December 12, 2017 Arts & Culture Why Write Fiction in 2017? By Joe Fassler Constantin Alajalov, cover for The Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1949 Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wireless router. The plug pulls away from the wall with a soft, satisfying sound, and on the plastic box a row of twinkling green lights blinks out. I’ve learned I have to do this. Otherwise, in the morning, I’ll succumb to temptation: I’ll rise, open my laptop, and start reading the news. I know that that decision will feel innocuous, even necessary, in the moment. But I also know I want to spend my morning writing as much as I can—and that a working Wi-Fi signal has the power to derail me. Even fifteen minutes of headline-scanning Twitter—if I can limit it to that—leaves me feeling overloaded, angry, panicked, worn out, weirdly high. So instead of flooding my mind with other voices, I back away. My work begins then with an act of disconnection, this physical severing I perform each night before I go to sleep. As much as we carp about the increasing digitization of our lives, this isn’t really a new problem. Writing required cord-cutting long before the computer. It’s an act of refusal, of relinquishment, and of retreat, a decision to turn away from the world and its noise of possibilities, to chase instead a signal down the quiet of a page. That work—the deep, sustained kind that yields poems and essays and fiction—can only happen in solitude, and in silence. And that’s the trouble. Read More
December 11, 2017 Look Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Anarchist Bikers Who Came to Help By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. Molly Crabapple, Bennie, 2017. On November 4, a little over a month after the hurricane, five bike punks arrived at La Loma, the hilltop community center in Mariana, the barrio where my friend Christine Nieves lives. They hung their hammocks between the beams of the ruined playground, lit some cigarettes, and got to work. Cooze, Greg, Angie, Jerry, and Bennie had come from Charlotte, North Carolina. A decade ago, they founded Ride or Destroy, a bike club known for its tricked out cycles and death-courting stunts—they refer to it as a gang, tongue half in cheek. The anarchism came later. In 2016, members took part in the anti-police-violence protests that broke out in Charlotte after police officers killed Keith L. Scott, a forty-three-year-old black man. After Maria hit, the friends formed DABS, or Direct Action Bike Squad, then crowdfunded money to come to Puerto Rico in order to distribute supplies to mountain barrios. They first spent a week in Luquillo looking for work that needed doing, then, through a facebook page run by a network of Puerto Rican mutual aid centers, they found the mutual aid project started by the community in Mariana. Read More
December 11, 2017 At Work States of Desire: An Interview with Anne Garréta By Sarah Gerard Anne Garréta was the first person born after the founding of Oulipo to be admitted to the experimental literary group. The conceit of her memoir, Not One Day (2002), is consistent with that association: At the book’s opening, she vows to write five hours a day, every day for a month, each time recollecting one woman whom she’s desired or who has desired her. She will place the entries in alphabetical order. The result, she says, will be a “stammering alphabet of desire,” one that will locate, spell out, and delineate desire in her life. But in the end, the book doesn’t follow its own rules; it is as elusive as desire itself, unable to be pinned down, slippery as the object of its second-person point of view. Rather than comprising, impossibly, an elucidation of the nature of desire, the memoir instead enacts it, becoming an experience of seduction and pursuit. Garréta has published six books in France, and two—Sphinx (1986) and Not One Day—have been translated into English (in 2015 and 2017, respectively, both by Emma Ramadan). Both upend expectations for love and literature, insofar as we can expect to be anything but transported. In Sphinx, Garréta offers a love story without revealing either of the lovers’ genders. The book is a dark, pulsing romance, tortured and thrilling. I spoke with Garréta recently about Sphinx and Not One Day. I was, at the time, falling in love and in the grip of desire. “Everything becomes salient,” Garréta told me, when I shared this with her. We talked about the relationship of desire to writing, the various states and attitudes of the physical body, and the reawakening of curiosity. INTERVIEWER How do you view the relationship between desire and writing? In your life, are those two things intertwined? GARRÉTA I’d say yes because they’re both quite complicated to figure out and they are both liable to fall into cliché, into patterns that are customary and basically uninteresting. So the difficulty, both in desire and in writing, is to create forms that are not necessarily given or granted. It takes effort. I would say that it’s not a writing of desire, or that there’s a direct connection—there’s an analogy. Read More
