August 24, 2017 Correspondence Malcolm Cowley Learns to Love the Bomb By Malcolm Cowley Malcolm Cowley. From a 1945 letter from Malcolm Cowley, who was born on this day in 1898, to literary theorist Kenneth Burke. R.F.D Gaylordsville, Connecticut August 24, 1945 {NL} Dear Kenneth: It’s my birthday and a slow cold rain is falling and in general it’s a good day to write a letter, except I haven’t much to say. The atom bomb. We can’t keep it out of our minds. It gets worse as time goes on and we learn more about its effects. The Japanese say, of course they may be lying, as today’s radio announcer piously suggests, but then again they may be telling the truth, and they say that people in the Hiroshima area continue to die from radioactivity, they lose their red corpuscles and peg out—and the Japanese say they can’t afford to send their doctors to Hiroshima for fear of losing them too—and they say that people just a little burned by the bomb found the burns growing worse as time passed, and pegged out, so that the death toll (what a horrible phrase) was 30,000 in the first week and 30,000 more the second week—and you get a new picture of the way radioactivity will wipe out the world not in a good healthy smash, as you pictured it, with a new sun appearing in this constellation, but rather in a slow leukemia, the world simply made uninhabitable. Some people will certainly get so frightened by this picture that they’ll go off into the jungle of the mountains and live by raising roots, in the hope that when the next war comes it won’t be worth while wiping them out. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred will want never to use the atom bomb again, but there’s always one bad apple in the barrel, always one mad scientist or mad dictator, and in the long run I don’t see much hope—but in the short run we’re living in the great imperial republic of the twentieth century, we’ll be rich, we’ll all have three automobiles, we’ll have to have them, by law, whether or not we want to sleep with Mae West, we’ll have to sleep with her, we’ll have to eat too much and then take expensive cures to be slenderized, we’ll have to eat extensively denatured food expensively renatured with expensive vitamins, we’ll have to have a good time, by God, so we might as well grit our teeth and eat, drink, and be expensively merry, for tomorrow we’ll be blown sky high. Read More
August 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Degas’s Model Tells All By Jeff Nagy Edgar Degas, Sulking, ca. 1870, oil on canvas. Chrissakes, Pauline! No one would have been more horrified than Edgar Degas at the thought of a model taking up the pen. Not a fan of working-class literacy in general, he might well have died of apoplexy at the very idea that a model might dare not only to write about art but about his art. And from the very first words, we know that Alice Michel’s memoir is not going to be a typical hagiography of a great dead artist. This Degas is not the elegant gentleman, proud member of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie and scion of a well-to-do and diasporic family, with branches running banks in Naples and plantations in New Orleans. Nor is he the grand habitué of ballets, café concerts, and the opera, haunting the loges alongside his one-time friend librettist Ludovic Halévy. Not the cultivated disciple of Mallarmé who tried his hand at the occasional sonnet, not the obsessive aesthete who co-organized the exhibitions that made Impressionism an art-world phenomenon, and certainly not the purveyor of cutting, perfectly formed witticisms at exhibitions and dinner parties. Read More
August 24, 2017 Inside the Issue What’s Wrong with Us: An Interview with J. M. Holmes By Caitlin Youngquist Photo by Julie Keresztes. J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” appears in our Summer issue (no. 221); it’s Holmes’s first published story. Next year, it will be included in the collection How Are You Going to Save Yourself. Like the other stories in the collection, “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” follows a group of friends, four young black men—Dub, Rolls, G., and Rye—as they navigate the tangle of sex, race, and class. The story opens with Dub pressing Rye with the question “How many white women you been with?” Rye shies away from answering amid the group but later tells G., in confidence, about a sexual encounter with a white woman that left him at once ashamed and exhilarated. I spoke with Holmes over the phone recently, just after he’d returned to Milwaukee from a trip through Portugal, Italy, and Croatia with his mother and sister. He was laid back and cool, despite admitting that he was nervous. (“That was my first interview,” he told me afterward. “I feel like I just asked my girl to prom.”) We talked openly about intimacy in interracial relationships, the black body as sexual fetish, and shadeism. (NB: Some of the story’s details are purposefully left out, so as not to spoil the experience for our readers. But you can read “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” here.) Read More
