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- Unlocking Library Coolness: Language Learning
- How the Cowboy Was Won by Lori Wilde
- Links: Lando, Lucy Liu, & Alien vs. Predator
- O’Neill’s Dark Energy at BAM
- Roth in the Review
- Escape from the Nazis: Anna Seghers’s Suspenseful Classic
- This Flesh Container We Call a Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel
- Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth?
- Fragile but Fixable: The Collages of Deborah Roberts
| Unlocking Library Coolness: Language Learning Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT 
Today I'm going to talk about some other features of my library that are likely available to you as well: should you wish to learn or practice foreign languages, your library is very well equipped to help you out! I was using Duolingo for a very long time to practice Spanish (I'm moderately fluent) and to learn rudimentary French, but after a few aspects of the app really started to bug me, I switched over to see what my library had to offer. I'm very fortunate in my public library, as the Montgomery County Public Libraries in Maryland provide a LOT of language resources: Mango, which I've been using and enjoy quite a lot, plus Muzzy, Tumblebooks – both for children, and Rosetta Stone, which is accessed by patrons through EBSCO. The bulk of my experience is with Mango, which I'll talk a little about here, as I'm really enjoying it. But it is far from the only language learning option available through libraries. There are a bunch of different language learning options that may be available at your library, including borrowable materials and online and app-based resources. Other choices I've encountered at other library systems include Transparent Language, and Pronunciator. If you visit your library website, you'll likely find a few options for language learning software, and probably some conversational practice groups as well. So let's take a quick look at Mango, because it is charming and I'm really enjoying it. First, Mango has a TON of languages, and teaches in a conversational format where an opening conversation is broken down in to parts and then rebuilt. I've done lessons in so many different languages, including Hawaiian (Aloha! Pehea 'oe?), Japanese, and Dutch, and I've done considerable number of lessons in Spanish and French, which are the two I work on most attentively. Second, the easiest way to set up your access if your library uses Mango is to visit the website. You can view the complete set of languages available, and set up your account (your library should have instructions as well). You can do lessons on the computer, but I've found that downloading the app makes the lessons easier to use. I tend to do my language practice over coffee each morning. Each lesson begins with a conversation, and then you learn the elements of that conversation. Different parts of speech are color coded to correspond between the two sentences in two different languages. Here is an example from my lesson in Spanish:
Each sentence is read aloud but you can disable the additional encouragement narration that reads aloud cultural notes and adds things like, Isn't this easy? and Ok, let's hear it!. That got on my nerves after awhile. The primary narrator is, fun trivia fact, Kathleen McInerney, aka Veronica Taylor, who is also the voice of Ash Ketchum.
Well, to be honest, he probably speaks more. The context of each lesson is usually based on common interactions with the world: introducing yourself, going to the store, going clothing shopping, going to parties, or, in this example, maybe stopping embezzlement or theft:
Each section also contains a timer that allows you to try to answer aloud. When the timer runs out, the answer is read by another narrator. Some languages have both a male and female voice actor, which helps with languages that have gender rules. (I am somewhat bad at remembering those.) You can also record yourself and compare your audio to the lesson, though it doesn't grade or give you feedback on your spoken attempt. One of the features of Duolingo that I found both useful and frustrating was the oral responses, which were evaluated by the app, though sometimes I knew I was saying things correctly and it would tell me I did it wrong. Duolingo can be very specific in its pronunciation demands. (Also, I learned Spanish in Zaragoza, so I have a kinda specific regional accent, and Duolingo was not having any of that.) I didn't think I was learning that much when I started using Mango for French, but then, after several weeks of lessons, I was in Paris and found myself able to converse with people based on phrases I'd memorized and practiced, and was able to translate and read a large number of signs and posters because I knew most if not some of the words. If you went through drills and verb conjugating recitations in school like I did, learning through conversations broken apart and then rebuilt in sections may seem different, but for me personally, it's been pretty effective. Plus, when you reach the end of a unit, the little mangoes that accompany you through the lessons will throw you a little party:
There is a placement test for some languages, but you do have to take it on the Mango website, and it's not available for every language and variation. For example, I had to take the placement test in Latin American Spanish, but I learned Spanish in Spain. There is a Spain, Castilian lesson series, but it is shorter and there is no placement test. I've been working in the Latin American Spanish lessons just fine, but there are a few times where the words I know and the words it uses don't match entirely. But hey, languages change (Have you met English on the Internets?), and it not like learning more words is a bad thing (MOAR WORDS PLS).
We have also used Mango (my husband and I, I mean) for travel. Before we went to Greece last year, we did Lessons 1, 2, and 3 in Unit 1, mostly so we'd know how to say please, thank you, yes, no, and common polite greetings like, Good morning, Good afternoon, and Good night. The people we met were, as one would expect, very patient with our attempts to greet and thank them in Greek (and a few taught us naughty or fun words, which anyone who has traveled knows is the most funnest part of learning a new language). So even for basic tourism purposes, Mango can be useful. But learning a language also has long-term cognitive benefits. I think it's another way to learn empathy and connect on a more intuitive or emotional level, too. It also, as a very wise person I met in a restaurant said, teaches you how much you don't know. Not being able to talk in one language when you're very fluent in another but can't necessarily use it teaches me right quickly how much I do not know, a very humbling experience. I learned Spanish as an exchange student when I was 15, but being able to converse in Spanish, even if I'm trying to talk my way around a word I can't remember, has been useful in myriad ways. Moreover, to my everlasting shock, being multilingual or merely speaking Spanish out loud now has become a political act. To my contrary mind, the best way to battle against such linguistic bullshit is to learn as many languages as I can stuff into my brain (which really doesn't want to add a third or fourth, but I'm going to keep trying). Libraries, in my never-humble opinion, are a constant and admirable resource of much badassery, and I love that I can indulge my love of cookbooks, ebooks, comics, and audiobooks alongside my long-held aspirations to be a polyglot. I hope you'll check your local library if you're curious about learning or practicing a language. Buena suerte! The post Unlocking Library Coolness: Language Learning appeared first on Guaripete. |
| How the Cowboy Was Won by Lori Wilde Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT  How the Cowboy Was Won very loosely retells Emma in a modern day Texan town. As a retelling of Emma, it wasn't great, but as a "friends to lovers" romance I liked it a lot. Ember Alzate is a woman of Irish-Native American descent who makes a good living selling real estate. She also has a knack for matchmaking – so much so that people say she should consider it as a second career. Ember herself is single, coming off of a terrible and short marriage that rattled her self-esteem and optimism. Her family has lived in Texas for several generations. Ranger grew up in Cupid and has been best friends with Ember since they were kids. They've had a strict "no dating each other" rule all their lives because they cherish their friendship. Ranger is an astronomer (!) and has just returned to Cupid after doing his postdoctoral work in New Zealand. Right away Ranger and Ember are consumed with pants feelings for each other but neither one wants to reveal this to the other because of the "no dating" rule. While Ranger and Ember are trying to keep from ripping off each other's clothes, people keep coming to Ember for matchmaking help. In the past, Ember was a good matchmaker because she has no personal stakes in the matter. Now one of her clients wants to get matched with Ranger. Ember is determined to think of his well-being before her own, but it still complicates things. Here's how the constantly shifting dynamic looks at one point. Don't worry about who these people are. They are all fun characters, but essentially they are chess pieces in the game of love.
