Category: 2017

April 10, 2017

Predicting the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Bradley Sides for Electric Lit

Bradley Sides takes a look at this year’s contenders for American literature’s most prestigious prize

Considering how unpredictable the past few months have been, it seems almost unreasonable to even attempt to predict the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But, at a time when books — and all of our arts, really — are facing such scrutiny, shouldn’t we take every chance we get to talk about and celebrate those things that inspire us and, in so many ways, enrich our lives? I certainly think so.

At a time when books — and all of our arts, really — are facing such scrutiny, shouldn’t we take every chance we get to talk about and celebrate those things that inspire us and enrich our lives?

The Pulitzer Prize, which honors the year’s best fiction by an American writer that deals with some aspect of American life, is the Oscar of the literary world. It’s the rare literary occurrence that garners news attention; it’s the book award that results in real sells. Some Pulitzer winners are household names. William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Junot Diaz are all past winners. But, just like with the Oscars, there are occasional surprises that cause shock and delight. For example, few people (seriously, “few” is extremely generous) predicted in 2010 that Paul Harding would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Tinkers. It’s commonly known that Tinkers, published by the small Bellevue Literary Press, sold only around 40 copies the week before it won the Pulitzer. In the week following the announcement, Harding’s novel sold over one thousand copies. For every Tinkers-level surprise, there are also some decisions that aren’t so great. In 2012, the Pulitzer jury nominated David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, but the Pulitzer board couldn’t agree on a winner. So, we were left with nothing. Talk about a bummer.

I don’t think this year will be like 2012. There’s too much at stake. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction seems especially crucial in 2017. Every novel and short story collection that I read felt important, and even more that that, these works of fiction felt urgent. Reading fiction teaches us empathy in ways that nothing else can, and, my friends, we NEED empathy now more than ever.

Reading fiction teaches us empathy in ways that nothing else can, and, my friends, we NEED empathy now more than ever.

In looking over some of the hundreds of worthy works that could be nominated, I’m amazed at the quality of work writers gave us over the past year. There were meticulously-constructed debuts, and there were epic tomes by some of today’s most established and respected authors. Comedies and speculative works received notice alongside family dramas and redemption tales. Most importantly, diversity came to the forefront of the conversation. It’s certainly true that we have a long way to go, but writers in 2016 told stories that couldn’t have been told before. These voices were simultaneously brave and bold. We can only hope that future Pulitzer contenders will enlighten us and inspire us just the same.

(…)

April 3, 2017

From Im Stein to Bricks and Mortar

Katy Derbyshire on translating Clemens Meyer

Translating a book title is rarely an easy feat. Think of Die Verwandlung, rendered as either Metamorphosis or The Metamorphosis – do we need that definite article or not? The first two translations into German of Crime and Punishment were entitled Raskolnikow, followed by many called Schuld und Sühne (meaning something like “guilt and atonement”), then in the 1920s a couple of Verbrechen und Strafe (“crime and punishment”), then a spate of either Raskolnikow or Schuld und Sühne or variations on the two, and back to Verbrechen und Strafe in Svetlana Geier’s most recent iteration from 1994. The shorter and more meaningful a statement, the more difficult it can become to capture it faithfully in another language. And there are few short statements that hold more meaning than book titles.

Clemens Meyer’s Im Stein is one of those conundrums. It’s a long novel, 654 pages in English, with a short title. Two words, two strong beats, not a common phrase but immediately clear. The literal meaning is easily rendered: in the stone. But to my mind, the obvious choices rock and stone are tainted words in English, hackneyed and dulled by overuse in popular culture:

The Sword in the Stone

The Rolling Stones

Rolling Stone

Like a Rolling Stone

Stone cold sober

Sticks and stones

A stone’s throw

Between a rock and a hard place

Rock ‘n’ roll

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

Rock around the Clock

Punk rock

Dad rock

Brighton Rock

Crocodile Rock

Jingle Bell Rock

And so on, very possibly ad infinitum.

I knew I didn’t want either of those words to anchor my translation, to drag it down from vaguely mystical to banal. But what to do? The novel plays on different kinds of stone – the bedrock of the city in which it’s set, gemstones, brick walls – all of which can be called “stein” in German, at least in the elastic way that Meyer uses language. For a while, the working title was Hearts Like Diamonds, a phrase used frequently in the book to sum up women working in prostitution. I liked that it brought those women into sharp focus, but it had the distinct disadvantage of sounding like a romance novel. Which the book is not, by a long shot.

