July 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Photos of a Pioneer By Carson Vaughan Solomon D. Butcher’s prairie photographs embrace homesteading life in all its complexity. Solomon D. Butcher, Nebraska Gothic (detail). All photos courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society (Digital ID: nbhips 10236). My grandparents lived in a massive two-story home with creaking pinewood floors and lace curtains that hung like ghosts from the windows. It figured prominently in the nightmares of my childhood, and yet I loved that old house, every inch of it sprinkled with dust and wonder. Come summer, the pear tree out front littered the yard with fruit and the paint curling from the wraparound porch clung to our blackened, clammy feet. My brothers and I loved the basement, cool and damp and packed with my grandpa’s peculiarities—junk mostly, shoeboxes filled with rubber bands and fat rolls of stickers from bygone political campaigns. We loved the attic, too, wide and flat as a roller rink, it seemed, with corners so deep and dark I never dared explore them. But it’s the second floor hallway that still crops up in my dreams. My distant relatives lingered on that floor, hanging from the burgundy walls in black and white. None of them smiled. They never slept. They stared at me. They sat upright in wooden chairs in front of their soddies, surrounded by the trappings of their frontier existence: their sheep, their horses, scythes, spades, guns, grinding wheels, framed photos of their dead loved ones. Their lives seemed tiny and brutally sincere, swallowed by the grass and sand of Custer County, Nebraska, a land so vast and so empty it appears often dimensionless in the photos. These faces had a way of sobering me as a kid, stopping me cold in a playful sprint around the house. Later, when my grandparents passed, my mother brought the photos home and displayed them in our living room. Read More
July 24, 2017 At Work The Uncanny Double: An Interview with Megan McDowell By Raad Rahman and Raluca Albu Megan McDowell. Horror, historical fiction, literary fiction, autofiction—whatever the genre, the Spanish translator Megan McDowell is drawn to work that takes her by surprise. This is, in part, what compelled her to translate Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. The compact, urgent novel is told through an intimate dialogue between Amanda, a young mother on her deathbed, perhaps poisoned, and David, a mysterious boy who sits beside her, urging her to remember what brought her to the brink of death. Through their exchange, we learn of Amanda’s brush with lethal pesticides, of a possible transmigration of souls, and, most importantly, of the disappearance of Nina, her daughter. Though it takes place in Argentina, where agro-industrial production technologies pose a variety of health risks, the novel is a cautionary tale for us all about the dangers that come with the use of agricultural chemicals. McDowell has translated more than thirteen works of fiction from Spanish, including books by Alejandro Zambra, Lina Meruane, and Carlos Fonseca. By the end of this year alone, she will have translated Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire, Diego Zuñiga’s Camanchaca, fiction by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, an autobiography by Virginia Vallejo. McDowell is currently at work with Schweblin on a new book of short stories titled Pajaros en la boca, or Birds in the Mouth. McDowell does all this while working a job in finance. Our conversation began in New York City in 2016 and continued over Skype and email. McDowell is a seamless combination of upbeat and no-nonsense: she tells it like it is, but always with a sense of humor. Throughout our conversation, she spoke about the ways gender and translation are in dialogue with one another and of life as a translator in Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, the United States, and now Chile. Read More
July 24, 2017 Inside the Issue Returning Home By Jeffrey Yang The story behind Jeffrey Yang and Kazumi Tanaka’s collaboration “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home,” a series of poems and drawings in our Summer 2017 issue. Kazumi Tanaka, Girl, 2007, oolong on paper, 10″ x 10″. Kazumi Tanaka works with wood, bone, sound, and her own hair. She works with plaster, glass, paint, and light. She’s remade the furniture of her mother’s only “tiny corner of … comfort space” in miniature—every drawer and door perfectly functional, with the use of tweezers. She’s made a bird’s nest out of hundreds of stainless-steel pins. She has indigo-dyed silk fabric using a traditional shibori-zome technique, stitching the fabric with cotton thread and intertwining it with rope before arranging it, at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, into a rippling umbilical form on a low, square altar draped with white linen. As a gift for a friend, Kazumi made a tiny oval “Box of Wisdom” out of cherrywood and copper nails, in which she placed utensils sculpted out of her wisdom teeth, on a pillow of her hair. For another friend, she carved an achromatic flute, tuned to the key of C, out of the leg bone of a deer. Read More