December 11, 2017 Arts & Culture The Rise of Queer Comics By Hillary Chute Gay Comix no. 1, ed. Howard Cruse, cover by Rand Holmes, 1980. The fastest-growing area in comics right now may be, broadly speaking, queer comics—comics that feature in some way the lives, whether real or imagined, of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer) characters. Queer comics are one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary comics, fueled in large part by the runaway success of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—the story of a gay girl and her closeted, ultimately suicidal gay father that was adapted to be a Broadway musical of the same title, and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. Gayness used to be a public accusation leveled at comics to discredit the medium: in the 1950s, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman, were suspected to be gay, and therefore a negative influence. Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote in his influential book on comics that the former represent “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” and for the latter, “the homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable … For girls she is a morbid ideal.” The infamous 1954 Comics Code, inspired by Wertham’s study, banned “sex perversion or any inference to same”—a clear reference to homosexuality. But today gay comics are an ever-expanding feature of the field, marking a new era of self-expression. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced. Read More
December 8, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Interwar, War, and Postwar By The Paris Review Tracy K Smith “Our bodies run with ink dark blood. / Blood pools in the pavement’s seams. Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?” So begins Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Unrest in Baton Rouge,” from the forthcoming collection, Wade in the Water. Like many of the poems in this slim yet searing book, “Unrest” is at once a haunting testimonial of the foulness on which the country was built and an homage to the love—however scant it may at times feel—that’s persevered despite it all. From start to finish, the collection traverses American history, comprising imagined letters between slaveholders, between black men or women and “Mr abarham lincon” or “My Children” or “Excellent Sir”; erasures, using the Declaration of Independence as source material; and poems about “our magnificent roads, / Our bridges slung with steel, / Our vivid glass, our tantalizing lights … ” But Smith writes, too, of more personal moments—the wonders of motherhood, the terrors of womanhood—so that by the collection’s end, we’ve listened to a choir of voices from generations past and present who have shown us the beautiful alongside the monstrous. In the poem “New Road Station,” Smith writes that “history is not a woman,” but in Wade in the Water, she most certainly is. —Caitlin Youngquist I have carried Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege around with me for the past year and a half as though it were my bible. For all intents and purposes, it is: Williams is a powerhouse of a writer, one who could level an entire city with a single sentence, and I feel a devotion to her work that borders on dogmatism. Yet as with most spiritual matters, the exact cause of this fierce allegiance eludes me. After sixteen months with Joy, I don’t think I’m any closer to articulating, or even understanding, why I love her stories so much. What I can say is this: in each of the tales collected in the career-spanning Visiting Privilege, there is a sense that something is shifting just behind the veil. The machinations of daily life take on an Old Testament weight. Things mean what they mean until, suddenly, they don’t. The protagonists are alien to everyone they encounter, alien even to the reader, and their fundamental unknowability captures the desperate isolation of our modern era. I started reading The Visiting Privilege in August last year. Over the months, I’ve bounced my way through story after wonderful story, scratching my head, drinking in the sentences, trying to hold on to each word just a little longer than usual. And now, here I am, interning at The Paris Review, who just announced this week that Williams will receive the 2018 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. This whole chain of events has a whiff of the beyond for me. Surely, this means something, I say, and then I turn the page, knowing it either does or does not, and making peace with this lack of understanding all the same. —Brian Ransom Read More
December 8, 2017 Arts & Culture How Original Are You? By Robert Shore Copyright © Museo Nacional del Prado “The old idea of making things” So there I was, sprawled across the floor of my living room in south London, happily riffling through the newspapers on my iPad (I’m old-fashioned like that). The shortlist for the annual Turner Prize had just been announced, and the broadsheet commentators seemed even more mystified than usual by the list of nominees. It was evident that the judges had done something unusual—unusual even in the context of the prize that had made Tracey Emin’s Bed tabloid fodder—by the reaction in the Guardian, where the super-sober Adrian Searle declared himself baffled. After offering a rundown of the candidates (Duncan Campbell, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell, Ciara Phillips), he declared: “It’s all a bit dour, and I take this as deliberate. This year’s judges seem to be intent on delivering an exhibition that not only shakes things up—none of the shortlisted artists are exactly familiar to a wider audience—but also want us to struggle with meaning as much as the artists seem to do … It’s going to be hard work.” Read More