It's a lot of fun to see Ember, who is sure that she knows what she's doing, scramble around trying to get the right people with the right partners, while secretly wanting Ranger for herself. The marketing for this book suggested that it's a loose retelling of Emma by Jane Austen. The matchmaking thing is very Emma. The rest is not. For instance, Ranger is not a generation older than Ember, and he isn't constantly judging her. Also, Austen's Emma is full of self-confidence when the book begins, and Ember is not (except when it comes to matchmaking). However, the books do share a common theme: watching someone try and fail to match-make can be hilarious. The story takes place in a culture that blends Mexican, Irish, and Native American, and Texan influences. There's a family Christening party that is beautifully written. May I also direct your attention to the FOOD:
There's also a lot of beer and bar food and breakfast food. Meanwhile, Ranger's work-related problems (he has to learn to network with donors, which he's terrible at) are all too realistic, and the star-watching is great. My problems with the book are two-fold. First of all, this is one of many romances in which there is really no reason for the couple not to get together on page one. The demands that two otherwise intelligent people act like idiots. Secondly, Ember's grandmother fits the "Magical Native American" stereotype. This brought down my enjoyment significantly. There are many non-magical characters who identify as Native American, at least in part, which broadens the representation. Grandma is a teeny tiny woman who rules with an iron hand from her chair at the party and, presumably, all parties. She dispenses wisdom to all who approach her. Grandma sagely informs Ember and all her sisters about the hum. The hum? This family has a special gift, which is that when an Alzate woman kisses The One she knows it because she hears a humming noise. Ember is skeptical. Grandma is smug in a "you'll find out eventually" way. I enjoyed this book despite constantly wanting to hit the protagonists upside the head. It was fun to see everyone settle neatly into the perfect places by the end after all the confusion. The supporting characters, aside from Grandma Stereotype, were endearing. This is part of a series, and I had obviously missed a book, but it didn't hinder my experience at all. But the stereotyped character and her role in the family did hinder my enjoyment of what would have been an otherwise fun book. And now I'm hungry. The post How the Cowboy Was Won by Lori Wilde appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Links: Lando, Lucy Liu, & Alien vs. Predator Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT 
… Have you heard of SkyKnit? Knitters + neural network = very odd results. You can check out the generated patterns and photos of finished projects here. They're all very…alien-like to me. Have you tried any of the SkyKnit patterns? … I'm on the fence about seeing Solo, the new Star Wars movie that focuses on a young Han Solo. If I do see it, it's only to gaze upon Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian. However, I absolutely loved reading this article from The Verge on Lando's pansexuality: Kasdan's eagerness to represent the LGBT community is a lovely thought, but it's just that: a thought. Real representation means crafting considered, nuanced characters whose sexuality is treated as respectfully on-screen as it is off. If creators want to do right by LGBT fans, they can start by picking them up off of the cutting-room floor. I completely agree. Saying a character is LGBT seems like the lazy way out of giving communities real representation. … Curious about what your baby name would be if you were born in a different decade? For me, Ruth was killing in during the 1900s and 1910s. … Author Alyssa Cole is at Frolic and she's challenging my opinion on whether Alien vs. Predator was really a horror movie. Meet cute Well, it's not super cute. He's trying to kill Alexa and her colleagues because, that's just what predators do. Though, when a wellmeaning Lance Hendriksen tries to distract him so Alexa and Sebastian can get away, Pred (that's what we're going to call him) decides to let him live, foreshadowing that perhaps there's some compassion beneath those layers of steel? (He does end up just killing Lance when he won't be ignored). Alexa and Sebastian are busy running from Alien Xenomorphs and Pred, though alas Sebastian doesn't make it, leaving room for love to bloom between Pred and Alexa. Enemies no more? Alexa stumbles upon Pred while trying to navigate her way out of the pyramid. He pulls out his weapon, but she hands over her own, telling him "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," which marks their transition from enemies to more. He's wary, but then an alien attacks and she uses Pred's weapon to try to kill it. Pred sees this go down and hey, he has to respect that, right? After reclaiming his weapon, he turns to leave instead of attacking her and Alexa follows, demanding he take her with him. Pred should kill her…instead he offers her a gift. A badass weapon and shield he makes himself from the carcass of the alien she killed. (Pred's love language is clearly "acts of service.") They then run off to battle the enemy together. Cole makes a compelling argument. I may have to watch the movie again with this new outlook. …
… Don't forget to share what super cool things you've seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we'd like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way! The post Links: Lando, Lucy Liu, & Alien vs. Predator appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT   Matthew Beard as Edmund Tyrone, Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone, Rory Keenan as Jamie Tyrone, and Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2018 For the first stretch of the opening-night performance of Richard Eyre's Bristol Old Vic production of Long Day's Journey into Night at BAM, I had the uneasy sense that things might have been jumpstarted at too rapid a clip. The impression may have owed something to the annoying habit indulged by some theatergoers of applauding celebrity actors (in this case, Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville) when they make their first entrance, even if it means drowning out the opening line of a most delicately calibrated play. Irons retrieved matters by quickly repeating the line, but there did seem something a little wrong-footed in the way the dialogue between the two raced along from then on, not allowing for even a hint of apparent domestic calm before things started spinning out of control. There is, after all, only one moment of rest in the play: before anything has happened. The initial moment—when James Tyrone (Irons), using all his actorly charm to compliment his wife Mary (Manville) on what "a fine armful" she has become while she was away, can still believe, or pretend to believe, that things are back to normal, and that Mary has been cured of her drug habit at the sanatorium she has just returned from—is so brief as barely to register. The façade will begin promptly to erode—nothing is brought to our attention except as it falls apart—and when their sons Jamie (Rory Keenan) and Edmund (Matthew Beard) come into the room they will join the process by which every form of reassurance will be chipped away by evasion or contradiction or direct attack. Here at BAM, that process kicked off at a headlong pitch that at first felt uneasily rushed. Ultimately, as the wider arc of Lesley Manville's performance became apparent, the unease made sense. The rattled breathlessness of her delivery, as if half a second's interruption would bring everything crashing down, established the state of things in the Tyrone household with no delay: the masks are already off. Manville's Mary is not merely distracted but positively a junkie with screaming nerves, turning her head from side to side almost spasmodically, not knowing what to say or do from one second to the next, her words tearing along like a runaway train. Her speediness pulls the rest of them along, struggling to keep pace with her and revealing at once that none of them is in control.  