One of the less literal meanings with which Meyer imbues the word Stein is that of real estate. If the novel has a main character other than the city itself and the rock being drilled into beneath it, then it’s AK, a football hooligan turned property magnate who lets apartments to prostitutes. It’s his move into “bricks and mortar” that takes him from providing security services for the sex trade – muscle – to providing shelter and infrastructure – stone, if you like. And that was the mental leap I needed. Once I hit on it, I went back through the translation to sow seeds for my title, adding flourishes to the prose where I felt it could take it. This is the kind of writing that can take it, so we now have sentences like this:

The music echoes across the bricks and mortar, through the rock and stones.

Or like this:

And if you think back to those years between time and stream, between bricks and mortar, between rock and hard place, there’s no way back and that’s a good thing too, even though things are hotting up again now; there weren’t any apartments or luxury girls back then, or as good as none.

Or like this:

The markets and marketplaces are becoming more and more linked, steel and concrete town halls, the meat markets expanding, the bricks and mortar, sticks and stones, the rock growing, in a red-lit circle where everything’s linked, the rubbish truck, the fat woman, the Coke, the Viagras, the blockers, uppers and downers, lost cats, the right to sexual self-determination, scraps of memory like old police badges, the Angels on their motorbikes, peat mosses, flyovers, sixty-six municipal brothels in 1865, trade chronicles, he burrows in the old files, real estate on silver strings leading all the way to Italy, and the fall of the real-estate boss Silvio Lübbke, three bullets, boom, boom, Dead Peepers Alley, houses for pocket money, clues, clues, the country air so clean and pure, soon they’ll be building here but we’ll stop the diggers, the question is, who brings three bodies out to this mire, this swamped puddle, where everyone knows they won’t decompose, when you can dig holes in the sandy ground of the heath or drive out to forest lakes like the ‘Blue Eye’, and there must be anglers there who discover the remotest of lakes, the woods arching around the north-eastern belt of the suburbs and incorporated villages to the south, all of it flat as a pancake.

Clemens himself still isn’t keen because there are other books with the same title, so this piece is partly a defence of my choice. But I stand by it, for several reasons. Firstly, the stone is still there under the surface, even though it’s now clearly manmade, one meaning standing in for all the others. The phrase is something I can imagine all of the book’s characters using, something earthy and real. More important though is the sound: it still has two beats, Bricks and Mortar. Still short and sharp – a trochaic rhythm, I’m told. And when I pronounce my title – and it feels like my title, because I had to fight for it a little bit – it comes out in my accent, which is from London, and I hear a secret echo of rhyming slang concealing one woman, at least. There’s a daughter gone missing in the book, too, and so my title is for her.

March 28, 2017

Out of the Iron Closet

Masha Udensiva-Brenner for Guernica

In search of acceptance, a gay Russian man seeks asylum in the United States:

March, 2015

Sitting in his seat, the plane scheduled to leave JFK for Moscow, Lev noticed how nonchalantly the passengers browsed their computers and iPads, their papers, and magazines. The doors had just closed, the flight attendants were giving their safety speeches, and Lev felt himself falling into a wild panic. It was March 2015, and he had been in the US seeking asylum for nearly two years when he felt he couldn’t take it anymore—his lover, the only person he had become close to during his time in New York, had just left the US for good; he desperately missed his friends and family; and his asylum proceedings were plodding along with no end in sight. He decided to go home, where at least he could see his mother, but now, with the plane doors closed, he couldn’t breathe.

He grabbed a flight attendant’s arm, and told her he had to get off.

She didn’t understand, so he jumped out of his seat and ran to the front of the plane, where he approached the pilot as he entered the cabin.

“I am not going to fly,” he said.

The pilot looked around. “It’s not going to be easy to get you off.”

Scared of causing a commotion, Lev told him to forget it and rushed back to his seat.

Minutes later, both pilots found him.

“Will you fly or not?” the head pilot asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you have to decide.”

