November 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cats, Combat, Conversationalists By The Paris Review Notebook pages from Éric Chevillard’s autofiction. The other night, sprawled on the floor of my apartment, I opened the newest issue of Music & Literature and found myself quickly smitten with one of its featured artists: the French writer Éric Chevillard. This is neither the first nor the second occasion M&L has introduced me to work that has left me in awe of its author—it’s happened before, with the fiction writer Ann Quin and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik. But this time felt different. Why? To start, Chevillard has accomplished what few writers, in my readings of them, have: he got me to laugh … aloud. The pages devoted to him flaunt his impeccable range—there’s Chevillard the critic, the novelist—but my favorite bits are those doused in humor, the short snippets of prose that take as their subjects such peculiar things as Hegel’s cap (“it’s a must-see … a thing to behold”) and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (where its audience “ends up definitively and permanently associating the instruments with the characters they arbitrarily play in the story”). Then of course there’s Chevillard’s piece “Autofiction,” in which he subs the word ejaculating in for writing: “To be honest, what I ejaculated back then was worthless. Inconsistent. Peanuts. Flan. Eggnog.” Chevillard’s prose brims with outrageous wit, sophistication, and fun, the likes of which I’ve never read before. —Caitlin Youngquist Julia pressed the most recent issue (for American readers) of the London Review of Books into my hands, demanding I read a short piece titled “Cat-Brushing,” by Jane Campbell. Julia and I talk about cats regularly, and why wouldn’t I read an article about cat brushing. But feline grooming is only a metaphor and jumping-off point: the story (I later discovered it was fiction) is a reverie by an older woman of her past lovers, of deeply pleasurable sex, of growing old and losing all of it. She calls aging “a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed … Once, when I arched my back and let out little miaows of pleasure my lovers thrilled with the knowledge of their potency. Now, I offer a few inches of knitting to my son. It is a terrible loss.” I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story in which an older woman’s loss of sexuality and independence was written so preeningly and with such elegant mourning. “I was loved and feared in return,” she recalls of her catlike fierceness. “It was a good place to be.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
November 10, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Zora Neale Hurston By Valerie Stivers This is the fourth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel on black Southern womanhood by Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), people eat soda crackers with cheese, drink lemonade or sweeten their water with ribbon cane syrup, and serve whole barbecued hogs with sweet-potato pone. A man on a spree offers fried chicken and macaroni for all, and Janie, the heroine, leaves her first husband after frying him a hoe-cake to go with his coffee. “She dumped the dough on the skillet and smoothed it over with her hand. She wasn’t even angry,” Hurston writes. Instead of a loveless marriage, Janie insists on having the sweet things in life. Her second husband buys her “the best things the butcher had, like apples and a glass lantern full of candies.” And her great love is a handsome man 15 years her junior whom everyone calls “Tea Cake.” (A tea cake is a classic of Southern cooking that’s actually a simple round of sugar dough with a crisp bottom and chewy texture, something between biscuit and cookie.) Hurston’s belief that the pursuit of happiness and sensuality was a worthy life goal, especially for a black woman, was radical when the book was published. She was criticized for being “pseudo-primitive,” too female, too personal, not promoting black causes in the right way. Hurston died in obscurity and was only rediscovered in the 1970s thanks to the efforts of Alice Walker, who was teaching at Wellesley at the time. Read More
November 10, 2017 At Work Daring as a Woman: An Interview with Lorna Simpson By Heidi Zuckerman The following is excerpted from Conversations with Artists, a collection of conversations by Heidi Zuckerman with thirty-four contemporary artists. INTERVIEWER Your work is extensive and takes many different forms. How do you respond when people ask you what you do? SIMPSON It gives me pause when people ask me what I do, because there are so many different avenues that my work has gone down. Photography being one avenue, film and video another, more recently—over the past five years—drawing, using inks, and collage. Although I’m trained in different areas, I gravitate more toward the photographic arts. I’ve always left it open as to how I work in different mediums and try not to put too many boundaries on what I do. It’s more about experimenting or the process of making that matters. INTERVIEWER Do you consider your works to be narrative based? SIMPSON Many, yes. My earlier works from the eighties and midnineties are very narrative based. But even more recently, the work has an undercurrent of the narrative of the archive, of found photographs, implied narratives, and fictions. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture The Case for Seasonal Sentimentality By Mary Laura Philpott All original illustrations © Mary Laura Philpott. There’s a line in Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn: “Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.” I reread it recently and thought, wait a second—I cry sometimes when the leaves fall. Although I’ve always wished I’d had a chance to meet the late Ephron, maybe it’s better that I never had to admit to her my sentimentality, which apparently was as uncool then as it is now. I’ve also been known to get a little teary when I find a craggy pebble that looks like a frowning face. I sniffle when I see a skunk in my yard who looks lonely, like it’s dawning on him that all his skunk friends went on an adventure without him. I laugh, too, when I see a twig that looks like it’s giving me the finger. I chuckle when I see an ant trying to carry a half a Froot Loop. As a cartoonist, I draw talking birds, smiling flowers, and chickens wearing socks, and very often these creatures feel as real to me—and as filled with inner narratives—as people. Read More
November 9, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Is a Period By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. © Tom Toro How do you read a sentence by Gertrude Stein aloud? What she puts between periods is often fragmentary and repetitive, unhelpfully underpunctuated, reliant on a series of appositions and flat ands to hold it together. There is a decision to make. You could read it with a take-it-as-it-comes evenness of tone, as though the point were to reject the sentimental habits of the speaking voice. Or you could read it as though you understood it, or even as though you were trying to convince someone that what it says is true. As though you were delivering an oration: In the practice of orations and the relief of fears, in the practice of orations and the relief of fears, in the practice of orations and in the relief of fears, he we and they, they and we and he, he and they and we and in the practice of orations and in the relief of fears may we accept that which when sent is not only acceptable but in a way need not be regarded as a surprise. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art By Cody Delistraty Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius,” she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. “He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.” After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself. Read More