Lesley Manville as Mary in Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2018 Even more than usual, in this production Mary is the center around which the rest move in denial, sometimes pausing to confront her in brief outbursts of anger or pleading, or turning away as if in the hope she might disappear. The extent to which these three men live in fear of her is manifest in the cowering dread with which, in the last act, they listen to her footsteps pacing in the upstairs bedroom. Mary inherits the ultimate curse of solitude—she is the only one ever alone on stage, and even speaks a few lines of soliloquy—and Manville comes into her own triumphantly in the final two acts, as Mary becomes the creator of her own theater of memory, a play within a play for which she becomes all the characters and is the only audience. In the heart of solitary delusion, she becomes the being she truly is, the being that flakes off into fragments in her dealings with others. Tempo is crucial since O'Neill is so essentially a musical writer. Robert Falls, who directed a bracing production of The Iceman Cometh at BAM three years ago, has remarked of him: "He's writing a score." If Iceman is an orchestral work for some twenty voices, rising often into busy ensemble passages, Long Day's Journey into Night is his supreme chamber piece. The four chief instruments—James Tyrone and Mary and Jamie and Edmund—are sharply differentiated whether sparring in duets or quartets or launching into extended solos. (The fifth voice, that of their maid Cathleen, played by Jessica Regan, is injected into the middle of the play as a brief tonal respite, comic and oblivious, to break up an otherwise inexorably gathering heaviness.) To think of these characters as instruments rather than agents goes to the heart of the play. For all the reiterated talk of "willpower"—specifically with regard to Mary's morphine addiction, yet pointing also to the mens' habitual drunkenness, Tyrone's obsessive parsimony, Jamie's self-lacerating pessimism—everything shows them deprived of any real liberty, even enough liberty to keep from saying the same things uselessly, again and again, in conversations that connect only fitfully before subsiding into postures of resentment and hopelessness. The family dysfunction of which Long Day's Journey is the classic portrait is embodied in a music of violent stasis, in which forces of attraction and repulsion toggle perpetually back and forth. However isolated each voice, the echoes of the others are always hanging in the air around it, all of them inextricably tied together no matter how stubbornly they tug to pull free. In Eyre's production, the protagonists circle continually around one another, occasionally lurching into violent contact, sometimes attempting affectionate overtures that are quickly curtailed. Early on, there is a good deal of energetically overlapping dialogue, and it is only gradually that each of the actors emerges fully. Irons is a lean Tyrone tightly wound within himself, with only a hint of the grandiloquence of the theatrical idol. (Irons certainly brings a persuasive note to his portrayal of a popular star who has reached the stage of burnt-out reflectiveness.) Even his flare-ups of patriarchal wrath when egged on by Jamie or Edmund are half-hearted, scenes, one senses, that have been played many times too often. If Mary is a force of chaos set loose in the household, the senior Tyrone is the principle of order reduced to a melancholy but formally correct stance. Rory Keenan's Jamie has the right mix of wiseguy humor and bitter contempt, and in his final drunk tirade manages to strip away any trace of empathetic feeling; while Matthew Beard, as Edmund, more than holds his own in a part that can sometimes seem the play's weakest link. As a stand-in for O'Neill, the consumptive Edmund hovers on the periphery, more observer than participant. The others figure as what they irrevocably are, but he is not yet realized, and thus not altogether doomed. As Beard plays him, Edmund is very much the writer in embryo, restlessly roving around the room, never without the safety valve of a book in hand. In his cups, he turns his speeches into literary sketches. The monologue about his transcendent experience at sea of seeing "the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand" can seem endless and mawkish, but here it plays as an ambitious young poet self-consciously trying out his powers of invention, showing off for his father, half-exhilarated and half-depressed at the results. Narrative is of little account in Long Day's Journey; the tale is almost blurted out in order to get at what matters. This is, after all, as close as O'Neill could have gotten to putting his early life on stage. The painful secrets revealed are his own. It is not a play about family, but family fully realized as a play. The underlying rhythm is of a ritual whose phases are preordained, a ritual of progressive and exhausting exposure. What has been set in motion must continue long past the point of any reasonable hope—in fact, to a point of bone-weariness—and yet the production radiates an energy close to ecstasy: a sorrow not enervating but vital. It is a work that mercilessly tests each actor's ability to inhabit roles that are not characters but beings, summoned by an authorial process that can only be conceived as an occult attempt to restore speech to the dead.  Beard as Edmund and Irons as James in Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2018 The sense of exhaustion is accentuated by those diabolical patterns of repetition that were O'Neill's fundamental device. For some readers and playgoers, his repetitions are a flaw and a mark of stylized implausibility, sometimes eliciting nervous laughter. Stylized they may be—his theatrical mode is always expressionist at its core—yet they mark the seam where his sense of music and his sense of brute reality are joined. To diagram any of his plays by the frequency and arrangement of its repetitions, of words and behavior and the recurrence of memories, would be to define its essential shape. The bits and clumps of language his people grab at—"snoring" and "fog" and "quack" and "summer cold" and "willpower" and "morbid" and "cheap hotels" and "it's a good man's failing"—are turned around, tossed back and forth, questioned, and seized on as a last resort. If the Tyrones scarcely pause to search for a word, it is because they are condemned to repeat what they have said a thousand times before. In between the repeated words are the repeated sounds: the foghorn, Mary's pacing footsteps, the comforting gurgle of whiskey poured into a glass. Rob Howell's set design gives us a sense of skewed perspective. The left side of the stage is dominated by an impressive ceiling-high bookcase with the matched sets of classics of which O'Neill writes in a stage direction: "The astonishing thing about these sets is that all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread." The foreground has the minimal elements of a 1912 interior, some chairs, a couch, and the table where the booze is poured: this tentative space is where the family makes its gestures toward being a family. But the room's timelessly abstract wall slants inward, its angle suggesting an arctic bareness in the house's inner reaches, the jail-like abstraction of what, for Mary, can never be a home. As the characters back toward its various exits and passageways, each can duck toward some offstage escape hatch, whether the upstairs bedroom where Mary takes her morphine or the tavern where the men take their comfort. The world outside the room is invisible, and the lighting translates the foggy overcast weather into a darkness that sets in long before night falls. That the prominence of the bookcase is not a casual touch comes to the fore in the last act, with its long passages of poetic declamation. The Tyrones are a literary family not by comfortable habit but for dear life. The autodidact James Tyrone has saved himself by literature, with dreams of becoming a great Shakespearean actor, and at the same time has betrayed literature by succumbing to the easy money of a popular melodramatic success. His life has been a matter of reciting words written by others; the alcoholic Jamie has the talent and the talk of a writer, but is incapable of being one; and Edmund, book in hand, has not yet become the writer he needs to be to avoid self-destruction. His only redemption will be the very play we have been watching, the play he has in extremis been able to write. When Tyrone and Edmund confront each other in the last act, their weapons are Shakespeare on the one hand and Dowson and Baudelaire on the other. (The present production underscores this battle by expanding the passage from The Tempest recited by Tyrone, and Irons uses this to display at once the sincerity of Tyrone's craft—his recitation is not a matter of bombastic bluff—and the impairment of his ability to summon up the lines.) Jamie's belated drunken return is punctuated by recitations of Rossetti and Swinburne, a reminder that Edmund will never be entirely free of his brother's influence. And as Mary, now terminally lost in memory, makes her final entrance, Jamie is given the play's bitterest and most surefire laugh line—"The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!"—as if to certify that it has all been a play, but one from which the characters are unable to exit. Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through May 27. The post O'Neill's Dark Energy at BAM appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT   Philip Roth at Yaddo artist's retreat, New York, 1968 A life in literary criticism: how Review writers read and responded to the novels of Philip Roth (1933–2018). LeRoi Jones, "Channel X," July 9, 1964 One of the gaudiest aspects of the American Establishment, as nation, social order, philosophy, etc., and all the possible variations of its strongest moral and social emanations, its emotional core, is its need to abstract human beings. It is a process that leads to dropping bombs. Mr. Roth, you are no brighter than the rest of America, slicker perhaps. » Alfred Kazin, "Up Against the Wall, Mama!", February 27, 1969 Roth is pitiless in reducing Jewish history to the Jewish voice. "Why do you suffer so much?" the Italian "assistant" jeeringly challenges the Jewish grocer in Bernard Malamud's novel. To which the answer of course comes (with many an amen! from Jesus, Marx, Freud, and others too numerous to mention)—"I suffer for you!" "Why do I suffer so much?" Alex Portnoy has to ask himself in Newark, Rome, Jerusalem (Alex is lonely even in the most crowded bed). His answer, his only answer, the final answer, what an answer, is that to which many a misanthropic son of the covenant is now reduced in this mixed blessing of a country—"My mother! My… Jewish mother!" This is still funny? In Portnoy's Complaint it is extremely funny, and the reason that Roth makes it funny is that he believes this, he believes nothing else. » Murray Kempton, "Nixon Wins!", January 27, 1972 That Mr. Roth failed should finally