* * *

May, 2013

Though Lev spent his first nights in New York City sleeping on a bus-stop bench near city hall and brushing his teeth at Starbucks, he maintains the experience wasn’t traumatizing. As soon as his flight from Moscow landed at Kennedy Airport in May 2013, he felt so free that nothing could have brought him down—not the fact that he spoke almost no English, nor that his living arrangements had dissolved, nor that he didn’t know a single person in the entire city. When he emerged from the A train on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan, he was in awe.

For three days Lev wandered the streets, gazing at the throngs of people and savoring his newfound happiness—even the sky seemed iridescent. On the fourth day, unable to bear the possibility of never seeing his mother again, he went back to the airport and, with his meager savings, bought a ticket home for the following evening. But when it came time to leave, he lost his nerve and stayed.

(…)

March 25, 2017

You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday

Michael Robbins writing for the Paris Review

Michael Robbins’ poem in the Spring 2017 issue of the Paris Review:

You haven’t texted
since Saturday,
when I read Keith Waldrop’s
translation of Les Fleurs du mal
on a bench by whatever
that tower is on the hill
in Fort Greene Park
until you walked up
late as always and I do
mean always
in your dad’s army jacket
and said “Hi, buddy”
in a tone that told me
all I needed to know,
although protocol dictated
that you should sit next to me
and spell it out
and we should hold each other
and cry and then pretend
everything was fine, would
be fine, was someday
before the final
trumpet, before heat death,
zero point, big rip
sure to be absolutely
perfectly completely
probably fine. And
though it wasn’t and
wouldn’t be,
I walked you to the G
then rode the C
to Jay Street–MetroTech.
Just now I took a break from
this retrospect
to smoke one of the Camels
in the sky-blue box marked
IL FUMO UCCIDE
you brought me from Italy
and page through a book
on contemporary physics.
“Something must be
very wrong,” it said,
and I agreed,
although it turned out
the author meant that “no theory
of physics should produce
infinities with impunity.”
I’d point out that every theory
of the heart
produces infinities
with impunity
if I were the kind of jerk
who uses the heart
to mean the human
tendency to make
others suffer
just because we
hate to suffer
alone. I’m sorry
I brought a fitted sheet
to the beach. I’m sorry
I’m selfish and determined
to make the worst
of everything. I’m
sorry language is a ship
that goes down
while you’re building it.
The Hesychasts of Byzantium
stripped their prayers
of words. It’s been tried
with poems too. But insofar
as I am a disappointment
to myself and others, it seems fitting
to set up shop in almost
and not quite and that’s not
what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,
though, with its
infinities. And I have to say
I am not a big fan
of being sad. Some people
can pull it off. When
we hiked Overlook, you
went on ahead to the summit
while I sat on a rock
reading Thomas Bernhard.
I’d just made it to the ruins
of the old hotel
when you came jogging back down
in your sports bra
saying I had to come see the view.
But my allergies were bad
and I was thirsty,
so we headed down the gravelly trail,
pleased by the occasional
advent of a jittery
chipmunk. You showed me pictures
on your phone of the fire
tower, the nineteenth-
century graffiti carved
into the rock, and the long
unfolded valley
of the Hudson. At the bottom,
the Buddhists let us
fill our water bottles
from their drinking fountain.
We called a cab and sat
along the roadside
watching prayer flags
rush in the wind. I said the wind
carried the prayers
inscribed on the flags
to the gods, but Wikipedia
informs me now that
the Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread good will and compassion into all pervading space.
So I was wrong, again,
about the gods. Wherever
you are, I hope you stand
still now and then
and let the prayers
wash over you like the breakers
at Fort Tilden that day
the huge gray gothic
clouds massed and threatened to drop
a storm on our heads
but didn’t.

March 24, 2017

The Multiplying Hells of Pierre Guyotat

Blake Butler writing for Vice

Writing for Vice, Blake Butler talks about the unreadable, and Pierre Guyotat as an alternative to Sadism:

I think I always wanted the writing of the Marquis de Sade to be more fucked up than it is. For all the hype that’d been built up around him, by the time I first snuck in the library in like seventh grade to peek into Justine or whatever all full of adrenaline and some kind of unknown fear, I think I expected to read the book and have it burn me on the face, or at least to feel nauseated to the point it would be hard to even look straight at the words.

