August 16, 2017 In Memoriam Repo Man: Glen Campbell in Charles Portis’s Norwood By Rebecca Bengal Glen Campbell was the perfect articulator of Portis’s defiantly at-odds small-town characters and their old-fashioned dreams. Glen Campbell in 1967. Like most sharecroppers’ kids, the country singer Glen Campbell, who died last week of complications of Alzheimer’s, instinctively looked for the quickest way out of the cotton field. He was born in 1936, in Billstown, Arkansas, an unincorporated community near the evocatively named town of Delight; he was, he often told people, the “seventh son of a seventh son.” Campbell got good at the guitar fast—he received his first Sears model at the age of four, a gift from his Uncle Boo, and by the age of seventeen he had left Pike County far behind. Notably, he made it in Los Angeles long before he went to Nashville—a trajectory that would point him toward becoming one of the first true country pop stars, like the rhinestone cowboy of his own mammoth hit song. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Campbell would become best known for performing other writers’ songs. Like Willie Nelson—a friend later in life with whom he recorded versions of “Hello Walls” and “Just to Satisfy You” on his variety TV show, and an aching rendition of “Funny (How Time Slips Away)”—he was deeply influenced by the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He had an ability to wrest the heart out of stories of the common man in the common place—the rhinestone cowboy with the “subway token and dollar tucked inside my shoe”; the plaintive yearnings of the overworked, under-romanced Wichita Lineman; the contemplative, brokenhearted hobo of “Gentle on My Mind.” Even when he took issue with the lives he sang about (after Campbell made a hit covering Cree musician Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” he told a reporter that people who advocated burning draft cards “should be hung”), Campbell was most at home in the world of other people’s songs, as he would be until the end of his life. His ability to channel other personas may well owe as much to skills honed early on as a session musician, but they also speak to the survival instincts of a man with eleven siblings who left behind his impoverished, cotton-picking childhood as soon as he could. His phrasings were as versatile as his appearance; you could picture Campbell, with his genial, down-to-earth good looks, slipping into virtually any situation. You might work the factory line with him, you could have a beer with him, you would let him sell you a used car—or, perhaps, drive a stolen vehicle across the country. Read More
August 16, 2017 On Language Teaching Them to Speak: On Juan Pablo Bonet and the History of Oralism By Gerald Shea Children being taught to speak at a school for the deaf. Beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing well beyond the eighteenth century, “medical” treatments were devised in an effort to “cure” deafness. Many were violent, yielding illness, suffering, and at times death: Hot coals were forced into the mouths of the deaf to get them to speak “by the force of the burning.” Catheters were inserted through the nostrils, twisting them through the nasal cavity and into the Eustachian tubes and injecting burning liquids. Wide holes were drilled into the crown of a young girl’s skull so she could “hear” through the openings. Severe blistering agents were applied to the neck, scorching it from nape to chin with a hot cylinder full of magical burning leaves. Adhesive cotton was applied and set afire; vomitories and purgative agents were used; hot needles were injected into the mastoids, or the mastoids were removed altogether. One French doctor threaded the necks of deaf students with seton needles and, with a hammer, fractured the skulls of a number of deaf children just behind the ear. All of these practices were based on the idea that drilling, cutting, fracturing, scorching, or poisoning would “open up” the ear, the brain, and the body to the world of sound. Sixteenth-century Europe also saw a bloodless but equally ineffectual approach to treating the deaf, one concerned less with the intelligibility of speech and more with reproducing its sounds. The century marked the beginning of the oralist movement, which contended that the deaf should abjure their “signs” and learn to speak, a practice motivated in part by a central problem for aristocratic families in Europe with deaf children: they had to be able to speak in order to inherit. And so the influence of those who taught the deaf grew. One of the most well known among those teachers was Juan Pablo Bonet, a Spaniard. Bonet and those who followed him were either charlatans or incompetents; they mistook their students’ inability to speak for ignorance, and they not only failed to acknowledge but also prohibited their students from using their own language. In 1620, Bonet published the first known work on teaching the deaf to speak, Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos (The Simplification of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak). In it, he writes that the deaf are “inferior beings, monsters of nature and human only in form.” He claimed he could “cure” them with his “scientific art.” But what was that art? Read More
August 16, 2017 Arts & Culture Abdo Shanan’s Algerian Photographs By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie All photographs by Abdo Shanan, from the series “Diary: Exile, Algiers and Oran, Algeria,” 2014–16. Courtesy the artist and Collective 220. The photographs in Abdo Shanan’s series “Diary: Exile” (2014–2016) take viewers by the hand and race them through a vertiginous world of gritty, everyday intimacies. Imagine Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus meeting Roger Ballen in the inner cities of twenty-first-century Algeria to produce work that none of them had the background or experience to perceive. More often than not, Shanan frames his images from above or below. He points his camera up to catch a shredded campaign poster or the face of a woman laughing, down to catch a splash of white paint on the sidewalk, a hand on a leopard-print coat, or a pair of lovers rolling on the ground. In Shanan’s series, there are friends, strangers, twins, soiled bedsheets, signs of poverty, hardship, and distress, as well as moments of unguarded pleasure. Shanan was born in the Algerian city of Oran in 1982. His family left just before the start of the civil war, which erupted in 1991 and tore through the country chaotically until 2002, when the conflict didn’t so much end as exhaust itself. Shanan’s father was a professor of international law. He moved the family to Sirte, in Libya, where Shanan grew up among an international crowd. Shanan’s friends were the children of people from across Africa, Asia, and Europe who were there to work in universities, hospitals, oil and gas industries, and construction. Unfortunately, he graduated from university just as Mu‘ammar Gaddhafi imposed a law prohibiting the employment of non-Libyans. That left Shanan with time on his hands. He filled it by taking pictures—first with the camera on his mobile phone, and then, when that was stolen, with an analog camera. Shanan belongs to a pivotal generation in the history of photography, the first to be born in a totally digital age, the first to move anachronistically from the flood of images online back to film, chemicals, equipment, and developing pictures in a darkroom. “Photography is my fourth language,” says Shanan, who returned to Algeria in 2009 and now lives in Oran. (His first, second, and third are Arabic, French, and English.) But black-and-white film has to be imported from Europe and is now extremely hard to find in Algeria. And, on various levels, Shanan continues to find his homecoming frustrating. “I thought coming back here would bring me home, but it didn’t,” he says. The country had changed, and so had Shanan during his time away. “It was difficult to find common ground. This led me to do the diary. It created a kind of exile for me.” Read More
