September 25, 2017 Procrastination Confessional Joining the PTA As Writerly Self-Sabotage By Minna Zallman Proctor In his masterful book Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer writes at great length about not being able to write a book about D. H. Lawrence and, in the process, writes a book about D. H. Lawrence and about himself. There’s a bit of a novel thrown in there, too. It’s the holy grail of procrastination. All of this not-writing piles up, and miraculously a book emerges. Even more miraculously, Dyer gets to not-write on a beach on a Greek island. I do my not-writing in a coffee shop in Park Slope for the hour and a half between dropping the kids off at school and starting my actual job. I do my not-writing at five in the morning, before everyone gets up and starts eating cereal, and looking for socks in my office, which is the living room and the dining room, too. Sometimes, in a desperate pinch, I do my not-writing on Saturday morning, hunching guiltily in the corner pretending that I’m not not-helping clean the apartment. Though I also have the gall on those occasions to bark furiously at anyone who has the temerity to approach my desk about borrowing scissors. Read More
September 25, 2017 At Work Survival Story: An Interview with David France By Garth Greenwell David France, center, in June 1983. “Amid the largest influx of gays in city history, I migrated to New York to become part of what epidemiologists call an ‘amplification system’ for disease.” Last month, the British Library hosted a conversation between the journalist and filmmaker David France and writer Garth Greenwell on the occasion of the publication, last November, of France’s book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. In 2013, France wrote, directed, and produced the Oscar-nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the activist organizations ACT UP and Treatment Action Group. The book expands that narrative, interweaving the stories of individuals to trace the scientific history of AIDS and the birth of AIDS and LGBT activism, and to show the profound and underrecognized effect of the gay community’s struggle on American society and culture. “Their resistance and cunning,” Carl Bernstein wrote, “will remain as seminal to medical history and humanity as the efforts of Pasteur and Salk.” The exchange below is an edited version of France and Greenwell’s discussion, with thanks to the British Library. —Nicole Rudick GREENWELL It seems to me that we’re in a moment, and have been in a moment for a few years, of a revisitation of the height of the AIDS crisis in America. The extraordinary amount of recent cultural production around that crisis would include memoirs by Sean Strub, Dale Peck, Alysia Abbott, Bernard Cooper, Cleve Jones, whose memoir of AIDS activism was made into a miniseries, your own documentary, which we’ll talk about, and also Jim Hubbard’s documentary United in Anger, a film production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, new biographies of the artist David Wojnarowicz, the activist and singer Michael Callen, and the poet Essex Hemphill, a resurgence of interest in the extraordinary African American composer Julius Eastman, major novels by Tim Murphy, Larry Kramer, Rabih Alameddine—all in the last few years. This follows a period in which interest in AIDS seemed to have waned, and you’ve said that in 2008 and 2009, when you were carrying around a proposal for this book, no one was interested. What do you think is behind the sudden interest in this period? FRANCE There was a belief that the story of AIDS had been told, that it had been captured in the canon of the time—another long list—and that we had gathered and collected and transmitted those stories for the generations. The argument I was making in 2008 and 2009 was that all of that work had been produced inside the plague, and the reporting was very early, the thinking was very early. The arguments and conclusions represented the thinking in the middle, when no one knew what was going to happen. It was all very powerful, like Paul Monette’s work—devastating, so much of it. But by 1996, when the new drug class came to market and made it possible to survive an HIV infection—meaning we’d reached the end of the plague as we knew it, the untreatable, almost-certain-death period—we were all sent into some sort of dizzying future we hadn’t imagined and couldn’t celebrate it. There was no way to have a party, because of what had happened. So to look at that period—no one had done it. Read More
September 22, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Pranks, Prints, and Penises By The Paris Review Belkis Ayón, La cena (The Supper), 1991. Last Saturday, my roommate took us to El Museo del Barrio to see “NKAME,” a haunting retrospective of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón. It is a show of paradoxes, crackling with stillness and intricate in its simplicity. Ayón’s work merges elements of Christian narrative with that of the founding mythology of the Afro-Cuban fraternal society Abakuá to establish an independent and forceful iconography of her own. Her prints are populated by androgynous, ghostly figures, featureless save for the almond-shaped eyes that peer out from their canvases in a resolute, subtly confrontational stare. One piece reimagines Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but many of the scenes are more deliberately abstract, and those are the ones that are the most viscerally evocative. The show includes one of her color prints, but the rest are the result of her midcareer decision to work only in grayscale. Ayón’s true virtuosity is in her command of this palette, and the nuance of patterns she weaves into her prints is captivating. These patterns imbue the stillness of her scenes with a buzzing energy just below the surface, underscoring the archetypal uncanniness of her hybrid mythology. It was my roommate’s third time seeing the exhibition, and it is certainly one to pull you back again and again. Spend time with each print; the experience of each is a slow, mysterious revelation of masterful detail. —Lauren Kane Read More
September 22, 2017 Revisited Merce Cunningham’s Legacy Plan By Eugene Lim Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Eugene Lim revisits the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final performance. Photo: © Daniel Arkham CONAN: How do you obliterate space and time? Mr. JONES: Well, you know, sometimes, when I’ve had one tequila too many and I’m lying on the floor, I feel pretty obliterated in space and time. No, but I don’t think that’s what [Merce] meant. —Bill T. Jones remembering Merce Cunningham, on NPR. On the few last nights of 2011, I saw a series of performances that so moved and changed me that I thought to myself, This is the greatest experience of art I’ve ever had! And yet because I didn’t have the training or the critical terms to note the details of what I’d seen—and even if I’d had them I’m not sure the soft muscles of my memory would have retained them—I have only emotional and murky impressions. A dance performance I know I once felt was a pinnacle of experience I now can only vaguely hold in mind, like a summer in a foreign city where you carried out a painless and shimmering affair—that is, something idealized and maybe romantic but shrouded and perhaps no longer real. These were the final dance performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on the nights of December 29th, 30th, and 31st in 2011. Prior to his death, Merce Cunningham created a remarkably prescient and meticulous legacy plan which, after his passing, would send the company on a two-year world tour. It would culminate with final performances in New York. Then, the company would disband. Read More
September 22, 2017 Stolen Reading J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine in Fall By Barret Baumgart Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft. It was autumn and warm, late evening, and the shadows were as long as the hot busses that hissed and braked alongside the main library’s midwestern utilitarian grim, lifting trails of dead leaves like a breath of smoke in their wake as they rumbled toward the river. I read the dedication in J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, “To My Wife,” before dropping the book in my backpack and unlocking my bike. I found it somewhat cheering. At least this neglected author managed to find someone. But over the decades, many readers—I later learned—had come to debate this. They said he never had a wife. They said he lived alone; he was a librarian; he was sick when he wrote the book, hence the melancholy that colors his prose. Others said it was not prose but poetry, while others insisted it wasn’t nonfiction but a novel. Even certain filmmakers wanted to lay claim to the text. Werner Herzog told a Rio audience to quit film school. If they wanted to make a movie they had only to read one book: The Peregrine. Classic Herzogian hyperbole, I thought, pushing my bike uphill across the dried grass toward the old capital. Read More