February 14, 2017 Inside the Issue The Crying Cat By Matthew Gleeson Amparo Dávila’s translator discovers the truth behind her fiction. Amparo Dávila. The stories of the Mexican author Amparo Dávila intrude on “external reality” in unnerving ways. To illustrate, I’ll offer a personal tale: my brush with her story “Moses and Gaspar,” which appears in the Winter issue of The Paris Review. Last fall, when Audrey Harris and I were at work on the translation, I visited a friend who was moving house in Oaxaca. We’d packed some of her books into boxes and paused, at twilight, to sit down for dinner at a table in a large half-covered patio. My friend said that her two cats sensed the upcoming move and had become agitated. At that moment, we saw that one of them—a big marmalade cat, an intelligent and communicative fellow—was crouched at the far end of the tabletop. In the meager glow of the single bulb that lit the growing gloom, the cat began to cry soundlessly: tears filled his eyes and dripped onto the edge of the table and the floor below, while he stared into space. “See?” said my friend. “He knows we’re moving.” It was an uncanny, inexplicable scene. Cats are emotionally sensitive to changes, I know—I’ve heard cats cry, moan, yowl in distress—but never had I seen one mourn in a way that seemed so peculiarly, exclusively, jarringly human. I went home that night to find a new round of corrections on “Moses and Gaspar” in my inbox. Read More
February 14, 2017 On the Shelf He’s a Giant Gorilla, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Nicholas Monro’s King Kong, Manzoni Gardens, Birmingham, England, 1972. Photo: Arnolfini Archive at Bristol Record Office/Courtesy the artist, via NYRB. Growing up near Baltimore, I remember when, in 2004, a massive aluminum sculpture called Male/Female was installed outside the city’s beautiful Beaux Arts train station. Passions were inflamed. I recall a pair of women walking by the sculpture and one saying to the other, I hate that fuckin’ thing, and the other saying, Well, duh. What I’m trying to say is, it’s rough being a public sculpture. People shit on you. Birds shit on you. And it’s always been rough: looking back to the seventies, Jon Day has revisited England’s “City Sculpture Project,” in which sixteen sculptors received grant money to liven up the nation’s public space. One of the few surviving works is Michael Monro’s King Kong, which is, you guessed it, a massive fiberglass gorilla first installed outside a brutalist shopping mall in Birmingham. Day writes, “Monro thought obviousness was what the people wanted. ‘In this case they will like him won’t they?’ he said at the time. ‘Because they can understand it and appreciate it. He’s a giant gorilla’ … Though children enjoyed playing on King Kong, and a pair of disgruntled builders climbed it as part of a protest for better compensation and working conditions a few months after it was installed (placing a trowel in its hand and a hardhat on its head), the public didn’t seem to warm to it particularly. At the end of the six months there was a half-hearted campaign and public collection to keep King Kong in Birmingham, but only one person, a crossing guard named Nellie Shannon, gave any money to the cause. Her £1 donation was later returned.” Tim Parks got an e-mail from J. K. Rowling. Can you believe it? The J. K. Rowling! She was full of stirring words about the value of a free and open society, and she told him, “We will not go quietly and we are Louder Together!” But she’d sent that e-mail to thousands of people through PEN; it was a plea for donations. And for Parks, it’s the symptom of a confused culture, one that conflates the most honest art-making with the high dudgeon of political protest: “I have been drawn, almost against my will, to notice the intensifying politicization of the literary world and, hand in hand with that, a predilection for melodrama, for prose that stimulates extreme emotions—in good causes of course. The cause justifies the melodrama. The melodrama serves the cause … In the months ahead this debate will heat up. Both as readers and as writers, each of us will react in a way congenial to our temperament … My own position is this: Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.” Read More
February 13, 2017 Look Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin By Dan Piepenbring “Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin,” an exhibition of paintings by John Wellington, is at the Lodge Gallery through March 5. Wellington embraces the formal tactics of the old masters to depict a bleak, surreal, new world order—seemingly both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—animated above all by a kind of perverted militarism. His work fixates, as his gallery writes, on “lost worlds, passing empires, false prophets, unlikely heroes, and the allure of idolatry.” John Wellington, You and Me, 2009, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 68″ x 48″. Read More
February 13, 2017 Bulletin This Wednesday: Morgan Parker at BAM By The Paris Review Morgan Parker. This Wednesday, February 15, Morgan Parker will appear at BAM to launch her new poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé. (One may be tempted to object, after Beyoncé’s stunningly baroque performance at the Grammys last night.) Parker will join the Brooklyn Museum’s Rujeko Hockley to discuss black American womanhood, politics, art, and pop culture. Tickets are available here. Parker’s poem “Hottentot Venus” appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. (“I wish my pussy could live / in a different shape and get / some goddamn respect,” it begins.) Last summer, she told the Daily, One thing that interests me about Beyoncé is who her predecessors are, and how she’s a kind of symbol for all the different ways that black women are revered but also surveilled in a really intense way, put on display. That happens to me just walking down the street. It happens in another way for black women who are celebrities. The whole legacy of Hottentot Venus is one of dehumanization and display. I was interested in that line between awe or reverence—and also exploitation. Where is that line? What does it mean to be at once upheld and at the same time continually made to feel less than? All these questions belonged in the manuscript, which I think of as kind of a tome of black womanhood.
