May 8, 2017 At Work Relationships Normally Beyond Our Knowing: An Interview with Madison Smartt Bell By Andrew Ervin Linear time doesn’t exist in Madison Smartt Bell’s new fever dream of a novel Behind the Moon, at least not for long. The fractured narrative centers on a young woman named Julie who falls into a deep Badlands cave while fleeing would-be rapists. In her liminal, un-, or semi-conscious state, she’s able to interact with the prehistoric paintings on the cave walls. Elsewhere, in interspersed sections, her mother—who gave her up for adoption years earlier—is lured to the hospital to which Julie has been transferred and where she remains in a coma. A shady shaman also steps in to help, or to attempt to. The novel works in disordered and mystical ways. It maintains a remarkable ability to surprise. Bell is likely best known for his trilogy of historic novels about Toussaint L’ouverture and the Haitian revolution and the widely taught craft book Narrative Form: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, but it would be a mistake to snooze on his back catalog titles like Save Me, Joe Louis and Waiting for the End of the World. I find myself going back to his short stories every few weeks, especially those in Zero db and The Barking Man. Over the past three decades, Bell has proven capable of changing direction in his work, but a singular American voice resonates throughout his oeuvre. A. M. Homes has called Behind the Moon “a visceral, full-body primal experience.” Bell cotaught (with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires) the one and only creative class I took as an undergraduate at Goucher College. In a letter at the end of the semester, he wrote to me, “We’ve already gone over most of these stories pretty thoroughly so I won’t go into them again except to admire your patience for painstaking revisions—much greater than mine as a student (or even now, sometimes).” I’m still an obsessive rewriter. Something I wrote in that class formed, many years later, the basis of my first published story, so to claim that Bell’s guidance and inspiration have been foundational to my own writing life would be a vast understatement. But that’s only part of the reason it was such a joy to exchange emails with him about Behind the Moon near the end of April. Read More
May 8, 2017 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Claudia Rankine and Alasdair Gray By The Paris Review Claudia Rankine, 2016. The two Writers at Work interviews from our Winter 2016 issue are now online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Poetry No. 102, Claudia Rankine talks to David L. Ulin about finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces, reaching as wide an American audience as possible, and having a breakthrough with her collection Citizen: It felt like the first time I could actively be involved in a public discussion about race, in a discussion that, to me, is essential to our well-being as a country. It wasn’t simply about publicizing the book, it was about having a conversation. It was also an opportunity for me to learn what others really thought and felt. The responses were various. One man said he was moved by a reading I gave and wanted to do something to help me. I said I personally had a privileged life, which I do, and that I didn’t need his help. What I needed was for him—this was a white gentleman—to understand the urgency of the situation for him and to help himself in an America that was so racially divided. It wasn’t about him coming from his own position of privilege—of white privilege—to take black people on as a burden, but rather to understand that we are all part of the same broken structures. He said, I can take what you’re saying, but you’re going to shut down everybody else in this audience. And all of a sudden I was like, What? I thought you wanted to help me! To remove him from the role of “white savior” was to attack him in his own imagination. A white woman, a professor, told me that what I was calling racism was really bias against overweight black women. You might think they were just a defensive man and a crazy professor, but again and again I was coming up against what was being framed as understanding and realizing that it was not that. Read More
May 8, 2017 On the Shelf Witchcraft Is Still a Fine Idea, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, 1579. Say you’re an uptight God-fearing Christian type, and it’s your job to stamp out the sinful specter of witchcraft wherever it may rise. Your central problem will be this: witchcraft is fun, it’s always been fun, it always will be fun, and by depicting it in any form whatsoever you’re probably just going to prove how fun it is. This is not a new dilemma for the antiwitchcraft set. As Jon Crabb writes, early sixteenth-century witchcraft pamphlets relied on a variety of woodcuts to plead their case, and these woodcuts made for perhaps overly exciting storytelling: “One of the earliest and most notorious British witchcraft pamphlets was published in 1579: A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Deuell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches. Stile was a sixty-five-year-old widow and beggar accused of bewitching an innkeeper. The pamphlet describes her association with three other old women … as well as a man named Father Rosimunde, who could transform himself ‘into the shape and likenesse of any beaste whatsoever he will.’ Woodcuts show these old women and several animal familiars, which they reportedly fed on their own blood. The folkloric image of the crone was established through these images and repeated in similar pamphlets over the next century. These witches were usually bitter old women, who lived on their own, and kept cats or other animals as pets … Whether the authors intended it or not, they managed to make witchcraft seem rather exciting and attractive. The stories are easy, compelling reads and the images feature young men and women doing extraordinary things.” Kent Russell is watching the NHL playoffs and hymning the poetry of ice hockey: “Part of what makes the in-person experience of hockey so absorbing is the sound of the game. The shush of skates, the click-click-clack of sticks and puck (which sounds, to me, like an illicit substance being lined up). In-person hockey is orchestral in that the range of its sound is so wide, so rich: from the basso profundo of an errant slap shot booming against the endboards; to the jarring, early-days-of-electronica BARK! of a clearing attempt whipped against the glass; to the tantalizing, cherry-red ping! of puck off post; to the awesome flatulence of the goal horn—ice hockey is set to the best score in sports … You can hit people, hold them; you can use your body (and the tool in your hands) to obstruct or otherwise make difficult the progress of the other guy. You can physically enact the ressentiment of the lesser-skilled, is what I’m saying. You can (and are encouraged to) heave your body, wrench-like, into the gears of artistry.” Read More
May 5, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mothers, Metromedia, Murderous Amphibians By The Paris Review From Rachel, Monique… Last night, I dipped into Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novel, Mrs. Caliban, which New Directions will reissue later this year, and am already agog over it. I’ll admit, its premise seemed a smidge too outré, even for me, but after the first few pages I was hooked. Mrs. Caliban follows a lonesome housewife, Dorothy, who—tormented by the malaise of domestic life, her husband’s infidelity, and the loss of their two children—takes up an affair with a six-foot-seven, murderous amphibian named Larry, who’s just escaped from the Oceanographic Research Institute. Thirty pages in, the two have already “made love on the living-room floor and on the dining-room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs, and upstairs in the bathtub.” As deranged as the whole thing is, Ingalls’s prose, strikingly austere, taps into a profound sadness, too: Is Mrs. Caliban a work of fantasy or are we inhabiting the psyche of a woman unhinged? Whatever the answer, the book is, as Michael Dorris wrote in his 1986 review in the Times, an “intriguing portrait of a woman’s escape from unacceptable reality,” and one that begs to be read over and over again. —Caitlin Youngquist Sophie Calle’s new project at Green-Wood Cemetery has gotten a lot of attention this week, deservedly, but I’m hung up on Rachel, Monique…, a memorial to her mother in the form of a lavish, clothbound book, with an embroidered cover and iridescent fabric. Based on Calle’s 2010 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the book arranges diary excerpts and family photographs to tell an oblique story about mothers and daughters, and the narrative that coalesces around a life glimpsed in fragments. Calle’s mother, who died in 2007, comes across as observant and sharp, with a charming fatalism waxing and waning over the years. Calle, unsurprisingly, likes to linger on her thinking about death. One diary entry says simply: “God, I hate spring!” In another, she writes, “I would already like Christmas to be over. Or perhaps I’d like my life to be over.” And elsewhere: “Good-bye, Diary! I’m off to New York. Let’s hope it will all be wonderful. If the plane crashes, here’s a cheery farewell to life!” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
