January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing Fiction in the Shadow of Jerusalem By Moriel Rothman-Zecher I started writing fiction while a cloud of death and mourning hung heavy over Jerusalem. To be clear: death and mourning are always hovering in the air over Jerusalem. It is not a joyful city. But in this period, beginning in early fall of 2015, death and mourning were increasingly part of the daily reality of almost every Jerusalemite I knew, and were spreading elsewhere, throughout Israel-Palestine. In late September of that year, a car driven by a sixty-four-year-old Israeli man named Alexander Levlovitz was stoned by a number of Palestinian youths in Jerusalem. He crashed into a pole and was killed. A few days later, an Israeli couple were shot and killed by Palestinian gunmen while driving in the West Bank with their four children, who were not physically harmed. In the days and weeks that followed, the Israeli military began a trigger-happy campaign of suppressing any form of Palestinian uprising, whether armed or not. By mid October, some two hundred Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces—some of them armed with lethal weapons and attempting to carry out attacks; some of them throwing stones at army posts, vehicles, or checkpoints; some of them entirely unarmed; some of them small children, like thirteen-year-old Abdel Rahman Obeidallah. During the same period, twenty-eight Israelis had been stabbed, axed, run over, or shot to death by Palestinians, and an Eritrean refugee named Haftom Zarhum was beaten to death in a bus station after a group of Israelis mistakenly identified him as the Palestinian perpetrator of a shooting attack that had just taken place there. Read More
January 17, 2018 Look Two Thousand Pieces of Subway Ephemera By The Paris Review A bag of bullseye subway tokens. All photographs by Brian Kelley. In 2011, the Brooklyn-based photographer Brian Kelley began collecting old MetroCards, a project that soon transformed into a zealous obsession. After scouring all of the city’s 472 stations, he widened his scope to include maps, pins, tokens, buttons, uniforms, promotional papers, and other historical artifacts. With the help of fellow enthusiasts, MTA workers, and eBay sellers, he has amassed, over the years, some two thousand pieces of ephemera. A selection appears below. In his new book, New York City Transit Authority: Objects, Kelley tells the story of the subway’s evolution. In a moment when the subway’s future has been put into question and dissected by frequent exposés of the system’s degradation, this project offers a uniquely intimate view into its history. The transit passes and MetroCards, in particular, read like familiar texts, each inscribed with traces of their respective time and place. A pink omnibus pass from 1956, for example, contains a name field for the passenger’s husband. A test MetroCard from 1992 heralds the end of tokens. Two years later, in 1994, the MetroCards already resemble those New Yorkers use today. Later specimens from the aughts feature public-safety warnings as well as advertisements, most recently for the fashion brand Supreme. Some things never change: a flyer from 1985, when the 7 line was overhauled for repairs, shows a commuter frustration that wouldn’t be out of place today. Taken together, the objects constitute both a public record and a palimpsest, suggestive of the countless ways the city has grown, faltered, and reinvented itself over the decades, even as the structures undergirding it have remained for the most part unchanged. Read More
January 17, 2018 On Music Don’t You Weep: The Bruce Springsteen Cure for Despair By Tom Piazza Bruce Springsteen One year down, three to go. Season one of the Trump unreality show was a fire that wouldn’t stop burning, set against the apocalyptic backdrop of real California wildfires that consumed over a million acres in the fall. Huge tracts of psychic energy, funds of hope and goodwill, were consumed by the effort to make sense of what was happening to the nation, to respond meaningfully, and to maintain sanity. Millions ranted about the “arsonist in chief,” yelled at their televisions, at their laptops, yelled on Facebook and Twitter or at protests in the street. Some, it is true, retreated into permanent Cat Video Land. But almost everyone was looking for evidence of hope. Twelve years ago, New Orleans was still on its knees after Katrina. I remember January 2006 well. Four months after the disaster, vast sections of the city were still mud logged and disfigured; citizens were still being pulled—soaked, bloated, dead, stinking—out of shipwrecked houses. The failure of the federally funded and constructed levee system, the Bush administration’s bungled, ineffectual response, and, in the background, the ongoing disaster in Iraq made it feel as if the country were going off the rails. That spring, Bruce Springsteen played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It remains probably the single greatest performance that I’ve ever seen, by anyone. It wasn’t just the music itself but the way Springsteen and the band grasped the moment, understood what the city needed, and delivered it to an audience made up largely of people who had lived through, and were still living through, disaster. For years, I’ve wished for some kind of document of that afternoon, and now there is one. A company called Nugs.net—do you know these guys?—has just issued a two-disc set of the entire concert, Bruce Springsteen, Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans, April 30, 2006. Read More
January 17, 2018 At Work Sappho Eating Her Heart Out: An Interview with Megan Levad By Anthony Madrid In Karl Shapiro’s best book, The Bourgeois Poet (1964), there’s an excellent poem to Randall Jarrell. The last line of that poem goes, “I rush to read you, whatever you print.” That’s how I feel about Megan Levad. That’s how I feel, and that’s what I do. We became acquaintances years ago in Ann Arbor. She described to me the manuscript she was working on, and I remember thinking it sounded like not at all my kind of thing. I don’t remember the details, but I know it was gonna be a set of connected lyrics, orbiting some dramatic historical incident. Years later, her first full-length work came out, and it had nothing in common with the book she had described. It was a bunch of thoroughly droll and inventive prose pieces, wherein she set out to explain (reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly) various complex processes and ideas—without doing a dot of research. Instead, she just used her own reasoning powers and whatever information one picks up from TV and high school. The resulting humor was so much to my taste that I renewed with her on Facebook or whatever it was, and we’ve been poetry friends ever since. Now her second book is out, and it’s a complete surprise once again. But it is not merely different from the other book. It’s more like the poet has grown a new head. What Have I to Say to You (Tavern Books, 2017) is, in my judgment, one of the actually good poetry books of the last fifteen years. Best in terms of memorable lines and bold vision, and best in terms of being the kind of book one happily reads over and over. It took me twenty-nine minutes and five seconds to read the whole thing into a voice recorder. I have listened to that recording six times in the last week. I decided to ask Megan some questions about the book. Read More
January 16, 2018 Redux Redux: Henry Miller, Ottessa Moshfegh, Denise Levertov By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Henry Miller’s Art of Fiction interview from our Summer–Fall 1962 issue, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “A Dark and Winding Road,” and Denise Levertov’s poem “Sound of the Axe.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to two of these pieces—plus Eudora Welty’s recollection of meeting Henry Miller in Jackson, Mississippi—in the seventh episode of our podcast, “The Listening Forest”; and if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts and subscribe on iTunes. While you’re there, tell us in the comments how much you love the show. Read More
January 16, 2018 Arts & Culture “What Does Your Husband Think of Your Novel?” By Jamie Quatro The spring my first book came out—a collection of stories, several of which detailed an erotic but unconsummated emotional affair—I was invited to speak at an all-men’s book club. I was excited such a club existed in my town. I told them I’d love to come. Southern male readers of fiction with serious literary habits! The meeting was held in the home of one of the members. About a dozen men showed up. We milled around and made the usual small talk. We ate good Mexican food and drank good Spanish wine and eventually gathered on sofas and chairs around the coffee table. I gave a brief talk about my “creative process”—something they’d asked me to discuss—and opened it up for questions. No one said anything. Men shifted in leather cushions and flipped through their copies of my book. It was hot out. Someone kept opening and closing the sliding back door in little screechy increments. Maybe no one actually read it, I thought. Finally the man sitting in the chair across from me flung his book onto the coffee table. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll just say it, because we’re all wondering the same thing: What in the hell does your husband think about your work?” Read More