January 26, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sinners, Slavery, and Shults By The Paris Review Adrienne Kennedy and her son in 1970. Photo: Jack Robinson On Sunday, I’ll be in the audience of Adrienne Kennedy’s latest play, He Brought Her Home in a Box. To prepare for it, I thought I’d revisit a few of the playwright’s earlier works, such as Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, and A Lesson in Dead Language. These one-act plays, along with Kennedy’s interwoven commentary, are bound together, among others, in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. The compendium offers a glimpse into the mind of a remarkable dramatist. Surreal, lyrical, and fragmentary, her plays are beautifully merciless in the ways they explore racism, colonialism, womanhood, and the violence inherent in each. In them, time is nonlinear, and characters shift between a multitude of selves. (Take The Owl Answers, for instance, in which there is “she who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the bastard who is the owl.”) To parse Kennedy’s exquisite experimentalism demands readers give themselves over entirely to the experience of her plays, perhaps reading them again and again. As she tells us in the book’s preface, “The days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head.” And that’s precisely what these are: images of torment, in sequence, that will leave you feeling as though you’ve just woken from a nightmare. I’m eager to see what she’s dreamt up this time. —Caitlin Youngquist What makes the loss of Ursula K. Le Guin so much harder to bear is that she was writing only recently. In 2010, she started a blog, and last year, some of those nonfiction posts were collected as No Time to Spare. My husband and my mother both read it and loved it, and on Tuesday, all excuses dissolved in grief, I opened the book and went straight to the cat chapters. A cat is a question that does not require an answer, so Le Guin, who spent her writing life investigating questions that needed addressing, here writes only of appreciation and affection. Is it any surprise Le Guin was a cat person? “If I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog,” she quips. Pard is her feline subject, a lively, mousing tuxedo, and she observes his cat behavior plainly and openly with love: “If I dribble him water in the washbasin he closes the stopper, thus creating a water hole where savage panthers may crouch in wait for dik-diks and gazelles, or possibly beetles. Then we go downstairs—one flying, the other not.” The last cat chapter ends with a devotional doggerel and a small, mischievous feline portrait. “His breed is Alley, his name is Pard,” she writes. “Life without him would be hard.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 26, 2018 Arts & Culture The Ghost of Zora Neale Hurston By Chantel Tattoli © Jennifer May Reiland “Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, “the most amusing” among New York’s “Niggerati.” She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she once wrote. “It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. “She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished,” Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?” And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contributing editor at Ms. magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate—Mathilda Moseley, teller of “woman-is-smarter-than-man” tales in Hurston’s Mules and Men—where she was put under. Walker’s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the Garden of Heavenly Rest. Read More
January 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Scenes from Gerald Murnane’s Golf Club By Tristan Foster The Goroke Golf Club in Victoria, Australia. Photo: Tristan Foster The Australian writer Gerald Murnane is a man of profound contradictions. A recluse who craves attention. A Luddite who uses his smartphone to google himself. An author who retired long ago, then went on to produce his richest work. He was recently treated for prostate cancer, and yet he’s still the sprightliest person in the room. The room on this occasion was a small golf club in Goroke, Murnane’s rural hometown in Victoria, Australia, not far from the state border. We had gathered from faraway places to attend “Another World in This One,” a one-day symposium on Murnane’s fiction, and to mark the publication of what is by every account his final novel, Border Districts. The club was furnished with vinyl chairs and tables with the covers tacked on. It had views of the golf course, the flags for each distant hole waving between spindly gum trees. The attendance for the symposium was capped at forty people—the club is cozy and the kitchen only able to turn out so many scones and sandwiches. Attendees included Murnane’s tireless publisher at Giramondo Publishing, Ivor Indyk; Alexis Wright, another of Australia’s major writers; academics; poets; and passionate readers. Rumors abounded that noted fan J. M. Coetzee was due to make the drive from Adelaide. That he had other engagements was perhaps for the better—his presence would have been too much for the little golf club to bear. Read More
