Here’s a disclaimer, front and center: I was in Fiona Maazel’s class this semester at Columbia. The topic of our seminar was about keeping readers interested in narratives; many strategies were discussed. Have something creepy and intriguing happen in the first paragraph—be elusive. Or don’t be elusive, tell the readers exactly why the barn burned down and then make us care about it. But then there are the books in which content blindsides well-executed craft and style, and this is one of those. Is there a prostitution center and casino only accessible through underground tunnels in Cincinnati, Ohio? Sure. Is there a Caucasian woman dressed as a Korean trying to impersonate a Caucasian woman, slyly navigating North Korea in search of her ex-husband, the most mild-mannered cult leader of all time? Yup. Everything is wildly unique and foreign and heart-wrenchingly nonchalant in announcing its unique- and foreignness, and that is enough to keep me hooked. All the elements of this novel that could usher in clichés—broken family, cuckolded husband, a deeply unfortunate woman who gets slammed with cancer, sexual abuse, and unrequited love—instead somersault through our expectations. Maazel has created a world that is all her own.

From the first two sentences, the reader is struck by alienation and façade that feature strongly throughout the book: “They were together. In their way.” Their way, of course, signifies to us—particularly in hindsight—that this group of characters is closer to the cast of NBC’s Community than the lovable nuclear family of Leave it to Beaver. The heart of the novel centers on the figure of Thurlow Dan: father of Ida; ex-husband of Esme; founder of the ubiquitous cult, the Helix, which offers a “cure” for loneliness for its loyal members. If the Helix sounds utopian and strangely appealing, that’s because it is. “Tell me something real,” Thurlow Dan tells his followers. “Talk to each other… and start feeling better.” Thurlow, who comes across as the kind of guy who would wear socks with mismatching flip flops, is the opposite of the prototypical cult leader. He’s not a good father or a good husband, but his fuck-ups have the aftertaste of good intentions. His imagined ten-year reunion with his daughter involves a three-sentence meditation on which dessert would be most irresistible. He’s perpetually trying out for a play, and that play is a modern-day salvation: the mending of the nuclear family. Forgiveness.

Which is why it’s surprising when Thurlow Dan, the “biggest virgin” we’ve ever seen, takes four hostages in Cincinnati. These misfits have been sent there by Thurlow’s ex-wife Esme—who is two-timing the FBI, her now-impatient employer, by protecting Thurlow—for the innocuous task of spying on Thurlow. He’s just returned from North Korea, seeing opportunity for the Helix in their socially secluded nation (Is there a lonelier place in the world than North Korea?). Esme, we learn, has been tailing Thurlow for the past nine years, despite divorcing him and raising their daughter Ida alone. Or, leaving her daughter to be raised by her own, now deceased, parents—Esme has as much maternal instinct as a slab of concrete. The plotline with Ida, Esme, and Thurlow is skillfully interwoven with the fate of these four hostages and the consequences of the hostage crisis for the Helix. Some of the supporting cast shine here, particularly Thurlow’s father and stepmother; others feel lost in the shuffle, especially the expectant father with a gambling problem and Crystal, a teenage Helix member that Esme adopts in hopes of curing her loneliness without Thurlow and Ida. Nice try, Esme—nobody’s getting out of the modern emotional crisis that easy. Crystal’s main focus is whether she can access the car keys, and sadness prevails.

But not always. There are small triumphs along the way: characters realizing their potential for happier lives outside of the confines of the Helix, characters shutting the (literal) door on their traumatic pasts. In “Woke Up Lonely,” plotlines are eccentric rollercoasters, swinging into conclusions with relief and satisfaction. The reader travels along with Esme, Ida, and Thurlow on their individual paths, hoping (hoping hoping hoping) that things will come together. And they do, in only the way that Maazel’s characters could.