interest us less than why he chose to run. But then he is particularly interesting as a novelist just because his good fairy kept his bad fairy from inflicting upon him one of those guardian angels who protect the writer from unseemly adventures and therefore from redeeming risks. Roth has continually striven, from love or hate or a bit of both, to explain America to himself; and that is why he has so steadily managed to give us work that, if it cannot always be judged as satisfactory, has been unexpected and, what is more to the point, exhilarating. » Frederick C. Crews, "Uplift," November 16, 1972 What makes an image telling, Roth accurately observed in his interview about The Breast, is not how much meaning we can associate to it, but the freedom it gives the writer to explore his obsessions. But has he explored his obsessions in this book, or simply referred to them obliquely before importing a deus ex machina to whisk them away? In a sense The Breast is a more discouraging work than the straightforwardly vicious Our Gang. Aspiring to make a noble moral statement, Roth quarantines his best insights into the way people are imprisoned by their impulses. What would Alex Portnoy have had to say about that? » William H. Gass, "The Sporting News," May 31, 1973* So The Great American Novel is not about popcorn, peanuts, and crackerjack, or how it feels to sit your ass sore in the hot stands, but how the play is broadcast and reported, how it is radioed, and therefore it is about what gives the game the little substance it has: its rituals, its hymns, chants, litanies, the endless columns of its figures, like army ants, the total quality of its coverage, the breathless, joky, alliterating headlines which announce the doings of its mythologized creatures—those denizens of the diamond—everything, then, that goes into its recreation in the language of America: a manly, righteous, patriotic, and heroic tongue. » Michael Wood, "Hooked," Jun 13, 1974 My Life as a Man is a novel about not being able to write any other novel than the one you turn out to have written. The house of fiction becomes a house of mirrors, and this, presumably, is Roth's problem as much as Tarnopol's, since he did write thisnovel, and not another one. Fair enough: the problem is the theme, the novel enacts the problem. But then such arguments tend to fence with one's doubts rather than make one entirely happy with the book. There remains a certain triviality there, a sense of the trap too eagerly embraced; an occasional sense of insufficient irony. » Al Alvarez, "Working in the Dark," April 11, 1985 What excites Roth's verbal life—and provokes his readers—is, he seems to suggest, the opportunity fiction provides to be everything he himself is not: raging, whining, destructive, permanently inflamed, unstoppable. Irony, detachment, and wisdom are given unfailingly to other people. Even Diana, Zuckerman's punchy twenty-year-old mistress who will try anything for a dare, sounds sane and bored and grown-up when Zuckerman is in the grip of his obsession. The truly convincing yet outlandish caricature in Roth's repertoire is of himself. » Gabrielle Annan, "Theme and Variations," May 31, 1990 Roth is an aggressive writer. More aggressive than the Dadaists, or Henry Miller, or the Angry Young Men in Britain in the Fifties, or the Beat generation: he goes for the audience in the spirit of Peter Handke, who called one of his plays Offending the Audience. Roth challenges the reader to walk out, then woos him back again with cleverness and charm, and even an occasional touch of cuteness. Still, Maria walks out, and so does the mistress in Deception. » Harold Bloom, "Operation Roth," April 22, 1993 At sixty, and with twenty books published, Roth in Operation Shylock confirms the gifts of comic invention and moral intelligence that he has brought to American prose fiction since 1959. A superb prose stylist, particularly skilled in dialogue, he now has developed the ability to absorb recalcitrant public materials into what earlier seemed personal obsessions. And though his context tends to remain stubbornly Jewish, he has developed fresh ways of opening out universal perspectives from Jewish dilemmas, whether they are American, Israeli, or European. The "Philip Roth" of Operation Shylock is very Jewish, and yet his misadventures could be those of any fictional character who has to battle for his identity against an impostor who has usurped it. That wrestling match, to win back one's own name, is a marvelous metaphor for Roth's struggle as a novelist, particularly in his later books, Zuckerman Bound, The Counterlife, and the quasi-tetralogy culminating in Operation Shylock, which form a coherent succession of works difficult to match in recent American writing. » Frank Kermode, "Howl," November 16, 1995 Checking through the old Roth paperbacks, one notices how many of them make the same bid for attention: "His most erotic novel since Portnoy's Complaint," or "his best since Portnoy's Complaint," or "his best and most erotic since Portnoy's Complaint." These claims are understandable, as is the assumption that Roth is likely to be at his best when most "erotic," but that word is not really adequate to the occasion. There's no shortage of erotic fiction; what distinguishes Roth's is its outrageousness. In a world where it is increasingly difficult to be "erotically" shocking, considerable feats of imagination are required to produce a charge of outrage adequate to his purposes. It is therefore not easy to understand why people complain and say things like "this time he's gone over the top" by being too outrageous about women, the Japanese, the British, his friends and acquaintances, and so forth. For if nobody feels outraged the whole strategy has failed. » Elizabeth Hardwick, "Paradise Lost," June 12, 1997 The talent of Philip Roth floats freely in this rampaging novel with a plot thick as starlings winging to a tree and then flying off again. It is meant perhaps as a sort of restitution offered in payment of the claim that if the author has not betrayed the Jews he has too often found them to be whacking clowns, or whacking-off clowns. He bleeds like the old progenitor he has named in the title. Since he is, as a contemporary writer, always quick to insert the latest item of the news into his running comments, perhaps we can imagine him as poor Richard Jewell, falsely accused in the bombing in Atlanta because, in police language, he fit the profile; and then at last found to be just himself, a nice fellow good to his mother. And yet, and yet, the impostor, the devil's advocate for the Diaspora has, with dazzling invention, composed not an ode for the hardy settlers of Israel, but an ode to the wandering Jew as a beggar and prince in Western culture, speaking and writing in all its languages. » Robert Stone, "Waiting for Lefty," November 5, 1998 Who would have thought, forty years ago, it would be Philip Roth, the gentrified bohemian, who would bring remembered lilacs out of that dead land for us, mixing memory and desire? But the fact is that, besides doing all the other marvelous things he does, Roth has managed to turn his bleak part of Jersey and its people into a kind of Jewish Yoknapatawpha County, a singularly vital microcosm with which to address the twists and turns of the American narrative. In his most recent work, he has turned his aging New Jerseyites into some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction. » David Lodge, "Sick with Desire," July 5, 2001 One might indeed have been forgiven for thinking that Sabbath's Theater(1995) was the final explosive discharge of the author's imaginative obsessions, sex and death—specifically, the affirmation of sexual experiment and transgression as an existential defiance of death, all the more authentic for being ultimately doomed to failure. Micky Sabbath, who boasts of having fitted in the rest of his life around fucking while most men do the reverse, was a kind of demonic Portnoy—amoral, shameless, and gross in his polymorphously perverse appetites, inconsolable at the death of the one woman who was capable of satisfying them, and startlingly explicit in chronicling them. Even Martin Amis admitted to being shocked. Surely, one thought, Roth could go no further. Surely this was the apocalyptic, pyrotechnic finale of his career, after which anything else could only be an anticlimax. How wrong we were. » J.M. Coetzee, "What Philip Knew," November 18, 2004 Just how imaginary, however, is the world recorded in Roth's book? A Lindbergh presidency may be imaginary, but the anti-Semitism of the real Lindbergh was not. And Lindbergh was not alone. He gave voice to a native anti-Semitism with a long prehistory in Catholic and Protestant Christianity, fostered in numbers of European immigrant communities, and drawing strength from the anti-black bigotry with which it was, by the irrational logic of racism, entwined (of all the "historic undesirables" in America, says Roth, the blacks and the Jews could not be more unalike). A volatile and fickle voting public captivated by surface rather than substance—Tocqueville foresaw the danger long ago—might in 1940 as easily have gone for the aviator hero with the simple message as for the incumbent with the proven record. In this sense, the fantasy of a Lindbergh presidency is only a concretization, a realization for poetic ends, of a certain potential in American political life. » Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Way Out," June 8, 2006 And indeed, just as his allegedly ordinary hero can't help being a vividly Rothian type, it's hard not to see, creeping into Roth's annihilating pessimism here, an irrepressible