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
August 14, 2017 On Poetry Unlocking the Unconscious Through Poetry By Matthew Zapruder Thiago Rocha Pitta, Heritage, 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Thiago Rocha Pitta On the cover of this pocket-size edition of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poet stands in a doorway. He wears the somehow simultaneously ill-advised and completely stylish ensemble of a half-unbuttoned patterned shirt and tight beltless pants. Looking closer, the doorway seems to open not to a room or to the outside but to a closet: on a shelf behind him there is a pot or urn, and the flatness of the photograph makes it seem a bit as if he is wearing it on his head, like a bizarre hat. He is looking straight out of the front of the book, with a direct, slightly furrowed expression. He is about to smile beneath his full mustache. Something strange is just about to happen. When I bought this copy of Self-Portrait, in 1993, I had just begun a doctoral program at UC Berkeley. Full of a desire, secret to everyone including myself, to live a creative life, I was skeptical about, but also attracted to, poetry. Now, holding this same book in my hand, I remember that time, and how Ashbery’s poems at first didn’t seem to make any sense, or go anywhere, or do anything. I felt angry reading them, as if I were in the presence of a giant literary hoax that I had the choice either to sanction or to condemn. The situation felt profoundly ethical to me. The poems offended my sense of what poetry, and art, should do. Read More
August 14, 2017 Fashion & Style The Enduring, Gloriously Déclassé Style of Barbara Windsor By Laura Bannister Barbara Windsor in Carry On Doctor. In 1969, the English actress Barbara (Babs) Windsor costarred in her fourth motion picture in the Carry On franchise, a succession of low-budget, campy comedies that dominated national cinemas for two decades. For Carry On Again Doctor, she assumed the role of a walking trope named Goldie Locks: a comely but rattlebrained blonde who’d fallen while modeling for a baby-food commercial, and thus required a checkup. In a now cult scene, a stern hospital matron peels back a blanket to reveal Windsor’s milky, bruised flesh, privates obscured only by heart-shaped nipple pasties and a matching glitter G-string. A male doctor gawps and splutters and spins around at the sight of her. The matron shoots him a censorious glance. Windsor, or Goldie Locks—all alabaster skin and towering, curly beehive—asks, “What’s wrong?” with Gorblimey cockney intonation. A clichéd comedy of errors ensues. Since its inception in the late fifties, Carry On was an easy, if surprising, cash cow for its founders: deliberately slapstick, smutty and formulaic in plot, expert in recycling themes and motifs to engineer maximum audience delight. It internalized a then-lowbrow English attitude to sex; scripts were carnivalesque, replete with all the bawdy innuendo, double entendre, and wheezy wisecracks of a seaside postcard. (A writer for the Telegraph would later opine that Carry On adopted “innocent smut that plays Grandma’s footsteps with its subject, furtively creeping up on it, then freezing and corpsing when it comes face to face.”) As the second-longest running British film series, bested only by James Bond, it leveraged a universal-adaptor cast of comics to send up various Blighty institutions: the monarchy and the Empire, the police force and trade unions, the National Health Service. Perhaps that irreverence and lack of prudishness is why viewers hung on. Thirty-one films in total were churned out, conveyer-belt style, from Pinewood Studios, about twenty miles west of central London. Sometimes they took as little as six weeks to make. There were other spin-offs, including four Christmas specials, a thirteen-episode TV series, and three plays. Carry On was always cheap and high-energy, increasingly interspersed with nudity, always a lot of the same (ditsy plot, cheeky dialogue, rudimentary, drama-school costuming). It was whipped-cream and zany slapstick chase scenes and jovial leering at Windsor’s ample cleavage. Read More
August 11, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Spooks, Oddballs, Dopes By The Paris Review Jan Morris. I went to visit Jan Morris in North Wales a few months ago and heard her saying some of the same things you will hear in this recording. Nothing made me miss America—and especially New York—more than hearing this distinctly English woman, ninety years of age, lyrically and lovingly reminisce about her time there. “I’ve loved America since I first knew it twelve presidencies ago,” she says, “and I love and honor all that’s best about it today.” —Mitzi Angel The current issue of Granta contains an essay so good, so expressionistic and yet so cooly observed, that it made me think of Didion or Naipaul at their best. In “Notes on a Suicide,” Rana Dasgupta uses the death of a nineteen-year-old girl, in a town outside Paris, as a prism through which to view contemporary France and what it means to be young today: “Océane was the first person to broadcast a live suicide on today’s social media platforms. During the hours I spent watching her online videos, however, I never got the feeling that she was, in other respects, unusual. I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days—and possibly to myself, even if they are more pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself … In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.” —Lorin Stein Read More