May 18, 2018 On Writing For Sarah By Antoine Wilson I was drinking coffee with a friend in Los Angeles, in an adorable cafe that also happened to sell books. On a whim, I decided to see if they had any of mine. I made my way to the w’s, and there it was—my first novel—on the shelf. I felt happiness followed immediately by anxiety. Why had nobody purchased it? I opened the book and realized it was a used copy. There was the inscription: “For Sarah—I hope you enjoy my twisted little book!” Followed by my signature and the date. I went through a mental Rolodex, trying to figure out who Sarah might have been. I knew many Sarahs—it must have been one of the most popular girl’s names in the early seventies. I pictured first the writer Sarahs, several of whom I respected greatly as my peers or my same-age betters. I tried to remember whose names ended with an h and whose didn’t. I wanted to impress these Sarahs. I wanted them to find my work as valuable as I had found theirs. It pained me to imagine one of them deaccessioning an inscribed copy of my first novel. Read More
May 17, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You All Have Lied 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, I feel like I’m living in a world of decay right now. My mother and both of her brothers are dying of Huntington’s disease, which slowly kills your mind and body over a decade or so (think ALS + Parkinson’s + Alzheimer’s + extra mood/psychological challenges). My other mother has cognitive challenges that are making it hard for her to manage their care, and she seems to be worsening. As a twenty-six-year-old, I certainly am capable of taking on responsibility, but I often find myself feeling like a scared, lost child. I’ve moved back home to New Orleans to help, but I struggle to find anything like optimism or contentment. My city is also in a state of cultural and physical decay—it’s being taken over by those who seek to exploit my fellow native New Orleanians. These things (and of course the state of the world) weigh on me daily. Hoping you might have a poem to bring a little solace, Seeking Hope Read More
May 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Whither the Angel in Angels in America? By Julia Berick Emma Thompson in the HBO film of Angels in America. There are some of us who would rather face death than face our own delusion and, friends, I am one of those people. I have argued for the existence of horrible things—ovarian cancer, bedbugs, even a gluten intolerance—rather than face the fact that I am a healthy hypochondriac with a genetically inescapable amount of anxiety. New York did me in, like it does so many people. What began as low-grade anxiety transformed—after a period of uncertain part-time jobs, rent beyond my income bracket, and Daily News ebola headlines—into near dementia. Why would I want to believe that I was the problem? Creating my own headaches? Heart palpitations? The desire to believe in the self is strong. Hundreds of times that year, as I felt wandering pains and icy chills, I was faced with two options: I was sick in some serious way or I was—at least partly—insane. The former seemed preferable. During the worst of my anxiety, one of the many things “I couldn’t do” was sink into Angels in America. In the past, it had been my easy remedy for a bad day or a worse night. I would just open up my two-disc set and turn to any scene in the six-hour masterwork. But anxiety kills empathy, and, when I was at my worst, I couldn’t see Kushner’s story of human dignity. All I could see was sickness. Since the fall, a painfully negotiated détente has meant I’ve been able to turn to it again. With a starlit revival now up on Broadway, I realized it had been at least a decade since I’d read the play itself. There is a magic to seeing the play performed, a magic I still seek to understand, but in rereading the play, I found myself with a new unanswerable question: Is there really an angel in Angels in America? Read More
May 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Hunting for a Lesbian Canon By Yelena Moskovich At the Aligre flea market near my Parisian flat, I haggle over a trinket I’ve decided to give to my on-the-rocks lover. It is a rock, a small but well-shined one. Twenty euros is too much, I insist. I’m from Ukraine, I tell the seller, in an attempt to get sympathy for my country’s political climate in the form of a discount. He replies that our eyes are drawn to objects that can read us between the lines. I pay the twenty. Let’s back up: as a Ukrainian kiddo during the fall of the Soviet Union, at six years old, I was held back from starting school while my family awaited immigration approval. The process dragged on for over a year, and when we were finally granted entry into the American Midwest as Jewish refugees, I was seven, and my literacy a club-footed Cyrillic. I was put into an Orthodox Jewish school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and began groping my way through two more alphabets, English and Hebrew. The page transformed into a vertical stage, complete with curtains of chattering. Read More
May 16, 2018 Arts & Culture You, Too, Can Live in Norman Mailer’s House By Nadja Spiegelman Images courtesy of Core NYC. Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights pad is on the market! The fourth-floor two-bedroom apartment overlooking the promenade was first listed in 2011, but the sale fell through when the prospective buyer discovered the atrium wasn’t up to code. Norman Mailer was afraid of heights, and so, macho to the core, he had his apartment outfitted with crow’s nests, gangplanks, galley ladders, and hammocks. In short, he built himself a nautical jungle gym on which to exercise his biggest personal fears. Now his son Michael has removed all that, bringing the space in line with those rigorous regulation-atrium requirements. The walls have been painted white, and Norman’s stacks of books have been whittled down by professional stagers, but the $2.4 million price tag is the same as it was seven years ago. Mailer had nine children (from six wives), who will split the proceeds. “The nautically themed space is iconic, like its creator,” the real-estate listing reads, in excellent Executioner’s Song–esque prose, “with a two-story glass and wood atrium and a sloping wood ceiling recalling the curves of a grand sailboat.” Sure, as Joan Smith wrote after his death, “Mailer hated authority, homosexuality, women and almost certainly himself.” Sure, he stabbed one of his wives with a penknife, complained about the “womanization of America,” helped spring a murderer from jail, made a failed run for mayor, and declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” But the place probably isn’t haunted. Look at that view. Read More
May 16, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Leslie Jamison By Leslie Jamison In our new series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Any discussion of my fridge in the current moment needs to begin with a discussion of who lives in my home: my husband and I, our nine-year-old daughter (who likes Lunchables but not the particular flavor of Lunchable that has been sitting in our fridge for the past week), and our three-month-old daughter—who, in her beautiful way, takes up much of the time that might otherwise be spent, say, cleaning out the fridge. Which is all to say: our fridge is actually a pretty decent portal into the acts of survival that constitute our daily life. Read More