May 29, 2018 Arts & Culture Helen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World By Andrew Martin Helen DeWitt. Photo: Zora Sicher. The literary world is small. Once you’ve worked a few jobs in or around the publishing industry—I’ve been an intern at a trade magazine, an editorial assistant at an old-school book review, a publicist for a university press, a freelancer for more publications than I can easily count, and a fiction writer—it can begin to feel, only somewhat inaccurately, as though you’ve met everyone who works with books. One of my fellow former assistants just replaced another one of our former colleagues as the reviews editor for a prestigious literary magazine. While feeling especially awkward at a New York party a couple years ago, I struck up a conversation with the woman standing next to me. She was my agent’s assistant; she’d just read my manuscript. She had some notes. As someone who has spent the majority of the past five years writing fiction, this familiarity has had limited professional utility (my “friends” have too much “integrity” to shuffle my work into print-on-demand), and it also presents challenges for the work itself. For one, cynicism is an unattractive quality in a fiction writer, and smirking knowingness can kill a work of fiction as surely as it can kill a conversation. More prosaically, it renders large swaths of one’s social knowledge off-limits in one’s writing, or at least subject to extreme vetting. Most editors and publishers can take a joke, of course (or can pretend to), and recent books by Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Cusk, and many more take the egotistical denizens of the self-regarding literary scene as their subject. But a more dangerous and difficult task is showing up the still-prevalent notion (at least in marketing materials) of the writer as heroic individual by revealing the process through which a work is transformed—and sometimes even created wholesale—as it moves through the machinery of the publishing world. That is the bold project Helen DeWitt has been taking up for years in the stories now compiled in the book Some Trick. Read More
May 25, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sharp Women and Humble Turtles By The Paris Review Michelle Dean. What I like most about Michelle Dean’s book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is its cumulative effect. It’s not a biography of one or two or even three brilliant intellectuals, but ten: ten women writers (all are referred to by their last names alone, comme des garçons) who are variously funny, acerbic, insightful, opinionated, and complex. Together, they make a sisterhood, even though, Dean explains, most would likely balk at that notion. All were persistent in their rejection of ever-evolving accusations of aggression, vindictiveness, unseriousness, and facileness. In fact, the number and variety of stories in Dean’s book also illustrate how hard it is for women to find the “right” tone among male-dominated ideologies. (Dean’s primary subjects are white; a book about women of color would evoke other, unique difficulties.) Of Pauline Kael, Dean writes, “It’s plain she was hoping the brilliance of her work would be enough, as it would be for a man in her position.” Such a small desire, and still so fresh. —Nicole Rudick All happy gardens are alike, except that they’re not, not at all, a truth rendered in Penelope Lively’s thoroughly charming forthcoming nonfiction Life in the Garden. As with all successful nature writing, reading this book is like being taught a new way to see. What previously registered as a vague, general whole now registers as an abundance of individual parts, each worthy of their own attention. Lively’s nimble book is a captivating kind of memoir balanced on pillars of social history and art criticism, examining the role of the garden as a mainstay of modern culture (and as such, subject to the influence of waxing and waning trends and styles) and its significance in selections of literature and art (my personal favorite being the cameo of Mr. Noakes from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia). As a card-holding member of the New York Botanical Garden, I recognize that the color of my personal fascination with gardens is as an American, born and raised in a country where the garden is less an integral part of the cultural fiber than it is in Lively’s Britain. But Lively herself asserts that there is a magnetism to the garden that transcends nationality, hooking into themes of time, transience, and memory. —Lauren Kane Read More
May 25, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Pather Panchali By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Bengali novel Pather Panchali, Song of the Road is best known in the West as a Satyajit Ray film but the 1929s classic is also one of the most popular titles from prolific Indian author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894–1950). It chronicles the lives of two poor children in rural India. The great animating spirit of this beloved book is that, despite their poverty, the children’s experience is one of abundance. Every path in the village is beloved to Durga, the elder sister, “she had known them all her life, so naturally and intimately that they had become a part of her…they were her own dear friends, her lifelong companions.” Though Durga and her brother Opu are often hungry, their lives are a paradise of guava and mangosteen and custard apple trees, simple but delicious dinners made by mummy, and festival treats and feasts. On a day when Durga makes a picnic of dal, rice and eggplant snuck from her mother’s stores, Opu reflects, “To think that they were out together sitting under a date-palm tree with leaves from a custard apple tree lying like a carpet all around them, and that it was real rice and real vegetables that they were eating! How wonderful it all was!” Every bite these two take seems to be bursting with flavor, and small things like the quest for ingredients to make “a mango pickle” with oil, salt and chili become major plot points. Read More
