August 11, 2017 In Memoriam Sam Shepard’s Dynamic Women By Sylvie McNamara Joe Hanley and Rose O’Loughlin in the Abbey Theatre production of Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. I grew up in a house in which writing was for men. My mom didn’t read, and my dad—a physicist with an abstract admiration for rugged pursuits—preferred a strain of male writer known for pinballing between debauched parties and bouts of rural isolation: Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, and, of course, Sam Shepard. Shepard, who died last week, was my model of a writer for most of my adolescence: a grizzled, curt, heavy-drinking, self-taught genius who wrote plays about decaying American families and cowboy-types who got drunk in rundown motels. On the one hand, I was fascinated—I read all of Shepard’s work before I was eighteen. On the other hand, inheriting my dad’s favorite writers put me in an odd position. In high school, a friend and I would dress up as Hemingway and read his stories to one another, lamenting that we would never be old men. I have a picture of it, both of us in tweed caps with our hair ponytailed under our chins like beards. It wasn’t until after high school that I understood that there were women worth reading (or worth becoming). Until then, I had Sam Shepard. The Shepard character who most captivated my teenaged imagination was not one of the familiar Shepard archetypes—not an anachronistic cowboy, a jazz-talking rock star, a petty criminal with a monosyllabic name, or the drunken ghost of a patriarch. It was Emma, the brash twelve year-old from The Curse of the Starving Class. As her mother and father try to sell the family home out from under one another, Emma rants and screams and eventually rides a mean horse into a bar owned by one of her father’s predatory creditors and shoots the place up. I was the kind of adolescent who rolled over for anyone who asked something of me, and Emma has a Grecian fury: her dream is to be the only auto mechanic in a small Mexican town so that she can punish her stranded family by withholding expertise. I named my bike after her, and pedaled it with rage. Read More
August 11, 2017 On Writing Six Tips on Writing Inspired by My Farmers Market By Ann Beattie Lincoln Perry Read More
August 10, 2017 Inside the Issue The Competing, Indignant Voices in “Rights” By Amanda Auerbach Amanda Auerbach’s poem “Rights” appears in our Summer issue. Here, she remembers the two voices—one from the left and one from the right—that inspired it. Photo by Jerry Kiesewetter. I wrote the poem “Rights” in early February, on a drive up to Winter Park in Colorado, where I was going for my first ski day of the season. Back home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’m a graduate student, it was the first day of Jorie Graham’s spring-semester poetry workshop. Even though I was missing the first day of workshop for skiing, I decided I would still make this my first day of poetry. I hadn’t been able to write since the election; there had been so many sources of anger to sort through that I was left feeling empty. I wasn’t sufficiently energized to create or do much else beyond working on my dissertation. Attending the Boston Women’s March in January had helped pull me out of that state. I was struck by all of the politically relevant expressions of joy I encountered there. My favorite was probably the pervasive pink pussy hat, which casually baited the religious right. Though I came to the march sans poster and sans pussy hat, feeling like I didn’t have anything to add, I discovered, from participating in the chants, that I did. I had a voice I could use to say the same things as everyone else. I wanted to try saying something in that protesting voice to see how it sounded. As my father-in-law drove me and my husband up Highway 40, the first two lines of “Rights” came into my head: “I do not do well without my chattel. / I do not do well without doing what I will with my chattel.” I assumed, after writing these lines, that my speaker was a stock Trump supporter. Then the language of the Women’s March protestors started to make its way into the poem as well. “It will bite your fingers,” the poem says. This came from the posters that said, THIS PUSSY BITES BACK. The place where these two lines meet is righteous indignation. What would happen, I thought, if I blended the language of the left and the right into a single voice? Read More
August 10, 2017 On Film The Grim Game’s Disappearing Act By Will Stephenson Harry Houdini in The Grim Game. In 1919, a year after he’d startled America by vanishing a four-thousand-pound elephant named Jenny onstage at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini arrived in Hollywood to make his first feature film. Already, the magician was roughly as famous as any American performer could be in his era. He’d spent years diving handcuffed into ice-cold rivers, locking himself in jail cells, maneuvering his body in and out of sealed crates and prison vans and (once) the belly of a beached whale. He was a living legend, and a world-class egotist: he named his pets after himself; printed his initials on his pajamas, his bathroom tiles, and his cuff links; and signed most of his trick blueprints “H. H., Champion of the World.” Still, Houdini was always looking for new frontiers, and he believed that Hollywood was the next step. “I think the film profession is the greatest, and that the moving picture is the most wonderful thing in the world,” he told an interviewer. Like the movies themselves, Houdini had emerged from vaudeville, and he understood film’s appeal intuitively. Earlier in the year, to test the waters, he’d starred in a fifteen-part serial, The Master Mystery, featuring a robot with a human brain who could shoot lasers out of his fingertips. (Houdini claimed to have designed the villain himself.) The series was well-received. Billboard deemed it a “cracker-jack production” that “will thunder down the ages to perpetuate the fame of this remarkable genius.” Financially, though, it was a nonstarter; it took Houdini four years in court to recover his earnings. Read More
August 9, 2017 Our Correspondents H.D. Notebook, Part 2 By Anthony Madrid Headnote: Part 1 of this piece appeared here (on The Paris Review Daily), on Wednesday, May 3, 2017. Mr. Madrid originally intended to publish part 2 in June, but lost track of time. You needn’t read part 1 to understand part 2. There is no part 3. H.D. ❧ 1 Poetry readers who spend a lot of time in used bookstores will have seen some of H.D.’s novels from time to time. They stand out because their titles are unfamiliar, and because they are recently printed books. One does not find old-looking hardcovers. Asphodel. What is that. HERmione. What is that. Majic Ring. The White Rose and the Red. Friends of modernism say: “Why have I never heard of these?” Before my H.D. project, my assumption was that these books must have been previously judged unfit for publication on the grounds of their containing explicit scenes of girl love. Wrong. None of them have explicit scenes of any kind of love. The only hot-sex bit in any of the H.D. prose I’ve read actually was printed in her lifetime. Privately printed, but printed. It’s in her novella Nights, and it’s woefully hetero. (It’s her and that musician guy, father of her only kid.) My next wrong thought was that she had written all those books “for the drawer,” just her way of working out her feelings, et cetera. This would have made her a very unusual case: a writer whose prose was private but whose poetry was invariably intended for the public. Most people are just the opposite, but that doesn’t matter, ’cuz she did intend to publish these novels and memoirs—the ones she finished anyway, with maybe like one exception. She sent ’em around or allowed Norman Pearson to send ’em around for her. They just never found takers. This—or rather the equivalent of this—would not happen today. Or I doubt it. Semi-unintelligible melodramas, thoroughly interesting and impossible to care about, where the point of view is suppressed to the threshold of nonexistence—there are many, many small presses who would be happy to put these works into circulation in 2017. Their mission statements literally say this. Read More