February 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Rachel Lyon, Radiohead, and Richard Pryor By The Paris Review Karin Tidbeck. Karin Tidbeck’s collection Jagannath strings together a chain of eerie vignettes where the fantastic creeps in from a place just outside your peripheral vision, subtly seeping into a reality you thought you recognized. Tidbeck translated these herself from her native Swedish, and the end result is a clear, succinct prose style that makes for a crisp blank canvas so that the strangeness of her plots and ideas stands out against a clean background. These stories are quick and varied, though Tidbeck deftly navigates each shift between narratives, keeping the reader hooked with swift, absorbing plots and empathetic, human characters. They often arrive at their endings unresolved but satisfying, and rarely ever in a place you thought they would take you. —Lauren Kane Rachel Lyon. Photo: Debra Pearlman. I read a draft of Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, in 2014. The finished book, published this week by Scribner, has evolved and changed, but the essentials were in place from the beginning. The story is told in crisp, clicking, photographic prose and has the narrative momentum of a thriller, though the question isn’t what tragedy will befall the main character but what that character will do with a tragedy once it’s happened—and, most interestingly, happened to someone else. The story is set in DUMBO in the eighties. Pipes leak. Artists squat. Developers are only just beginning to arrive. The central character is the struggling photographer, Lu Rile. Rile happens to be taking a self-portrait in her apartment as a neighbor’s child falls to his death outside her window. She catches the moment and ends up with the image of a lifetime. Now she must decide what to do with it. She harbors the secret as she comforts the child’s mother. They become increasingly close, but all the while, Rile is developing the film in her apartment right downstairs, in her makeshift darkroom, adjusting its size, trying out different versions—Lyon makes this process especially thrilling—creating the work of art that she knows could lift her from obscurity into the amoral splendor of the eighties art world. For those of us who have loved this novel for years, this week feels like something out of its pages. Finally, the secret is out. —Brent Katz Read More
February 9, 2018 Arts & Culture Gabriel García Márquez’s Road Trip Through Alabama By Caleb Johnson García Márquez in his home in Mexico in 2003. Photo: Indira Restrepo. In the summer of 1961, Gabriel García Márquez lived with his family in the Webster Hotel on West Forty-Fifth Street in New York City. They paid two hundred dollars a month for a room. The thirty-three-year-old García Márquez had moved to the city a few months earlier to join Prensa Latina, the fledgling Cuban state news agency with offices at Rockefeller Center. While he worked, his wife, Mercedes, and infant son Rodrigo spent their days strolling Central Park. The FBI was monitoring the newsroom, which was itself consumed with subterfuge and rumors over who among the journalists were counterrevolutionaries. Before long, García Márquez’s friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who worked at the agency’s Havana bureau, heard of impending mutiny and flew to the States to warn him. By the time Mendoza arrived, Gabo, as he was affectionately called, had already quit. He had enough money to get his family to New Orleans aboard a Greyhound bus. Mendoza returned to Bogotá and wired the cash the family would need to reach Mexico City. There, Gabo had friends and the prospect of part-time journalism work to sustain him while he wrote his next novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Read More
February 9, 2018 Écuyères Selika, Mystery of the Belle Epoque By Susanna Forrest Selika Lazevski exists in six black-and-white photographs and nowhere else. I first saw her when those six studio portraits appeared on Tumblr in 2012. They quickly spread around the Internet as readers asked, Who is she? But although I’ve searched for years, every pin I place to try to map the real woman snaps and slides out of place, multiplying new leads that take me nowhere. I wrote a blog post about her name, guessed the wrong photographer, and saw my error replicate around the Internet, too, even turning up in the publicity materials for a short film about Selika. This much I do know: she was a black amazone in Belle Epoque Paris, a city where black “Amazons” were shown in a human zoo; she was a celebrity who left no other trace than these six tokens of her celebrity; she was a horsewoman without a horse, a power hinted at but not granted. In the first portrait, she stands with her body turned away from the camera but confronts the photographer with her gaze. The backdrop is hazily painted with trees—European deciduous trees in a landscaped park, natural and artificial at once. She wears the respectable tenue sobre of the late-nineteenth-century riding habit: a light-colored top hat and a dark riding jacket that crosses under the breast and is fastened with two rows of three buttons at her waist. A white stock hugs her throat; her strong bare hands emerge from white cuffs. One holds a long cane or whip. The outline of her leg, slightly lifted, is visible through her skirt. She stands before a waist-high couch covered with a shaggy pelt—wolf or bear rather than exotic leopard or tiger. In the second image, she reclines on the fur as comfortably as her short riding corset allows. In the third photograph, the corset is tighter, and her pale habit, which matches the top hat, is wrinkled at the waist. She is almost smiling. In photograph four, she stands, sternly holding the whip at the top of her thighs. Five and six must have been taken at the same time as the first images in the same tenue sobre. Her hands shift position on the whip; her expression tips over into a frown. Most images of black women in nineteenth-century France show slaves, sexualized nudes, or bare-breasted ethnographic curiosities. Who is this anomaly, Selika, and why, as she vaults into an equestrian world where sex, breeding, and power combine, has she no horse? Read More