This is a novel that demands a lot from its readers. Maazel’s vocabulary can be demanding, and the tone fluctuates from cynically playful (“Time heals all wounds? Ha, ha-ha, ha-ha”) to stiff and informative (though certainly necessary) background on North Korea and related treaties, groups, and innumerable acronyms associated with the Hermit Kingdom. The decision to break traditional narrative with long lists of memories and introspection is a gamble, but one that pays off. Maazel is smart and expects as much from her readers. The form mimics the events of the story; the hostages disappear for much of the novel, and the reader may feel surprised and unsure about his/her emotional connection to these four strangers when they reappear. This has the interesting effect of allowing readers to become Thurlow Dan, if just for a moment: who are these people? What are we doing here? What about our families, our cookies and hot chocolate? The chapter divisions plunge us through disjuncture, resulting in a jarring dreaminess that creates momentum and interest. Maazel anticipates and utilizes her readers’ reactions with talent and grace.

That is not to say that the novel doesn’t occasionally veer off from the lusciously eccentric, well-paved road. The brief inclusion of Kim Jong-Il’s perspective is puzzling, and at times Esme and Thurlow seem conflated. For a novel about a cult, I would have liked to see more of the Helix and less of Thurlow’s prostitutes (though they bring some pleasurable, no pun intended, comedic relief). However, Maazel’s impressive imagination and adept use of language make up for these flaws. “Woke Up Lonely” is intelligent, sharply constructed, and unique; an insightful novel that brings both challenges and rewards.

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Amy Feltman is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Fiction at Columbia University. She is working on a novella.

Laurie Notaro, The Potty Mouth at the Table, Gallery Books 2013

The first Laurie Notaro book I read was The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life. I remember laughing out loud and snorting in a very unladylike way in public while reading it, and calling one of my best friends because she had to hear this tale of someone who was just as awkward and unsure as we were. Her humor was self-deprecating and good-natured. Given her past books, I was eager to dive into her newest one, The Potty Mouth at the Table.

Reading Notaro’s latest book took much longer than I expected. I could only stomach it in small doses. There were times where her humor is relatable and genuinely funny. In the essay “Don’t Make Me the Asshole,” when she finds out someone has been using her shower puff, and it’s either her husband or her nephew. The idea of someone else’s DNA on her puff freaked her out and she calls a hilarious family meeting in which everyone is given a color-coded puff and the rules of puff-using are explained.

Other essays fall flat, like the short piece “Striptease,” in which her friend reveals a tattoo of a flaming cupcake covering her entire back. Notaro’s response was, “You’ll never make enough money in your lifetime to get that thing removed.” The rest of the essay centered around the awkwardness of the situation and Notaro telling readers to praise any tattoo a friend gets.

Notaro also seems to have a fascination/disgust with “foodies.” There are several essays – “I Hate Foodies” and “Hierarchy of Foodies” – that were overly snarky, that could have been very funny if the undercutting tone wasn’t present. If you are a fan of snark, the humor in this book is amusing; I found it tiring and unnecessary, and overused. Unlike Notaro’s other books, which were self-aware of her awkwardness that allowed the reader to identify with her, the tone of this book focused on other people, often feeling a little mean-spirited and overly-snarky.

She saves the best for last, and the last essay is where Notaro truly shines, and I wish she would write more essays like this one. It is called “Rewinding,” and chronicles the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of the most dangerous kind of brain tumor, a glioblastoma. There is no snark or cynicism in this essay, but an accurate portrayal of finding hope and molecules of humor in a devastating situation. Her humor is tamped down and it feels a little like survival. This is the Notaro I remember. Life stories with humor interspersed in them, not stories of hobos or lists of things you don’t want to hear in a drugstore line that aren’t really funny.

Notaro hits her stride with her last essay, and the tone and content of “Rewinding” is so different than the other essays that the reader wonders why the sudden switch of tone and subject? The previous essays try too hard to be funny, too hard to be darkly witty – when all the reader needs is Notaro as herself, in her element.

Jaime R Herndon is an MFA degree candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University.