August 23, 2017 Look Jack Pierson’s Dreamy, Erotic Hungry Years By Eileen Myles Jack Pierson, Grease Monkey, 1990. Courtesy the artist and Cheim & Read, New York. This October, Damiani will release The Hungry Years, a collection of photographs from the eighties by the artist Jack Pierson. The images, taken during the height of the AIDS epidemic and featuring many of his friends, are striking for their dreamy introspection, their melancholy, and their celebratory homoeroticism. Pierson has worked in many forms, including sculpture, word sculpture, bookmaking, drawing, painting, and photography. (The Paris Review published a portfolio of his word pieces in our Summer 1992 issue.) Eileen Myles, a friend of Jack’s, wrote the introduction to The Hungry Years, which we’ve published below, along with a selection of Jack’s photographs. —C.L. Last year we were in my apartment and Jack was talking about going on a trip to Florida in the eighties and I’m of course thinking that Florida means something particular to someone (like Jack) who is from New England because New England sadly has about as much past as America has got—it’s branded by that New and of course New England is anything but new. Really it just wants to be old and it isn’t so you see those of us from New England just traveling around the world, shaking off those chains of the sharp quickening weather and that sad desire to be classy or old usually betrayed by our quaint speech—wicked or our loafers, or deliberately well-worn clothes in New England’s endless imitation of “real,” which is a copy of those who we think know about something older—we think they own stuff, Harvard and the Swan Boats and that Swan Boat accident and all that cold-weather food. So when this person goes south and not because he’s training for the Red Sox and not old but maybe he’s running away from something, hitching a ride on somebody else’s vacation, their buddy’s family owns something down there, maybe a deal of some kind is going on, or their parent’s place on the beach is empty for a while anyhow they go. According to Jack he took some pictures in response to I’m guessing the lightness, the eeriness of the bright buildings and the palms and the Florida tendency to be another America, professing to be new not old and failing at it. And explaining himself about that first burst he took he said, “and I kept using the camera there.” Read More
August 23, 2017 First Person Fish Story: Dispatch from Coney Island By Joe Kloc Édouard Manet, Fishing, ca. 1862–63. I don’t fish, but I enjoy being around those who do. They’re easy to find in New York, leaning against the railing of a Brooklyn pier or resting on the rocky banks of the city’s rivers. In Sheepshead Bay, the fishermen are often jolly and sun-beaten, as if they’ve just returned from a long voyage. By early afternoon, they fill the local bars, swearing off red meat and bragging about not taking their medications. The Battery Park esplanade is more relaxed. Sometimes the only sign of a fisherman is an unmanned rod cast out to sea; a passerby might assume that fish in the Hudson catch themselves. One August morning a few years ago, I went out to Coney Island to clear my head on Steeplechase Pier, where fishermen gather in the summer months to fill their buckets with flukes, stripers, and porgies, much as they did a century ago. Coney Island is slow to change. Its busier blocks still have working pay phones on both sides of the street, and until recently, broken signs dangled off the facades of abandoned buildings, unmoored from their bracings by Hurricane Sandy. On hot days, the main stretch of Coney Island’s two-and-a-half mile boardwalk is crowded with visitors from the nearby amusement park. They eat mango on a stick as they navigate the performers dancing with snakes and rainbow-colored poodles. Down by the fishermen’s pier, the boardwalk quiets down. Elderly residents of the nearby towers read paperback novels and check the time on their digital wristwatches, and kids gather in the shade beneath the arches of an old terra-cotta building with a flaking portrait of Poseidon on the front. In the painting, the sea king is sitting alone in a rowboat, paddling toward the Atlantic. Read More
August 23, 2017 First Person Putting on the Veil: Boys Invade an All-Girls School By Rafia Zakaria From the cover of Veil. I wore the full-face veil for the first time on my wedding day. I was eighteen years old and I had never worn it before. In Pakistani Muslim tradition, this was the day of the ceremonial giving away of the bride, the day I was to say goodbye to my family (theatrically, and before an audience of a few hundred) and go off to be with my husband and his family. The fabric I had chosen over a year before for my wedding dress had been selected for hue and sheen—a fiery red-orange—and it was utterly opaque. I could see nothing. For navigation, I had the assistance of two younger cousins, unveiled and full of giggles. It was September in Karachi, I was pouring sweat and also blind. The story of how I ended up fully veiled and a bride did not begin that day. The skein connecting it to incidents past could be reeled back to an event a few years earlier, one that had led me to begin wearing the half-veil or the head scarf. Fifteen then, I was a student at an all-girls school that prided itself in being almost entirely free of the contaminating male presence, whose very existence made veils necessary in the first place. The hundreds of girls that were students there were instructed almost entirely by women. From the time we were six years old and began first grade to the time we were seventeen and graduated eleventh, it was women, women and all women. At five past eight every morning, the gates of the school would be locked and the man-free day would begin. The only men left inside were the very poor ones that the school employed, who mopped the halls, set up the nets for games of volleyball behind our high walls, or guarded the gates. The fact that they were poor seemed to cancel out their masculinity. Read More