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
January 19, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking from Sixteenth-Century Fairy Tales By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The first and most deliciously weird collection of European fairy tales comes not from the Brothers Grimm but from Giambattista Basile (1575–1632), a poet, courtier, and feudal administrator from Naples. Because Basile wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, The Tale of Tales—in the original, Lo cunto de li cunti—has been obscure for most of its history. The first authoritative English translation, by Basile scholar Nancy Canepa, appeared only in 2007. For those of us who read to enter different skins and live in different worlds, the book is a treasure box of estranging language and metaphor. The tales are fantastical, but the greater thrill is how the writing brings alive the details and sensibilities of daily life in Baroque-period Italy, six hundred years ago. Here is Basile describing a pretty young girl: She truly was a delectable morsel: she looked like tender curds and whey, like sugar paste; she never turned the little buttons of her eyes without leaving hearts perforated by love; she never opened the basin of her lips without doing a little laundry of souls. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture The Academic’s Guide to Academese By A Community of Inquiry The following definitions are culled from a critical glossary written by a group of Princeton graduate students and faculty. The glossary defines fifty-eight terms common to academic life, in a style intended “to prick both egos and consciences.” art. Most generally, the ability, manner, or “knack” essential to the realization of some task or goal, especially when tricky or specialized (e.g., “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”). Also, a large class of objects and/or nonmaterial phenomena privileged for their putative ability to occasion unpredictable but significant responses (particularly aesthetic, but sometimes sentimental or political) in individuals and groups. A term substantially defined by resistance to definition. Hence, difficult to define satisfactorily, if also satisfactory to define difficultly. canon. A sacred weapon within academic departments, fired ritually upon the uninitiated or wayward. Injuries suffered may generate the scars requisite for entry into the relevant sodalities and/or encampments. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Finding Science Fiction and Fantasy for Female Readers By Dara Horn “Why don’t you write anything fun? You know, like about an alternate universe or time travel or something?” That’s my twelve-year-old daughter, an obsessive reader who plows through four or five books a week, disappointed that her novelist mom hasn’t invented a tweenage dystopia like the ones she devours daily. For her, like for so many readers her age, reading means plunging into the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, some wild imagined world where new rules apply. I watched endless alternate universes with daring heroines pile up on my daughter’s nightstand, baffled by how different her tastes were from mine at her age—until I finally understood one very obvious answer to her question. My daughter’s fascination with nonrealistic literature began a few years ago with one of my own childhood favorites: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962. And that was where the wrinkle between my daughter’s time and mine began. Read More