February 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Dance of Steel By Simon Morrison In Soviet Russia, getting a ballet off the ground was no mean feat, as Sergei Prokofiev learned the hard way. Léonide Massine wields a large hammer over the head of Alexandra Danilova during a production of Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier in London. In Russia, during the Soviet era, government control made the challenge of getting a ballet onto the stage no less onerous than being admitted into the ballet schools of Moscow or Leningrad. The daunting auditions of Soviet legend—teachers scrutinizing preadolescents for the slightest physical imperfection—found an ideological parallel in the required inspections by censorship boards at the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky–Kirov theaters. First, the subject of a prospective ballet was adjudicated in terms of its fulfillment of the demands for people-mindedness; the music and the dance would be likewise assessed. There would follow a provisional closed-door run-through to decide if the completed ballet could be presented to the public, after which it would either be scrapped or sent back to the creative workshop for repairs. Dress rehearsals were subsequently assessed by administrators, cognoscenti, politicians, representatives from agricultural and industrial unions, and relatives of the performers. Even then, after all of the technical kinks had been worked out, an ideological defect could lead to the sudden collapse of the entire project. Bodies as well as plots were changed by politics. The traditional emploi that defined danseurs noble and demi-caractère endured, but emphasis was placed on bigger builds and altogether less softness in the curves. In sculpture, “Soviet man” became like a Greek or Roman demigod, the muscles stronger than steel. So, too, he became in ballet. Read More
February 13, 2017 On the Shelf Buy Yourself Some Old Seeds, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A vintage ad for a seed catalog. All writers are spies, but some of them, not unreasonably, want to do it full-time: it’s generally more lucrative than the “authorship” game, and it gets you out of the house, often armed. Few would be totally surprised, then, to learn that Ernest Hemingway had a yen to practice espionage. Nicholas Reynolds, a military historian, alleges in his book Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (see what he did there?) that Papa was a double agent, snooping around on behalf of the Commies and Uncle Sam: another lost soul in that vast miasma we call the twentieth century. Andrew O’Hagan writes of the new book: “Reynolds looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before, a man out of control and out of focus, a man in bits … What is Hemingway alleged to have done as a spy? We know that, in 1937, at another hotel in Madrid, he had a drink—vodka and Spanish brandy—with that ‘representative of the diabolical Russia’, the NKVD chief Alexander Orlov. (Politics didn’t come up but they talked about their shared interest in guns.) Other evidence? That during the Second World War he set up a counterintelligence bureau in Havana. The American diplomat Robert Joyce told Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker that Hemingway was willing to pay for it himself. It is further alleged that he set up the Crook Factory, to keep an eye on enemy aliens in Cuba, and put his beloved, thirty-eight-foot fishing vessel Pilar out to sea as a scout for German U-boats. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway wrote that he aimed to be ‘a secret agent of my government’ but when it comes to the Soviets, there’s a lot of ‘reaching out’ and alleged meetings, but facts about him actually engaging in operations are thin on the ground.” The author is just a single person, and you know how single people are: writhing with subconscious prejudices, pacing this earth with ever-larger blind spots, accumulating more ignorance by the day. The most well-intentioned writers, especially of fiction for young people, have begun to concede that their work can’t be done alone if it’s to be done properly; hence the rise of the “sensitivity reader,” a kind of paid shoulder angel, poring over your manuscript to disabuse you of your tone-deafness. Katy Waldman writes, “Hired by individual authors or by publishing houses, sensitivity readers are members of a minority group tasked specifically with examining manuscripts for hurtful, inaccurate, or inappropriate depictions of that group … Some sensitivity readers draw distinctions between offensive descriptions and offensive descriptions that appear to enjoy the blessing of the author … Still, it’s a messy project for one reader to suss out authorial intent. While sensitivity remains a positive value in most literature, and perhaps one of the greatest priorities for young adult literature, enforcing it at the expense of other merits, including invention, humor, or shock, might come at a cost. Cultural sensitivities fluctuate over time. What will the readers of the future make of ours?” Read More