April 26, 2018 Comics Endless Summer Wells By Chris Reynolds The Welsh cartoonist Chris Reynolds has been creating Mauretania Comics since 1985. Short detective tales and poetic fragments like the one below thread through a future earth where aliens politely control humanity. On the surface, this world seems much like ours: a place of cool afternoon shadows and gently rolling hills, half-empty trains and sleepy downtown streets. But the closer you look, the weirder it gets. Mysterious figures suddenly appear in childhood photos, family members disappear forever without warning, power outages abound, and certain people gain the power of flight. The loosely plotted comics raise more questions than they answer, leaving behind a lingering sense of existential unease and dread. A new collection of Mauretania Comics, selected and designed by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, will be published by New York Review Comics on May 1. Below, read “Endless Summer Wells,” a strange and melancholy comic that appears in the forthcoming book. From The New World: Comics from Mauretania, by Chris Reynolds. Excerpt courtesy of New York Review Comics.
April 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women By Rachel Kadish Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. When you need to tell the truth, sometimes nothing will do but lies. Thanks to the labor of women of all backgrounds who have raised their voices in the face of indifference or opposition, some of the silences in our culture’s narratives are now getting long-overdue attention. The labor of filling the gaps is under way in venues large and small—only last month, the New York Times launched Overlooked, its series of obituaries for unsung women. Yet while retrieving the facts of willfully forgotten lives is essential, some of the most necessary work of repair ultimately can be accomplished only by our culture’s most scrupulous liars: writers of historical fiction. This may sound like an endorsement of fake news, but in fact, it’s the opposite. Any history that doesn’t include women, and doesn’t make ample space for the lives of women of color, is itself fake news. The question, then, is how to correct our collective understanding of reality. And while the meticulously verified works of historians and journalists are essential to that goal, if we don’t set well-researched fiction by Louise Erdrich or Geraldine Brooks prominently by their side, we’ll miss one of the surest paths to repair. Read More
April 26, 2018 At Work The Child Thing: An Interview with Sheila Heti By Claudia Dey Sheila Heti. Photo: Sylvia Plachy. I met Sheila Heti at her home in the west end of Toronto on January 31, 2018, three months before the publication of her novel Motherhood. Heti opened her front door with one hand while the other gripped the leather collar of her dog, a Rottweiler named Feldman with a handsome boulder-size head. They led me up the stairs to a rambling second-floor apartment. Heti washed fresh fruit and made black tea before we retreated to her writing studio. We sat facing each other on a velvet couch, Heti’s desk and a hard chair in the opposite corner. She explained that her boyfriend had just rearranged the seating area and with the positioning of the armchairs, coffee table, and bookshelf, it was now much better. Feldman moved between the furniture, negotiating a space for his massive, shining body. He curled himself between us and panted heavily. When I listened back to the tape of our conversation, his breaths sounded as if something were being inflated. Heti explained that she and her boyfriend gave him the name Feldman so he wouldn’t seem so scary to others. Feldman eventually relocated to the floor. As we spoke, Sheila occasionally dropped fruit into his mouth. Sheila Heti was born in Toronto on Christmas Day in 1976 to Jewish Hungarian parents. After high school, she went on to study playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal (she dropped out after one year), then art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. She began publishing in her early twenties with the short story collection The Middle Stories (2001) and went on to produce work in nearly every form: collaborations in The Chairs Are Where the People Go (2011) and Women in Clothes (2014); a play, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (2015); a book for children, We Need a Horse (2011); and the novels Ticknor (2005), How Should a Person Be? (2010), and now, Motherhood. Alongside her writing, Heti cofounded the lecture series Trampoline Hall and served as the interviews editor at The Believer. In Motherhood, Heti takes on her most controversial and private debate yet—whether or not to have a child. A brilliant, radical, and moving book, it is sure to cause the cultural riot her earlier work has. Heti answered every question without hesitation. Her attention never wavered. We laughed often. At times, she turned the question on me. I was struck by her precision and curiosity. We edited the conversation over email for length, but otherwise, it reflects the hours we spent together in her studio as it darkened, neither of us wanting to move from the couch to turn on a light. Though its red glow did not enter the curtained room, it is worth noting that we met on the day of the rare astronomical phenomenon called the super blue blood moon. Heti and I talked about the noxious divide between mothers and nonmothers, art as a form of offspring, and how every book has its platonic ideal. We talked about the dog I dog sit, who inside the house is aloof and manly but outside becomes the cliché of a dog: leaping at other smaller dogs and peeing on pee. Heti and I agreed that writers must also have inside and outside versions of themselves. As Heti said, “Outside, you have to be a different dog.” —Claudia Dey Read More
