May 13, 2024 Dinner Parties Story Time By Cynthia Zarin “Un Joyeux Festin.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0. There was a time in my life when I went to many formal dinner parties. Were they parties, exactly? They were dinners orchestrated to celebrate something—a book, or an exhibition—or to raise money. Older and better-off friends often invited us to these events. I was young and newly married to my second husband. We had three and then four children, and pennies slipped through our fingers. For winter I owned a black dress with a keyhole neckline, and for spring a thrift-shop chiffon skirt and an embroidered tunic the color of spilled tea. I imagine our friends thought we would enliven the table. As I said, we went to many of these dinners, but one evening put a stop to it. It must have been springtime, as I was wearing my skirt and tunic. My husband wore his tuxedo. Before we left the apartment there was the usual brouhaha about his bow tie. In the movie version of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, Mr. Darling (Cyril Ritchard, who in an thrill-inducing about-face, also plays Captain Hook) cannot tie his bow tie properly and the scene devolves: he must tie his bow; he must go to this dinner; if he does not, he will lose his job, and the family will be in the poorhouse! He practices by tying it around a bedpost, but, after all, the bedpost can’t go to the party! My children had watched this movie perhaps fifty times, and whenever we went out to these dinner parties they would circle their father as he tried to tie his bow tie, chanting, To the poorhouse, to the poorhouse! As usual, in this grim ambience, we left them to their very tall babysitter, Ann, a Barnard student who looked like an elongated Alice; in the afternoons, she often took them across the park to the Met to see the mummies. Read More
May 10, 2024 The Review’s Review The ABCs of Gardening By Adrienne Raphel From An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Kara Walker. A is for ABC book. An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, a new book by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, is an alphabetical sequence of lavishly illustrated, crisp lyric essays that takes readers on a tour of gardening, past and present, and serves as a teaching tool for children to learn about flora while practicing their letters. But at its roots, An Encyclopedia is a postcolonial excavation of the tyrannical alphabetization that has formed America since its origins. As the historian Patricia Crain writes in The Story of A: From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter, her investigation of the alphabet’s chokehold on American letters, “The alphabet is the technology with which American culture has long spoken to its children and within which it has symbolically represented and formed them.” Teaching children how to use the alphabet might seem like a natural, lawful neutral activity: here are the building blocks that create our communication system. But alphabetization as the default mode for organizing subjectivity—“As easy as ABC”—is a recent, and surprisingly problematic, phenomenon. B is for Bible. The New England Primer, the first reader designed for the American colonies and the foundational text for schoolchildren in the United States before 1790, presents the alphabet via Biblically themed and morally didactic rhyming couplets: “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all,” the A ditty goes, and the letters march on a mostly tragic journey from there, with dour little images that illustrate each couplet. Today, ABC books do lots of things. Many use the genre to provide a parade of content: A is for activist; R is for Rolex. Alphabet books aimed at adult audiences often satirize the genre. The Cubies’ ABC, from 1913, skewers Futurist artists in alphabetical order, shooting them down in doggerel: “B is for Beauty as Brancusi views it. / (The Cubies all vow he and Braque take the Bun.) / First you seize all that’s plain to the eye, then you lose it; / Next you search for the Soul and proceed to abuse it. / (They tell me it’s easy and no end of fun.)” ABC books sometimes even undercut the well-trodden form itself, with a wink or some wishfulness. Michaël Escoffier’s Take Away the A: An Alphabeast of a Book! suggests an alternate universe for a world without each letter: “Without the D, Dice Are Ice” depicts dice clinking in drinking glasses. Kincaid and Walker’s Encyclopedia embraces all these modes, from instructive to subversive to lyric to sly. Here, A is for apple, but it’s also for “Apple and Adam, too,” and “also for Amaranth.” A gets three entries; S, T, U, and W each get two; the rest get one. The rule seems to be that there is no rule, bucking the alphabet’s insistence on pattern. Read More
May 9, 2024 First Person Anacondas in the Park By Pedro Lemebel Parque Forestal. Photograph by Arturo Rinaldi Villegas, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 BY-SA 3.0 Deed. “Pedro Lemebel, one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America,” writes Gwendolyn Harper, his translator, was “a protean figure: a performance artist, radio host, and newspaper columnist, a tireless activist whose life spanned some of Chile’s most dramatic decades. But above all he was known for his furious, dazzling crónicas—short prose pieces that blend loose reportage with fictional and essayistic mode … Many of them depict Chile’s AIDS crisis, which in 1984 began to spread through Santiago’s sexual underground, overlapping with the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship.” Over the next few weeks, the Review will be publishing several of these crónicas, newly translated by Harper, as part of a brief series. And despite the man-made lightning that scrapes intimacy from the parks with its halogen spies, where municipal razor blades have shaved the grass’s chlorophyll into waves of plush green. Yards upon yards of verde que te quiero verde in Parque Forestal all straightened up, pretending to be some creole Versailles, like a scenic backdrop for democratic leisure. Or more like a terrarium, like Japanese landscaping, where even the weeds are subject to the bonsai salon’s military buzzcuts. Where security cameras the mayor dreamed up now dry up the saliva of a kiss in the bigoted chemistry of urban control. Cameras so they can romanticize a beautiful park painted in oils, with blond children on swing sets, their braids flying in the wind. Lights and lenses hidden by the flower in the senator’s buttonhole, so they can keep an eye on all the dementia drooling on the benches. Old-timers with watery blue eyes and poodle pooches cropped by the same hand that hacks away at the cypresses. But even then, with all this surveillance, somewhere past the sunset turning bronze in the city smog. In the shadows that fall outside the diameter of grass recruited by the streetlamps. Barely touching the wet basting stitch of thicket, the top of a foot peeks out, then stiffens and sinks its nails into the dirt. A foot that’s lost its sneaker in the straddling of rushed sex, the public space paranoia. Extremities entwine, legs arching and dry paper lips that rasp, “Not so hard, that hurts, slowly now, oh, careful, someone’s coming.” Read More