But it didn’t feel like that. There was all this other talking in the book, philosophy and Victorian back and forth. There were dirty scenes too, though they didn’t affect me as much as the anticipation of reading them did. As an adult now there are still certain things I like about Sade, and I’d take his masturbation scribbling over most other straight white male literary fantasy. It never was really his language or even the affect of his descriptions as much as simply his historical existence that I believe has made him stick around as “taboo.”

Years later, when I finally came across the writing of Pierre Guyotat, that whole gap of where the somewhat fizzled damage from Sade’s legacy had left open became suddenly and immediately awakened. Guyotat came with a similarly messed up biographical framework: He was drafted into the Algerian war around age 20 and served there until he was eventually arrested for inciting desertion among the troops and as a result was detained in a hole in the ground for three months. Using that experience and his hallucinations on the battlefields he wrote several books in his early 20s, including 1970’s Eden Eden Eden, which was banned for 11 years in France as pornographic.

Subsequently a petition on behalf of the merit of his work was written, including signatures by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Beuys, Jean Genet, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Simone de Beauvoir, and Nathalie Sarraute, which essentially had no legal effect. Beyond all that, he is notoriously known for having written himself into a coma, writing from such a state of hyper-volatility and obsession that he refused to eat and was hospitalized (and later explored this experience in great detail in his most recent work, Coma, released in English in 2010).

All this context still doesn’t really set you up for the onslaught of full-on linguistic beatdown this man has managed to cram into his words. Where other extreme-aimed texts focus on their subject matter to do the heavy lifting on how they slam into the reader, Guyotat’s language is the primary weapon in his barrage. He uses sound, stink, texture, motion, color, and relentless juxtaposition to break through the simple sheen of something maybe gross or terrifying to immediately graft it onto more: the image not static or pleased to be itself, but constantly unscrolling. His sentences are often full of colons and semi-colons and commas, forcing the eye to continue to move and feed the brain. I mean, here, one paragraph at random, from his Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, which is dedicated to his uncle who was killed in a concentration camp, published in French in 1968, and finally translated by Helen Lane to English in 2003…

(…)

March 23, 2017

Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk in Granta magazine

An excerpt of Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, transated from the Polish, has been published in Granta magazine:

I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of an ambulance having to take me away in the Night.

Had I examined the Ephemerides that evening to see what was happening in the heavens, I wouldn’t have gone to bed at all. Meanwhile I fell very fast asleep; I helped myself with an infusion of hops, on top of which I took two valerian pills. So when in the middle of the Night I was woken by hammering on the door – violent, immoderate and by that token boding ill – I couldn’t come to. I sprang up and stood by the bed, unsteadily, because my sleepy, shaky body couldn’t make the leap from the innocence of sleep into wakefulness. I felt weak and began to reel, as if I were on the point of losing consciousness. Unfortunately it happens to me lately, and is to do with my Ailments. I had to sit down and repeat to myself several times: I am at home, it is Night, someone’s banging on the door, and only then did I manage to get a grip on my nerves. As I searched for my slippers in the dark, I could hear that whoever had been banging was now walking around the house, muttering to himself. Downstairs, in the cubbyhole for the electrical meters, I’ve got the disabling gas Dizzy gave me because of the poachers, and that was what I was now thinking about. I managed in the darkness to seek out the familiar cold aerosol shape, and thus armed, I switched on the outside light, then looked at the porch through a small side window. There was a crunch of snow, and into my field of vision came the neighbour, whom I call Maladroit. He was pulling around him the tails of the old sheepskin coat I sometimes saw him wearing as he worked by the house. From under the coat his legs protruded in striped pyjamas and heavy hiking boots.

‘Open up,’ he said.

With undisguised astonishment he cast an eye at my linen suit (I sleep in something Mr & Mrs Professor wanted to throw away last summer, which reminds me of a fashion from long ago and the days of my youth – thus I combine the Practical and the Sentimental), and without a by-your-leave he came inside.

‘Please get dressed. Big Foot is dead.’

For a while I was struck dumb with shock; without a word I pulled on my tall snow boots and threw on the first fleece to hand off the nearest hanger. Outside, in the stream of light falling from the porch lamp, the snow was changing into a slow, sleepy shower. Maladroit stood beside me in silence, tall, thin and bony like a figure sketched in a few pencil strokes. Every time he moved snow fell from him like icing sugar from angel wings.

‘What do you mean, dead?’ I finally asked, my throat constricted, as I opened the door, but Maladroit didn’t answer.

