April 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Book I Kept for the Cover By Anjali Enjeti The first time I saw a picture of an Indian on the cover of a novel was in the fall of 1995. I was a twenty-two-year-old law student browsing the literature section at an independent bookstore in Clayton, Missouri. While scanning the shelves, a small photograph of a dark-skinned woman on the spine of a paperback caught my eye. The book was Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee, and the same photo was magnified on the cover: a woman stands in the opening of a window; her lips are full, slightly parted. What struck me most was her very brown skin. I took the book to the register and purchased it. A Bengali Hindu, Mukherjee was born in 1940 in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was educated in England and Switzerland before emigrating to the U.S. in 1961 to study at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She was a true pioneer. At the time of her arrival, only some twelve thousand Indian Americans were living in the United States. This was four years before the institution of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), which abolished discriminatory quotas, thereby eliminating race, ancestry, and national origin as barriers to entry and enabling the resettlement of thousands of immigrants from the subcontinent. Though I didn’t discover Mukherjee’s work until I was twenty-two, her prolific career began the year before I was born. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), tells the story of a woman named Tara who returns to Calcutta after establishing herself in the United States, only to feel unsettled by how much her hometown has changed in her absence. In 1975, Mukherjee published her second novel, Wife, and a decade later the short-story collection Darkness (1985), followed by The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Jasmine hit the shelves in 1989, at about the middle of Mukherjee’s long literary career. Several novels—including Holder of the World (1993) and the trilogy Desirable Daughters, Tree Bride, and Miss India—followed. Read More
April 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists By Ellen Weinstein On days like today, we need all the tips, tricks, and good omens we can get. This Friday the thirteenth, we’re presenting you with the superstitions of ten artists and writers who (mostly) managed to avoid bad luck. Charles Dickens Slept Facing North Charles Dickens (1812–1870) carried a navigational compass with him at all times and always faced north while he slept—a practice he believed improved his creativity and writing. Audrey Hepburn Lucky Number Fifty-Five The screen legend, humanitarian, and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) had a fascination with the number fifty-five. She is known to have requested the number for her dressing room—as it had also been her dressing-room number for both of the now classic films Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read More
April 12, 2018 In Memoriam What Do Poets Talk About? By Chris Ware J. D. McClatchy with his husband, Chip Kidd. J. D. McClatchy, one of America’s foremost men of letters, died in his home Tuesday at the age of seventy-two. He was the author of eight volumes of poetry and a string of acclaimed opera librettos. He also was a prolific editor, anthologist, translator, critic, the longtime editor of The Yale Review, and the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won too many awards and fellowships to list with brevity here. His poems appeared frequently in The Paris Review, and his Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 2002 issue. I first met him when I was twelve or thirteen years old. He sat down next to me on my parents’ couch and complimented my dress, pinching the fabric between his fingers to feel it. I jumped up, ran to the kitchen, and breathlessly told my mother that one of her friends was being inappropriate with me. She laughed warmly—Sandy, as his friends called him, was both very gentle and very gay. I last saw him two years ago at the Miami Book Festival. A mutual friend asked if, now that I had published a book, I considered myself a writer. I found myself flustered, unsure how to respond. Luckily, Sandy stepped in. “A writer is only a writer when they are writing,” he said firmly, then winked at me. It’s an answer, an understanding, a confidence that I have carried around in my pocket ever since. —Nadja Spiegelman As the spouse of one of my closest friends, Chip Kidd, I got to know Sandy McClatchy as one might know, well, a friend’s spouse. Chip and Sandy met in the early nineties, Chip and I having been friends for a few years before and I first learning of Chip’s infatuation when he mailed me a color-xeroxed eight-by-ten-inch publicity photo of Sandy with the words PROPERTY OF C.K. written diagonally in red across its lower quadrant like bubble letters on a school spiral notebook. Though I felt like I’d been passed a secret note in math class, I offered up my heartiest of congratulations because Chip had been single for a while. Privately, however, I was worried: Chip and I really only talked about comics and dumb stuff; this guy was a poet and opera librettist. What do poets and opera librettists talk about? What was I going to talk about if I ever met him? Read More
