January 23, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Houses By Amit Chaudhuri This is the first installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s new column, The Moment. When do we start noticing a house? We know it’s there, but don’t look at it. We might die without actually having seen it. I ask this because of my interest in Calcutta’s residential houses. Calcutta is where I was born, but I grew up in Bombay. I rehearse this sentence yet again for strangers to explain my discombobulated sensibility. I used to visit my uncle’s three-story house in Calcutta over my summer holidays as a child, and think of it as home—because my aunt and uncle and three cousins exuded a Bengali dysfunctionality that I associated with that word. But, in comparison to the twelfth-story flat where I grew up in Bombay, in Malabar Hill, and from where, when I was ten years old, I had an uninterrupted view of the sea, the house in Calcutta absorbed me. At some point, I must have gained clarity about two things: first, that the low houses of South Calcutta, and the opportunities they offered me to study the street outside and the houses opposite—to eavesdrop and spy—were preferable, to me, to the panoramic and godlike perspective that the twelfth-story flat provided. Second, I understood retrospectively that these Calcutta houses meant something not solely because of my personal memory but because they comprised areas that bore the imprint of a modernity that was to be found in some other cities, too—in Istanbul, Montevideo, Berlin, New York—though not, when I was growing up there, in the bit of Bombay in which I lived. These areas involved an encounter with the “historical.” Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture The Poet Upstairs By Aysegul Savas Avigdor Arikha, “Anne in Summer,” 1980 We call her Upstairs; she calls us Downstairs. From our ground-floor apartment in Paris, my husband and I can look across the courtyard to her apartment on the top floor, with its large, curved windows. “Downstairs,” she writes, “before drawing the curtain for the night, stepped out on the balcony, and saw your light on; which was good news.” Each message from her is a treasure: “When next we meet, we’ll salute each other like two lamp-posts, lighting up at the same time. Have a lovely day without rain.” She tells us often that we live in a village. She says that’s a lucky thing. She has a way of molding the mundane into harmony, of living in music. “Look at me walk,” she says, and sets off singing to the rhythm of her walking stick. “Un, deux, trois. Un, deux, trois.” She rhymes when she jokes, recites poems out of the blue, as if she had the lines flowing through her without cease. One morning, when we run into her at the Saturday market, she tells us she’s been reading the phone book and that it made her cry. “All those names,” she says. This is our neighbor, the poet Anne Atik. Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance By Mark Whitaker Duke Ellington with a group posed in Loendi Club for Synchronettes Club party, by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1938. Copyright: © 2006 Carnegie Museum of Art. Toward the northern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, at the point where the East Coast ends and the great American Midwest begins, three rivers meet. The Allegheny flows from the north, gathering the tributaries of western New York State. The Monongahela cascades from the south, through the hills and hollers of West Virginia. Together, they form the headwaters of the Ohio, which meanders west all the way to Illinois, where it connects to the mighty Mississippi and its tentacles reach from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of its strategic value, the intersection of these three rivers had generals named Braddock and Forbes and Washington fighting to control the surrounding patch of western Pennsylvania two decades before the War for Independence. Because it allowed steamboats to reach the coal deposits in the nearby hills, the watery nexus made the city that grew up around it the nation’s largest producer of steel and created the vast wealth of businessmen and financiers named Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, and Mellon, whose legacies live on in the renowned libraries, foundations, and art collections funded by their fortunes. Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture A Queer Reading of Go Ask Alice By James Frankie Thomas Reading Go Ask Alice—the so-called real diary, first published in 1971, of an anonymous girl who took drugs and died—is an experience so widely shared that there’s little point personalizing it. Everyone who encounters Go Ask Alice goes through the same four stages: Titillated horror, for the young reader, at the book’s dramatic depictions of drug use. Creeping suspicion, as the reader ages past adolescence, that there’s something fishy about the diarist’s life-destroying addiction to LSD and marijuana, not to mention the very premise that a diary kept by a homeless drug addict and “recorded on single sheets of paper, paper bags, etc.” was perfectly preserved for posthumous publication. Revelation, for the adult reader, that Go Ask Alice is not, in fact, a “real diary” but a fictional hoax written by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks whose other books included Jay’s Journal (the “real diary” of an anonymous boy who got involved in Satanism and died) and It Happened to Nancy (the “real diary” of an anonymous girl who got date-raped, caught AIDS, and died). Howling hilarity upon rereading the book in this context. By now, the Go Ask Alice reader’s narrative is a comic genre unto itself. (For the best examples, see Paul F. Tompkins and Mallory Ortberg.) I will now add my own to the pile, if only to establish my credentials as the world’s foremost authority on Go Ask Alice. Read More
January 19, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Vengeance, Evil, and Grace By The Paris Review Still from Phantom Thread. As often happens when watching a perfect movie, by the time the first shot bloomed across the screen, I nearly forgot I had a body. I would have forgotten entirely except that Phantom Thread made my heart pound and my palms sweat. Friends, this is not a thriller, though it was thrilling. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, and allegedly Daniel Day-Lewis’s last, is about a couturier in postwar London. It is about devotion, though depending on who you ask it is either about a man’s devotion to his work or a women’s devotion to a man. Either way, the film itself was made with obvious devotion. The clothing is arresting. What color is that bowtie except, perhaps, Proustian? The interior shots each want to be a still. Each time Day-Lewis’s character drives through the English countryside, his perfect sports car enrobes him like his gowns enrobe his clients. Weather, branches, or crowds be damned, he is a perfect pilot in a perfect vehicle. Both the movie and the characters run the risk of failing to live up to the exacting standards they set. But to my intense satisfaction, Phantom Thread is the picture of success. There is a twist, a fetish introduced so deliciously that it makes the trailer for the final Fifty Shades movie look like it belongs in Barbie’s beach house. If this is Day-Lewis’s last movie, what a way to go. —Julia Berick Eka Kurniawan I recently read Eka Kurniawan’s novel Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash as if either the book or I were outfitted with afterburners. Vengeance is a comic picaresque that the publisher has likened to a Quentin Tarantino film; Kurniawan’s prose, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker, is pungent and blunt, but there’s more talk of fighting than actual fights, and a scene in which a pair of 18-wheelers battle for dominance at high speeds on a two-lane road could not have been reproduced in film to such great effect. The novel’s protagonist is Ajo Kawir, who suffers a youthful erotic mishap that leaves him impotent (he treats his “bird” as a kind of Yorick, delivering monologues to it and wondering whither its gambols). He fights to relieve his frustrations and meets the tough-as-nails Iteung, who kicks his ass and wins his heart. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth, as we know, and Ajo Kawir abandons his old life for one spent making long-distance hauls. There are disappointing moments later in the novel—Kurniawan’s handling of gay and female sexuality is rather awful at times—but the physicality of his prose and his story is invigorating.—Nicole Rudick Read More
January 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Falling in Love with an Empty Man: The Work of José Leonilson By Elisa Wouk Almino In general, I do not want to meet the artists I fall in love with. I’m keen to preserve the relationship between the art and myself. But that changed when I saw José Leonilson’s work in person for the first time, in the exhibition “Empty Man” at the Americas Society in New York. In Brazil, Leonilson is considered one of the most important artists of his generation. Born in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, he came of age in the 1980s, in the years immediately following Brazil’s twenty-year dictatorship. Emerging from oppressive times, he and his peers embraced the pleasures of painting, and they made bright and figurative work. But Leonilson’s art was also uniquely personal and literary; words float alone or in poetic arrangements (“here comes your man / full of numbers and words”). His presence looms over almost everything he left behind. Read More