July 10, 2017 On the Shelf It’s No Fun to Be a Governess, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jean-Simeon Chardin, The Governess, 1739. Most writers need day jobs. I recommend the Charlotte Brontë approach: become a governess. It’s your destiny. Yes, it will leave you feeling lonely and downtrodden, and it will nurse a sense of righteous indignation in your soul. But it’ll furnish all the “material” you need for your sensational debut, and isn’t that what really matters? John Pfordresher, who has a new book out about the writing of Jane Eyre, notes that Brontë’s various stints as a governess brought her nothing but heartache, even as they informed her work: “Charlotte’s first ‘situation’ as a temporary governess began in May 1839, at an estate named Stonegappe, a large house of three stories set on a hillside surrounded by woods, enjoying a vista in the distance of the valley of the River Aire. Charlotte was to care for a young girl and her brother—the stone-throwing son of the Sidgwick family we have seen as a model for John Reed. For the socially awkward and impoverished Brontë, at age twenty-three, the inferior position of governess in a wealthy family was an almost intolerable position, far worse than teaching at Roe Head. She was ignored by adult family members, charged with insolent and rebellious children, and denied respect by all, though she considered herself not only more than their equal in terms of intelligence and ability but also a potential writer of genius … Winifred Gérin, in her beautifully written biography of Brontë, pictures Charlotte in the Sidgwick’s handsome country home during a ‘long summer evening when she sat alone, her lap filled with Mrs. Sidgwick’s “oceans of needlework” … no one from the noisy self-absorbed house-party below to share her solitude.’ ” Speaking of writers on the job: Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography of Thoreau highlights the indignities of his career as a surveyor. Jay Parini writes, “Despite Thoreau’s achievements as a writer, environmentalist and social activist (he was, among other things, a passionate abolitionist and supporter of John Brown), many of his contemporaries considered him little more than a crank, a self-involved Pied Piper for the children of Concord, MA, whom he led in search of huckleberries on hot summer days … Walls does not miss the irony that Thoreau’s profession made him ‘complicit in destroying the forest he loved.’ In 1850, for instance, he ‘walked over land he had surveyed the year before, which the owner had clear-cut and subdivided into fifty-two house lots.’ Not surprisingly, he expresses guilt over this work in his journal: ‘Today I was aware that I walked in a pitch pine wood which erelong, perchance, I may survey and lot off for a wood auction and see the choppers at their work.’ In 1851, he completed a substantial commissioned survey of Concord’s boundaries and recalled that the task had left him feeling as if he had ‘committed suicide.’ He says darkly: ‘Trade curses everything it handles.’ ” Read More
July 7, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Candlelight, Cellmates, Cult Leaders By The Paris Review From the cover of The Book of Emma Reyes. Emma Reyes grew up in astonishing poverty in Colombia—illiterate, illegitimate, and abandoned. Remanded to a Catholic convent, where she endured a strange mix of manual labor, religious fear, and wonder, she escaped at age nineteen. This is where her memoir, The Book of Emma Reyes, leaves off, but as an adult, she became an artist and an intellectual and befriended a host of Latin American and European notables, including Frida Kahlo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guiseppe Ungaretti, and Alberto Moravia. Hers is an incredible biography by any measure, but the book’s most startling element is Reyes’s clear-sighted, unsentimental remembrance of her difficult childhood. The narrative comes in the form of twenty-three epistolary sketches written by Reyes between 1969 and 1997 to her friend, the critic and historian Germán Arciniegas. (He once showed them to García Márquez, who effused about them to Reyes herself; furious with Arciniegas’s breach of privacy, she didn’t write him another letter for some twenty years.) Reyes is gloriously unceremonious in her telling: the memoir begins in a garbage heap and ends with a dog sniffing another’s behind. —Nicole Rudick Fans of the Parisians, our softball team, know Tony Hatch as a power hitter and stalwart first baseman. I know him as Cousin Tony—a man of intense enthusiasms, most recently English literature of World War I. Which is how I was slipped a copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the follow-up to his slightly better known Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man. I was up reading it most of last night. And if your blood stirs to the grim pluck of young officers reading Thomas Hardy by candlelight, with trench mouth, in months before the Somme, it may keep you up reading, too. —Lorin Stein Read More