July 21, 2017 First Person Voyage in the Dark By Brian Cullman I was in London in November of 1978, staying at the Portobello Hotel, famous for having a twenty-four-hour bar in its basement. I came back late, two or two thirty in the morning, and there was Van Morrison in the lobby, sitting on a low stool and staring at a coffee table. Just staring, in a trance. He radiated a deep and hard-won solitude, and it looked like he was in the mood to kick someone’s cat. I went up to my room, but better sense prevailed, and I came back to the lobby a few minutes later. He was gone. I looked around and decided to go down to the always-open bar in the basement. It was empty, aside from a pretty girl tending the bar and what looked like an overcoat someone had left in a booth. I saw Van Morrison upstairs, I said. The girl nodded. Read More
July 21, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Disaster, Calamity, Ecstasy By The Paris Review From the cover of The Violins of Saint-Jacques. I bet you didn’t know that Patrick Leigh Fermor, recognized as Britain’s greatest travel writer during his lifetime, penned a novel, or that it was adapted into a three-act opera in 1966. No new productions are scheduled, but The Violins of Saint-Jacques was reissued last week, so I’ve spent my mornings with a nameless narrator listening to Berthe de Rennes, an elderly Frenchwoman, recall a Mardi Gras ball on the titular Caribbean island in February 1902. The Violins is a kind of travel book, too: chock-full of elaborate details about French architecture, local politics, geography, and the weather. The moldering French aristocracy’s tense relations with local “creoles” are never far from view, nor is the Romeo-and-Juliet-style plot between the mayor’s and governor’s families. The island’s volcano lingers above the lot. Though Saint-Jacques is a figment, the novel’s later, defining event (spoiler alert) is based on something that occurred in Saint Pierre on Martinique, on the same date. In his travel writing, Fermor had an uncanny ability to take readers somewhere impossible; so, too, with this novel. Saint-Jacques never existed and the world it’s based on is long gone, yet The Violins of Saint-Jacques is a full-color Caribbean cruise–cum–French tragedy, one well worth the trip. —Jeffery Gleaves The other day, I plucked an advance copy of Meghan O’Rourke’s new collection of poems, Sun in Days, from a colleague’s bookshelf and curled up with it in one of the office reading chairs. Though I had barely begun before having to return to my work, I found myself mesmerized and finished the book later that evening. It’s a slim compendium, just over a hundred and twenty pages, with an arresting cover: a tangerine-colored globule plunging into an aqua-blue backdrop, like blood in seawater. The poems that follow are arresting, too. O’Rourke’s sparse, unguarded verse traverses the mind of a woman preoccupied with loss and longing, recounting the days that were and the ones that will never be. She remembers a childhood in Maine, the smell of fish guts on her father’s overalls; the addict that paces outside her Paris sublet; she writes over and over of the daughter she wants but cannot have and of her mother who’s died. The lines I love most, though, are the ones that heave with a sort of quiet lonesomeness, like these from “The Night Where You No Longer Live”: “Did you love me or did I misunderstand // Do you intend to come back // Will you stay the night.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
July 21, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Ellen Cooke By Sadie Stein Photo by Steinar Engeland. My mother has seen more ghosts than anyone I know. I am not sure why, although I once read that there is some correlation between allergies and sensitivity to such things. Certainly my mother has worse allergies than anyone I’ve ever met, and a constitutional disinclination to seek treatment. Also, the barriers between her emotional states have always seemed unusually porous—she can switch from anger to sadness to laughter to unfettered generosity with dizzying speed and total commitment—and maybe that applies to the barriers between the living and spirit realms, too. The first ghost my mother ever saw was her dead best friend. Although I’ve known about the sighting all my life, I don’t know very much about Ellen Cooke herself, except that she had long, straight, 1960s hair, and that she and my mom used to ride around downtown shrieking the Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme song at the top of their lungs. The car was driven by my mom’s high school boyfriend, Tom Alvarez, who would go on to become attorney general of a Great Plains state. My mother always says it was a “very innocent” relationship. Read More