January 25, 2018 In Memoriam Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin By Karen Joy Fowler © Marian Wood Kolisch “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004. Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the first science-fiction writers I read. I was in college at the time, breathing the heady air of second wave feminism, when a book clerk handed me The Left Hand of Darkness. Since then, I’ve heard many other readers say the same thing I felt: that book took the top of my head right off. There was more Le Guin to read after that. I’ve been reading her all of my adult life. I read her before I thought of writing myself, and I read her after. I read her for pleasure, and I read her for comfort, and I read her for guidance, wisdom, and inspiration. I read her for poetic leaps and for scholarly discourse. I read her to spend time in the many incredible worlds she created. And then I was lucky enough to get to know her personally. I can’t possibly provide a complete list of what she taught me, by word and example. But here is my starter list. Feel free to add and revise to make your own. Read More
January 25, 2018 In Memoriam Ursula K. Le Guin: The Rabble-Rouser with a Gentle Smile By Neil Gaiman Ursula K. Le Guin. Photograph: William Anthony/The Nation The thing about Ursula K. Le Guin was that she didn’t actually look like a rabble-rousing, bomb-throwing, dangerous woman. She had a gentle smile, as if she was either enjoying herself or enjoying what the people around her were doing. She was kind but firm. She was petite and gray haired, and she appeared, at least on first inspection, harmless. The illusion of harmlessness ended the moment you began to read her words, or, if you were so lucky, the moment you listened to her speak. Read More
January 25, 2018 At Work Owning Brooklyn: An Interview with Naima Coster By Carina del Valle Schorske Naima Coster Naima Coster and I met in passing in college at Yale. We had people in common, but I knew her first onstage. I remember watching Naima perform on the step team: her long braid was like flashes of lightning, but I sensed that even as she was moving, she would not be moved. This is a kind of torque I now recognize in her writing. Her debut novel, Halsey Street, remains true to the stubbornly slow pace of psychological change and to the centuries that bind us to others and to the street, to the body, and to the earth itself. But her writing also registers the sudden speed with which an event can snatch us up and set us spinning. Her craft is polyrhythmic, like the jazz she is named for. Halsey Street chronicles all the ways the machinery of gentrification gets jammed by unruly human lives. The time and place is mostly Bed-Stuy circa 2010, where Penelope Grand, an art-school dropout, has returned to care for her sick father. She’s rented a room in the renovated brownstone of a wealthy white family new to Brooklyn. Her father’s beloved record store, a neighborhood icon, has been priced out of business. His wife, Mirella, has left him, returning to the Dominican Republic, where she was born, in an overdue bid for independence. In Halsey Street, losses intersect and ramify like cracks in ice, and underneath rushes a reckoning: cold, bracing, hard to bear, yet still the sign of a new season. But calling Halsey Street “a novel about gentrification” somehow, ironically, gentrifies it via quick taxonomy. So much of what I remember from my reading doesn’t register in that description. I remember Penelope’s view from the attic window, and the obsessive sketches she makes of it in a frustrated effort to render the world as one she can desire. I remember all the ways she styles her hair. And most keenly, I remember the letter Mirella writes to Penelope: “I have learned that to be a mother is to be left behind. I did it to Ramona; you have done it to me. When you were a girl, you used to follow me around, and I did not like it. I was not fit to be followed.” Naima has taught me, in life as in fiction, that we don’t have to be “fit to be followed” in order to make way for one another. Sometimes candor is more loving than comfort. We text a lot or email, and I’m grounded by this communication and restored to my human dimensions. Cardi B would say “regular regular shmegular.” I think writing to Naima helps me feel regular about even my wildest fantasies, ambitions, refusals, and ambivalences as an artist. She reminds me that we all have them, along with blood, breath, vision. This call was taped on a Saturday morning in January between New York City and Durham, North Carolina. We were drawn together by a snap of blistering cold. Read More