August 15, 2017 From the Archive The Sneaky Brilliance of Geoff Dyer’s “Into the Zone” By Matt Levin Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I recently fell asleep in a movie theater. I think the movie is a masterpiece. An hour in, the three main characters, on an expedition into mysterious territory called simply the Zone, have just emerged from a slog through an aqueduct, shouting over the sound of crashing water. They each lie down, exhausted, on the brown-green moss that blankets the water’s edge. The characters speak with each other about where they are going, and for what. It is a late-night road-motel talk—fatigued, but searching. A character called Writer begins a monologue about fame, the future, technology, and soon it doesn’t matter, because he is talking to himself, in the shorthand that exists only in each individual head, using big, meaningless, opaquely personal words like “Life” and “Art.” What matters is the tone of his voice—soft and drifting and stretched seemingly over one long yawn. He is talking himself to sleep. A guitar drone intensifies. And as he went on, I found myself becoming heavily tired, too, and I slumped over. I had a dream that I cannot remember, except that it feels like a kernel lodged under my tongue, and involved a river. I woke up only when a tall man sitting next to me gently tousled my hair and told me in a stage whisper that I had spilled popcorn all over my lap. The characters are sitting up, awake now, listening to a voice telling them about his dream. In my memory of the film, there is a blank. The movie was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, recently remastered and finishing its months-long run at the IFC Center. Geoff Dyer wrote about the film and his relationship with it for our Fall 2011 issue, in “Into the Zone,” an excerpt from his full-length book Zona. “Into the Zone” is, as much as an essay can be like a movie, an imitation of Stalker. The essay proceeds by summarizing each scene of the movie chronologically. Each scene summary takes on the pace and tone of the scene being described. When the pace picks up, so does Dyer’s prose, and his thoughts come quick and abbreviated. When the movie slows to a pan, or arrests on a static shot, so does Dyer, and he takes the placid moments to tell us things he knows, stories, about Tarkovsky: about Tarkovsky and his relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni, about the fights Tarkovsky had with Mosfilm over the meditative pace of Stalker, about Flaubert and style, inventories of films shown in other films, about time as it exists and is manipulated by movies, about his desire for a drink when he sees characters drinking, and finally, during the scene Dyer calls “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema”—the long, seemingly unbroken shot of the trolley ride into the Zone itself—about himself and things he wants and can’t have. “Into the Zone” is Dyer’s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker. This is the only narrow path to Stalker—a film that is both direct and maddeningly slippery. Read More
August 15, 2017 First Person Exit Strategy: A Letter from Belize By Bryan Washington You can’t really escape your problems at home. Mara Sánchez-Renero, El Cimarrón y su Fandango: Threshold, 2014. From Almanaque Fotografía’s exhibition, “Júpiter XL.” Most summers for the past few years, I’ve worked in contracting. Sometimes it takes me places: usually the northwestern states or patches around the South. Last month, I spent a weekend shuttling around Wisconsin, where I didn’t see another person of color for about three days. But the morning before I flew back to New Orleans, I ran into a Nigerian lady tending bar in La Crosse. She was holding court at this diner decked out with WE WELCOME IMMIGRANTS! stickers. We were equally shocked to have found each other. Flying into Belize City this month, on the other hand, damn near everyone was black or brown. I knew what most Americans know about the country, which is nothing. The plane touched down just beside the Western Highway, alongside the miles of marshland surrounding the city’s outskirts. The airport flanked a mostly dirt road, lined with signs calling for abstinence and grace. Belize is predominantly English speaking. Nearly half of its population is multilingual, and many speak Kriol, the local patois. Most of the country remains undeveloped. Charles Portis called it a “beautiful blue map with hardly any roads to clutter it up,” and folks fly down from wherever to see the Mayan ruins scattered throughout the country. Or they’ll lounge around Caye Caulker. Or they’ll fuck around with the reefs strafing the Caribbean Sea. When the rental-car guy asked me which I was here for, I told him neither, and his eyebrows kick-flipped from his face. Read More
August 15, 2017 In Memoriam Voyage to the Otherworld: A New Eulogy for Ray Bradbury By Margaret Atwood Ray Bradbury. At the end of February 2012, I was sitting in a bar in the Chicago Hilton, discussing Ray Bradbury. I was staying at the Hilton, and in a moment of Bradburian weirdness, I had been put into the suite where President Obama saw on TV that he had just won the U.S. presidential election. On that occasion, the immense, many-roomed suite must have been full—of family, of security folks, of political staffers—but I was in it all alone, and it was not the best place to be while dwelling on things Bradburian. It was too easy to imagine that there was someone in the next room. Worse, that someone might be my evil twin, or myself at a different age, or it might contain a mirror in which I would cast no reflection. It took some self-control not to go in there and look. In February, however, the Chicago Hilton was not crawling with secret servicemen talking into their sleeves but with four thousand writers, would-be writers, students of writing, and teachers of writing, all of whom were attending the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs where I was to give the keynote address, and every single one of whom would have known who Ray Bradbury was. Read More