March 20, 2018 On Film David Lynch’s Night Truths By Michael Chabon When I saw David Lynch’s first feature film, Eraserhead, at a midnight showing at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in early 1981, it blew my seventeen-year-old mind in ways I have yet to recover from. Twin Peaks forever rewired the circuitry of the apparatus I use to scan and interpret American life. And I’m just going to totally nerd out and confess that I’ve seen Lynch’s 1983 adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune, at least five times and never failed to totally dig it. “To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell said, “needs a constant struggle.” Think about that. To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. Traumatized, perhaps, by the unremitting grim truths of evolution and human history, the human mind—that ancient, dubious assemblage of learned and inherent biases, habits of sensory triage, and cognitive rules of thumb—has become resistant to truth. This doubtful gift of being able to ignore the cold, hard, cheerless facts of existence allows us, as individuals and as nations, to be continually surprised by calamities, defeats, and disasters that in hindsight ought to have been—were—obvious all along. When the ice caps melt and the lowlands flood and species collapse and Earth turns inhospitable, those who survive will look back and say, How could they have missed this? How could they not have known? Wasn’t it obvious? And the answer, of course, will be, It needs a constant struggle to see what is in front of one’s nose. A constant struggle: who has the strength, or the time, for that? Those among us who are equal to that struggle we call prophets, and in general we treat such people very shabbily. Read More
March 19, 2018 On Writing On Writer’s Block: Advice from Twelve Writers By The Paris Review Our Writers at Work series, which spans sixty-five years of interviews with nearly four hundred writers, offers no shortage of advice. Should this multitude seem daunting, fear not! The editors of The Paris Review have combed through the series and sorted the best tips and tricks into tidy categories meant to guide you through the authorial landscape. In The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from “The Paris Review” Interviews, readers can learn how Eudora Welty and E. B. White revised their prose, what Vladimir Nabokov and Dorothy Parker thought about their editors, how Elena Ferrante and Eileen Myles face success (and failure), how Kurt Vonnegut and Truman Capote dealt with their critics, and much more. The Writer’s Chapbook has it all, from tips on how to begin a work to advice for (and against) writing under the influence. Below is an excerpt from the chapter “Do You Ever Get Writer’s Block?” If you’re hungry for more, you can preorder The Writer’s Chapbook today for $15. But hurry, this discounted price is only available for a limited time. Read More
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