May 11, 2017 At Work Fantasy Life: An Interview with Tabitha Soren By Louisa Thomas Tabitha Soren, Modesto Nuts bull pen, California, 2014. In 2003, Tabitha Soren went to the Oakland A’s spring training in Phoenix with her husband, Michael Lewis, who had just finished writing a book about the Oakland A’s front office, Moneyball, which would be published later that year. Soren brought her camera; she wasn’t a baseball fan, and she thought she would be bored. “I thought it was going to be a pretty place to shoot,” she told me when we spoke over the phone. She didn’t expect that project she began there would take her fourteen years. Back then, Soren had only just begun her career as a fine-arts photographer. She first made her name on the other side of the camera, as the face of MTV News’s politics coverage in the 1990s, then as a reporter at ABC and NBC News. Since she left journalism to become a fine-arts photographer, her photographs have been widely collected and shown. Her latest project, Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream, chronicles the trajectories of twenty-one baseball players who began their professional careers at that spring training in 2003. Ten of them are featured in the book, which also includes a series of linked short stories by Dave Eggers; the larger show will be up at San Francisco’s City Hall from July 20 to January 6. Read More
May 11, 2017 On the Shelf Make Something Up About Agatha Christie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of A Talent for Murder. In 1926, Agatha Christie went missing—she turned up at a hotel ten days later with a case of amnesia. Her disappearance has never been properly explained, and you know how people are about explanations: they’ve gotta have ’em. In the absence of facts, they’ll just as soon make something up. And so it went with Christie—as Andrew Wilson writes, all sorts of wacky theories about her were aired as “news,” and even today people continue to postulate: “Newspapers were fascinated by the idea that her husband Archie Christie might have killed the author so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele. But those ten days in 1926 were in effect a news vacuum. Despite an extensive search of the Surrey Downs and the dredging of nearby pools, the police discovered precious few clues, let alone a body—so journalists began to manufacture news of their own. The Daily Sketch claimed that it had employed the services of a medium, whose spirit guide was Maisie, a ‘twelve-year-old African girl, tribe unknown.’ ‘As soon as the medium went into a trance Maisie took command,’ the paper reported. ‘Sensational claims were made by the medium, who afterwards described Mrs Christie’s fate as a tragedy almost too terrible to speak about.’ ” Christian Lorentzen weighs in on “Formentera Storyline,” the photo-novella in our Spring issue: “Journals like The Paris Review and NOON have risked their pages on unlisted unknowns (who prove that publicity isn’t the oxygen that keeps fiction alive). It was in one of those magazines that, to my mind, the knockout discovery of 2017 appeared: ‘Formentera Storyline,’ by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva, a ‘photo-novella’ in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, about a Spanish-island group vacation that devolves across 150 pages—most of which feature a banal photo from a Mediterranean villa (e.g., the washing machine) and a deadpan sentence or two—from Pilates and talk therapy into druggy chaos and bad Instagram behavior. All told, a party where everybody stays too long. It’s funny, sly, and very much of the Fyre Festival moment.” Read More
May 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Some Sort of Grace By Moira Donegan Two films about queer love frame grief as both intimate and political. Kris Kovick, in a photo distributed with Silas Howard’s What I Love About Dying. When the photographer Peter Hujar died, in November 1987, David Wojnarowicz filmed his dead body lying in the hospital bed. Hujar had grown thin from AIDS: his broad, boyish cheekbones were sunken and covered in an ashy beard, and his clavicle pressed against the limp fabric of the hospital gown. Wojnarowicz panned his camera over the body only seconds after Hujar died, and in the footage, his face still bears the traces of life: his eyes are half closed, but his mouth hangs open, as if it’s about to groan. There’s a fragility to the images of Hujar’s body. The hand resting on the sheet seems strangely narrow; the skin is papery and impossibly brittle, like half-melted ice. Wojnarowicz, a multimedia artist whose autobiographical, intensely intimate work aroused admiration and provoked right-wing censorship during his lifetime, had known he wanted to make a film about Hujar’s death. But he didn’t work on the movie at all before the event; the Super 8 camera only came out after the curtain was drawn back around Hujar’s body in the bed. In another five years, Wojnarowicz himself would die of AIDS, but not before creating some of his most arresting work, much of it conceived in response to the loss of Hujar. Even so, his film was never completed. What survives is a four-minute black-and-white reel, the footage of Hujar’s body intercut with swimming beluga whales at the Coney Island Aquarium—an unexpected juxtaposition, but one that Wojnarowicz felt was fated. In the days after Hujar’s death, he was obsessed with capturing the whales, finally managing to sneak in his Super 8. Grief has a way of provoking strange impulses. In his diaries, Wojnarowicz said that the light of the whales’ twirling white hides against the darkness of the water was one of the most beautiful images he could imagine. Read More