sentimentality. What, after all, does it mean to commune with the bones of one's parents in a cemetery—a communication that involves not only the hero talking to them, but them talking back—if not that we like to believe in transcendence, believe that there is, in fact, something more to our experience than just the concrete, just the bones, just the bits of earth? If the scene is moving, I suspect it's because of the nakedness with which it exposes a regressive fantasy that seems to belong to the author as much as to his main character: once again, Roth reserves his best writing and profoundest emotion for the character's relationship with his parents. This reversion to the emotional comforts of childhood seems to me to be connected to the deep nostalgia that characterizes this latest period of Roth's writing (it's at the core of The Plot Against America, too); it also seems to be something that Roth himself is aware of, and which, in a moment that is moving in ways he might not have intended, his everyman articulates. "But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood?" he muses during a sentimental trip to the New Jersey shore town he visited as a boy. It's a question some readers may be tempted to ask, too. » Charles Simic, "The Nicest Boy in the World," October 9, 2008 His powerful new novel, Indignation, seethes with outrage. It begins with a conflict between a father and son in a setting and circumstances long familiar from his other novels going back to Portnoy's Complaint, but then turns into something unexpected: a deft, gripping, and deeply moving narrative about the short life of a decent, hardworking, and obedient boy who pays with his life for a brief episode of disobedience that leaves him unprotected and alone to face forces beyond his control in a world in which old men play with the lives of the young as if they were toy soldiers. Roth's novels abound in comic moments, and so does Indignation. His compassion for his characters doesn't prevent him from noting their foolishness. » Elaine Blair, "Axler's Theater," December 3, 2009 Among all the twinned characters in Roth's body of work there is no starker contrast than that between Axler and Roth's other would-be suicide (and performer), Mickey Sabbath of Sabbath's Theater (1995). Sabbath's life too has turned to shit, but his howl of grief is driven—for hundreds of pages—by a great vital force that seems inextinguishable. With The Humbling, the scope of the novel has shrunk to accommodate a subject who is stunned nearly silent by his loss. Axler is an ordinary man and cannot turn his own grief into scathing and hilarious soliloquy, and therefore into art. And the art that Axler knows so well offers no consolation. » *Philip Roth, "Roth's Novel," July 19, 1973 In response to:The Sporting News from the May 31, 1973 issue To the Editors: Please advise Professor Gass that I am too old to be grown up. Philip Roth The post Roth in the Review appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Escape from the Nazis: Anna Seghers’s Suspenseful Classic Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT   Distant view with a mossy branch and a winding road, by Hercules Segers, 1610–1638 My first encounter with Anna Seghers's novel Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross) was brief and painful. At some point in the mid-1990s—I must have been in tenth or eleventh grade—our German teacher announced that in the months to come we would be reading excerpts from an antiwar novel written in the days of the Third Reich. The announcement was greeted by the students with incredulity and protest. What? Such a big fat book! On top of that, the antiquated language and a plot that refused to get under way, quite aside from the fact that no one could keep track of all the characters. I have a vague recollection that the story began with a description of the Rhine landscape I found hard to follow, and that the main character was constantly on the run. There was a feeling of general relief among the students when we were finally able to put the book aside. In all honesty and to my shame, I should add that I don't have a single pleasant memory of any of the other books I read in school, from Goethe's Faust to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum to Paul Auster's Moon Palace. For almost a quarter of a century, that was my only acquaintance with Anna Seghers—until I recently looked up something in an entirely different context and got snagged on a still from a movie. It showed Spencer Tracy in a Hollywood film called The Seventh Cross. I was amazed: that unreadable old tome had been made into a movie! And with a star actor? My curiosity aroused, I read The Seventh Cross for a second time, and I devoured it in two days. After that, I understood why it was an international bestseller. It had been a hit almost immediately after it was published in 1942—simultaneously in German by a publisher in exile in Mexico and in an English translation in the United States. Within six months, it had sold 421,000 copies in the US. To date, it has been translated into more than thirty languages. Then, in 1944, the Austria-born director Fred Zinnemann, who would make the western classic High Noon a few years later, filmed The Seventh Cross for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Besides Tracy, the cast included Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, and Helene Weigel (in her only film role during her American exile). After the war, the novel was published to acclaim in Seghers's native Germany. In 1947, in Darmstadt, Seghers was awarded the most important prize for German-language literature, the Georg Büchner Prize. The same year, she returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and joined the Communist party, the newly formed SED, in the zone occupied by the Soviets. She later moved to East Berlin and remained a citizen of the GDR until her death in 1983. In 1961, when Seghers, who had by then become the president of the Writers' League of the GDR, did not condemn the building of the Berlin Wall, Günter Grass wrote her a letter appealing to her conscience, emphasizing the extraordinary position she held for him as well as his colleagues in the Federal Republic (West Germany): "It was you who taught my generation and anyone who had an ear to listen after that not-to-be-forgotten war to distinguish right from wrong. Your book, The Seventh Cross shaped me; it sharpened my vision, and allowed me to recognize the Globkes and Schröders under any guise, whether they're called humanists, Christians, or activists." Later, after the Willy Brandt era, when West Germans had reconciled themselves to the existence of the GDR, The Seventh Cross assumed the position in the West that it had long held in the East: it became a book assigned in the schools. Indeed, the novel was rediscovered by the members of the '68 generation who were protesting their parents' deep silence about the Third Reich. And the novel continues to be listed in school curricula. It seems to have accomplished the leap into the twenty-first century. * Anna Seghers was born Netty Reiling, in Mainz in 1900, the only child of an upper-class Jewish family. Her father was a dealer in art and antiquities. Seghers always felt close ties to her native city. Decades later, at the age of seventy-five, she wrote in a telegram to the citizens of Mainz, "In the city where I spent my childhood, I received what Goethe called the original impression a person absorbs of a part of reality, whether it is a river, a forest, the stars, or the people."  Anna Seghers, Paris, circa 1940 She published her first story in 1924, using the pen name Seghers. She married Laszlo Radvanyi, and the couple had two children, Peter (Pierre) and Ruth. Radvanyi was a Marxist, and Seghers herself became increasingly involved in the German Communist Party (KPD); around the same time, on playwright and novelist Hans Henny Jahnn's recommendation, she was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize for literature. A promising future seemed to lie ahead. Then, in 1933, as in a stage drama, came the moment of peripeteia, a sudden, total reversal. In the year Hitler came to power Seghers, doubly endangered as both a Jew and a Communist, fled with her family to Switzerland. It was the beginning of a long odyssey. She lived in Paris—separated from her husband, who had been interned in a French concentration camp—until France was occupied by the Nazis in 1940. Alone with their two children, she managed first to organize his release and then orchestrate the family's escape by ship via New York to Mexico City, where she would stay until 1947. It was in Mexico that she learned of her mother's fate: murdered in 1942 in the Lublin concentration camp in Poland. The message from the Jewish congregation of Mainz was matter-of-fact: "Mrs. Hedwig Reiling arrived in Piaski near Lublin in the month of March, 1942, and died there." Between May of 1938 and late in the summer of 1939, with world war imminent and in precarious circumstances, Anna Seghers wrote "a little novel," as she called it at first, or as an early working title reads, the "7 Crosses Novel." According to her telling, there were originally just four copies of the manuscript, all of which she mailed off in hopes of being published. The first copy was destroyed during an air raid; a friend lost another while fleeing the Nazis; the third fell into the hands of the Gestapo; only the fourth copy, addressed to her German publisher in the United States, arrived at its destination. However, she herself hadn't kept a copy of her manuscript because the danger of its being found in her apartment