July 7, 2017 On History For Our Cause Is Just By Lydia Moland The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child feared the effects of electing “a blot upon humanity.” An engraving from Lydia Maria Child’s The Oasis, 1834. “I am not yet prepared to believe that the people of this republic are corrupt enough to choose by fair and honest votes, such a blot upon humanity as Andrew Jackson,” Lydia Maria Child wrote to her new mother-in-law in the early months after Jackson’s election in 1828. When I stumbled upon this letter among Child’s papers at Harvard, I felt a pang of sympathy. The sorrow and despair behind Child’s reluctance to accept her fellow citizens’ choice were all too familiar. She did not contest the election: the votes had been “fair and honest.” Why, then, did she call her fellow citizens “corrupt”? Child was only twenty-six when Jackson was elected, but she was already an established author, well on her way to becoming a household name as a crusader for justice. Her 1824 novel Hobomok had propelled her to literary fame with its sympathetic account of the plight of native Americans. Her 1833 treatise An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans was so progressive in the cause of abolition and so scathing against northern racism that she was temporarily ostracized from Boston society. Undaunted, she followed the Appeal with The Evils of Slavery, and the Cure of Slavery and the Anti-Slavery Catechism, as well as newspaper columns, children’s stories, and novels all with abolitionist themes. Those published writings give ample evidence of her convictions, but the box of letters in front of me provided a more personal view. In 1862, twenty-four years after she’d lamented Jackson’s election to her mother-in-law, Child was writing to her nephew William Haskins, then serving in the Fifty-first Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army. (His brother, also enlisted, would die in the coming year.) By then, Child had penned any number of excoriating condemnations of slavery and diagnoses of its persistence. But the task here was different. How to describe to a young man whose life was on the line how it had come to this, that his country had engaged in an evil so radical that it required his life to right itself? Read More
July 7, 2017 On the Shelf Your Soul Is in the Closet, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring There you are! We all have skeletons in our closets. The problem is, they’re so rarely literal skeletons—if they were, we could call up some anthropologist or archaeologist and get a reliable prognosis on the situation. No, the real problem with our closets is that they lend themselves to extreme and total disarray. A closet is a place for throwing things and forgetting about them until life calls on you to remember them again. As Shannon Mattern writes in a new essay, this makes for a fecund space—though few of us enjoy rummaging through all of the stuff we’ve allowed to accumulate, the closet remains a unique repository, a locus for a certain form of selfhood. And it has ever been so, Mattern writes: “Think of all the corporations and universities and municipal offices, the billions of closets hiding secret inventories. Old media accumulate for all kinds of reasons—nostalgia, ambivalence, data security, paranoia—and all of us, eventually, become the managers of our own distributed personal archives. We never know when we might need to access that data again. Meanwhile, the detritus that Lisa Parks and Charles Acland call ‘residual media’ piles up in garages, thrift stores, and neighborhood electronics repair shops (themselves a ‘residual’ enterprise), until some of it winds up in recycling and salvaging facilities. Those spaces, too, are extensions of our closets. They move off-site and out of sight the abject and often hazardous labor of disposal and destruction … For centuries, closets have enabled the collection, preservation, and suppression of missives and media-machines, files and folios. But they are more than that. Behind the doors, closets are also active, generative spaces where media are made, where imaginaries and anxieties are formulated, where knowledges and subjectivities are born and transformed.” Stephen Greenblatt remembers reading The Merchant of Venice as an undergraduate at Yale—the anti-Semitism troubled him, not least because it mirrored a strain of xenophobia he’d often encountered on campus. Then he went on to become a Shakespeare scholar. He found a way, he writes, to square “problematic” texts with his curiosities and proclivities: “I wouldn’t attempt to hide my otherness and pass for what I was not. I wouldn’t turn away from works that caused me pain as well as pleasure. Instead, insofar as I could, I would pore over the whole vast, messy enterprise of culture as if it were my birthright. I was determined to understand this birthright, including what was toxic in it, as completely as possible … I already had an inkling of what I now more fully grasp. My experience of mingled perplexity, pleasure, and discomfort was only a version—informed by the accidents of a particular religion, family, identity, and era—of an experience shared by every thinking person in the course of a lifetime. What you inherit, what you receive from a world that you did not fashion but that will do its best to fashion you, is at once beautiful and repellent. You somehow have to come to terms with what is ugly as well as what is precious.” Read More