He generally doesn’t say much. He must have Mercury in a silent sign, I reckon it’s in Capricorn or on the cusp, in square or maybe in opposition to Saturn. It could also be Mercury in retrograde – that produces reserve.

We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air which reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Man, and for at least half a year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and white clouds of steam came streaming from our mouths. The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Maladroit’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just ahead, as I toddled along in the Murk behind him.

‘Haven’t you got a torch?’ he asked.

Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to find it until morning, by the light of day. It’s always true of torches that you can only see them in the daytime

(…)

March 22, 2017

The Mythmaker

James Campbell writing for the Guardian

In this 2006 Guardian piece, James Campbell talks to Seamus Heaney about growing up on a farm in County Derry, politics and his project inspired by a 15th-century Scots poet:

In 1977, Seamus Heaney visited Hugh MacDiarmid at his home in the Scottish borders, when the great poet and controversialist was in the final phase of life. MacDiarmid had been overlooked by the curators of English literature: compiling the Oxford Book of English Verse, Philip Larkin asked a friend if there was “any bit of MacD that’s noticeably less morally repugnant and aesthetically null than the rest?” Heaney, who has always felt at home with Scots vernacular takes a different line. “I always said that when I met MacDiarmid, I had met a great poet who said ‘Och’. I felt confirmed. You can draw a line from maybe Dundalk across England, north of which you say ‘Och’, south of which you say ‘Well, dearie me’. In that monosyllable, there’s a world view, nearly.”

In a literary career that spans 40 years, Heaney’s appointed subject matter has been largely extra-curricular: Irish nationalism, “Orange Drums”, the sod and silage of his father’s 45-acre farm at Mossbawm, County Derry. In 1999, he took the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and hammered it into a weathered English, which sold in astounding quantities and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. However, it is “the twang of the Scottish tongue”, audible throughout his Derry childhood, particularly “over the Bann in Country Antrim”, that has given him his current project, a modern English account of the work of the 15th- century Scottish makar Robert Henryson. Last year, the small Enitharmon Press published Heaney’s retelling of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid – praised by Bernard O’Donoghue in the TLS as “a poem which is unmistakably his own” – and he is now engaged on the same poet’s witty, homely Fables, with one eye on a new book and another on dramatic recitation.

“I read Beowulf at the Lincoln Center in New York, and a woman said to me, ‘You should do something that actors could do’. And I thought right away of Henryson’s Fables. Billy Connolly would be the ideal speaker. I’d seen him in the film Mrs Brown and I thought that if he stood up and read this stuff – ‘The Two Mice’, for example: ‘Still, being soothed so sweetly, she got up / And went to table where again they sat, / But hardly had they time to drink one cup / When in comes Hunter Gib, our jolly cat’ – he has enough insinuation and intelligence to help bring it within reach of a modern readership. These things are popular, they’re talkable, they’re full of horse sense and roguery.” The limited edition of The Testament of Cresseid apart, his Henryson exists mainly in typescript. He is planning a recital on stage for this year’s Edinburgh Festival.

The only books in the farmhouse at Mossbawm, County Derry, where Heaney grew up in the 1940s, resided “on a high shelf – a dictionary, an algebra and other things I don’t know what. They belonged to an aunt who had done a clerical course and became known in the family as ‘Susan Heaney, a typewriter in London’, where she had gone before the war. The book house, for me, was my Aunt Sarah’s. She had sets of Kipling and Hardy, which she had bought as a young schoolteacher, and which I now have.” Their shared name and initial, “S. Heaney”, decorate the inside leaf, which tickles him. “On Saint Patrick’s Day, a gathering of men would come to the house. There would be some drinks and singing and recitation. So there was a certain sense of ritual enjoyment, but nothing that resembled high culture, no.” His mother was “very devoted to singing and Scottish songs, though she wasn’t a singer herself”, his father “didn’t particularly like music”.