May 25, 2018 Arts & Culture The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls By Rainer Maria Rilke Rilke wrote this essay after having viewed the dolls of Lotte Pritzel at a Munich exhibition in 1913. They were not designed for children. These elongated and emaciated dolls were mounted on small baroque stands and dressed for the most part in weird gauzy costumes, their postures and limbs and long scrawny fingers suggestive of dance and decadence. Olivier Joseph Coomans, The Old Doll, 1882. Faced with the stolid and unchanging dolls of childhood, have we not wondered again and again, as we might of certain students, what was to become of them? Are these the adult versions of those doll childhoods cosseted by genuine and feigned emotions? Are these their fruits, reflected fleetingly into this atmosphere so grossly saturated with humanity? False fruits whose seed could never come to rest, almost washed away sometimes by tears, at other times exposed to the passionate aridity of rage or the desolation of neglect; planted into the most compliant depths of an utterly venturesome tenderness, to be torn out again time after time and hurled into a corner with angular broken things, spurned, despised, done with; just where it should really be given to them, smearing themselves with it like spoilt children, impenetrable and, in their advanced state of inevitable corpulence, unable at any point to absorb even a single drop of water; without any judgement of their own, yielding to any rag and yet, once appropriated, taking possession of this in a particular way, negligently, smugly, impurely; awake only for an instant as the eyes flicked open, then off to sleep again with disproportionate and insensitive eyes open, scarcely able, it would seem, to tell whether it is the mechanical eyelid which weighs on them or that other object, the air; inert; dragged along through the changing emotions of the day, lying for a while in each; made into a confidant, an accomplice, like a dog, but not as receptive and forgetful as a dog, and a burden in both roles; initiated into the first nameless experiences of their owners, lying about in their earliest uncanny spells of loneliness as if in empty rooms and all that was needed was to exploit this new spaciousness crudely with all their limbs; dragged as companions into cots, abducted into the deep furrows of illnesses, appearing in dreams, entangled in the disasters of feverish nights—such was the nature of those dolls. For they themselves took no active part in these events, they just lay at the edge of childhood sleep, filled with nothing more than rudimentary thoughts of falling, letting themselves be dreamed, just as they were accustomed to being inexhaustibly lived during the day by alien forces. Read More
May 24, 2018 On Music A Siren in a Paper Sleeve By Christopher King Still from Ghost World, by Terry Zwigoff. I am a record collector. The type of disc with which I am obsessed, the 78-rpm phonograph record, is made of slowly decaying organic materials, bound together and coated with synthetic compounds. John Blacking, a pioneering ethnomusicologist of the twentieth century, proposed that music is a “humanly organized sound,” a pat yet inclusive definition. Like most of the music he studied in the fifties, the 78-rpm phonograph record is a relic of the past, a fossil. These curious black discs are all that connect us with the best part of our musical past, with the rapture that we were once able to convey through deep song and dance. These records are fragile, yet they were the dominant medium of auricular permanence and commerce for roughly the first fifty years of the twentieth century. When I was young, I discovered that 78 recordings—unlike so many other parts of contemporary culture—needed no outside validation, just an attentive, appreciative listener. I was the listener, and the artists that made them were my friends. They were constant. People would betray you, institutions would fail you, but this, this old music, a music lacking all pretension, would never change. Read More
May 24, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: It’s Not Sad at All, Any of It By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, My wife and I are expecting a baby in five months. We are both women, and she is carrying it. The months feel expansive and momentous, like I need to get myself wholly together, smooth out all my rusted-in neuroses, do all the wild kayaking, dancing, writing, and running around in forests. I need to do all that so I’m perfectly composed and ready for the sacrifices of parenthood. I feel I should be savoring every delicious hour of this right-before-baby time, but I’m still worrying and feeling a little bereft and not working out, just like usual. I can’t wait to meet our son or daughter, but how can I graduate to fully baked adult in just five months? What if I’m not good at it? I need a poem that speaks to crossing a big threshold, and the inevitability of unreadiness for being a mom. Sincerely, Not Grown Up Yet Dear NGUY, Every new or expectant parent I’ve ever spoken with has shared the anxiety you articulate beautifully and concisely: “What if I’m not good at it?” I remember being fascinated by the realization (it came embarrassingly late) that before they had my older brother, my parents had never been parents. Some part of me just idly assumed they’d been born parents, fully equipped to handle our feeding and fevers and acne crises. Read More