February 6, 2017 First Person Different Sanctuaries By Bryan Washington Jane Brewster, Houses on the Bayou, 2008. Just about every Tuesday, I play soccer in City Park. Our pickup matches are in the back, behind the New Orleans Museum of Art. My first few weeks in the city, I only joined the ones out front, which were mostly made up of oil-and-gas types, or parents, or younger white dudes. One day, during a halfway decent set, a couple of Honduran guys settled on the grass to watch. Afterward, they asked what the fuck I was doing. Was I up for a real game? They told me they needed forwards. Maybe they could use me for a set, they said. Their English was a little slow, and eventually I switched to Spanish, and that’s when their eyes almost popped out of their heads. Being black and speaking anything but English in this country can do that. After living in Houston, I’d picked up pieces of Spanish, mostly to talk to boys, but also because it fuels the city, one that’s nearly half Latino and just about seven hours from the border. Mexico’s culture is virtually inextricable from Houston—the further east you drive, you’ll hit taquerias and cantinas ad infinitum. I started spending most of my time out that way, but never once was I treated like an outsider, or el pinche gringo negro. Everyone treated me like I was home. Read More
February 6, 2017 On the Shelf Celebrating the Everyday, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from an 1870s photograph in the Loewentheil Collection. In June 1941, Stefan Zweig, having fled Austria for England and then New York, sat down to elaborate on the circumstances of Hitler’s rise—a story he feared would be lost to history if it weren’t told often and in great detail. George Prochnik explains, “Zweig set to furious work on his autobiography—laboring like ‘seven devils without a single walk,’ as he put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks. His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote, ‘that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.’ For the benefit of subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings.” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities sprang from a brilliant, contentious speech she gave in 1956—one that defied the doctrines of urban planning before an audience who’d staked their careers on those doctrines. It was also, as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes, a tightrope walk between conservatism and liberalism: “Jacobs was celebrating commerce and condemning government overreach in the form of public housing, and thereby showing some sympathy with the values of the right. Yet she was doing so on behalf of low-income people who, she believed, had been ill served. Like any good leftist, she was defending the underdogs: the mom-and-pop stores as well as the residents of these projects, many of whom hated their bleak housing as much as she did.” Read More
February 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Witches, Wolves, Warlords By The Paris Review From the cover of The Witches by Stacy Schiff. For a brief second, some fifty pages in to The Witches, Stacy Schiff’s history of the Salem witch trials, I almost started to wonder whether any of the accused were guilty. Like, of witchcraft. I spent the rest of the book waiting for Stoughton, Hathorne, Cotton Mather, and the other investigators to come to their senses and call the whole thing off. Of course I know better, but her retelling of the trials is so vivid, and resonates so deeply with current events, that the nightmare seems to unfold in real time, its causes obscure, its conclusion impossible to foresee, like a terrifying story you’ve never heard before. —Lorin Stein “One cannot reason anymore with the President. One life for the life of thousands. Lies lies lies airplanes. Warlords profit false idols prophet.” Reading Kate Zambreno’s first novel, O Fallen Angel, is like getting a dose of electroshock therapy—a galvanizing current of electricity straight into the brain. Written in 2007, in the aftermath of September 11 and in the midst of the second Bush’s presidency, O Fallen Angel was published by Lidia Yuknavitch’s small press Chiasmus the following year; it was fittingly reissued last month, a few days before Trump’s inauguration. The novel is related through three characters’ streams of consciousness: the Valium-popping housewife Mommy, one of literature’s great monsters; her daughter, Maggie, a drug addict who pursues a physical and psychological drive toward death; and Malachi, a street prophet, who seems to foresee, among other events, burning towers. O Fallen Angel is blackly funny and brutal, a radical and clear-sighted antidote for banality and complacency. —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 3, 2017 Inside the Issue Drawing and Imagining By Caitlin Love Alasdair Gray’s paintings, like his books, are marked by both fable and reality. Alasdair Gray, Small Boy Sleeping (Stuart Maclean), 1970, ink drawing with watercolor and acrylic on board. With every one of our Writers at Work interviews, we include a manuscript page, giving a glimpse into writers’ approaches to editing and revision. On the page that accompanies Alasdair Gray’s interview in our Winter 2016 issue, there are two drawings: a hooded man in profile, and a den of snakes rising happily out of a pyramid. The man’s face has been expertly hatched, and the snakes seem to have been doodled by a cheerful hand. They complement Gray’s dense, looping handwriting on, in this case, a draft of Lanark: A Life in Four Books—a monumental, six-hundred-page work published in 1981, and the first of Gray’s landmark novels of Scottish contemporary experience. As that manuscript page suggests, Gray’s work as an artist is integrated into his writing. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1957, he worked as a painter and muralist for nearly twenty-five years before publishing Lanark. When he signed on with his longtime publisher, Canongate, they gave him a remarkable degree of creative control over his books. Illustrations, cover design, frontispieces—they’re all designed by Gray. Read More