April 25, 2018 On History The Strange History of the “King-Pine” By Nina-Sophia Miralles Recent pineapple decorating trends. “There is no nobler fruit in the universe,” Jean de Léry writes of the pineapple. Charles Lamb loved the fruit erotically: “Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lovers’ kisses she biteth.” Pieter de la Court professes: “One can never be tire’d with looking on it.” How did these men, and so many others, become so enraptured with the pineapple? And how have we forgotten its former grandeur? In 1496, when Christopher Columbus was returning from his second voyage to the Americas, he brought back a consignment of pineapples. Little did he know that this golden gift, nestled among the tame parrots, tomatoes, tobacco, and pumpkins, would be the crowning glory of his cargo. The fateful pineapple that reached King Ferdinand was the sole survivor: it was the only specimen that had not dissolved into a sticky rot during the journey. It produced enough of an impression for Peter Martyr, tutor to the Spanish princes, to record the first tasting: “The most invincible King Ferdinand relates that he has eaten another fruit brought from those countries. It is like a pine-nut in form and colour, covered with scales, and firmer than a melon. Its flavour excels all other fruits.” At least part of the excitement came from the fruit’s spiked form, which sent Europeans into rapture. King Ferdinand’s envoy to Panama, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes, writes, “[It is] the most beautiful of any fruits I have seen. I do not suppose there is in the whole world any other of so exquisite and lovely appearance.” The sweetness of the pineapple, too, should not go unmentioned. Renaissance Europe was a world essentially bereft of common sweets. Sugar refined from cane was an expensive commodity, and orchard-grown fruits were subject to seasons. The pineapple may well have been the tastiest thing anyone had ever eaten. But delicious or otherwise, it was still the preserve of adventurers, and the pineapple might never have made it into common lore if it hadn’t coincided with yet another global development: the widespread dissemination of the written word. Read More
April 25, 2018 First Person Becoming Spring Brucesteen: My Quest to Meet the Boss By Toniann Fernandez This is a story about getting in the getaway car, driving fast toward your dreams, and then turning the car around. In this case, the getaway car was New Jersey Transit. One day, I was eating a can of chickpeas and drinking Aperol in my living room, and the next, I was on a train from Penn Station to Asbury Park, New Jersey. It was January, and we were in the midst of the bomb cyclone. I had received a hot tip from a loyal informant in the form of a text message: “This is tomorrow at The Stone Pony,” she said. Attached was a flyer for the Big Man’s Bash, a concert in honor of the life and work of “Big Man” Clarence Clemons, the musician and former saxophone player in the E Street Band. She went on, “A friend of mine (and more importantly, a friend of the Boss) says she would bet $$ that Bruce Springsteen will be there if he is in New Jersey.” I wondered how much money this friend was willing to bet and decided I would wager the seventeen-dollar train ticket. The NJ Transit North Jersey Coast Line train is one I have taken many times. I grew up in Manasquan, New Jersey, a beach town, alternately known as “Bruce nation.” Asbury Park, of Springsteen’s famed Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is just a short bike ride down the boardwalk, and during the summer months, virtually every bar hosts a Bruce Springsteen cover band performance every night. This sojourn, however, was the first NJ Transit ride I took in search of the Boss. My fandom was recent. The sound of “Born in the U.S.A.” used to conjure images of the muscular white boys of my high school years, drunk with testosterone and Natural Ice, clad in denim and American flags. They screamed along with E Street imitators in bars we were all too young to patronize. I had always found the Springsteen omnipresence in coastal New Jersey offensive. Read More
April 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Prime Numbers By Anthony Madrid I suppose there are mathematicians out there “working on prime numbers.” I don’t know if there are. There probably are. They’re putting on coffee at 11 o’clock at night. They’re getting upset at each other on email, cussing. Or adopting “withering tones.” They’re working. I myself don’t work on prime numbers. I work … on working on prime numbers. Not really. I’ve given the matter some thought. I did work on prime numbers for a few ecstatic days in the year 1999. That was the outcome of more than 10 years of brooding. Intermittent brooding. And now it’s been almost 20 years since that. And now I brood over people who brood about prime numbers. I understand them. Read More