December 11, 2017 At Work States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta By Sarah Gerard Anne Garréta was the first person born after the founding of Oulipo to be admitted to the experimental literary group. The conceit of her memoir, Not One Day (2002), is consistent with that association: At the book’s opening, she vows to write five hours a day, every day for a month, each time recollecting one woman whom she’s desired or who has desired her. She will place the entries in alphabetical order. The result, she says, will be a “stammering alphabet of desire,” one that will locate, spell out, and delineate desire in her life. But in the end, the book doesn’t follow its own rules; it is as elusive as desire itself, unable to be pinned down, slippery as the object of its second-person point of view. Rather than comprising, impossibly, an elucidation of the nature of desire, the memoir instead enacts it, becoming an experience of seduction and pursuit. Garréta has published six books in France, and two—Sphinx (1986) and Not One Day—have been translated into English (in 2015 and 2017, respectively, both by Emma Ramadan). Both upend expectations for love and literature, insofar as we can expect to be anything but transported. In Sphinx, Garréta offers a love story without revealing either of the lovers’ genders. The book is a dark, pulsing romance, tortured and thrilling. I spoke with Garréta recently about Sphinx and Not One Day. I was, at the time, falling in love and in the grip of desire. “Everything becomes salient,” Garréta told me, when I shared this with her. We talked about the relationship of desire to writing, the various states and attitudes of the physical body, and the reawakening of curiosity. INTERVIEWER How do you view the relationship between desire and writing? In your life, are those two things intertwined? GARRÉTA I’d say yes because they’re both quite complicated to figure out and they are both liable to fall into cliché, into patterns that are customary and basically uninteresting. So the difficulty, both in desire and in writing, is to create forms that are not necessarily given or granted. It takes effort. I would say that it’s not a writing of desire, or that there’s a direct connection—there’s an analogy. Read More
December 11, 2017 Arts & Culture The Rise of Queer Comics By Hillary Chute Gay Comix no. 1, ed. Howard Cruse, cover by Rand Holmes, 1980. The fastest-growing area in comics right now may be, broadly speaking, queer comics—comics that feature in some way the lives, whether real or imagined, of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer) characters. Queer comics are one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary comics, fueled in large part by the runaway success of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—the story of a gay girl and her closeted, ultimately suicidal gay father that was adapted to be a Broadway musical of the same title, and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. Gayness used to be a public accusation leveled at comics to discredit the medium: in the 1950s, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman, were suspected to be gay, and therefore a negative influence. Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote in his influential book on comics that the former represent “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” and for the latter, “the homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable … For girls she is a morbid ideal.” The infamous 1954 Comics Code, inspired by Wertham’s study, banned “sex perversion or any inference to same”—a clear reference to homosexuality. But today gay comics are an ever-expanding feature of the field, marking a new era of self-expression. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced. Read More
December 8, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Interwar, War, and Postwar By The Paris Review Tracy K Smith “Our bodies run with ink dark blood. / Blood pools in the pavement’s seams. Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” So begins Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Unrest in Baton Rouge,” from the forthcoming collection, Wade in the Water. Like many of the poems in this slim yet searing book, “Unrest” is at once a haunting testimonial of the foulness on which the country was built and an homage to the love—however scant it may at times feel—that’s persevered despite it all. From start to finish, the collection traverses American history, comprising imagined letters between slaveholders, between black men or women and “Mr abarham lincon” or “My Children” or “Excellent Sir”; erasures, using the Declaration of Independence as source material; and poems about “our magnificent roads, / Our bridges slung with steel, / Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights … ” But Smith writes, too, of more personal moments—the wonders of motherhood, the terrors of womanhood—so that by the collection’s end, we’ve listened to a choir of voices from generations past and present who have shown us the beautiful alongside the monstrous. In the poem “New Road Station,” Smith writes that “history is not a woman,” but in Wade in the Water, she most certainly is. —Caitlin Youngquist I have carried Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege around with me for the past year and a half as though it were my bible. For all intents and purposes, it is: Williams is a powerhouse of a writer, one who could level an entire city with a single sentence, and I feel a devotion to her work that borders on dogmatism. Yet as with most spiritual matters, the exact cause of this fierce allegiance eludes me. After sixteen months with