May 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Whither the Angel in Angels in America? By Julia Berick Emma Thompson in the HBO film of Angels in America. There are some of us who would rather face death than face our own delusion and, friends, I am one of those people. I have argued for the existence of horrible things—ovarian cancer, bedbugs, even a gluten intolerance—rather than face the fact that I am a healthy hypochondriac with a genetically inescapable amount of anxiety. New York did me in, like it does so many people. What began as low-grade anxiety transformed—after a period of uncertain part-time jobs, rent beyond my income bracket, and Daily News ebola headlines—into near dementia. Why would I want to believe that I was the problem? Creating my own headaches? Heart palpitations? The desire to believe in the self is strong. Hundreds of times that year, as I felt wandering pains and icy chills, I was faced with two options: I was sick in some serious way or I was—at least partly—insane. The former seemed preferable. During the worst of my anxiety, one of the many things “I couldn’t do” was sink into Angels in America. In the past, it had been my easy remedy for a bad day or a worse night. I would just open up my two-disc set and turn to any scene in the six-hour masterwork. But anxiety kills empathy, and, when I was at my worst, I couldn’t see Kushner’s story of human dignity. All I could see was sickness. Since the fall, a painfully negotiated détente has meant I’ve been able to turn to it again. With a starlit revival now up on Broadway, I realized it had been at least a decade since I’d read the play itself. There is a magic to seeing the play performed, a magic I still seek to understand, but in rereading the play, I found myself with a new unanswerable question: Is there really an angel in Angels in America? Read More
May 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Hunting for a Lesbian Canon By Yelena Moskovich At the Aligre flea market near my Parisian flat, I haggle over a trinket I’ve decided to give to my on-the-rocks lover. It is a rock, a small but well-shined one. Twenty euros is too much, I insist. I’m from Ukraine, I tell the seller, in an attempt to get sympathy for my country’s political climate in the form of a discount. He replies that our eyes are drawn to objects that can read us between the lines. I pay the twenty. Let’s back up: as a Ukrainian kiddo during the fall of the Soviet Union, at six years old, I was held back from starting school while my family awaited immigration approval. The process dragged on for over a year, and when we were finally granted entry into the American Midwest as Jewish refugees, I was seven, and my literacy a club-footed Cyrillic. I was put into an Orthodox Jewish school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and began groping my way through two more alphabets, English and Hebrew. The page transformed into a vertical stage, complete with curtains of chattering. Read More
May 16, 2018 Arts & Culture You, Too, Can Live in Norman Mailer’s House By Nadja Spiegelman Images courtesy of Core NYC. Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights pad is on the market! The fourth-floor two-bedroom apartment overlooking the promenade was first listed in 2011, but the sale fell through when the prospective buyer discovered the atrium wasn’t up to code. Norman Mailer was afraid of heights, and so, macho to the core, he had his apartment outfitted with crow’s nests, gangplanks, galley ladders, and hammocks. In short, he built himself a nautical jungle gym on which to exercise his biggest personal fears. Now his son Michael has removed all that, bringing the space in line with those rigorous regulation-atrium requirements. The walls have been painted white, and Norman’s stacks of books have been whittled down by professional stagers, but the $2.4 million price tag is the same as it was seven years ago. Mailer had nine children (from six wives), who will split the proceeds. “The nautically themed space is iconic, like its creator,” the real-estate listing reads, in excellent Executioner’s Song–esque prose, “with a two-story glass and wood atrium and a sloping wood ceiling recalling the curves of a grand sailboat.” Sure, as Joan Smith wrote after his death, “Mailer hated authority, homosexuality, women and almost certainly himself.” Sure, he stabbed one of his wives with a penknife, complained about the “womanization of America,” helped spring a murderer from jail, made a failed run for mayor, and declared himself an “enemy of birth control.” But the place probably isn’t haunted. Look at that view. Read More