February 8, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Tiles By Amit Chaudhuri On watching Ben-Hur in Bombay, remakes, and the wide-ranging repercussions of a loose tile. Still from Ben-Hur (1959). I think I began watching MGM-style historical epics at the New Empire. There was a cluster of three cinemas in the bit of Bombay near my school—Sterling, the New Empire, and the New Excelsior. I have a memory of shamefacedly submitting to The Ten Commandments. These films were shown as reruns in the midseventies, of course, but the crowds were large and easily impressed. I say “shamefacedly” because, even then, I think I was allergic to the genre: the costumes, the sets, the battles, the panoply. To in some way abet such a spectacle seemed beneath one’s dignity at thirteen. When it came to history, my generation was drawn insatiably to the downfall of the Nazis. Biblical stories, given we went to schools with Christian affiliations, weren’t taken seriously. Nevertheless, Dinyar, a boy of superior culture, said gravely (in retrospect, I see his tastes were quite camp), “Have you seen The Ten Commandments? You’re missing something if you haven’t.” So I went to the New Empire and was moved to reluctant tears by the parting of the Red Sea. The cinema and the life I knew had been bereft of miracles, and here was an example of what Dinyar said I’d been “missing,” of what technology and divine intervention could achieve if they chose to. Here, too, I encountered the sculpted, orange-skinned Charlton Heston, who appeared like a plausible link between the vengeful expanse of antiquity and a lithe Californian freedom. Whether I knew him already from Ben-Hur, I can’t say, but I did see Ben-Hur, too, at the New Empire. In a couple of years, I had forgotten these films. I saw them as inextricable from the comic exuberance, hard-nosed commercial agendas, and faux devotionalism of a particular period and consigned them to a category called DeMille movies. Then I saw Ben-Hur again, probably a decade ago. It might have been shown on TV during Christmas or Easter—it is, after all, as the subtitle of the novel it was based on states, tangentially “a story of the Christ.” I rewatched Ben-Hur as you would pick up a storybook you’d read as a child: to check if its pages amused you in some way. I was also curious, I suppose, about what the chariot race at the end, in which the eponymous hero’s survival skills are displayed at their keenest, would look like on an adult review. My prejudice against the genre had grown more ingrained since I was thirteen, and I was also in fundamental agreement with Roland Barthes that these Hollywood epics comprise a weaving of codes (“The frontal lock [of Romans in Hollywood films] overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt he is in ancient Rome.”). Yet I discovered, at the end of the four hours, that I was again inexplicably moved. Read More
February 8, 2018 At Work If I Can’t Cry, Nobody Cries: An Interview with Tayari Jones By Abigail Bereola Tayari Jones is the author of four novels; An American Marriage is her latest. I first came to her work through her novel Silver Sparrow, about a man and his two families—one public, one private. Jones writes about people and the trauma they carry. She unpacks what it took to get them to their current moment and what it might take for them to be able to let go of the past. I found myself enthralled by how deftly she captures the emotions of her characters. In An American Marriage, Jones introduces us to a man who has been wrongfully incarcerated and examines how he, his wife, and their families deal with the ensuing fallout. Jones renders her characters humanely, and none of them are above reproach. In conversation, it is clear that Jones thinks deeply about who her characters are and how they appear on the page, as well as how they would exist in the real world and not just her fictional ones. “Look at you, just right on time!” she exclaims when I call her. The same can be said about An American Marriage. Read More
February 8, 2018 Arts & Culture “Even poverty is ancient history”: Resurrection City, 1968 By Jill Freedman Now out in its fiftieth-anniversary edition, Jill Freedman’s Resurrection City documents the culmination of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination. Three thousand people set up camp for six weeks in a makeshift town that was dubbed Resurrection City and participated in daily protests. Freedman lived in the encampment for its entire six weeks, photographing the residents, their daily lives, their protests, and their eventual eviction. Jill Freedman, Demonstrators in the streets, Poor People’s Campaign, Washington D.C., 1968. I knew I had to shoot the Poor People’s Campaign when they murdered Martin Luther King Jr. I had to see what was happening, to record it and be part of it, I felt so bad. Besides, it sounded too good to miss. So I went and had one of the times of my life, and this is my trip. And I never realized how much it had become a part of me until I was writing this and saying “we” and “us” and feeling homesick. Which is what Resurrection City was all about. Of course, it was old stuff from the start. Another nonviolent demonstration. Another march on Washington. Another army camping, calling on a government that acts like the telephone company. Even poverty is ancient history. Always have been poor people, still are, always will be. Because governments are run by ambitious men of no imagination. Whose priorities are so twisted that they burn food while people starve. And we let them. So that history doesn’t change much but the names. Nothing protects the innocent. And no news is new. Read More