La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams
Georges Perec, Translated by Daniel Levin Becker
Melville House, 2013
Review by Javier Fuentes

In La Boutique Obscure, we see Georges Perec in a completely new light. We have come to know him as an author who thrives on constraint; here we are granted access to Perec in his freest incarnation, liberated from any rigorous technical boundaries. One of the most active members of Oulipo, the famous French “workshop of potential literature” founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, Perec is a writer known for his experimental word play and writing constraints. He conceived this book less as a dream journal and more as a literary exercise. La Boutique Obscure captures his dreams from May 1968 to August 1972, a fertile period in which he wrote his celebrated novel, A Void, which he constructed without ever using the letter “e”. In his subsequent novella, The Exeter Text, written during the same period, the letter “e” is the only vowel used.

At the beginning of the book, we are given some specifications in regards to the typography and the formatting so we can better understand the text. But as soon as we start reading and enter this oneiric world, we quickly lose sight of these guidelines. This a world in which we instantly feel suspended, as if navigating a void, striving to be anchored by Perec’s references to time and space. We oftentimes follow the author arriving and leaving train and métro stations, returning to the same address but on different streets, coming in and out of apartments whose locations have been altered–their walls and doors moved and the inhabitants changed.

La Boutique Obscure is comprised of 121 of Perec’s own dreams, three by J.L. and one by P. The names of the characters are designated only by initials, and this implies that he wanted to hide or protect the identity of those who appeared in his dreams. The frequent references to puzzles, chess, Go, etc., hints at Perec’s fascination with games in which tangible logic plays an important role, an obsession we see more vividly in his other works. Instead, here Perec centers on a world, often devoid of rational logic, the world of dreams. Most of his dreams are infused with recurring motifs such as the fear of arrest, the SS and even Adolph Hitler; motifs that make reference to his Jewish ancestry and most likely to his childhood memories. Apart from an explicit reference to an actress’s small breasts that make him think of his mother (Oedipus Express__ 83), the dreams are free of sexual repression as he engages sexually with different women frequently throughout the book. Although I’m sure that those interested in a Freudian read could find plenty of symbolism to entertain themselves.

La Boutique Obscure is the least “Perecquian” of his texts, and it is there where its appeal lies. This is Perec’s only book in which we experience the writer free of self-imposed constraints. This freedom is passed forward to the reader who can decipher the symbols, images and patterns that impregnate these dreams and experience the text in a more unfettered way. Through the repetition of certain elements and through their accumulation, the surreal narrative begins to cross into the realm of reality. This “nocturnal autobiography”, as Perec called it, is as much about his dreams as it is about the consciousness that Perec musters to render those dreams. La Boutique Obscure was written in 1973 and it is hard to believe that it has taken 40 years for the first English translation to appear. It makes for a fascinating read and offers a fresh perspective on Perec’s genius.

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Javier Fuentes is an MFA candiate in fiction at Columbia University
and a creative director. He doesn’t live in Brooklyn.

Berlin Reed, The Ethical Butcher, Soft Skull Press 2013

When writing a book that aims, at least in some measure, to persuade truculent vegans that the responsible consumption of animals is not the primeval barbarism it’s cracked up to be, one must recognize the marked danger in opening with an anecdote about spoon-scooping goat brains from a freshly severed head while bystanders look on in horror. But Berlin Reed, author of The Ethical Butcher: How Thoughtful Eating Can Change Your World, doesn’t seem to pay that danger any mind. Perhaps because he knows that, in an age where the chatter about food and cooking is more profuse than it has been probably since the discovery of fire, his manuscript would get laughed all the way to the paper shredder if he let his readers even think about doubting his credibility as a butcher. So, gray matter in hand, he makes quick work of showing us that he is not just another enthusiastic hobbyist—no, he’s elbows-deep in a craft that is obviously not for the lily-livered.

Yet, understanding the lion’s den into which he’s just sauntered, and no doubt in an effort to retain the attention of what few vegetarians have carried on, the sharp-witted, soi-disant Ethical Butcher quickly parries with an journey through his herbivorous youth, where it appears he was staunchly opposed to eating animals for numerous high-minded reasons. It’s counterintuitive, of course, this vegan-cum-butcher motif (which is a virtue the author happily capitalizes on), but, it’s in this dualistic exchange at the top of the book that we first glimpse Reed’s even-handed approach to the subject matter, which, central to any sound argument, is what hoists his position in the end.