by a police raid—a constant fear of hers, even in neutral Mexico—was too great. The Boston publishing house Little, Brown accepted the novel for publication, but at first, Seghers, at that time the sole support of her family, saw no money from it. The modest author's advance was withheld in order to pay for the translation. In 1942, the publisher F.C. Weiskopf, by then a friend, wrote her a letter with the happy news that her novel had been selected by the Book of the Month Club: "Be glad, my people, Manna has rained down from heaven." But it wasn't until the following year that Seghers started receiving a monthly royalty payment of $500. The breakthrough came with the Hollywood filming. Seghers was paid the fabulous sum of $75,000 in four installments, the last in 1946. This, at least, brought to an end the time of financial distress. * The Seventh Cross is an example of something rare in the literature of the German language: a brilliantly written novel that keeps alive one of the most important chapters of German history—though I can still see why as a student I thought the book was old-fashioned. The grammar is complex, the language at times curious, its female characters oddly passive. So what gives The Seventh Cross its literary quality? First, something quite simple: Anna Seghers, it turns out, was a veritable master of suspense. It's obvious why Hollywood grabbed this book—not just for the popular prison-escape motif that makes for breathtaking action, but also because of the cliffhanging delays in the narrative sequence. The central plot, Heisler's escape, is not told straight through; instead, it is constantly interrupted by jumps in the story to one of the more than thirty other characters in the novel. As for Heisler, he is what used to be called "a real man." Rough and inscrutable, even ruthless, he is a man who left his wife and baby for another woman; even amid terror and horror, he is a womanizer who is even allowed, at the end, a flirtation with a waitress.  A panel from the graphic version of The Seventh Cross, illustrated by William Sharp, 1942; click to enlarge The book also takes a filmic approach to form. The transition from the last sentence of the prologue, "Where might he be by now?," to the beginning of the first chapter and the description of Franz and his cheerful bicycle ride suggests a classic cross-fade. At the same time, The Seventh Cross is characterized throughout by very strong visual symbolism—as we see in the use of Christian iconography, beginning with the cross in the title. The motif of the seven crosses is not Seghers's invention, but rather a particularly perfidious punishment that was actually meted out in 1936 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after an escape (fatally unsuccessful), an incident the author had no doubt heard of. Other Christian references include the allusion to the dragon slayer in the main character's first name; the first night of his flight spent in the Mainz Cathedral; and, not least, the number seven, which turns up not only in the cross of the title, but also in the basic seven-chapter structure of the novel, covering a week, from Monday to Sunday. So, in a certain way, it is also a creation story, at the end of which, although not everything turns out all right, a few things do somehow work out, at least for the protagonist George Heisler. Such Christian images catch the eye, though their use in the novel is largely unrelated to their original significance. The Mainz Cathedral may have been constructed from the "inexhaustible strength of the people," but it is depicted, alongside descriptions of the "almost excessively proud" bishops and kings, as a "refuge in which one can freeze to death." The seventh cross remains empty; George Heisler is no messiah, but rather an ordinary human being with all his weaknesses who won't let himself be consoled with some abstract future; he is about the here and now. He intends to go to Spain to fight against the fascists. In contrast to the writing of her advocate Hans Henny Jahnn or of Thomas Mann, Seghers's sentences are artfully simple. Everything serves to create clarity, and describe action, such as Belloni's flight across the rooftops. The vivid descriptions of nature lead me to surmise that the young Netty Reiling intentionally chose the name of an artist as her pen name—that of the Dutch painter Hercules Segers (1590–1638), who was known above all for his realistic landscapes and who, to some degree, influenced Rembrandt. Moreover, Seghers's 1924 doctoral dissertation was titled "Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts" ("The Jew and Jewishness in the Work of Rembrandt"). There, too, she was interested in the depiction of unadulterated reality, for, after all, it was the unassimilated Eastern Jews in all their poverty who served as Rembrandt's models rather than members of the "brilliant Sephardic congregation," the official Jewish community. Rembrandt was much more concerned with "rendering real Jewish individuals from his knowledge of their essential nature and their appearance." Similarly, Seghers worked "from reality," and with an effect that was admired by her colleagues. But how was it possible for her, living in exile, to present such an intense and accurate picture of contemporary Germany? For one thing, there was the previously mentioned "original impression," that Seghers absorbed in her childhood of the landscape in the environs of Mainz. For another, she did careful, thorough research. Seghers spoke with fellow refugees and read the voluminous KPD-inspired Braunbuch über Reichstagsbrand und Hitlerterror (Brown Book About the Reichstag Fire and the Hitler Terror) and a report by the Munich Communist Party delegate Hans Beimler dealing with his imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp, from which he escaped to fight, like George Heisler, in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was killed in 1936. But another ingredient is added to this feast of detailed description and the everyday ordinary, culminating in the character of Ernst the shepherd who stands on his hill literally above everything. It is something that points to a metaphysical (not to be confused with religious) dimension behind the novel's tangibly concrete aspect. It is the voice of the omniscient narrator. It is the invisible and omnipresent intellect hovering over and around the characters and seeing to it that what happens does not remain futile and meaningless, even at moments of the greatest brutality. The voice knows about the "eiserner Bestand," the "emergency reserves" that people find within themselves, or as it says in the remarkable concluding statement of the nameless collective voice: "We all felt how profoundly and how terribly outside forces can reach into a human being, to his innermost self. But we also sensed that in that innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable." It may be that, in the aftermath of 1945, when the totality of the horrors of National Socialist rule became known, horrors that no doubt exceeded even Anna Seghers's powers of imagination at the time, such a passage sounds almost too benign. Yet it is precisely these authorial passages that touched me most deeply on rereading the book. Today, the gruesome acts of the camp commandant would be presented more graphically; the details of Heisler's flirtation at the end would probably be stretched out; above all, though, a modern author would strike an ironic note, perhaps a cynical one, since now after two world wars we know what a hopeless case our species is. But considering that Anna Seghers, in a moment of extreme existential danger, created, in spite of it all, this literary credo to humanism, this beacon that inspires us, in an ambiguous, crepuscular world full of inhuman barbarity, with the courage never to give up, to retain our humanity no matter what the cost—for that we should and must be grateful. Adapted from the afterword to Anna Seghers's The Seventh Cross, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, which is published by New York Review Books. The post Escape from the Nazis: Anna Seghers's Suspenseful Classic appeared first on Guaripete. |
| This Flesh Container We Call a Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel Posted: 24 May 2018 07:05 AM PDT 
