March 5, 2018 At Work An Interview with Julián Herbert and Christina MacSweeney By Lily Meyer Julián Herbert began the book that made him famous while he was sitting in his mother’s hospital room. She was dying of leukemia, and as he cared for her, he wrote what became one of the most heralded literary experiments in the Spanish language in decades, Canción de tumba (2014). An English translation of the book, Tomb Song—an exceptional work of metafiction and autofiction—is out this week from Graywolf Press. There is, certainly, no way for a reader to know how to divide fact from fiction. A tender conversation between the narrator and his pregnant wife could be invented; a wild hallucination in Havana could be the truth. There’s no way to know. Fiction or not, Tomb Song is clearly a work of self-examination. As the narrator describes his itinerant childhood, his mother’s work as a prostitute, and the fracturing of his atypical family, he seems to be looking in the mirror. And yet Tomb Song is more like “a hall of mirrors,” as Herbert said to me. Once you start seeking facts, you’ll be looking forever. I came to Tomb Song through its translator, Christina MacSweeney, whose work I began seeking out after I read her translations of another great Mexican experimentalist, Valeria Luiselli. Like Herbert, MacSweeney is devoted to voice. When I spoke with them, both told me how vital it is for them to read their work aloud. I conducted these interviews over email. Julián Herbert’s answers to me were in Spanish, which I’ve translated into English below. Read More
March 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bobby, Janelle, and Romeo By The Paris Review Like most people who live in New York, I’m always threatening to move to Los Angeles, and like most people who live in New York, I likely never will. This winter, however, I almost made a visit. The impetus was an exhibit of Ellen Gallagher’s at Hauser & Wirth. The deterrent was the thought of taking the A train from Harlem to JFK. Luckily for me, and for people everywhere thwarted by inertia and a lack of cheap flights, Hauser & Wirth published Accidental Records, a catalogue of paintings, photographs, collages, and texts meant to accompany the show. In it, Gallagher patches together a series of strange seascapes populated by ruled lines, whale fins, and teeny, tiny spores. The images appear unpeopled but evoke a population that’s been willfully forgotten. In the liner notes to their 1997 album, The Quest, the Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya writes, “During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?” The Drexciya myth is one that’s been taken up by a number of black artists, Gallagher included. In Accidental Records, she creates the imagery for a world in which these mothers and sea babies, dead or unborn, were able to survive. —Maya Binyam Read More
March 2, 2018 On Sports How Do You Judge Je Ne Sais Quoi? By Brent Katz Madison Chock and Evan Bates at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. Photo by Bernat Armangue. On February 19, when the American pair Madison Chock and Evan Bates glided onto the ice for the free-dance competition at the Winter Olympics in Pyenogchang, some Darwinian instinct in me whispered, Root for them. You won’t be disappointed. They were calm, focused, attractive. My faith was shaken for a moment when their risky music choice began playing—a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” sung live from inside the arena. But when Chock and Bates met eyes and began their routine, their synchronicity had a strange, tranquil power. A hush descended on my friend’s living room. Watching TV felt like being in nature. Their dreamy routine evoked stillness with motion, and their movements were so linked that it felt as if their individual personalities converged into one. I couldn’t tell the ice dancers from the ice dance. A few minutes in, they tangled blades and Bates went down like a teen at Chelsea Piers. The pathos of the moment was intense—years of work and hope vanished in an instant. In addition to their deduction, they got no points for that combination spin. They were hemorrhaging points. Read More
March 2, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Langston Hughes By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Langston Hughes’s 1931 classic Not Without Laughter, recently rereleased as a Penguin Classic, tells the coming-of-age story of Sandy, a light-skinned black youth in a small, mixed-race Kansas town in the 1910s. Sandy wants great things for himself but can’t see how to achieve them in a world rife with racism. Late in the novel, he muses that “being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs.” Out of context, this may seem simplistic, but it follows Hughes’s devastating explication of how the adult black role models in Sandy’s life have tried, and failed, to thrive. Sandy’s mother is a cook for a white family. She feeds her own family on scraps from her employer’s table, bringing home things like “a large piece of fresh lemon pie,” “two chocolate eclairs in her pocket, mashed together,” or “a small bucket of oyster soup.” Sandy’s grandmother, Aunt Hagar, cleans laundry for whites. She works herself to the bone for pennies with the belief that a quiet respectability will, in the end, save black people. Sandy’s father, Jimboy, and Sandy’s aunt embrace the blues and enjoy what they have, though Hughes does not sugarcoat the reality that what they have is too little. Read More
March 2, 2018 The Lives of Others The Misunderstood Byzantine Princess and Her Magnum Opus By Edmund White The history of the Byzantine Empire is threaded with dynastic clashes and family feuds. The Byzantines do not hold the same familiar spot in the Western imagination as their Roman forbears, but the narrative history of their scandals and intrigues is easily as compelling as the episodes Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio recorded of Caesar, Caligula, and Nero. For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison. Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political players, whether they were power-grabbing populists, slick backroom schemers, or principled reformers. It started with Empress Theodora, sometimes described as a kind of sixth-century Eva Perón, who interceded in a wave of riots that shook Constantinople, put an end to the fighting, won the adoration of the public, and saved her husband’s throne. Irene, an empress from the late eighth century, ruled for several years with a mixture of silky court diplomacy and unflinching ruthlessness—to maintain her grip on power, she ordered that her chief rival, who also happened to be her son, be blinded. The princess Anna Komnene was another of these influential women. To Edward Gibbon, who framed her reputation for modern audiences with his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she was a Lady Macbeth character who attempted to bump off her brother so she could rule the empire through her husband. The plot failed, and Anna was forced to flee to a monastery, where she spent the rest of her life stewing with resentment and thwarted ambition. Gibbon dismissed Anna as vain, vengeful, dissembling, and reckless, the embodiment of a particular type of unpleasant Byzantine woman. But to a generation of historians currently revisiting her reputation, Anna Komnene is not a lethal Machiavel but a sparkling litterateur, one of the great figures of her age who exhibited something that one might call distinctly, beguilingly Byzantine: a flair for disruptive innovation while, paradoxically, striving to keep centuries of tradition alive. Read More