May 9, 2024 Dinner Parties Death by Sea By Rosa Shipley Photograph by Isabel Dietz Hartmann. Heading to the dinner party, I wondered if people there would be able to tell that I was in crisis. Out the window of the Toyota Land Cruiser—on loan, from my uncle—islands and ocean floated past. I was on the car ferry from Lopez Island to San Juan Island, in the middle of the Puget Sound. It was February of 2020, and I was a few months into living on Lopez. I had moved from New York City, where I was from, so that I could help start a restaurant there. This restaurant, which would open in a dockside bar, had existed in many incarnations before our project. Now my team and I—food friends who would make their way in spring—were going to revamp it. I was twenty-four, earnest, electrified at my luck. But things had begun to go awry. Switching hands of the restaurant had caused local discord. Around town, strangers peppered me with questions about the future of the restaurant that I never seemed to answer in a satisfying way. The island’s Facebook groups were exploding with commenters fearful that outsiders were ruining something good, as dissident voices defended us with pleading emojis. At the worksite: anonymous, ominous notes. The island’s dogs had begun to bark at me. Insomnia and howling winds yawned unsettlingly into beautiful sunrise. I had come to the conclusion that the spirits of the island were angry with me. Everything felt big, dark, and personal. Read More
May 8, 2024 Lectures Book as Enemy By Adania Shibli Adania Shibli. Photograph courtesy of Adania Shibli. Smoking might be banned at book fairs, while one doesn’t expect books to be banned from book fairs. Even if a character in one of the books exhibited at a fair is smoking, this wouldn’t lead to a ban on characters smoking in books, or to a ban on that specific book. The simple, obvious reason is: literature does not equal reality. Fiction, especially, has its own way of working and should be examined on its own criteria. Smoking in real life has negative impacts on one’s health and the health of others, and banning it can prevent people from becoming ill. Smoking in a book can be evaluated only in terms of its relevance to a character and their actions in a text. In 1988, when smoking was still allowed in many indoor places, probably including book fairs, I learned from my schoolteacher about the creation of the first public library in my village in Palestine/Israel. Upon hearing the news, I rushed to the little room where this library was being assembled, offering the librarian my help in labeling the books and arranging them on the shelves. I had a love for books, which I wanted to share with others. Read More
May 7, 2024 On Books Second Selves By Elisa Gabbert Vincent Van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888. Public domain. I. Jill Price has remembered every day of her life since she was fourteen years old. “Starting on February 5, 1980, I remember everything,” she said in an interview. “That was a Tuesday.” She doesn’t know what was so special about that Tuesday—seemingly nothing—but she knows it was a Tuesday. This is a common ability, or symptom, you might say, among people with the very rare condition of hyperthymesia—excessive remembering—also known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM. All sixty or so documented cases have a particular, visual way of organizing time in their minds, so their recall for dates is near perfect. If you throw them any date from their conscious lifetimes (it has to be a day they lived through— hyperthymesiacs are not better than average at history), they can tell you what day of the week it was and any major events that took place in the world; they can also tell you what they did that day, and in some cases what they were wearing, what they ate, what the weather was like, or what was on TV. One woman with HSAM, Markie Pasternak, describes her memory of the calendar as something like a Candy Land board, a winding path of colored squares (June is green, August yellow); when she “zooms in” on a month, each week is like a seven-piece pie chart. Price sees individual years as circles, like clock faces, with December at the top and June at the bottom, the months arranged around the circle counterclockwise. All these years are mapped out on a timeline that reads from right to left, starting at 1900 and continuing until 1970, when the timeline takes a right-angle turn straight down, like the negative part of the y axis. Why 1970? Perhaps because Price was born in 1965, and age five or six is usually when our “childhood amnesia” wears off. Then we begin to remember our lives from our own perspective, as a more or less continuousexperience that somehow belongs to us. Nobody knows why we have so few memories from our earliest years—whether it’s because our brains don’t yet have the capacity to store long-term memories, or because “our forgetting is in overdrive,” as Price writes in her memoir, The Woman Who Can’t Forget. Price was the first known case of HSAM. In June of 2000, feeling “horribly alone” in her crowded mind, she did an online search for “memory.” In a stroke of improbable luck, the first result was for a memory researcher, James McGaugh, who was based at the University of California, Irvine, an hour away from her home in Los Angeles. On June 8, she sent him an email describing her unusual memory, and asking for help: “Whenever I see a date flash on the television I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was and what I was doing. It is nonstop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.” McGaugh responded almost immediately, wanting to meet her. Her first visit to his office was on Saturday, June 24. He tested her recall with a book called The 20th Century Day by Day, asking her what happened on a series of dates. The first date he gave her was November 5, 1979. She said it was a Monday, and that she didn’t know of any significant events on that day, but that the previous day was the beginning of the Iran hostage crisis. McGaugh responded that it happened on the fifth, but she was “so adamant” he checked another source, and found that Price was right— the book was incorrect. The same thing happened when Diane Sawyer interviewed Price on 20/20. Sawyer, with an almanac on her lap, asked Price when Princess Grace died. “September 14, 1982,” Price responded. “That was the first day I started twelfth grade.” Sawyer flipped the pages and corrected her: “September 10, 1982.” Price says, defiantly, the book might not be right. There’s a tense moment, and then a voice shouts from backstage: “The book is wrong.” Read More