May 10, 2017 Revisited The Blue Jay’s Dance By Sarah Menkedick Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Sarah Menkedick revisits Louise Erdrich’s memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance. From the first edition of The Blue Jay’s Dance. Nine weeks into my pregnancy, in the middle of an Ohio woods lit gold with fall, I sat in a small, dark cabin and wept. I had no idea how to proceed and I also understood with a wrenching clarity that I could not turn back. I had no model for pregnancy beyond the asexual lady on the cover of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, clad in neutral sweater and slacks, plain-faced in her rocking chair, an emblem of the dull, docile femininity demanded of American mothers. I was terrified of her blandness and of my own obsequiousness to that book, my careful noting of the iron content in dried fruit and my newfound pedantry about pasteurization. After a decade spent trying to prove my exceptionality, I found myself, in October of 2013, flailing in my newly discovered ordinariness. I felt my life, my identity, my future like shattered glass at my feet. I took a shower to calm myself and then, hair wet and sick at the smell of shampoo, I ran the five hundred feet from the cabin down to my parents’ house, where I sat on the couch with my stepmother and let loose with frightened sobs. She knew not to attempt rescue, to soothe me with platitudes or plead a strong case for the valor of motherhood. Instead, she sat quietly with my terrible uncertainty on a sunny fall morning and did not turn away. And then she recommended Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance. She had read and loved that book when my brother and I were little. I believe she understood that seeing motherhood through the eyes of a writer would validate and ground it for me in a way that nothing else could. Read More
May 10, 2017 On the Shelf Seduced Yet Again by Colonel Sanders, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Tender Wings of Desire. You know that Borges story, “The Library of Babel,” where he imagines a world containing all possible books? Perforce, one such book would have to be a romance novel in which a Kentucky-born fried-chicken magnate—the very same one whose face and name are emblazoned on fast-food franchises around the world—seduces an errant noblewoman at a dockside bar. And now, I’m happy to report, that book actually exists. True, it was a statistical inevitability. Someday, someone would sit down and string together the letters properly, and a Colonel Sanders romance would come to be. But who would’ve thought we’d have the good fortune to be alive for it? Kate Taylor writes, “To celebrate Mother’s Day—the chicken chain’s best-selling day of the year—KFC published Tender Wings of Desire, a novella following the love affair between Lady Madeline Parker and Colonel Harland Sanders … ‘The only thing better than being swept away by the deliciousness of our Extra Crispy Chicken is being swept away by Harland Sanders himself,’ George Felix, KFC’s U.S. director of advertising, said in a statement.” (As for the novella itself, here’s a representative passage: “They were so consumed that it took every ounce of their restraint not to give into the first right then and there. The flames would continue to rage throughout the night until the fire was too much, and at last they could let it engulf them.”) Speaking of things I’ve always wanted, here’s another one: a museum that gives American writers their due but makes literature seem so anodyne and boring that no visitors get any bright ideas about becoming writers themselves. (I don’t want the competition, you see.) And here, too, my dreams have come true. Witness the American Writers Museum, which makes a protean, deeply expressive art form seem like a neat self-improvement project. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing ‘Word Waterfall,’ in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations … Head from the entrance in one direction into a gallery called ‘A Nation of Writers’ and you get what might be called the logical, left-brain approach to literature, anchored by an eighty-five-foot-long wall that tells the chronological story of American writing through 100 significant writers. (The museum is careful not to say ‘best.’) … Visitors have to dig to get past the overall mood of inspirational uplift and moral progress and find knottier currents. Those who skip [the NPR critic Maureen] Corrigan’s video commentary on literary experimentalism, for example, may not realize that Lolita is more than a novel that ‘hinges on a road trip—a classic American genre—and riffs on motel and teen culture,’ as the brief wall text dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov puts it.” Read More
May 9, 2017 On Film Master of Light By Noah Gallagher Shannon Cinematographer Roger Deakins uses his blog to pull back the curtain on the lighting tricks that have made him famous. Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista. Sometime in the late nineties, the cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad “Connie” Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall—a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography—as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he’d recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. “My expectations were shattered,” Deakins later wrote, “when Conrad pronounced the photochemical process ‘antiquated.’ ” Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any “technique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller.” That was Hall’s guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: “Story! Story! Story!” Read More