January 29, 2018 Arts & Culture Serial Killers, Versace, and Me By Sarah Weinman Edgar Ramírez as Gianni Versace in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college (such things were possible in the late nineties). The gig itself was worlds away from my current occupation as a crime writer. “Inventory asset management” was the vague, jargony title that described the mix of my duties: lifting heavy objects—furniture, office supplies—and computer data entry. It was meant to be tedious, a spirit confirmed by the office’s gray cubicles, the recycled air, and the lack of ambition among my colleagues. But my mornings were not boring. I began my summer gig the first week of July, and within a week I had developed a lively routine. One of my coworkers—perhaps even my then boss—left a stack of printouts at my desk. They weren’t for my job. They were something else entirely. “Hey, Sarah!” he’d say. “Here’s the latest on that spree killer you’re obsessed with.” And every morning, I’d sift through the papers, then search on AltaVista or Lycos for the latest on a twenty-seven-year-old fugitive named Andrew Cunanan. I needed to know more. I needed to know why. Two decades later, I suppose I still do. Read More
January 29, 2018 In Memoriam Nicanor Parra, the Alpha-Male Poet By David Unger Nicanor Parra died last week at the age of a hundred three. Here, David Unger remembers a collaboration with Parra that seemed doomed from the start. Nicanor Parra. Photo: Fundación Iberoamericana I first began translating the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1973, on the recommendation of Frank MacShane, the professor of my graduate translation course at Columbia University. I bought Obra gruesa, an anthology of Parra’s poetry published by Chile’s Editorial Universitaria at the Las Americas bookstore in Union Square. Back then, there were four Spanish-language bookstores on or around Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Later, I picked up Poems and Anti-Poems and Emergency Poems, two New Directions collections of Parra’s work. At the time, I was a serious silk-scarf/whiskey-breath poet, best buddies with classmate Frank Lima, a Rimbaud-like, jail-schooled poet. I devoured these three Parra books, then went about looking for poems that had not been translated into English. I found “Último brindis,” a cynical mathematical poem that exemplified Parra’s antipoetry philosophy, and translated it as “The Final Toast.” Read More
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