June 11, 2018 First Person Toothless: On the Dentist, Powerlessness, and Pnin By Adrienne Celt Otto Dix, Mädchen vor dem Spiegel, 1921. Sometimes I wonder what I’d look like without any teeth left in my head. Lips turned inward on themselves, gums a shocking pink. My throat a cavern that empties forever downward, and my body hollow, without purpose or power. Mine would not be strong gums, like a baby has, with nascent teeth budding just below the surface. Mine would be a mouth of death, as soft and pliant as dirt tossed loosely on a grave. Clearly, I have some feelings about my teeth. When I was a teenager, my parents divorced and stopped making dentist appointments for me—I’m not sure whether this was a miscommunication between them or if, as I distantly recall, they both decided I ought to take on the responsibility myself once I reached fourteen, even though I couldn’t yet drive and was afraid of making phone calls to strangers. Either way, I didn’t go, and my teeth have been a mess ever since. Read More
June 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Few Words to the Graduates By David Sedaris The following is taken from David Sedaris’s commencement speech at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Thank you so much for having me and for presenting me with this honorary degree. It’s not necessarily better than the one I earned by going to classes and putting myself into debt, but I’m trying to collect a stack of them before I die, so I really appreciate it. And congratulations, graduates. This is quite an accomplishment. Like most of you, I am incredibly grateful for the education I received. A good public school followed by college. I went to three in all, looking for the right fit. The first two were okay, I guess, but midway through my sophomore year, I got heavy into drugs and dropped out. Everyone said that was it—I’d made an irreparable mistake at age twenty and could never correct it. But I did. The place that I eventually graduated from, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has its qualities but is nowhere near Oberlin when it comes to academics. It might be different now, but in 1984, if you could draw Snoopy on a cocktail napkin, you were in. I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987, when I was thirty. Our commencement speaker was a conceptual artist named Vito Acconci. He’d done a lot but was best known for constructing a wooden ramp in a New York gallery. Then he hid beneath it and masturbated for several weeks without stopping. “Well you could do that!” my mother said when I explained to her who he was. “I mean, isn’t that the goal? Doing what you love and getting paid for it!” I don’t think she understood a word of the man’s commencement address. I’m not sure I did either. In preparing for today, I asked myself what he might have said that would have had an effect on my future. Read More
June 8, 2018 In Memoriam Three Brief Encounters with Anthony Bourdain By Brendan Francis Newnam Anthony Bourdain during the Peabody interview for Parts Unknown. 1) The first time I met Anthony Bourdain, he told me a joke. I was an enterprising host and producer of a fledgling food-and-culture podcast and radio show, and word had spread that he was in the building, recording an interview. I waited outside the studio like a nerdy paparazzo, with my headphones, microphone, and recording kit cocked and ready to go. When he emerged, I quickly slipped between him and his publicist, introduced myself, and asked him if he knew any jokes I could share with my audience. He smiled and said, “Sure. Ready?” “Yeah,” I replied. “So why did Jesus cross the road?” “I don’t know.” “Someone nailed him to a chicken.” We shook hands, and he was off. His joke was too off-color to use on my public radio show. People often described Anthony Bourdain as a rock star, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Anthony Bourdain was a punk. Read More
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