In “The Famous Seamus”, a sometimes tart but truly affectionate profile of Heaney that raised eyebrows when it was published in the New Yorker in March 2000, his lifelong friend Seamus Deane wrote that the very act of bestowing the Celticised Christian name on a boy in Northern Ireland was “a signal” that a family “was loyal to the Gaelic, and not the British, account of things”. This account – related to what Heaney has called “the Catholic imagination” – is something to which Heaney pledged loyalty in the opening lines of his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), “Between my finger and thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun”, even if history has given them a more emphatic ring than the poet foresaw. He and Deane were fellow pupils at St Columb’s College, a diocesan grammar school for boys from the city of Derry and its surrounding farmlands. The country Seamus was a boarder, the town Seamus a sophisticated day boy. With a fond jab in the bumpkin ribs, Deane remarks that the boarders talked so slowly, “Maghera and Magherafelt … with all their ‘gh’s squatting on the wide vowels … that sometimes you thought a sentence had been spoken when in fact only a place-name had been”.

(…)

March 21, 2017

Interview: Robert Icke, one of Britain’s youngest theatre directors

Sarah Hemming writing for the Financial Times

With Robert Icke’s Hamlet currently playing at the Almeida Theatre, we look back to Sarah Hemming’s interview with the young director in 2016, for the Financial Times:

Theatre is the great art form of now,” says Robert Icke. “It happens to you live; we cook the food live. And if it’s not doing that, there’s a teenager in me that starts rebelling and going, ‘I just don’t know what that is for.’”

Although he is not yet 30, Icke has already proved his originality as a stage director. His 1984 (co-created with Duncan Macmillan for Headlong and currently touring the US) reshaped Orwell’s dystopian novel into a disturbingly timely stage work about surveillance and thought manipulation. The production won Icke and Macmillan the Best Director accolade at the 2014 UK Theatre Awards.

Another Best Director award followed last year, after Icke launched the Almeida Theatre’s Greek season with a revelatory and electrifying new version of Oresteia that approached the 2,500-year-old tragedy as if it were a contemporary text. Icke configured the theatre as a courtroom where nothing was certain — justice, narrative, the role of theatre itself — making us wrestle with our own judgment on the desolate central story.

So how do you follow such a harrowing, blood-soaked epic? In Icke’s case, rather surprisingly, with Chekhov. He’s back in the Almeida rehearsal room with Uncle Vanya, which, in contrast to Oresteia, with its cast of royals and deities, depicts a rundown rural estate peopled with disconsolate misfits.

“I really wanted to do something that was less bleak,” he explains. “Which seems hilarious now I am working on it! I spent 14 months working on nothing but Oresteia, which was blissful — but it’s a dark place to live. So I wanted something that was a bit more emotional; more microscope, rather than telescope. And this story is the opposite [to Oresteia] in a way: nothing actually happens and there really is no plot in the traditional sense.”

We are huddled beside a portable heater in a spartan back office at the Almeida’s north London rehearsal space. On the other side of the door, two cast members are practising lines, committing to memory the farewell scene between Astrov and Elena. Even when delivered with no emotion, it is heartbreaking — one of the many pinch-points in Chekhov’s humane masterpiece of misdirected love, wasted potential and thwarted hopes.

It’s the Russian playwright’s sheer daring that fascinates Icke. “Chekhov talks and talks about how you make it real,” he observes. “He says in a letter — this is paraphrased — everyone runs around on stage firing guns; too much stuff happens. There should be plays where people just eat and then fall asleep and get a bit drunk and say things that they don’t really mean.

“[In Uncle Vanya] characters keep doing things that you wouldn’t expect them to do in a traditional plot structure. So they say something and then don’t do it. He is so good at the unfinished sentence and the thought that nobody responds to. There’s just nothing like it. I can’t think of anyone else now who can achieve that sort of observation.”

(…)

March 20, 2017

Inshallah

Laura Kasinof writing for Harpers magazine

Laura Kasinof travels to Djibouti to investigate the Yemeni refugee crisis in the gulf of Aden, for Harpers magazine:

We traipsed across a muddy, trash-strewn creek bed in Djibouti City. Om Sakhr had insisted we chat someplace pleasant, and this was the way to the garden. She was dressed in a wispy black abaya and hijab, her lips painted a tart red. Her strappy heels weren’t exactly suited for the walk. But after several minutes, we reached a wicker table beneath long palms, tucked away in one of the city’s residential districts, a welcome respite from the afternoon sun.