February 3, 2017 The Lives of Others The Great Crime By Edward White How a forgotten American diplomat resisted the Armenian Genocide. An Armenian looking at the human remains at Deir el-Zor, 1916. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Brief though it was, Henry Morgenthau’s career as U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire marked one of the most astonishing chapters in American overseas diplomacy. In January 1916, he left Constantinople having served for little more than two years and headed home to New York, determined to help Woodrow Wilson win a second term. “I could imagine no greater calamity,” he later recollected, “for the U.S. and the world than that the American nation should fail to heartily endorse this great statesman.” Morgenthau was convinced that Wilson was the best candidate to reshape an international order that had descended into savagery. In the preceding nine months, he had seen it with his own eyes, as the Ottoman government carried out an unspeakable offense against its people, slaughtering more than a million ethnic Armenians. Protected by American neutrality during the first three years of World War I, Morgenthau was the fulcrum of a network of American diplomats, missionaries, and businesspeople who gained an eyewitness perspective of the massacres. Their testimony constitutes a compelling body of evidence about what happened to the Armenians: an outrage for which the term genocide was invented. News of the massacres reached Washington through Morgenthau, but it was U.S. consulate officials in more remote regions who saw up close what’s known in Armenian as Medz Yeghern, “the Great Crime.” Leslie Davis was U.S. consul in the province of Harput, an area of Turkey in which Armenians accounted for about a third of the population. Seated amid the Anatolian highlands, Harput was roughly seven hundred miles from the capital, necessitating a twenty-one-day journey: eighteen on horseback to a railway station, then three on a train. Davis himself described the Harput consulate as “one of the most remote and inaccessible in the world”; the urban splendor of Constantinople seemed as distant as the moon. Read More
February 3, 2017 On the Shelf The Ascending Strings, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Augusta Savage presents a model of “The Harp” to Grover Whalen, the organizer of the World’s Fair. Photo: New York Public Library Are you tired of fellow feeling? Have you had it up to here with all this talk about “walking a mile in another person’s shoes” and “understanding the suffering of others”? You probably don’t have many friends, do you? And yet there’s a place in this world for you. A new book by the psychologist Paul Bloom argues so steadfastly against empathy that its title is Against Empathy. And his theory is not so uncaring as that title suggests: “People are bingeing on a sentiment that does not, on balance, make the world a better place. Empathy is ‘sugary soda, tempting and delicious and bad for us.’ In its stead, Mr. Bloom prescribes a nutritious diet of reason, compassion, and self-control … His complaint is with empathy defined as feeling what someone else feels. Though philosophers at least as far back as Adam Smith have held it up as a virtue, Mr. Bloom says it is a dubious moral guide. Empathy is biased: people tend to feel for those who look like themselves. It is limited in scope, often focusing attention on the one at the expense of the many, or on short-term rather than long-term consequences. It can incite hatred and violence … It is innumerate, blind to statistics and to the costs of saccharine indulgence.” Augusta Savage was the most important black woman sculptor of the twentieth century, Keisha N. Blain writes, but she’s tragically uncelebrated now: “Like other key figures of the 1920s such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Savage skillfully challenged negative images and stereotypical depictions of black people. One of her largest commissions, for instance, was a sculpture for the World’s Fair of 1939, inspired by ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ a song often described as the black national anthem. Also known as the ‘The Harp,’ it depicted black singers as the ascending strings of that instrument. Regrettably, it was destroyed when the fairgrounds were torn down … The racial climate at the time hampered wider recognition of her work. Savage won a prestigious scholarship at a summer arts program at the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts outside of Paris in 1923, for instance, but the offer was withdrawn when the school discovered that she was black. Despite her efforts — she filed a complaint with the Ethical Culture Committee — and public outcry from several well-known black leaders at the time, the organizers upheld the decision.” Read More