February 21, 2017 First Person Dog Star By Hilary Reid Wandering the Westminster Dog Show on Valentine’s Day. Rumor takes Best in Show at the 2017 Westminster Dog Show. Photo: Tilly Grassa A middle-aged show-dog handler in green cargo shorts and black Birkenstocks crouches in front of a gray kennel. “Wait until you see what Daddy brought you for dinner,” he says to the purebred Cesky terrier within. I watch as Daddy carefully unwraps a Burger King Whopper. “You’re a star,” he tells the dog, breaking off a piece of the meat patty and sliding it through the crate’s metal door. In just under an hour, Daddy will put on a Paisley shirt and an ivory suit; he’ll take the terrier, officially known as Bluefire Heart of a Warrior, for a walk on the pristine Astroturf at Madison Square Garden before the thousands of people gathered on Valentine’s Day for the 141st Westminster Dog Show. Established in 1877, the Westminster Dog Show is the second longest continually held sporting event in the United States, after the Kentucky Derby. The Jumbotron at MSG offers a kind of potted history, with sepia photos of old New York fading in and out; the narrator’s refined, sonorous voice floats over a violin. A hundred and forty years ago, he explains, a group of “sporting gentlemen” gathered at the bar of the bygone Westminster Hotel on Sixteenth Street and Irving Place in Manhattan to drink and brag about their hunting feats. Looking for a venue superior to the sporting field for comparing hounds, they agreed that what Manhattan really needed was a dog show. They formed the Westminster Kennel Club, named after the hotel bar, and soon after the first annual New York Bench Show of Dogs was held at Gilmore’s Garden, the predecessor of Madison Square Garden. The Westminster Dog Show, the narrator informs us, is a “quintessential part of American culture,” having survived both world wars, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rise of the Internet. Read More
February 21, 2017 Inside the Issue The Fern Cat By Audrey Harris On Translating Amparo Dávila’s “Moses and Gaspar.” Remedios Varo, El gato helecho (The fern cat) (detail), 1957, oil on Masonite. Amparo Dávila was born in 1928—a fated year in Mexican letters, it also heralded the arrival of Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Ibarguëngoitia, Inés Arredondo, Enriqueta Ochoa, and Carlos Valdés—in the poetically named town of Pinos, in the state of Zacatecas. In interviews, Dávila has stressed the importance of her childhood in her formation as a writer, particularly the loss of her younger brother, who died in infancy. Her earliest memories are of her father’s library; she harbors a special fondness for his leather-bound copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which she read and reread even though its images of the infernal circles of hell and fearsome demons terrified her. She also recalls watching dead bodies driven in carts past her house; the surrounding towns had no cemeteries, and the dead had to be transported to her town for burial. The sight of the corpses, sometimes barely covered by sheets, left an indelible impression in her mind and, in turn, her fiction, which visits frequently with the specter of death. For someone like me, who grew up delighting in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton and the gothic illustrations of Edward Gorey, translating Dávila offers a delicious challenge. Entering the world of one of her stories is like walking back in time to the dark and lonely world of Pinos, a semideserted mining town “filled with wind and shadows,” as she described it to Elena Poniatowska in a 1957 interview; it is to witness the corpse-laden carts rattling by and to feel the yawning absence of a lost brother. It is also to experience a golden day in a garden in Guanajuato, when, as a young woman, Dávila quoted a passage from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to the exalted Mexican novelist Alfonso Reyes; enchanted, he invited her to visit him in the capital, where she became his assistant. Dávila still resides in Mexico City. She writes in a library whose shelves brim with books by her favorite authors, among them Kafka, Hesse, Paz, and Rulfo, as well as by those with whom she most identifies: Borges, Bioy Casares, Quiroga, and Cortázar (with whom she kept up a literary correspondence and friendship for many years). Read More
February 21, 2017 On the Shelf Cameras Aren’t Magic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Cumming, Quick Shift of the Head Leaves Glowing Stool Afterimage Posited on the Pedestal, 1978. Image via Aperture So you want to learn how to write well: you’re in luck! There are hundreds, maybe thousands of books designed to teach you just that. They’re called “usage guides,” but they’re sometimes not as boring as that designation would suggest. They’ll teach you how to wrangle subordinate clauses, where to put the best commas, how to wield participial phrases with style and grace. They’ll inveigh against weasel words; they’ll deplore indirection. They’ll tell you who’s hot, who not, who rock, who sell out in the stores, tell you who flopped, who copped the blue drop. And they will do all of this with authority and conviction. But how far, Nat Segnit asks, will that get you? More to the point, he writes, “What are these books for? In attempting to straddle the how-to guide and the critical study, they instead fall into the chasm between them, neither offering much in the way of practicable advice nor subjecting the writers they cite to worthwhile textual analysis … Literary style is the difference between a cricket bat and a lump of wood. It is the unapologetic authorial sensibility—‘an absolute way of seeing things,’ in Flaubert’s phrase—rendered in language that matches it as precisely as language ever can. When that sensibility is fine, humane, and receptive, and its owner’s ear sufficiently attuned not to deaden or distort it too greatly … a gifted writer’s style is as irreducible and arbitrarily conferred as any talent; amenable to practice and refinement, sure, but at base as God-given and inimitable as Federer’s touch or Picasso’s hand. Here lies the existential challenge faced by the style guide or writer’s manual: beyond the nuts and bolts of usage and basic writerly manners, they are attempting to teach the unteachable.” In an interview with Caille Millner, Rachel Cusk outlines (thank you) her revised approach to fiction, opening up the novel’s “Victorian construct” and urging it toward reality: “I’ve never treated fiction as a veil or as a thing to hide behind, which perhaps was, not a mistake exactly, but a sort of risky way to live. And I guess I thought about other people’s processes and how even though they constructed something that said ‘this isn’t real,’ you know perhaps they smuggled their reality into this sort of imagined structure—which is something I’ve never done. I always sort of thought that the memoir, the thing that says ‘this is real,’ even if it’s as constructed as a novel, seems to me to do something for the reader that’s very different from a novel. But in the end it is an exhausting enterprise, and you’ll be criticized too much for it, and the criticism is personal even if the writing of it is not personal at all. So I guess it was that, of thinking, okay, maybe I’m going to reexamine the novel as something that can be made to soften the concept of reality, to find something halfway, I suppose, between ‘I’ and ‘Not I.’ ” Read More
