March 23, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Strip Clubs, Lightning Rods, and Extramarital Affairs By The Paris Review On Wednesday, Anne Boyer received a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. On the same day, shut in by the storm, with only my apartment’s clanging radiators for company, I dove into A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Boyer’s forthcoming book of essays from Ugly Duckling Presse. From the first paragraph of the first essay, simply titled “No,” I was thoroughly captivated by Boyer’s language. Her prose is lyric and smooth. There is nothing labored about her discourse, which is conversational but incisive and often accompanied by a satisfying dose of arch humor. Two examples of Boyer’s particular genius are “Click-Bait Thanatos” and “The Harm.” The former is speculative and considers the eerie technological landscape left behind in a world no longer populated by humans; the latter is a meditation on trauma and how it occupies a person’s consciousness and daily life. Boyer’s essays are best experienced alongside one another; I suggest doing so in the thick of a snowstorm, but I suspect their impact would be equally forceful in any weather. —Lauren Kane This past Tuesday, I sat in my lottery-won onstage seats at the Public Theater and tried not to trip the actors. I was watching the first preview of a new musical called Miss You Like Hell. It’s up until May 6, and if you like musicals (as everyone should), you’ll want to catch it in this intimate setting before it inevitably moves on to a huge Broadway stage. With book and lyrics by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes—whose previous works include In the Heights and Water by the Spoonful—Miss You Like Hell is at once heart-wrenching and joyous in the way only musicals can be. Beatriz, a woman on the verge of deportation, ropes her severely depressed sixteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, into a coast-to-coast road trip. The ensuing events address the subjects of policing, mental health, gay rights, the conservation movement, et cetera. But the play never becomes didactic and never loses its nuance—its beauty and power come from its graceful exploration of human relationships. It feels special to see a show like this at the beginning of its run, when the cast and crew are still finding their places. Miss You Like Hell brightened my snowy Tuesday, made me laugh, made me cry, made me call both my mom and my grandmom, and made me smile in my sleep. —Eleanor Pritchett Read More
March 23, 2018 Look So Be It, See to It: From the Archives of Octavia Butler By The Paris Review Octavia E. Butler seated by her bookcase, 1986. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © Patti Perret Like most ambitious writers, Octavia Butler maintained a routine that became ritual. Each morning she’d rise before dawn, and then write until she had to do the work that brought her money. She labored as a dishwasher, then as a potato-chip inspector, and in her off time she orchestrated her future career. Since 2008, Butler’s annotations, notes, research materials, and drafts of novels have been housed at the Huntington Library in California. A selection is presented below. Read More
March 23, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Rootless and Rejected 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. Illustration by Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I was a third-culture kid, which basically means that any attempt to describe my identity requires a silly amount of en dashes. I recently went through a difficult breakup that has made my lack of roots more apparent and intolerable. I know this is a big ask, but is there a poem that can help me build a home? Sincerely, TCK Dear TCK, I am half Japanese American and half Jewish American, I grew up in New York City, and I attended an international school. I am very familiar with the phenomenon of being a third-culture kid, as well as a prisoner of the en dash. (For those less familiar, third-culture kids are children who grow up in a country or culture that is different from that of their parents. It is a common experience of expats or children raised abroad, and while the term attempts to cover a very disparate group of humans, I like that it gives a unifying language to children who grow up feeling different or lost or just a little bit outside.) These days I spend my time performing and teaching in schools around the world. I encounter TCK’s growing up in totally different countries and yet they all share similar experiences. They feel like a community to which I am connected. Because of this work, I also spend a lot of time in airports, those miserable transient places, and I spend most of my time far away from anywhere or anyone that feels like home. And oh! “Home!” That ephemeral and impossible ideal. Where is it? Who is it? How can we find it and reach for it when we need it? Today I give you Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful piece “Gate A-4.” In it, she speaks of an experience in an airport, when a woman needed her help. Together, they built a small community at the airport gate. For Naomi, we carry “home” around in our language, in our food, in the way we look into someone else’s eyes. She writes, I noticed my new best friend–by now we were holding hands–had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. You don’t have a lack of roots, TCK. You just carry yours with you. And even if it feels like you don’t come from one single place or that you do not belong to a “home” that you can point to on a map, all those en dashes you carry help you form new homes everywhere you go. As Naomi says: “Not everything is lost.” —S. K. PS: watch the author share her own piece. Read More