Rita Bullwinkel's debut story collection, Belly Up, is a kind of miracle. Imbued with darkness and absurdity, the stories in Belly Up announce Bullwinkel as a writer of deep intelligence and bold style. A snake thinks of himself as a pear in a tree, two high school girls fantasize about turning into plants, and a woman becomes slowly unhinged after witnessing a car accident. Bullwinkel is a gifted technician of words and moods. The quotidian is turned on its side. The economy is so bad that instead of buying a bra, a mother pays a man off Craigslist to hold up her daughter's breasts. A missing thumb leads to a suicide. Desire for knowledge leads to misery. The dead come back. The scale of what is possible in Bullwinkel's worlds is overwhelming; upon finishing this book, I was deeply moved. A couple years ago, when Bullwinkel and I first met, she told me that she had walked from where she was staying in East Los Angeles to our meeting place in Chinatown. In Los Angeles, there are no direct walking routes; there are no grids or city blocks. There are steep hills and chickens in backyards and sidewalks in disrepair. She said the walk took her over an hour. And yet, I was surprised to find, she wasn't sweating. A year later, I spent a few nights in her apartment above a hardware store in San Francisco where she lives with her partner, a musician. I remember art on the walls, various musical instruments, and plants with bright green waxy leaves spilling over the edge of a kitchen table. Bullwinkel is very good at keeping things alive. Her home, like her writing, gives one the impression of a peculiar and generous mind. This interview was conducted through email. INTERVIEWER When you were young, were you focused on writing, or were you interested in other arts? BULLWINKEL I didn't start writing until I was in college. Before college I had never read any books of fiction that I liked, so I thought I didn't like fiction. I used to make all of my own clothes. I also painted and made furniture out of broken surfboards and other trash I found in dumpsters. I was not very good at any of these things, but I knew I liked making things. The thing I was best at as a child was sports. I was recruited to play water polo in college, which I did all four years. I now view that as a completely insane and irrational thing to have done. I have almost no connection anymore to that part of my identity. INTERVIEWER I think there's definitely a connection between competitive sports and writing. Both require motivation and rigor if one wants to improve. Would you consider yourself to be ambitious? What motivates you to keep writing? BULLWINKEL I suppose the leap from being a reader to a writer is an opaque one. They are intertwined for me. I only became a writer when I became an obsessive reader. I'm not sure why I have a desire to write things, but it makes me feel more human than any other thing has thus far in my life. It makes me feel like I've done something worthy of the earth hours I've spent doing it. Even if no one else ever reads it, if no one ever wants to publish it, I still feel this way. I don't think I'm ambitious as much as extremely desirous. Once I've decided I desire something it is practically impossible to get me to think about anything else, or to get me to change my mind. I am sure this has something to do with why I was a proficient athlete. Water polo is a brutal sport, and one that requires a great deal of beating up on. My nose and all of my fingers have been broken. One time when I was sixteen I vomited for two days straight because of a full force kick I took directly to the stomach (I later learned I was probably experiencing some type of internal bleeding). It is also notable that literally no one cares about women's water polo. I co-captained a top 20 NCAA Division I team, and we played games for ghost towns. Nobody ever cared if we won or lost. Nobody even knows how the sport is played. May I ask, Patty, what motivates you to write fiction? Why do you make these beautiful books and stories that I read out loud to myself and that I so adore? INTERVIEWER I've always read fiction. I didn't start to write until I was in my late twenties because I ran out of things to do. I tried being a musician, a barista, a teacher, a librarian. For a few months, I pursued a masters in social work, then gave up because there was too much busy work. A few years ago, I decided to write a book because I thought a lot of contemporary fiction wasn't that good, so I might as well try. I know that sounds arrogant, and I was. I don't feel that way anymore. Putting a book out into the world has been humbling. Any aversion I had towards contemporary fiction has died down. I'm even dating a contemporary writer. BULLWINKEL I love the idea that the ultimate embrace of contemporary literature is dating a contemporary writer. I haven't gotten there yet, but maybe soon! INTERVIEWER In Belly Up, there's often a sense of absurdity in relation to every day life. For example, in "Decor," a woman working at a high-end furniture showroom becomes obsessed with a man in prison who writes to her requesting fabric samples. Where did this story start? BULLWINKEL I've worked many retail jobs where I was meant to be a decorative object whose sole purpose was to enhance the consumer's purchasing experience. Occasionally I would fold some clothes. But mostly it was just about being a young warm body at the ready to attend to someone's every need. I think the labor one has to offer the world can be an absurd thing to consider. We have these bodies that can perform tasks and the completion of said tasks can earn us money. We also have to live and think in these bodies, both privately and publicly. The range of things one can do with a body for money is staggering! Surely that, in itself, is absurd? I do find the experience of having a body, especially a female body, to be bizarre. INTERVIEWER "Black Tongue" begins with a young girl sticking her tongue into an electrical outlet. Later on, she says, "There are good things about having the impulse to throw yourself off the side of a cliff." How do you understand this line as it connects to the line that appears later in the story: "There is only so much of your body you can ruin"? BULLWINKEL I think there are good and bad things about having the ability to change oneself completely. It's a dangerous thing to do, but it's also a survival tool. I am self aware enough to know I have a type of flight syndrome. My solution to most difficult situations is to leave. This is true for all aspects of my life, except for my love life. I'm always threatening to leave my partner of ten years, but now the threat feels a little tired. He's my favorite human, so now my fantasies of flight usually involve dragging him along. INTERVIEWER Would you say you're an intuitive writer? Or do you work from an outline? As you're writing, do you know what will happen next? BULLWINKEL I don't work from outlines, though I wish I could. Sometimes I make them, and then immediately deviate from their course, so that the outline just becomes this relic of a thing that never could, or never will, be. I do try to wield the momentum of writing when I can grab it, and write in long, drawn out bouts. There is energy there, when that happens. INTERVIEWER Which story took the longest to write, and why? BULLWINKEL "Decor" took me the longest to write. It used to be much shorter, and it had a different ending. I think it required more time because Ursula, the protagonist of the story, is so angry and delirious with envy that she's a hard person to sit in for too long. She feels awful. It was difficult for me to sit in that awfulness for long periods of time. INTERVIEWER Many of your stories have a cool temperature. And by that I mean that you approach things from an odd and absurd angle. The reader doesn't have much access to your characters' emotions, as this isn't how they understand the world. I would compare the tone of Belly Up to the coolness of Fleur Jaeggy or Thomas Bernhard. I find this kind of writing incredibly brave and moving, because it trusts that the reader will invest in the world, without dangling in front of them some kind of emotional pay off. I'm curious if you think about a reader as you write. BULLWINKEL I do think about the reader. I want my writing to be compelling for them. It is so much to ask of someone, to ask a person to sit with your fiction, and so I am hyper aware of the need for brevity and momentum. In life and fiction, I have found that sentimentality is something that is not to be trusted. It's not an honest feeling, and so I don't find it moving. It's a screen feeling, as in, people feel sentimental about something when they are unable to look at the truth of it. I find so much of life to be about making nice with people. We must smile and we must get along. And so, I find it deeply refreshing, when reading, to sit in voices that have stripped all of the superficiality away and tell things plainly. This plainness seems the most honest to me. INTERVIEWER Do you remember reading the first book that made you want to write? BULLWINKEL The first book I read that made me want to write fiction was Jesse Ball's The Way Through Doors. It was assigned to me in a Fiction 1 class taught by the brilliant writer Joanna Howard. Other books on her syllabus included Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, Lydia Davis's Almost No Memory, Virginia Wolf's To The Lighthouse and Ben Marcus's magnificently curated Anchor Book of American Short Stories. I loved everything Joanna assigned, and, over the summer, read everything each of the authors had ever written. INTERVIEWER What has changed in your process since college? BULLWINKEL My mind feels like a bigger space to play in. I used to only write very short stories, but now I write both very long and very short fiction. I feel I can hold a whole book in me. I wasn't able to do that ten years ago when I first began. INTERVIEWER You've worked with Diane Williams on NOON, an innovative fiction literary journal. Diane is an amazing writer, a genius. Her use of language is peculiar and surprising. I read one of her stories aloud to my girlfriend. She said listening to it made her very uncomfortable. Can you tell me a little about what it was like to work with her? BULLWINKEL Diane is, indeed, a genius. Her story "All American," which is a masterpiece, was in the Ben Marcus anthology that Joanna Howard first assigned to me, so Diane was one of the writers I read the summer after my sophomore year. When I moved to New York, I wanted desperately to find a way to work for her. I acquired her email address, through a friend of a friend of a friend, and cold emailed her, and asked if there was anything I could do in any capacity to work for NOON. Diane is an intensely magnetic person to work for. She treats each sentence, each story, like it is the most important thing that anyone ever has, or ever will do. It was intoxicating to be around a person who took sentences so seriously. Perhaps