April 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Don’t Hate Us ’Cause We Fabulous By madison moore “Excuse me … are you Prince?” the hotel concierge asked me. At first, I thought he was joking, the kind of slightly homophobic jab I’ve grown used to hearing over the years, so I laughed as I said, “No, I’m not Prince” with a tone of obviousness. “Are you sure?” he doubled down. I couldn’t believe it. Had he never seen a picture of Prince? Over my lifetime, I’ve admired many black divas and pop singers, from Tina Turner and Little Richard to Beyoncé and Lenny Kravitz, but Prince’s fierce, androgynous aesthetic completely changed my approach to my own body. Prince also made me queer. He was proof to my teenage mind that living outside the box is sexy, a kind of magic. Prince, for me, represented freedom. On April 21, 2016, I boarded a flight from London to New York for a special performance-studies conference at Yale organized by my dissertation advisor. I hadn’t been back to New Haven since I graduated in 2012, so I was eager to see old faces and go to all my old hot spots—BAR (the bacon-and-red-onion pizza is to die for), 116Crown … and I really couldn’t wait to get a piece of Lithuanian coffee cake. As the plane touched down at JFK, still rolling down the runway, I took my phone out of airplane mode and was showered with a barrage of messages, from WhatsApp to Facebook, with the news that Prince died. Wait, what? I immediately felt numb. It was a shock to me because Prince was still so young, so active, and I guess I had believed he would outlive all the rest of us. I had left London in a world with Prince in it. Six hours later, he was gone. When I used to pump around the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, a place you know of now only because of the 2014 riots, the place where I spent a small chunk of my early childhood years, kids who wanted to be mean called me Prince. I’d walk down the street really feeling good about myself, and people would just yell, Hey, Prince!—laughing, pointing, sneering. Even when I lived in New York City and actually even until this day, people still yell Prince at me as a homophobic insult. Over the years, I started associating the word Prince with faggotry—not Prince’s own faggotry but mine. Read More
April 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Helen Weinzweig’s Interior Feminist Espionage Novel By Sarah Weinman When I first read Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls several years ago, I emerged in the sort of daze that happens when a book seems to ferret out your most secret thoughts and hopes. Since then I’ve described the book to others as an “interior feminist espionage novel.” That is, of course, a reductive way to look at this work, which is so much more than that single phrase can express. And yet those four words, taken together, suggest the scope and the breadth, the daring and the audacity, the humor and the pathos contained in a work of less than a hundred fifty pages. It was a novel I did not know I was looking for, but finding it was a revelation. The interior nature of Basic Black is central to its unfolding. Shirley Kaszenbowski, regarded from the outside, is the embodiment of the invisible woman. She is in her early forties, long married, with two children. She wanders through Toronto in the titular basic black dress, a strand of pearls around her neck, cloaked by a tweed coat from Holt Renfrew—then and now the city’s most expensive, most fashionable, and snobbiest department store—designed to last for decades. “I fool no one,” Shirley understands. “I am regarded as a woman with no apparent purpose, offering no reason for my presence.” Regarded from inside, however, Shirley is anything but invisible. She is aglow. Her appearance, her age, her station are a cloak for a rich life of travel, adventure, and meaning. As the critic Art Seidenbaum notes in his review for the Los Angeles Times, “Her odyssey is erotic, but her appearance is prosaic.” Read More
April 12, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: The Most Beautiful Part of Your Body Is Where It’s Headed By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, I’m so angry all the time—at nothing, at the people around me, and at myself. I find that I’m unsatisfied in my job, in the town I live in, and in my own development as a person. I know I’m young, but I feel as though I’ve squandered every opportunity given to me. It’s like I have a beast inside of me, clawing at my lungs. There must be a poem for that feeling, right? For when you’re so angry you just want to scream at the next person who even mildly upsets you. I want to be kinder, gentler, and I realize that bottling up this anger is unhealthy. But I truly don’t know how to express it—please help me do so! Sincerely, An Angry Machine Dear Angry Machine, In your letter, you mentioned that you feel like you have a beast inside you. I have a poem for you that is about a beast, and also anger, but it is a very tiny beast. Specifically: Franny Choi’s poem “The Mantis Shrimp Speaks.” In the preface to the poem, Franny informs us that “the Mantis Shrimp has the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Their powerful limbs spear or club their prey using one of the fastest responses known to man. They can deliver a blow that is equivalent to the force of a bullet.” What a perfect metaphor for how anger makes us feel: both beast and also tiny, both supercharged and also insignificant, pounding our fists against the injustices of the universe. Franny writes: This is the only way I know how to tell someone what I want, to describe the infinitely unfolded accordion of my heart. To love with a rage gone blind from the knowledge of the stolen lands, dirty wars, honor killings, false idols, forced soldiers, and buried throats haunting every sentence. Too many truths setting my retinas ablaze, and me, mad, mad, mad at the end of it all. Sometimes your anger is not wrong or incorrect. Sometimes it means that you are paying attention. After all, “it is hard, being a prism in a burning city.” But note that the narrator of this poem specifies her need to “describe.” Your instinct is correct: bottling doesn’t help. Describing does. Articulating the rage (to a therapist, a friend, your journal) is a way of focusing it and pinpointing what the rage is against instead of letting it morph into a vague and all-encompassing “anger” at “nothing.” Find the somethings. Point at them. Detangle them. At the very least, putting anger into words is a way to push it out of your throbbing human body and, perhaps in the process, find a direction for those powerful limbs. —SK Read More