A few weeks earlier, in April, 53-year-old Om Sakhr, along with her youngest son, Sakhr, arrived in Djibouti by boat after fleeing their home in Yemen’s southern port city Aden, now the center of the country’s civil war. (Om Sakhr translates to “mother of Sakhr”; she asked me not to use her real name.) In Aden, she had been a women’s rights activist. I asked her what she does with her days in Djibouti City. “Here, I don’t have any work except flipping through CNN, Al Arabiya, BBC, and Al Jazeera,” she told me, so she could keep up with the war in Yemen, where her husband still lives. “It’s not good for your psyche, but what else will I do?”

Om Sakhr suffers a common feature of refugee life: she waits. She waits for peace so she can return to her home, or for options—a job opportunity or a visa—so she can move on and try to establish a new life. Right now, none of these are available. Some Yemenis I met in Djibouti said they didn’t like being labeled refugees because they associate the term with the thousands of Somalis who used to pour into their country, fleeing violence and famine—but now they are desperate too.

Yemen’s long-simmering conflict reached a tipping point in February, after a rebel group of Iranian-supported Houthis attacked cities throughout the country and forced out Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. In March, a Saudi Arabia–led coalition responded to the uprising by carrying out a series of airstrikes on Houthi targets. Later in the month, the coalition imposed a blockade on Yemen’s ports, cutting the country off from crucial imports such as medical supplies and fuel. The Houthis, with support from fighters aligned with former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, have been engaged in bloody street battles in Aden for nearly two months.¹Neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble.

When Om Sakhr’s boat took off from Aden’s shores, she watched her beloved home, a beautiful coral-white city, disappear in the distance. “I never thought I’d leave Aden like that,” she said. “I was born in Aden and spent all my life in Aden, so taking me out of Aden is like breaking me down. It is not something I want to think about again.”

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March 17, 2017

Secrets of the Designers: On Creating the Look for a Literary Journal

John Freeman writing for LitHub

John Freeman in conversation with Michael Salu about the conception of a literary journal’s visual identity, for LitHub:

John Freeman: I’ve worked with you before on a brand (Granta) which was already well established. I’m curious how this differs, basically creating a visual identity from scratch.

Michael Salu: It was interesting trying to gather a starting point for the look of a new journal (Freeman’s). I supposed I’d begun with thinking about what might hook into the strong literary tradition of the journal and your own rather lucid, oak-distilled Americanness, if you don’t mind me saying? I wanted to create a feel to the journal that I suspect had quite a part in raising you and maybe get a touch of a bygone idea of America, but also create a fresh contemporary brand that could cloak the intended international perspectives that fill its pages.

So I began with looking at The Beat era, Ginsberg, Kerouac et al. Walker Evans and other artists from that era and the paraphernalia surrounding them during and soon after their respective heydays. I think of the scenes, the journals, the academic publications, the poetry and photography books. The typography of this time carries a certain robustness, directly inspiring the Freeman’s masthead. There’s such myth and movement through images more recently, so working with young photographers seemed an interesting way to go.

JF: Well you threw a bulls-eye dart there. I grew up driving distance from City Lights, which was my MFA and also how I found a more modern collision between aesthetics and ethics. Planet News could be a book for untruthy times. You’ve worked with me before though and must have known the journal would have a global list of contributors. How’d you figure you would signal that or do you feel like all the ways of signifying in that regard are too broken to employ?

MS: I’d say there’s a visual vernacular that’s universal. Particularly when it comes to magazines. It’s something we question little, the formula road-tested for optimal impact. The image as a signifier for something you want to or need to identify with. Using this formula in a literary context playing with that signification is I think a way to draw on the grouping of ideas you seem to aim at both now and before.

JF: One thing I know is you always wanted your covers to speak to readers’ intelligence and skepticism, can you give me an example of how that interaction grows out of questioning the vernacular you just described?

MS: I suppose I spend a fair amount of time examining the semantic data that exists within images, how they shape our narratives and there are certain strict codes we adhere to certainly for “commercial” purposes. What do they mean to the individual and our societal hierarchies? These codified archetypes of being, or saying that we imbibe and occasionally those life myths are disturbed and we struggle to react. Thinking about Charlie Hebdo and the recent Trump cover by Der Speigel, yet the likes of Vogue arguably carry more power as their tropes of propaganda are consistent and far-reaching. I’ve always been interested in subverting those codes. Remember Granta 110 and 115? In fact I’ve always wondered how you read images given your granular engagement with words.

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