The book, a trim, two-hundred-page volume out this month from the aptly named Soft Skull Press, is cleft into two major sections. The first part is an account of the author’s entrée into butchery, with special attention given to the moral transformation he underwent in order to get “back” to an omnivorous diet, and how that transformation inspired him to master the craft of cutting animals. The second part is a well-appointed argument for thoughtful eating, which waxes polemic on the subject of abolitionist vegetarianism, and lays pretty comprehensively into the terminological inaccuracies that abound in the food service industry today.

In the first section it is difficult to prefer the cozy vegetarian riffs (peppered as they are with conversational niceties) to the vivacious butcher-block scenes, where we get to peer into the body cavity, run our fingertips around the ribs and spine. The book really hits its stride when the author shows us the lived experience of a first slaughter; the athletic challenge of wrestling an entire animal into primal cuts; the way a curious, fledgling butcher learns to find his way around bones and sockets and sinew. Even if some of the descriptions verge on gratuitous, it’s when our hands are in the meat that we feel most at home with Reed.

But it’s not until Part Two that Reed brings his real authority to bear. It’s here that he extracts himself from the story and trains his blade on the facts of the matter, shedding some of the bland aphorisms that flavor the first section’s narrative bits in favor of an expert’s brio in handling information. “I don’t want to tell you how to eat,” he says. “I want to clear up all the confusing language and address a few misconceptions that will make your job easier.” With accelerating force, then, he unpacks for us some of the unsavory methodologies and nominal deceits that corrupt the industry and plague our trips to the grocery store (which, to the chagrin of the opposition, exist in meat and produce markets alike). He goes on to define for us what he means when he says, “thoughtful eating,” and ultimately provides us with a few ideas about how to apply it to our own lives, to whatever extent we wish.

Jonathan Safran Foer, in his book Eating Animals, calls the argument over the consumption of meat “a slippery, frustrating, and resonant subject…that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression.” The description couldn’t be more accurate, and the concept here lends Reed’s disinterested attitude a special relevance. In a conversation that’s overstuffed with animated opinions and lean on unbiased, comprehensible information, it’s refreshing to invite a new voice in: a person with brains about the subject, offering clear-cut facts that we can do with as we see fit.

In the end, The Ethical Butcher is a quick read, sure to provide a bounty of information, a fair amount of entertainment, and the occasional meal idea for any eager reader interested in delving deeper into the guts of the industry. And, if you’re primed for that sort of thing, it may even change your world, as the title suggests—or at least the way you think about it. If nothing else, it’s less adenoidal than other such works in the gastro-canon, which gives us some hope for the future of the discussion.

Perhaps even vegans would agree.

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Michael Gibney is a Chef with 14 years of experience in the industry. He holds a BFA in painting from Pratt Institute and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. His forthcoming book, SOIGNÉ: A Day in the Life of a Sous Chef, is due out in 2014. He lives in Brooklyn, NY

Judges Sigrid Nunez, Nick Flynn, and John F. Deane chose the following pieces from hundreds of entries for publication in Issue 51.

Fiction: Philip T. Carter, “The Sound Is a Comfort”

Poetry: Amanda Jane McConnon, “Far Means a Place Not Here”

The winners and select finalists will be published on our website, along with the entirety of Issue 51. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all who entered for the opportunity to read your work.

Review by Beth Livermore

Marcel Proust and his mother and brother Robert, c.1895.
Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BnF), Paris, France

I had just read In Search of Lost Time, the seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust. By all measures, this is one of literature’s most important works. So I looked forward to the upcoming Proust exhibit at the Morgan Library with great anticipation.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Swann’s Way, the first installment of this epic novel, curator Antoine Campagnon borrowed from the Biblioteque Nationale de France a selection of the author’s notebooks, manuscripts, and galley proofs to “provide unique insight into Proust’s creative process and the birth of his masterpiece.” Also on view would be period photographs of important people and places to Proust, plus letters to his mother.

