August 8, 2017 At Work Great Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo By Patrik Henry Bass Photo: Pixels Digital Stay with Me, the debut novel by Nigerian Ayobami Adebayo, explores a contemporary marriage in a Yoruba community stubbornly tied to tradition. Despite suspicious in-laws, scheming second wives, and secretive spouses, Yejide and Akin try to break from their obstinate middle-class neighbors’ outdated views on matrimony. Akin, an accountant and the eldest son in an influential family, initially rejects the notion of polygamy; Yejide takes pride in her successful beauty salon and her forward-thinking views on life and motherhood. Yejide’s inability to get pregnant, however, tests the couple’s values, and their future. In her last review for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described Stay with Me as being “at once, a gothic parable about pride and betrayal; a thoroughly contemporary—and deeply moving—portrait of a marriage; and a novel, in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” In a nearly hour-long telephone conversation from Brooklyn to Nigeria (with a three-second delay and an interviewer just discovering voice recording via cell phone), Adebayo reflected on the characters she had a difficult time getting to know and whom she subsequently couldn’t let go. INTERVIEWER Yejide will join a pantheon of unforgettable literary heroines. How did you find her? ADEBAYO I got to know her over five to seven years. I started thinking about the book two years before writing it. What was peculiar about her—and even her husband—was they felt very real. I created them, but I felt like there were things I discovered that, throughout the process, felt very real. When I didn’t understand what was going on or I didn’t know what would happen next, I felt that I needed to just wait and listen to Yejide and understand things about her. One of the ways I got to know her better and to start writing her was that sometimes I would sit down in my room and have all these conversations, which is weird now that I think about it. I basically talked to myself and talked to this person and asked her about things. A lot of it didn’t make it into the book, but … it’s bizarre, but she felt fully formed. Read More
August 8, 2017 Letter from Our London Editor Against Argument By Adam Thirlwell Teju Cole, Zürich, 2014, from the exhibition “Teju Cole: Blind Spot and Black Paper,” on view at Steven Kasher Gallery from June 15–August 11. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. 1 When I was a kid, I always wanted to inhabit the Wild West. It was the most exotic place. And now, I guess, I do. 2 I never had a definition of my country, or my identity. Everything has been a series of oxymorons. I grew up in Britain: savage and polite, a European island. Within that, I grew up in London: the British capital, and the pure international. But we also lived in the north London suburbs, neither countryside nor city, and I went to a private high school that was basically Jewish and Hindu, with perhaps the occasional Muslim or Sikh or very rare stray goy. We were rich but not exorbitantly rich: we were rich but intellectual. Moreover, if I was definitively Jewish, I was also definitively half Jewish. For me, this series of oxymorons represented a kind of ideal state: placelessness was my idea of a utopia. Read More
August 7, 2017 Inside the Issue Growing Up with the Odyssey By Emily Wilson Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey appears in our Summer issue. Here, she remembers performing in a child’s production of the Odyssey as a girl in Oxford, England. From the Odyssey, adapted by Gillian Cross and illustrated by Neil Packer, published by Walker Books in 2013. When I was a shy, awkward eight-year-old living in Oxford, England, I was moved to a new school. The transition was hard at first. I left behind a beloved best friend and traveled to a world where many things had to be learned all over again, starting with the daily routines (here we had to sit cross-legged on the rug for attendance, not upright on plastic chairs) and handwriting (my scratchy, illegible scrawl was no longer acceptable). I felt lost, as if in a foreign island or out at sea in a storm—although in fact, the school was only three blocks from my house. But there were good things in this strange new world. It was a Church of England school, and the teachers made us sing cheerful songs about “sharing and caring.” We learned to make pot holders, quiche Lorraine, and lumpy ashtrays out of clay—talents that are still more or less the pinnacle of my domestic abilities. I made a new friend, a girl with an adorable freckly smile. By far the most exciting thing that happened that year was the school play: an ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children. I had some dark moments when my younger sister, she of the gorgeous blonde ringlets, was cast as Helen of Troy. But I had no good reason to be jealous. Helen was a nonspeaking role, and my beautiful sister spent her single brief dramatic appearance being tugged across the stage by the sweaty little boy playing Paris. I was Athena, the most kick-ass goddess of them all. Though Odysseus is the hero (acted by our class troublemaker, a clever, rowdy British Pakistani boy on whom I had a secret crush), I was vastly more powerful, and I got to tell him exactly what to do. Read More