May 16, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Leslie Jamison By Leslie Jamison In our new series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Any discussion of my fridge in the current moment needs to begin with a discussion of who lives in my home: my husband and I, our nine-year-old daughter (who likes Lunchables but not the particular flavor of Lunchable that has been sitting in our fridge for the past week), and our three-month-old daughter—who, in her beautiful way, takes up much of the time that might otherwise be spent, say, cleaning out the fridge. Which is all to say: our fridge is actually a pretty decent portal into the acts of survival that constitute our daily life. Read More
May 16, 2018 In Memoriam Tom Wolfe, Straight-Arrow Virginia Gent By Gordon Lish Tom Wolfe, New York City, November 2011. Back in the day when I was stepping out and Anatole Broyard kept a one-room city fifth-floor walkup in which I would not infrequently step out in, Tom was living only a block or so easterly and would, damn our eyes, catch me making my way to or from where I wasn’t supposed to have been stepping and, bless his heart, not inform on me, despite his being the straight-arrow Virginia gent he was. Back in the day when there was talk between Tom’s Sheila and my Barbara of the two squads going halvsies on a great big house in Hamptonia, we all were sitting around in said real estate after a Sunday brunchy fress—Tom’s sidekicks Eddie Hayes and Richard Merkin among the newspaperbound bagelbound boasters—and I just so happened to have launched myself into a rapsode bearing on my baseball-playing startlements, this before I was expelled from the school where I’d done the startling, and Tom said he had a couple of mitts, why didn’t we go on out onto the lawn and throw it around awhile, and I said, thanks but no thanks, I having been a catcher when I was doing my startling and would therefore require the glove worn by a catcher if I were to catch a ball thrown by a pitcher known to me to have been a farm-team pitcher for the Dodgers, unless it was the Yanks, whereupon Tom allowed as to how he had happened to have fetched out from the city to Hamptonia the very variety of mitt, and so he had and so we did, humping it out onto the lawn and just as humpily regrouping among the housebound, Tom mum as you’d want that no toss he’d lobbed at me could I, the be-mitted braggart, begin to handle. Read More
May 16, 2018 At Work Boy Genus: An Interview with Michael Kupperman By Eric Farwell Michael Kupperman’s work traffics in one-off and absurdist premises and is immersed in a certain kind of Americana nostalgia. His ongoing series Tales Designed to Thrizzle, which comprises eight issues collected in two volumes, features jokes that riff on everything from Dick Tracy villains to the Hardy Boys; Mark Twain and Albert Einstein team up for raunchy adventures; and fake 1940s-era ads for haunted chewing gum punctuate oddball comics about magicians and Picasso. Kupperman’s work is notable not just for its impeccable comedy but for lampooning its subjects in a contemporaneous style and language, making the comic simultaneously irreverent and ahistorical. It was a surprise, then, to learn that his latest effort, All the Answers, isn’t humorous. The graphic memoir is a serious look at his father’s time as the math whiz on the popular 1940s radio and television program Quiz Kids, a show that featured hyper-bright children and teens answering difficult questions on topics in their area of expertise. While most kids ended their tenure on the show before high school, Joel Kupperman stayed on well into his teens, spending a decade or so living as a minor celebrity—a life that was fraught with anxiety and discomfort. As an adult, he repressed the experience and refused to talk about it until Kupperman began researching his years as a child and teen sensation. On a sunny day in April, Kupperman and I spoke by phone about the book’s impact on his family and his own understanding of his father’s trauma. INTERVIEWER All the Answers begins with your early awareness of a decline in your father’s mental acuity. Why did you decide to make that decline the subject of a book? KUPPERMAN It was really a combination of personal and professional coming together. I was looking for a more serious project to do, because all my work up until that point had been humorous, and my career trajectory was not going in a positive direction—it felt like things were falling apart. I also realized that my father was losing his mental cohesion and that I had very little time if I was going to get anything from him. In some ways, honestly, I didn’t want to do this book because it was so personally painful. If I’d had any excuses not to do it, I would probably have abandoned it in the early stages. Once I passed a certain point with it, and some realizations about my family and myself had become apparent, I really had to complete it. Read More