March 22, 2018 On Architecture When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Bookstore By Adam Morgan Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo: Yousuf Karsh. In October 1907—a few months after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle horrified Chicago—a new bookstore opened on the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building downtown. In her autobiography, Margaret Anderson, the founder and editor of The Little Review, called it “the most beautiful bookshop in the world.” But Browne’s Bookstore survived for only five years. In 1908, a visiting Publishers Weekly reporter may have hit upon why: “Thus far, only one dealer in all classes of books has had the courage to locate his store up ‘in the air.’ ” “The air” was the seventh floor. The lone dealer was Francis Fisher Browne, the editor of Chicago’s literary magazine du jour, The Dial, whose offices were located on the same floor. At the time, the Fine Arts Building was the center of Chicago arts and culture. Constructed by the Studebaker Company in 1885 to showcase their horse-drawn carriages, the colorful Romanesque building was remodeled a few years later to gather “the artistic, social, and literary concerns of the city into a single building.” By 1901, it was home to artist studios, theater companies, literary clubs, and more than ten thousand music students. A decade later, it gave birth to Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, and the Chicago Little Theatre. With thousands of booklovers moving up and down the stairwells every day, a seventh-floor bookstore didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. “All Chicago society came to Browne’s Bookstore,” Anderson writes. “Here tea was served and everyone was very smart.” Of course, the store’s altitude wasn’t the only reason it gained national attention: every inch of the interior was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright—the shelves, the windows, even the knickknacks. Read More
March 22, 2018 On Photography Women in Trees By Idra Novey The tension between trees and female disobedience is biblical. After succumbing to the snake’s suggestion and partaking of an apple from a tree, Eve gets some bad news: her body will bring her shame and pain. She is not meant to reach into trees or climb them; she should quietly remain on the ground and bear new life. Get down, history has said to the grown woman brazen enough to take even a brief arboreal leave from her earthly duties. Once a woman is off the ground, it may occur to her to keep on climbing. A man might find himself standing beneath her, subject to the sight of her womanly behind on a branch above his head. To defy history and climb a tree as an adult woman is exhilarating. The German photographer Jochen Raiß discovered, through old photos he found at flea markets and in junk shops, that primly dressed women all over Germany, from the twenties to the fifties, posed in trees during Sunday strolls. His first volume of these found photographs, Women in Trees, became a best seller in 2016 and led to the recent sequel, the aptly titled More Women in Trees. Together, the two volumes contain nearly two hundred of Raiß’s amateur finds, all roughly dating from that time period when he estimates the phenomenon of German women posing in trees for their male companions was most popular. Cameras during this period, Raiß writes, were considered complicated machines best handled by men. And the mischievous smiles the women display in the photographs were most likely for their male companions behind the camera. Their expressions are often coy; there is a canned mischievousness to them—young women performing for boyfriends on a leisurely walk. Read More
March 22, 2018 Arts & Culture The Time for Art Is Now By Claire Messud Still from The Shadows for Under The Influence by Nadav Kander. In these relentlessly dark and riven times, I find myself beset by a near ravenous hunger for beauty. My spirit lurches at a line of Shakespeare or Louise Glück—“All fear gives way: the light / Looks after you … ” My eyes linger on the photographs of Nadav Kander, the paintings of Marlene Dumas, the sculptures of Sarah Sze. I reassure myself of the possibility of serenity by recalling Willa Cather’s masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop, or by listening to the extraordinary voice of Hannah Reid, the vocalist of London Grammar. I long for that expansion of my soul. We have so much to learn. The ideals that have shaped my entire life thus far have been called into question by the election of this so-called president. They are ideals worth fighting for: a faith, as Martin Luther King assured us, that the long arc of history bends toward justice; that societies have the desire and capacity for improvement; that reflection and communication will foster greater compassion; and a belief that one of the most powerful paths to progress is through art and literature. I have believed in the value of knowledge and of truth. And I have believed that the quality of a life is not measured by money, celebrity, or material goods but by richness of mind, generosity of spirit, and by meaningful human relationships. Read More