August 7, 2017 On Music Suzanne Ciani and the Subliminal Property of Being Human By Dave Tompkins Suzanne Ciani. I’m being sold the memory of a weed-eater dream at the speed of August. The motor’s vortical hiss, slowed into an alligator groan. A commercial for the Black and Decker Cutter appears on a split screen, now a quadrant, continuously subdividing, each cell occupied with its own product activity, vying for attention and competing with human physiology, the maxed bladders and empty guts that threaten to spirit us away from our sponsor. A GE dishwasher offers to pamper the china. The Merrill Lynch bull walks into a popular idiom, a commercial space that is shiny but not as clean as ITT’s “Clean Room,” which, as claimed, is quantified a thousand times cleaner than an ER: “hyperclean.” It all seems to be happening at once. (I am suddenly compelled to trim the patio near the statue of a headless saint by the garden where I once interred my pajama bottoms beneath a geode.) To the ear, the weed-eater spot could be selling the Buchla 200 synthesizer, if not the work of Suzanne Ciani herself, an electronic-music composer who mastered Don Buchla’s switchboard of patch bays and oscillators. She’s a classically trained pianist who abandoned the keyboard interface (and its muscle memory) to revolutionize music, sometimes anonymously, right under your TV tray. The grid of old TV ads flashed on the screen in A Life in Waves, a documentary about Ciani’s life and career directed by Brett Whitcomb. Now available, it screened at Moogfest at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, last May. An original plug tuner, Ciani created identities for logos and products in the seventies and eighties as a way to support her own music projects and studio. Brands and their sonic referents may have been owned by the client, but the sounds themselves belonged to a woman whose work was singular in a field that was then undefined: routing signals and ideas into tiny spaces and “microcosmic time slots,” all while creating her own signature in the male-dominated world of advertising. Electronic music was largely mysterious then, a time when a modular synth for “Planetary Peace” would cause a bomb scare at the San Francisco airport. The media was no less baffled, but especially so with a woman behind the controls. “This is an album,” said one awkward TV interviewer, doing his best Perd Hapley. That’s about as far as he got. Cut to a commercial. Read More
August 4, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Pinkies, Pain, Plays By The Paris Review From And She Would Stand Like This. Photo by Ahron R. Foster. Lately, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, has been researching the early formation of the blues, in the years 1870 to 1910. His studies led him to an old newspaper from his own town in North Carolina, but nearly every edition of the paper had vanished. Now he and his colleague Joel Finsel have organized a group of middle schoolers to find and transcribe surviving copies. In John’s words: “The Wilmington Daily Record, a seminal African American newspaper (the offices of which were torched during a violent white-supremacist uprising here in 1898), has always been known to history and considered important, either inspiring or infamous depending who was talking. But for all practical archival purposes, it didn’t exist. You couldn’t read it, even if you had access to the fanciest academic databases and things. That was a very specific historical problem that we set out to solve. And we did find some copies. The most exciting moment was when Jan Davidson, the historian at our local historical museum, realized she had three copies of the paper in the basement of the museum!” John’s discoveries haven’t been limited to Wilmington. He recently struck gold in Indiana, too: “I knew that the songwriter Paul Dresser had once been in love with a woman named Sal, an Indiana madam, and that she’d inspired his famous song ‘My Gal Sal,’ which I wanted to know more about for a piece about Dresser that ran in the Sewanee Review. Anyway, as I’m reading around in the Evansville Courier and Press for the 1870s and eighties, I start seeing references to ‘bagnios,’ one of the period euphemisms for brothels, and then to a person called Sallie Davis, who supposedly kept the nicest one in town, and finally to ‘Sal’s place,’ as shorthand for the same establishment. On further inquiry, the woman’s real name turned out to be Annie, just like Paul Dresser’s brother had always said it was, the brother being Theodore Dreiser.” —Lorin Stein Friday night, I was in the presence of realness, fierceness, and royalty. I sat front row for And She Would Stand Like This, a theatrical retelling of Euripides’s The Trojan Women by Harrison David Rivers. Making use of drag and ball culture, the play, directed by David Mendizábal, reimagines the Trojan women as black and Latinx queer men and transgender women. It is set in a hospital waiting room, where an unnamed virus ambiguously fills the role of the warring Greeks, pitiless and destructive. By leaving the virus unnamed, Rivers renders timeless the early days of AIDS, reminding those who need reminding that there are still waiting rooms where doctors face queer and transgender populations with uncertainty, especially when these patients are people of color. The play beautifully complicates the essential trauma of kinship, love, and belonging with several times the body glitter and melanin of Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim. Rivers and the talented cast use chorus, repetition, and performance to their highest level of impact. The play turns masterfully on its platform stilettos, delivering triumphant choreography by the supreme Kia LaBeija and somber tragedy worthy of, well, the ancient Greeks. Performances are through Sunday, but RuPaul has already tweeted an endorsement, so act fast. —Julia Berick Read More