February 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bey, Bureaucrats, Bloody Hands By The Paris Review From There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. In the early 1920s, a series of unsolved murders terrorized the residents of Osage County, Oklahoma. Most of the victims were members of the Osage Nation—a tribe that had grown rich when oil was discovered on their reservation—but as the killings continued, even their privately funded investigations failed to crack the case, until it drew the attention of an ambitious young bureaucrat in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover. Through heroic and ingenious detective work, Hoover’s agents at what was then called the Bureau of Investigation exposed a cabal of white Oklahomans conspiring to kill Indians for their oil. The case made Hoover’s name, and the Bureau’s, but as David Grann shows in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI—out this April—the true scale of the conspiracy has never been revealed. It is an incredible story, stirring and impossible to put down, by a writer whose true-life mysteries always go deeper than the reader expects. —Lorin Stein In a New York Times opinion piece last November, just after the presidential election, the poet Morgan Parker wrote about being “a thing to be hated”—that is, being a black woman. “Society believes that black women are not beautiful,” she writes, “and so maybe I believe that, too.” Parker’s tremendous new collection, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé, echoes that sentiment but also takes it to task. Her feelings of invisibility alight in the first poem, “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood,” which doesn’t somuch open the book as explode from it. “At school they learned that Black people happened,” she says of a group of kids. It’s a small, powerful line whose suggestion—in part that black identity is history and thus forfeit in the present—permeates these poems. Parker, though, doesn’t concede the point (“A secret is during commercials / I am living other lives”), and she derives strength and inspiration from other black women, including Mickalene Thomas, whose photocollage appears on the book’s cover. In a poem written in response to Thomas’s work, Parker captures the embodied fullness of Thomas’s images of self-possessed black women: “Jeweled lips, we’re rich / We’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, / history and clothes and a mother.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 17, 2017 Arts & Culture The Internment Artist By Rory Tolan Isamu Noguchi, Sculpture Elements. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the son of a Japanese poet and an American writer, had the gnawing wanderlust of those who feel they never belong. His world had always been spinning: a blur of steel towers in Manhattan, of arch cafés in Montparnasse, of bowed pagodas in Kyoto. He’d walked the patchwork flats of Indiana, the palm tree avenues of Honolulu, the slated plazas of Mexico City. In 1942, he waded into a sea of dust, banishing himself to Arizona’s Sonoran desert, where his life gave way to bleaker scenery: plains of silt and ironwood, megaliths of saguaro cacti, a rift of barbed wire more cutting than the cacti, if the gunners didn’t mow you down first. That year, Noguchi entered a concentration camp entirely of his own will. He had lived in New York, a state exempt from the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The roundups that followed Executive Order 9066, signed seventy-five years ago next week, had affected mostly those in the American West. Yet Noguchi, whose first name means courage, had exiled himself anyway. He checked in to the Poston War Relocation Center, the largest of the United States’ concentration camps for those of Japanese ancestry. After talks with the U.S. government, he came to beautify the place, to make it more habitable. He also came in solidarity, to share the pain of a group he claimed as his own when he branded himself a Nisei, a first-generation Japanese American, in spite of feeling only like a gaijin, an outsider. Those efforts foundered. Rejected on both counts—by the administration, who regarded him with suspicion, and the internees, who feared he was a spy—he pleaded for months with the War Relocation Authority before he was set free. It was one of the blackest times of his career. Read More
February 17, 2017 Our Correspondents Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy By Wei Tchou An installation at the Museum of Chinese in America documents a quickly shifting American culture. From “Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Spicy,” an exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America. There used to be a restaurant at Fifty-First and Lexington, a relic of white-glove Chinese fine dining, called Mr. K’s. Its interior was all baby pink and Art Deco with high-backed plush seats and gold flatware, gold chopsticks, and gold soup bowls with little clawed feet. They served sorbet in between courses and kept a tea candle lit beneath the entrées, which were mostly plated versions of classic take-out fare: hot and sour soup, sweet and sour pork, eggplant in garlic sauce. The Peking duck came out prerolled in flour pancakes painted with hoisin sauce and scallion ribbons. Near the front entrance, there were glass cases of chopsticks inscribed in red with the names of celebrities and politicians who frequented the restaurant. Ruth Reichl panned it when it opened in 1998—her central critique was about the restaurant’s authenticity. She describes the food as “not-quite-Chinese” and lamented that “unfortunately, Mr. K’s is serving Chinese food from another American era, a time when people had not yet experienced the real thing.” Read More