July 6, 2017 At Work Escape Artist: An Interview with Guy Delisle By Simon Ostrovsky Detail from Hostage. Last month, the Quebecois cartoonist Guy Delisle met with Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist for CNN and documentary filmmaker, onstage at Housing Works, in New York, to talk about Delisle’s new book, Hostage. The 436-page comic tells the story of the kidnapping of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) administrator Christophe André in Chechnya in 1997 and his detention, for 111 days, in solitary confinement, chained to a radiator. In his minimal line and with his personable observational style, Delisle, who now lives in the South of France, has also made travelogues of life in Burma, P’yǒngyang, Jerusalem, and Shenzhen. Ostrovsky has reported extensively on North Korea, the West Bank, and Ukraine, where he was captured and imprisoned for three days in 2014. These overlapping experiences in life and work produced a fruitful conversation on storytelling and journalism, the anxiety of living in dangerous places, and André’s uniquely psychological ordeal. —Ed. OSTROVSKY I had the pleasure of reading both Hostage and your earlier book, Pyongyang, and it turns out we share a lot of interests. I covered Chechnya and the North Caucasus in Russia, and I also covered the issue of North Korean laborers working all around the world and earning money for the North Korean regime—that was an obsession of mine for two years. I was looking at it from the perspective of the North Koreans sending their workers out of the country to earn hard currency for this currency-starved regime, and I never had any idea that, as a Westerner, you could actually come into the country and work there, and that’s what Pyongyang, your book, is about. How did you end up working in North Korea? DELISLE I was there in May of 2001, before September 11, when North Korea became the rogue state, the axis of evil and all that. Citizens from a lot of countries were going there at that time. Spanish, French, and Italian animators were outsourcing in North Korea, for instance—it was four times cheaper than China. I was there from France on a contract to supervise the quality of the animation and work with the animation team, though the animators were on the upper floor and I could never really see them. I was working on a monitor, looking at the animation, taking notes—This is good, this is not good. OSTROVSKY The French company would send you the sketches, and then they would have the North Korean workers in a kind of animation sweatshop to fill out the rest of it? How did it work? DELISLE I don’t know about a sweatshop. It was just an animation studio, as there used to be in Germany and France, but everything is outsourced now. It’s exactly the same kind of studio, with fifty or sixty people who work and lay out all the scenes. So in an episode of twenty-six minutes, you have maybe two hundred layouts, and I supervised the boards so that the quality was equal to what they were asking for in Paris. North Korea has a tradition of animation, just like in the Philippines, just like in China, like in Vietnam. They used to have studios that made short films you could see in festivals. Now they don’t do that so much—they do outsourced work, and they make a lot of money. Animation in North Korea was, I think, second in earning money for the country in the year I was there. So I felt that at least they were making money with something other than counterfeiting, drugs, and weapons. Read More
July 6, 2017 On Poetry Queer Bubbles By Andrew Ridker How CAConrad turns ritual into poetry. CAConrad in a still from The Book of Conrad, a 2015 documentary by Delinquent Films. Last year, I attended a reading at Over the Eight, the now-defunct Williamsburg bar and performance space. Eileen Myles was headlining. But another poet, CAConrad, a close friend of Myles, captured my attention. He took his place at center stage, a large man draped in billowy clothes and what he calls his “war hair,” which he hasn’t cut since 2006, on the three-year anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Baghdad. He read from a piece entitled “Power Sissy Intervention #1: Queer Bubbles.” It began with what sounded like a short story or anecdote: “I occupied a busy street corner in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said, “to bless children with bubbles that will make them queer.” He went on to describe the reactions of passersby as he blew bubbles, shouting that they had magical properties to “help rid the world of homophobia, misogyny, racism, and other forms of stupidity.” The audience laughed. Some cheered. Conrad smiled. “Bubbles, of course, do not have such powers,” he acknowledged—but he was serious, serious about the act of standing on a corner blowing bubbles and watching how the world responded. After relating the anecdote, he told us that he’d taken notes on the experience. These notes became a poem, which he read aloud. The poem was completely unexpected—it was not in any way about bubbles, for one thing—but it was funny, angry, shot through with violence and informed by a reverence for nature. The first lines stuck with me: “I was naked / on a mountaintop / kissing someone / who loved me,” and the last: “there is nothing little about the cicada revving up while / we think our car horns / are so impressive.” The audience was rapt. You could hear the uninitiated whispering: Who is this guy? Read More