March 19, 2018 At Work Big-Tent Recovery: An Interview with Leslie Jamison By Chris Kraus I read the manuscript of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering last summer in Winnipeg, Canada, when I was going to several twelve-step meetings a week. I knew and admired Jamison’s 2014 breakthrough essay collection, The Empathy Exams; her ability to transparently render her meticulous, passionate process of thought astonished me. But The Recovering changed my life. It’s an antimemoir: generous with details of her own experience of addiction and recovery, Jamison insists on the existence, or primacy, of other stories as well. A personal story, she suggests, can be told only in the context of other personal stories and the conditions that shape them. Perhaps most importantly, the book challenges intellectual snobbery. Jamison explains the paradoxically profound and sloganeering rhetorical logic of twelve-step philosophy in ways no one has before. As she’s observed elsewhere, “Clichés lend structure and ritual and glue: They are the subterranean passageways connecting one life to another.” She writes beautifully, with furious clarity. I finished the book wondering why the active, nonjudgmental listening of twelve-step recovery can’t be applied to all realms of life. During the first weeks of the New Year, we wrote emails back and forth. INTERVIEWER In The Recovering, you move between three constellations of material—your own experience with addiction and recovery, the experience of other writers like John Berryman, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson, and the history, culture, and ethos of twelve-step programs. Did you always know you’d need to explore all three areas, or did your subjects emerge from the research? JAMISON I always knew I wanted the book to function as a kind of chorus—placing my own story among other stories—rather than offering any single perspective. Though I knew it could become a kind of boast to say, This won’t look like a memoir in the traditional sense. And the book ended up interrogating that, too—exploring the shame of memoir, especially the shame attached to the idea of the addiction memoir as an overplayed and overly familiar genre. Read More
March 19, 2018 Hue's Hue Incarnadine, the Bloody Red of Fashionable Cosmetics and Shakespearean Poetics By Katy Kelleher Janelle Monáe at the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar party. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images When looking up the word incarnadine in Merriam Webster I found some truly discomforting writing. After a brief definition of the word (“having the pinkish color of flesh” or “blood red”), there appears a drop-down box with an editor’s note. “Carn- is the Latin root for ‘flesh,’ and incarnates is Latin for ‘flesh-colored,’ ” the entry begins, under the rather perky headline DID YOU KNOW? Okay, so far so good. But then, following a quick timeline of the word in question (incarnadine dates back to the late 1500s), the unnamed editor tells us this: “Since then, the adjective has come to refer to the dark-red color of freshly cut, fleshy meat as well as to the pinkish color of the outer skin of some humans.” I read that passage and felt a record scratch reverberate through my skull. It reads as though an AI wrote this passage, but only after being feed a steady diet of Thomas Harris. This is not how people talk about bodies or color. This is how cannibalistic robots think about humans—pink, fleshy, freshly cut, bodies in parts. Read More
March 16, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cucumbers, Chiropractors, and Kleptocrats By The Paris Review Kathleen Collins Ever since Nicole first handed me “Scapegoat Child,” the gorgeous yet harrowing piece of short fiction by the late Kathleen Collins in our Spring issue, I’ve found myself returning, time and time again, to the writer’s first posthumous collection of stories, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? The book’s cover, which features a collage by Lorna Simpson of a young woman with a wash of purple ink for hair, sets the tone, and the stories that follow are just as arresting. In them, we hear from people of all shades, each of whom experience torment and love in equal measure. Collins writes of an uncle who can’t keep himself from crying (“I began to weep for him, weep tears of pride and joy that he should have so soaked his life in sorrow and gone back to some ancient ritual beyond the blunt humiliation of his skin”); of a girl who cuts her hair (making her look, in her father’s words, “just like any other colored girl”) and later falls for her professor; of interracial love (“I want to be a Negro for you,” says a white boy to his girlfriend). Put simply, Collins is a marvel, her prose ethereal and haunting and sharp. As Elizabeth Alexander writes in the book’s introduction, “She flinches from nothing.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
March 16, 2018 On Art Zoe Leonard: Archivist of Feeling By Yevgeniya Traps Zoe Leonard, TV Wheelbarrow, 2001, dye transfer print, 20 in. × 16 in. Collection of the New York Public Library; Funds from the Estate of Leroy A. Moses, 2005. Never have I wanted to touch a photograph as badly as I wanted to touch Zoe Leonard’s Red Wall 2001/2003 (Leonard typically includes two dates with each photograph, the first signaling when the photo was taken, the second when it was printed). It’s an image of such saturated—such tactile—redness that it was, for a beat, difficult to accept that it was only a representation of a wall, flat and smooth and framed. Red Wall is a minimalist monochrome wet dream that inspires a maximalist yearning—an outsized, outrageous need. Read More
March 16, 2018 On Art The Original Little Mermaid By Amber Sparks On Kay Nielsen, Disney, and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale. A concept drawing by Kay Nielsen for The Little Mermaid. The mermaid in the illustration was lithe, mysterious, sylphlike. She perched on a rock, inscrutable. For years, I’d been bombarded with the images, books, merchandise, and endless one-offs of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Disney’s Ariel was redheaded, cheerful, an open book—voluptuous in that squeaky-clean cartoon way. She was certainly not the mermaid Hans Christian Andersen envisioned when he wrote his tragic tale. But here was a sad water sprite who was the perfect embodiment of the ambiguous virtues of folklore. I’d stumbled across her online, in a series of concept drawings for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. They had been drawn in the fifties and shelved for thirty years. Read More
March 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Alexandre Dumas By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. If the lavish feasts and epic drinking sessions of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), are any indication, seventeenth-century France was the era of the gourmand. The musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and their young friend d’Artagnan, the Gascon nobleman who is the book’s hero, are frat boys of a different era, men for whom an ordinary evening at home is thus: Porthos was in bed, and was playing a game of lansquenet with Mousqueton [his servant], to keep his hand in; while a spit loaded with partridges was turning before the fire, and on each side of a large chimney-piece, over two chafing dishes, were boiling two stew-pans, from which exhaled a double odour of rabbit and fish stews, rejoicing to the smell. In addition to this … the top of a wardrobe and the marble of a commode were covered with empty bottles. The musketeers know no moderation. They order multiple bottles of wine for a quick drink, and at one point, one of them consumes an entire wine cellar. When Aramis plans to eat an omelet with a side of spinach, his friends ultimately convince him to say to the waiter, “Return from whence you came; take back these horrible vegetables … Order a larded hare, a fat capon, mutton leg dressed with garlic, and four bottles of old Burgundy.” Read More