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
August 4, 2017 The Lives of Others What Insanity Is This, Dr. Euclides? By Edward White After his best seller about the War of Canudos swept through Brazil, Euclides da Cunha went to Amazonia. It nearly killed him. Joricramos, Euclides da Cunha. There’s an argument that 1922 was the moment modernism took flight. It saw breakthrough works by a slew of writers including Joyce, Eliot, and Fitzgerald; Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus while Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago; Hitchcock directed his first movie as Disney made his first animations; Mussolini’s Fascists took hold of Italy, and Einstein got his hands on the Nobel Prize. Less known than those canonical events is the modernist happening that struck São Paulo, where a festival of exhibitions and lectures gave many Brazilians their first exposure to modern art, unveiling young, homegrown creative talents with a radical vision: to ditch the long-burning obsession with emulating European civilization, and instead glory at the beauty beneath their own feet. In the nineteenth century, this would have sounded absurd to educated Brazilians, Eurocentric to the core. But the 1922 generation was the first to have grown up with Os Sertões (“The Backlands”), a classic of Brazilian literature largely unknown to the outside world. Published in 1902, the book is a unique, genre-defying exploration of the country’s arid northeast and the calamity that befell it in 1897, when, in the name of the Brazilian national motto “order and progress,” the federal government flattened the town of Canudos and butchered as much of its population as it could get its hands on. It was written by Euclides da Cunha, a young civil engineer whose experience of the so-called War of Canudos turned him from a zealous government propagandist to the anguished voice of the Brazilian conscience. Read More
August 4, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Sadie: A Ghost Story By Sadie Stein It’s not as though I’ve never had the opportunity to see a ghost. I’ve spent plenty of my life in “haunted” spaces. Besides my grandparents’ house—where, after all, a ghost had been seen—there was the 1830s former funeral parlor where one of my best childhood friends lived. Another friend, who’s very sensitive to such matters, claims that she always had an uneasy feeling in my parents’ home; I never felt a thing. In the years since, I’ve stayed in haunted monasteries and onetime graveyards and, once, the site of a long-ago murder. In each, I slept without incident. I am writing this, in fact, from a big, old, drafty New England house full of creaks and corners. My husband is plagued in the nighttime by its inexplicable slamming doors and, once, through the window, saw the woods erupt into flame. I, of course, slept through it. I could be surrounded by a Haunted Mansion’s worth of swirling, leaping, leering spirits and presumably I wouldn’t even notice them. Read More