Joy, I don’t think I’m any closer to articulating, or even understanding, why I love her stories so much. What I can say is this: in each of the tales collected in the career-spanning Visiting Privilege, there is a sense that something is shifting just behind the veil. The machinations of daily life take on an Old Testament weight. Things mean what they mean until, suddenly, they don’t. The protagonists are alien to everyone they encounter, alien even to the reader, and their fundamental unknowability captures the desperate isolation of our modern era. I started reading The Visiting Privilege in August last year. Over the months, I’ve bounced my way through story after wonderful story, scratching my head, drinking in the sentences, trying to hold on to each word just a little longer than usual. And now, here I am, interning at The Paris Review, who just announced this week that Williams will receive the 2018 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. This whole chain of events has a whiff of the beyond for me. Surely, this means something, I say, and then I turn the page, knowing it either does or does not, and making peace with this lack of understanding all the same. —Brian Ransom Read More
December 8, 2017 Arts & Culture How Original Are You? By Robert Shore Copyright © Museo Nacional del Prado “The old idea of making things” So there I was, sprawled across the floor of my living room in south London, happily riffling through the newspapers on my iPad (I’m old-fashioned like that). The shortlist for the annual Turner Prize had just been announced, and the broadsheet commentators seemed even more mystified than usual by the list of nominees. It was evident that the judges had done something unusual—unusual even in the context of the prize that had made Tracey Emin’s Bed tabloid fodder—by the reaction in the Guardian, where the super-sober Adrian Searle declared himself baffled. After offering a rundown of the candidates (Duncan Campbell, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell, Ciara Phillips), he declared: “It’s all a bit dour, and I take this as deliberate. This year’s judges seem to be intent on delivering an exhibition that not only shakes things up—none of the shortlisted artists are exactly familiar to a wider audience—but also want us to struggle with meaning as much as the artists seem to do … It’s going to be hard work.” Read More
December 8, 2017 Document Hanging Out with the Churchills on Aristotle Onassis’s Yacht By Patrick Leigh Fermor Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915—2011), who was once described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” was regarded as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. His mostly autobiographical accounts of his adventures through prewar Europe, southern Greece, and the Caribbean are regarded as classics. The following letter was written to Ann Fleming, a British socialite whose third husband, Ian Fleming, was best known as the writer of the James Bond series. To Ann Fleming c/o Niko Ghika 18 September 1954 Hydra Darling Annie, Very many apologies indeed from both of us (1) for neither having answered your lovely long letter, full of exactly the sort of thing one wants to hear—it was a masterpiece, and by far the best of any ex-Hydriot so far; and (2) for being such laggards in saying ‘thank you’ for The Dynasts. It really was kind of you to remember it. Joan is now in the thick of the first vol.—the second, which is reprinting, will follow soon, your bookseller says. It arrived just as we were about to run out of books. That green detective one, The Gilded Fly, which vanished so mysteriously, miraculously materialized on the hall table yesterday! You were missed a great deal by everyone, including the servants, who still talk affectionately of Kyria Anna. Soon after you went, I got a letter from Kisty Hesketh, introducing her brother called Rory McEwen and a pal called Mr Vyner. You probably know the former, v. good looking, and a champion guitar player it seems, and probably very nice. They both seemed wet beyond words to us, without a spark of life or curiosity, and such a total lack of conversation that each subject died after a minute’s existence. We had sixty subjects killed under us in an hour, till at last even Maurice and I were reduced to silence. Joan did her best, but most understandably subsided into a bored scowl after the first few hours. Read More
December 7, 2017 Video & Multimedia A Very Particular Bird By Jem Cohen When asked to make a short film to accompany the release of Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink, I was more than pleased. It meant an increasingly rare excuse to wander, in Midtown and through my own footage archive. I’d need to sit with Stephenson’s soft-spoken reading of excerpts from the book and search for images that could at least loosely relate to Smith’s infamous Sixth Avenue “jazz loft.” I had neither the intention nor the means to re-create New York City in the period of 1957 to 1965, and in any case I didn’t want to compete with the text by being literal. It soon became evident that the film had to be a celebration of the subtractive, something Stephenson had done so beautifully in the book itself. I use that term to mean that which is added by leaving things out. For Stephenson, who worked on his Gene Smith project for more than twenty years, this meant relinquishing the more predictable biographical tome he could have written in favor of something looser and riskier. He would evoke the photographer via the lives of people Smith intersected with and through other fruitful, if unorthodox, digressions—one being the very particular sound of a very particular bird. Read More