May 5, 2017 The Lives of Others Unspeakable Affections By Edward White Brilliant Chang and the Sinophobia that birthed a moral panic in early twentieth-century London. Brilliant Chang Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Four years after The Birth of a Nation, his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, D. W. Griffith created what’s probably American cinema’s first-ever depiction of an interracial love affair. His 1919 movie Broken Blossoms centers on the relationship between a white woman and a Chinese man, a virtuous, loving couple driven apart by injustice, intolerance, and enervating poverty. The film was set in Limehouse, the notorious slum on the docks of the River Thames that was home to London’s Chinatown, and a synonym across the English-speaking world for the so-called Yellow Peril. Griffith’s portrayal of Chinese London was more positive than most. From the late nineteenth century, Limehouse attracted Britain’s most famous authors, usually on the subject of opium dens and criminal intrigue. Dickens was one of the first with Edwin Drood; twenty years later Oscar Wilde used it as a backdrop to Dorian Gray’s debauchery, and Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes there to infiltrate the capital’s underworld. But the writers most responsible for cementing Limehouse’s infamy were Thomas Burke, a British author inspired by Jack London’s take on the incipient danger of Chinese immigrants, and the pulp novelist Sax Rohmer. The latter created Fu Manchu, the evil Chinese genius bent on destroying white civilization, who became one of the most enduring literary characters of the twentieth century, inspiring a thousand and one inscrutable, amoral, and fiendishly brilliant Chinese baddies, including Dr. No and Ming the Merciless. Ridiculous caricature though he was, Fu Manchu tapped into genuine fears that white people on both sides of the Atlantic had about globalization and the Chinese diaspora. In 1922, less than a decade after the publication of the first Fu Manchu novel, Londoners were horrified to discover that a real-life Chinese supervillain lived among them in the form of Brilliant Chang, a dealer of opium and cocaine, who briefly acquired a reputation as the biggest threat to the empire since Kaiser Bill. At the time, one of the reasons Chang terrified the British public was that—in keeping with the racist stereotypes—he seemed so mysterious; nobody quite knew who he was or where he came from, though in a sense London had spent the past two hundred years inventing him. Read More
May 5, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Not Really Porn Until There’s Modern Furniture in It, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here. Last week, it came to light that the Eames lounge chair, that sleek mainstay of midcentury design, is for sale at select Costco locations. I was all set to force my way, stark raving mad, through doorbuster-style hordes of Eames fanatics. Then I saw the price tag: $3,900—apparently a handsome discount, but still too dear for me. So I had to settle instead for We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here, a photo book featuring a different, but equally iconic, chaise longue, the venerable Le Corbusier LC4. But this book, compiled by Augustine and Josephine Rockebrune, doesn’t just have pictures of furniture. That would be boring. Instead, as Claire Voon explains, it features stills from adult films in which people are fucking on the LC4: “Designed in 1928 and now attributed to Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, the LC4 champions relaxation, with a frame capable of reclining at any angle. This, perhaps, is what may make it a popular prop for sex, along with the fact that you can customize an order in buttery full-grain leather, seductive pony or cow skin, or luscious beige canvas upholstery … [The book] is over 200 pages of twenty-first-century nude or scantily clad women kneeling on the chaise in black pleather stilettos, chained and roped to it, or bent over its innovative, chromed tubular steel frame. At times, no one’s on the chair at all; it is but a humble emblem of refinement lurking in a corner amidst the wild, hold-no-bars action unfolding around its approximately $4,000 frame. But set in this context—where it’s difficult to ignore for its bold, undulating form—it embodies the power dynamics between men and women, and it stands as an enduring reminder of Le Corbusier’s privilege and gendered dismissal of a mind stirring with as much creativity as his own.” While we’re looking at porn, here’s Frederick McKindra on his desire for white guys—which may or may not be, he writes, a viable form of protest against whiteness. Porn bears him out on this: “I just went and sulked by looking at Rogan Hardy videos on HarlemHooksup.net. Hardy is the undisputed King of Race-Baiting Black Bottoms; when his white tops call him ‘nigger,’ he just grins through his glazed lips. Videos like these shored up what I knew: that my own sexual desire for white men was born of a drive to destabilize power. I hoped my willing submission as a black man would challenge what white lovers thought they knew about me, and undermine the assumptions they had about black men’s innate aggression. Processing what it meant to abdicate to power, to survive it, to transfigure it, was useful to me. I’ve never had a relationship with a white person, friendship or otherwise, innocent of this dynamic. I feel affirmed, sometimes haughty, at how adroitly I look at whiteness. The complaints from white guys in my life—that I shouldn’t racialize things all the time, that they never look at themselves this way—only compounds my glee.” Read More