April 11, 2017 Our Correspondents The Feminine Heroic By Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew Bergman’s column is about naturalism. This week, she discusses how women, often excluded from adventure narratives, carve out their own heroic space. Melinda Gibson, Photomontage XXIII, 2009-2011. Courtesy the artist and ROSEGALLERY/ It’s February 1959. Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen have joined Carson McCullers for lunch at her home on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. A photograph from that day shows Marilyn and Carson leaning into each other. Isak, invited to America by the Ford Foundation for what would be her first and last visit, toasts Arthur Miller, who’s nearly out of the frame. Carson wears all black and a depressed demeanor. Marilyn, in fur and a plunging neckline, tells a story about finishing pasta with a blow-dryer. Isak’s cheekbones announce themselves underneath the hem of her turban; she recalls the first time she killed a lion and ingests little more that day than oysters, grapes, and amphetamines. In eight years they will all be dead. For me, the picture is like looking at the fractal nature of womanhood: something carnal, intellectual, and willful existing inside of one body. Internal conflicts shaped Monroe, McCullers, and Dinesen as creators. Marilyn aspired to make her own films and control her image while negotiating a growing dependence on pills and fear of abandonment. McCullers, broken down by seizures, divorce, and addiction, continued to write in the shadow of the masterpiece she wrote at twenty-two. Dinesen, brave enough to face down a lion and manage a coffee farm outside of Nairobi, began to starve and diminish herself. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “all oppression creates a state of war”—and living in a state of war is depleting, as one tries to negotiate what she owes herself against what the world wants to collect. Read More
April 11, 2017 Arts & Culture Paula Wolfert at The Paris Review By Emily Kaiser Thelin Paula Wolfert with the chef André Daguin. I met Paula Wolfert in 2008, when Food & Wine sent me to Morocco to profile her. She never had a restaurant, a TV show, or any of the other contemporary markers of culinary success—but over nearly four decades, from 1973 to 2011, her cookbooks and writing on the traditional foods of the Mediterranean had an incalculable influence on American grocery shelves and our approach to cooking. Paula helped popularize foods we now take for granted: the couscous, preserved lemons, and tagines of Morocco; the duck confit and cassoulet of France; and the muhammara (Syrian red pepper–nut spread), sumac, pomegranate molasses, and mild red-pepper flakes—Aleppo, Marash, and Urfa—of the Middle East. With her curiosity, her rigor, and her vision, she legitimized a reverence for place that all good chefs now embrace. Read More
April 11, 2017 On the Shelf Keep an Eye on the Bees, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Mind this bee, and all the others. I hope you’ve been paying attention to the bees. They’re certainly paying attention to you. Oh, yes, yes they are, they know all about you. And they care. When you’re lonely, think of the bees. Feeling exhausted? The bees. In a new interview, the neuroscientist Christof Koch offers a concise summary of the bees’ intellectual gifts, which amount, in his eyes, to a kind of consciousness: “They do very complicated things. We know that individual bees can fly mazes. They can remember scents. They can return to a distant flower. In fact, they can communicate with each other, through a dance, about the location and quality of a distant food source. They have facial recognition and can recognize their beekeeper. Under normal conditions, they would never sting their beekeeper; it’s probably a combination of visual and olfactory cues … The complexity of the bee’s brain is staggering, even though it’s smaller than a piece of quinoa. It’s roughly ten times higher in terms of density than our cortex. They have all the complicated components that we have in our brains, but in a smaller package. So yes, I do believe it feels like something to be a honeybee. It probably feels very good to be dancing in the sunlight and to drink nectar and carry it back to their hive. I try not to kill bees or wasps or other insects anymore.” Akhil Sharma discusses his new short story in The New Yorker, about a boy who watches his mother become an alcoholic: “Don’t ideas of basic morality shift when one lives in a Western democratic society? If you look at how many women in America have been physically abused by their boyfriends and husbands (approximately a third), there seems no necessary reason why immigrant men who do such things (and only a very small percentage do) would treat their wives differently, just because they are living in America. Also, you have to remember that many people are narcissists. If someone is a problem for them and that person just goes away, they will not spend a lot of energy thinking about why the disappearance occurred. This conscious obliviousness also plays a role in such behavior … I asked an acquaintance who is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous in Jaipur whether there were many female alcoholics in the group. He, sounding startled, said, ‘Oh, no! We kill them.’ The idea came from this.” Read More
April 10, 2017 Bulletin Hilton Als Wins Pulitzer Prize for Criticism By The Paris Review Als in 2005. Photo: Dominique Nabokov, via The New York Review of Books. Congratulations to our advisory editor Hilton Als on his Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In today’s announcement, the committee cited the strength of his work for The New Yorker, where he’s written “bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality, and race.” You can—and must—read those essays here. But say you have hankering for more Hilton… Read More
April 10, 2017 Revisited Beyond the Alps By Jacob Bacharach Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Jacob Bacharach revisits Robert Lowell’s poem “Beyond the Alps.” I think I must have first read Robert Lowell’s poem “Beyond the Alps” the summer before my junior year of high school, when I was at the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia. I know I bought a copy of his Life Studies and For the Union Dead at one of the used bookstores there. I’d read “For the Union Dead” in some anthology or other, and it seemed to me that there was something intensely apropos about rereading this contemplation on a union colonel “and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry,” as depicted in Saint-Gauden’s civil war sculpture, on the Boston Common while living a poetical teenage summer in Charlottesville, surrounded by so much evidence of Jefferson’s cruel, horrible vision of a utopia with slaves. At the time, I gave “Beyond the Alps” very little thought, because it rhymed, and I’d recently learned from my peers that rhyming poetry was extremely silly. I was actually at the workshop as a songwriter, and I was able to smuggle my interest in rhyme past their censorious gaze by writing song lyrics, which existed in a weird zone of exclusion. Otherwise, I took their exaggerated disdain to heart. Read More
April 10, 2017 On Film Worst-Case Scenario By Tom Overton The vision of nuclear holocaust in Threads (1984) remains visceral and urgent. Still from Threads. The audience at the 1984 press screening of Barry Hines and Mick Jackson’s BBC TV film Threads apparently walked out in numbed silence. One of them, the novelist Russell Hoban, concluded in The Listener, This is not a film to be reviewed as a film; its art is that it cancels all aesthetic distance between our unthinking and the unthinkable: here is the death of our life and the birth of a new life for our children, a life … of slow death by radiation sickness and plagues and starvation and quick death by violence. Threads is a virtually faultless film, but as Hoban suggests, its unrelenting bleakness makes it all but impossible to recommend to someone one likes. That said, it has recently won a “Ten Films That Shook Our World” poll, and tonight, April 10, it’s showing at the Barbican Centre, in London. Spoiler alerts are irrelevant; the movie will spoil your day however you see it. In its harrowing vision of Britain after a nuclear war, pretty much everyone dies eventually, while rats, maggots, and the class system endure. As vividly as it defines the experience of living through the Cold War, we no longer have the luxury of viewing it as a historical document: in January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists declared us closer to doomsday than we’ve been since the early eighties. Read More