt You’re today’s modern black woman- on the go Love Nest The Sophisticate The Matinee Bell Boogie The Swish Rhythm Tempo Top Yourself Off Feel Lovely Right On Harlem Classic Nubian Queen Mellowone Black Huntress Be the Huntress From nine to five they will know you are alive For your evening appointments too Take charge Steal the scene Simplicity is the keynote For the woman on the go What are you doing tonight Keep em watching Watch yourself Jumbo Afro Colonial Cascade China Doll Boy’s Cut Flowing Beauty Brown Skin Beauty Afro It’s about time isn’t it It’s been a long time in coming, but it’s finally here your problems have one answer I’m glad you asked that question From Campus Queen to Hollywood Star Black Pearl Before and After we specialize in rich darker shades you can have it anyway you want it So easy now Great beginning for something beautiful A little goes a long way Why shouldn’t you Anytime is the right time Flawless Exact Match Reveal the beauty that you conceal Read More
June 7, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Won’t You Celebrate with Me? By Claire Schwartz 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, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, There are so many poems that I’ve read about being hurt. But what about hurting those whom you truly love? I need a poem to navigate this feeling of being the bad guy. Sincerely, Lost Dear Lost, When I sit down to answer these letters, I often find myself reflecting on the purpose of my response. What should the poem offer? Challenge? Company? Direction? Language for an old feeling? A way toward new possibility? Your note made me consider the particular challenges of writing about causing harm. Writing about one’s own violence sometimes feels like flaunting one’s complex interiority—a beautiful rendering would be its own kind of absolution. The harm doer’s persuasive telling can draw us willfully into their orbit. I want to offer you a poem not of solace or pardon, but one that crucially refuses reconciliation and, in so doing, holds space for the difficult work of reckoning: Sharon Olds’s “I Could Not Tell.” I could not tell I had jumped off that bus, that bus in motion, with my child in my arms, because I did not know it. I believed my own story: I had fallen, or the bus had started up When I had one foot in the air The title marks both the speaker’s shame of leaping off a bus with her child in her arms and the impossibility of assembling a narrative one cannot fully know. The distortions of both shame and memory pose a problem for language. Can one ever really tell the truth about the harm one does, or is the real work in positioning ourselves to listen well, to do better? The anxious repetition of negations that opens each stanza—“I could not tell,” “I would not remember,” “I have never done it”—structures something powerfully irreconcilable in the poem. This is a poem that breaks open the speaker’s own story about herself. It takes seriously the vulnerability of precious connection: I have never done it again, I have been very careful. I have kept an eye on that nice young mother who lightly leapt off the moving vehicle onto the stopped street, her life in her hands, her life’s life in her hands. I hope Olds’s poem keeps you company as you learn how to love better. Continue that guardianship of holding yourself accountable. —CS Read More
June 7, 2018 Arts & Culture The Surprising Literary History of Skin Care By Gavin Francis Evelyn De, The Love Potion, 1903. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, there’s a scene of miraculous rejuvenation accomplished by a magical cream. Margarita Nikolaevna, a thirty-year-old woman, is sitting on a bench in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens when a suspicious fang-toothed man (later revealed as an agent of Satan) presents her with a golden casket, heavy and ornate as a reliquary. He tells her to wait until exactly half past eight that evening before opening it and applying the contents to her skin. For reasons too complicated to summarize, she agrees. At 8:29 P.M., Margarita can’t wait any longer: she lifts the heavy box of gold and opens the lid. The cream is yellowish and oily and gives off the aroma of earth, marshland, and forest. She begins rubbing it into her forehead and cheeks, where it is absorbed quickly and greaselessly, producing a tingling effect over her skin. Then she looks in the mirror and drops the casket in shock. Read More