June 7, 2017 Books Suicide Blonde at Twenty-Five By Maggie Nelson From the cover of the first edition of Suicide Blonde. “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?” so begins Darcey Steinke’s “sensational” second novel, Suicide Blonde. I put the word “sensational” in quotation marks because a host of similar adjectives (“shocking,” “daring,” “scandalous,” and so on) greeted the novel at its publication in 1992. This may have given the book a well-deserved public velocity, but insofar as such adjectives also reflect the prudishness and insularity of many reviewers and readers, it also ran—and to some extent still runs—the risk of occluding some of the novel’s truest achievements, all of which are on display, in miniature, in its unforgettable opening sentence. The swirl of bourbon, blonde hair dye, and vaginal lips is audacious, sure, but it’s also funny, and evidences a fairly rare and delightful phenomenon I might call feminist camp. Feminist camp—which can be practiced by persons of any gender (see John Waters, who regularly identifies as a radical feminist)—doesn’t waste time exhibiting its feminist credentials. It simply moves with invention and forcefulness into a new field, one which both belongs to a canon of outlaw writers (Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Alexander Trocchi, William S. Burroughs, et cetera.), while also creating new ground to stand on (Kathy Acker, Leslie Dick, Virginie Despentes, and more). Suicide Blonde belongs to both of these traditions, as well as to other notable subsets, including noir, queer lit of the eighties and nineties (Michelle Tea, Leslie Feinberg, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles), classic twentieth-century fiction featuring itinerant, urbane women experimenting with dissolution and desire (Jean Rhys, Iris Owens, Renata Adler, Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith), maybe even erotica (Steinke remains one of the few writers I know whose writing about sex manages to be both literary and hot). Read More
June 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Madame Bovary’s Wedding Cake By Joachim Kalka Still from the 1949 adaptation of Madame Bovary, starring Jennifer Jones. There is a certain tradition in French cuisine with a paradoxical connection to French history: following the revolution, bourgeois cuisine saw itself as a sort of heir to court cuisine, and on formal occasions the elaborate productions of the aristocratic table were perpetuated in upper-middle-class dining rooms. This can be observed in many different details, for instance in the history of the table centerpiece. Among the oddest imitations of aristocratic dining extravagances utterly lost to us today was the custom of serving edible structures. The only example we are still familiar with (at least from shop windows) is the wedding cake, which combines elements of architecture, sculpture, and occasionally portrait painting. Surprisingly, Balzac, the great diner, never provides a detailed description of a grand dinner with all its accessories, a lack of interest implying a certain critique of the stultifying pomposity of these elaborate rituals—he is more concerned with depicting en detail the dreariness of the dinner table at Pension Vauquer. But in one superficially unremarkable passage, the bourgeois novel at its peak casually pulls off a radical exposure of the custom of staging food. Read More
June 7, 2017 On the Shelf Show a Little Respect for Milk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Dairy Queen ad from the fifties. The dairy is the locus of the sublime. Whatever it is you want from this world, whatever unnamable thing beyond the stratum of rational thought, you will find it in milk. Imagine water, but with more emotion—that’s milk. Beer for the soul—it’s milk! A liquid that’s also a medium and a metaphor—milk. Should you doubt its sway over human affairs, ask yourself this: If the land of milk and honey were merely the land of honey, would you still regard it as paradise? Embarking on what they call a “journey of lactic abstraction,” Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie have written a penetrating meditation on all things milky in the new issue of Cabinet. The news isn’t all good; humans have not been good to milk of late. Part of it goes like this: “The McFlurry, Mr. Whippy, Dairy Queen Blizzard, Cheese String, Dreaming Cow, Laughing Cow, Skinny Cow, Happy Cow, Crusha, Marvel—these dairy icons perform health and the abuse of health; an array of high-calorie, high-fat, low-calorie, low-fat, high-sugar, sugar-free, highly processed glimmer, with techno-scientific, multicolor, hedonistic, and eroticized appeal. These are the products of aggressive marketing, of low-margin, highly complex modes of manufacture. Dairy turns airy in ice creams that swell up with nothingness injected … Milk’s propensity for animation, for shape-shifting and transformation, teams it commercially with a bestiary of cartoon avatars and a dazzling spectrum of synthetic colors. Milk is frozen into colorful crystals with personality for a teeming frozen-treats market whose products bear ever less tangible relations to milk. In this format, milk adopts any and every shape, that of superheroes or cartoon villains, baroque architectonics or body parts. The cow, used frequently as a metaphor for the passive, dumb, and exploited, is replaced by wily, smart-talking animals