the most bizarre, and most brilliant, thing about working for her was that she made the other editors and I read the stories we were seriously considering out loud to her. We would sit in her living room on beautiful sofas surrounded by her beautiful art and read stories to each other for hours. Diane would often edit out loud. She would ask us to make changes verbally, and then read the stories out loud, with the changes, back to her. I loved working for her. INTERVIEWER The opening story, "Harp", has a smooth, placid surface. People are polite to each other and cook nice meals. They drive in cars and go to concerts. But there's anger coursing underneath the surface as the narrator becomes more and more unhinged. BULLWINKEL This feeling of impending disaster is a feeling I experience frequently. I think this is because I, like everyone else alive, am constantly having to reckon with all of the things I know are wrong with this world. It's extremely difficult to carry those wrongs, acknowledged and ignored, around with me while I go get a cup of tea. I assume that many people feel this way. There is a way one feels, and a way one must act outwardly. It's a difficult but universal performance. INTERVIEWER One of my favorite stories in the collection is "Arms Overhead." It has this curdled reality that reminds me of Jane Bowles. The protagonists in the story, Mary and Ainsley, are precocious girls entering high school who fantasize about being plants. Later on, they become obsessed with a "man in Japan who wanted to eat both himself and other people." Can you talk about how you see the grotesque in your stories? BULLWINKEL I am interested in the grotesque because the most repulsive things are often sheet masks for societal poisons. The grotesque often represents the thing in front the real thing. It's a lens with which to get the reader's attention. I think that for grotesque things to be written about successfully they must be turned on their head in some way. One has to make the reader want to get a little a closer, and reconsider whether or not the thing they are seeing is grotesque after all. INTERVIEWER Something I've been thinking about lately is what it means to be mortal and to be trapped in this flesh container we call a body. I suppose I'm thinking about this because my cat is very ill, and I love her. But she's going to die one day. Many of your characters grapple with their own physical being, their physicality, and the ensuing trauma and grief that goes along with that. So I'll end with, what does it mean to you to have a body? BULLWINKEL Bodies are such strange vessels to be contained in. I fantasize about growing old and having mine dramatically change. What will my body be like when I am ninety? Will I still be able to see myself inside of me? When I was a small child, I was primarily taken care of by my great grandparents who were eighty-three and eighty-eight at the time. My great grandmother spoke to me primarily in Italian, a skill which has, very sadly, completely left me. We went on long walks together every day. She spent hours cooking for me. My favorite thing she fed me was carrots and sweet onions sautéed in butter. My great grandfather only had nine fingers. He lost the middle finger on his left hand lassoing a bull. He used to own a dairy. They lived in the same neighborhood I now live in, only a bit further north on California St. I spent so much time with them. I loved them. Even though I was very young, just three or four, I remember being acutely aware of the differences between our human forms. They were the same in some ways. The four us, my great grandparents, my sister, and I walked places slowly. I had such a small body. Patty Yumi Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney's). She is the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. The post This Flesh Container We Call a Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth? Posted: 24 May 2018 07:04 AM PDT 
I first discovered Philip Roth at age fifteen. My parents, bless them, placed Goodbye, Columbus in my hands. Having grown up in the suburbs of Detroit—the rock-ribbed WASP enclave of Grosse Pointe—I found him exotic, thrilling. His audacity staggered me. His books were smart and dirty, and until then, I didn't know you could be both. In college, in grad school in New York, I kept reading him—going back into his early works and moving forward with the latest ones. I taught American Pastoral to undergraduates, standing in front of a classroom in upstate New York and trying to explain why this book was so important from an intellectual perspective when really all I wanted to talk about was how moved I was by it, how it brought me to tears. I'd have Roth jags, where I'd read or reread several of his books in a row, like that one heady summer, around age thirty, when I read the first four Zuckerman novels in sweaty sequence, the paperback print smearing in my hands on the subway. In recent years, I read his slimmer novels in near tandem with my dad, and we swapped emails about them, savored them. And I'll never forget the experience of reading Nemesis, Roth's exquisite and haunting final novel, and reading it so slowly, with such care, because there already was this sense, confirmed a year or two later, that Roth might not reward us with another. Inevitably, I'm no longer that well-behaved and wide-eyed Midwestern girl who tore through Goodbye, Columbus. In particular, my views on gender and power have evolved—from a deep, satisfying dive into feminist theory in graduate school through my more recent ideas about the canon and about consent and privilege—but I've always returned to Roth. And I've always been rewarded. Over the years, I've gotten into many arguments about Roth with friends and acquaintances and students charging Roth with misogyny. Those arguments were interesting and valuable, but they never lessened my love for the books or my love of Roth. In fact, I've come to think few writers could dissect misogyny as ably as Roth could. He is relentless and ruthless in his excavation of characters like David Kepesh, consumed by their fantastical and oppressive conceptions of women. And Roth gives us credit for knowing the difference between a character's misogyny and an author's, and between blind or unconscious misogyny and a reckoning with it. Would I wish for more full-bodied female characters in Roth? Surely. But I greatly value the writer in him who explores the whole frightening cultural apparatus that renders women, in the eyes of so many of his male characters, as femme fatales or ciphers. Ultimately, Roth's are books to wrestle with, occasionally to do battle. The books do battle with themselves. They're comfortable with contradiction and resistant to certitude. Each time I return to a favorite—The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, Zuckerman Unbound—I find it changed, as if it were not a book but a shifting, glorious, complicated organism always slipping from my grasp. This morning, waking to the news of Roth's passing, I found myself trying to shake it off like a bad dream. Hours later, I'm taken aback at the depths of my sadness. I realize now I always believed he'd give us more. That we'd hear that wry, cunning, thoughtful voice of his again. That we'd at least get—if not a novel—the chance to see him wrap his formidable brain around changes in the culture, as we did after the 2016 election. I wasn't prepared, you see. I wasn't prepared at all for the loss. His books are still so vital that they seem to spring from my shelf even now. They seem to vault into my hands with life and feeling and heart and rage. Will there ever be another writer like Philip Roth? A writer with such intellectual heft, emotional acuity, and artistic bravery? Probably. But today it doesn't feel so. Today the loss feels immeasurable and ours. Megan Abbott is the author, most recently, of You Will Know Me. The post Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth? appeared first on Guaripete. |
| Fragile but Fixable: The Collages of Deborah Roberts Posted: 24 May 2018 07:04 AM PDT  "Fragile but Fixable," Deborah Roberts's Los Angeles solo debut, is on view at Luis De Jesus through June 16. In her collages, Roberts takes found images of black women and girls and alters them with pigment and paint, manipulating the optics of advertisement to create new fictions of beauty. "My art practice," she writes, in her artist statement, "takes on social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in my work; I create a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty in the form of the ideal woman."  Deborah Roberts, Filling in the gaps, 2018, collage on paper. All images courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.  Girl in Charge, 2018, collage on paper.  Golden Smile, 2018, collage, gold pigment, and paint on paper.  Here before, here after, 2018, collage and paint on paper.  Human nature, 2018, collage, gold pigment, and paint on paper.  Political Lamb #3, 2018, collage on paper.  Small waves, 2018, collage on paper.  The Double Dare, 2018, collage on paper.  The Redress, 2018, collage and gold pigment on paper.  The step back, 2018, collage on paper. The post Fragile but Fixable: The Collages of Deborah Roberts appeared first on Guaripete. |
Last time in Unlocking Library Coolness, I introduced you to 
It's Wednesday Links time! We're all back from RT in Reno. I am still very jet-lagged, though my cat is appreciating all the naps we've been taking. For those of you who made it out to Reno, we hope you had a lovely time and it was really great meeting so many of you.
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