and apocryphal consumers of its milk—cats, rabbits, mice—leaving only a vestigial hint of the originating animality.” Vauhini Vara has spent some quality time at spelling bees and wonders about the increasing prominence of Indian Americans as brilliant spellers: “For the past decade, Indian Americans have dominated the Scripps National Spelling Bee—among last year’s top ten were seven Indian spellers … Even the most well-meaning attempts to understand the dominance of Indian-American spellers can be reductive. Shalini Shankar, an anthropologist at Northwestern University who is writing a book about spelling culture, told me that people ask her all the time if there is something inherent in the Indian brain that makes it well suited to this sort of competition—maybe a spelling gene? It’s legitimate, of course, to wonder why kids of Indian origin keep conquering Scripps, despite making up a relatively small proportion of the population. When I put this question to Paige Kimble, the director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, she said, ‘It seems to me that more and more South Asians have integrated, and as they do so, they do what immigrant populations do, and that is to work very hard to be successful in their new country. I think that’s absolutely the dynamic in place that impacts the Bee.’ ” Read More
June 6, 2017 From the Archive O Majestic Poet By Dan Piepenbring Hölderin, as painted by Franz Karl Hiemer. Look at that fresh-faced man. That’s Friedrich Hölderlin, baby. Poet, idealist, quintessential German romantic. Suffering from schizophrenia, he spent thirty-six years—about half his life—living in a carpenter’s tower on the river in Tübingen. People would stop in to visit him, hear him read a few poems or play a brief tune on the piano, maybe collect his autograph. Scholars have come to call this his “Tower Period.” Every poet should have one. Hölderlin died on June 7, 1843. You may not have carved out any time to mourn the 174th anniversary of his passing—you may think you have more important affairs to attend to. He did write, after all, that “he who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive,” which would seem to preclude loving a long-dead man. Still. If you’d like to pause and remember the great poet, Rilke will help. Read More
June 6, 2017 At Work Game of Second-Guessing: An Interview with Gabe Habash By Jonathan Lee Photo: Nina Subin Sometimes an epigraph offers you a serving of Plato, some Ecclesiastes, or perhaps a few fine lines from an obscure Eastern European poet. To welcome readers into Stephen Florida, his first novel, Gabe Habash has picked these five words from Arnold Schwarzenegger: “The mind is the limit.” Sitting alone on a page, floating in negative space, they feel like a frightening prophecy. Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season. It is written as if the ghost of Laurence Sterne watched a lot of ESPN before returning to his desk. Stephen’s voice draws momentum from his attempts to leave a mark on the world. Like the voice in Tristram Shandy, it obsessively digresses from that central aim into ideas of human failure and misreading. We learn that even his name has its foundation in a mistake: Stephen Florida was supposed to be called Steven Forster. An unfortunate clerical error occurred. Habash has a great eye for the ways in which our public identities and private insecurities are shaped by happenstance. Stephen Florida is full of vim and invention, good jokes and built-up bodies, unexpected sentences. He and I discussed his love of Barry Hannah and Roberto Bolaño, the common pitfalls of books about sport, and how frustrations with writing may have fed into his narrator’s preoccupation with completion. INTERVIEWER What was it that drew you to write about wrestling in Stephen Florida, and held your interest? Are you a sports obsessive? HABASH I really only love basketball. LeBron James is the greatest human being on the planet. But what drew me to wrestling was how demanding and unforgiving it is. It seems to exist in an adjacent world that not even other sports inhabit. Like other sports, wrestling can give you so much, but it seems to take more, to ask more of its participants. It was necessary for Stephen’s pursuit of a championship to exist in the periphery. He’s in the lowest division of college wrestling at a school in the middle of nowhere. I wanted readers to feel like they were watching something happen that no one else was paying attention to. Read More
June 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Three Movements By Amelia Gray Reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography. Isadora Duncan, 1905. There’s a story of Isadora Duncan and the press that has stuck with me since I read it years ago: “I’m going to Egypt to lay flowers at the feet of the Sphinx,” she told reporters in Boston. “At its paws, I should say. I’m going out on the desert … Remember that I said this mysteriously.” The story of your life arrives in three parts: your self, your image, and the product of the two. When I started writing about Isadora, I knew only the product: her body of work, classical figures draped in silks. I knew that she was considered a spontaneous dancer, despite the methodical repetition, the hours of work behind that effortless flow. Only by reading her autobiography, My Life, did I begin to understand the distance between her life and her image. Read More