Sadly, I was underwhelmed on arrival. The displays seemed meager. About six Plexiglas cubes that contained notebooks and manuscripts alternated with wall space hung with black and white images. This seemed strangely austere, even antiseptic, given this author’s penchant for detail, texture, and volume.

But the biggest disappointment was yet to come. The notebooks and other writings, which were obviously produced in French, were not accompanied by complete translations. My rudimentary French is hardly sufficient to appreciate the fullness and subtlety of the materials. Proust’s penmanship is no better than my own, making cross outs, write overs, and marginal notations, of which there were many, undecipherable. The excerpts that were included were maddeningly short, highlighting a single line or paragraph.

How sad, I thought, to stand so close to Proust’s original work, to the mind of a master, to the Rosetta stone of his process, and see so little.

I was not alone in my malaise. Every few minutes visitors would push through the double glass doors to this frigid little room, perhaps cooler than most galleries for hosting so few warm bodies. None stayed long, at least during my visit. They’d start off well enough, reading the introductory wall plate with a kind of reverence ordinarily reserved for places of worship. Then they’d tiptoe over to the first display, a portrait of Madame Proust and her two sons.

“I’m surprised,” said one young sophisticate, riding high on black boots, a cape slung over her shoulder. “Maman looks … I don’t know … indifferent.” Indeed, she looks oddly detached, sitting between the sons she revered, but staring off to the side, seemingly bored, waiting to be excused. The caption notes her influence on Proust; how his crushing grief for Jeanne Proust, née Weil (1849-1905), was a catalyst for his master work.

Some visitors also noted that Robert, with his nonchalant posture, his dark, romantic eyes could be mistaken for Marcel, who stood forward and forthright, like a jaunty society gent.

But most visitors began to lose interest after display number two. This is where several cahiers, given to Marcel by Bizet’s widow, lay open before them. These notebooks contained precious first notes for “Du Côté de Chez Swann.” But there was no way to penetrate the writings. Upon realizing this, most people looked bewildered, as if saying “Really? This is all?” They drifted about the room lighting now and then, like bumblebees searching for orchids but finding ordinary daisies, at best. Minutes later they’d leave for Degas, or lunch, or the Morgan’s well-stocked gift shop.

“My sister read the entire novel in college,” said one young lady to the next. “She says it changed her life.”

“How so,” said the other, holding the exit door for her friend.

“I don’t know.”

I decided to stay because I am a Proust fan—and I had made the long trip to midtown, which I loathe, just to see this show. Proust reveals human nature, life patterns, the value of authenticity, the reason for art, and the role of involuntary memory in his work. He shows us the magic of metaphor, the unbound shapes of sentences, the delight of full, unhurried description, and how an author’s perspicacity can provoke epiphany in readers. Surely I could find something revelatory in this room. A single object, perhaps?

In the end I was glad for my tenacity. As a writer I saw plenty.

First, the postcards and photographs served to remind me that fiction springs from reality. Proust modeled Combray on his ancestral home Illiers, Swann’s estate on his Uncle Jules Amiot’s expansive gardens, his party scenes on his social circle, and encounters with Swann’s daughter Gilberte on flirtations with a Russian girl he met in the Champs-Élysées, where he played most days after school. Proust did more than borrow inspiration from his life. He built castles in his mind from bricks of reality.

Furthermore Proust’s notebooks provided an intimate glance at this “writer-at-work.” They looked remarkably like my own notes, with bits of fluid text mingled with scratch outs, underlines, copious misspellings, and scribbles in the margin. And, you can see him working out the shape of his project. “Should it be a novel?” he asked. Or, is this “…a philosophical essay?” Proust even questions himself. “Am I novelist?”

His manuscripts were also revealing. There was nothing magic here. Just paper and words, just like mine. This showed me that Proust faced the same peril and uncertainty that we all do when staring at the page. All words are mutable. In one early draft, the famous madeleine that would be his portal to the past, access to a universe, was first no more than a slice of “toast,” later “biscottes.” Even Proust’s galley-proofs were at risk of last minute edits. On two occasions whole sections were cut and set aside as scrap. Luckily, Proust recovered them later, making one the opening to Within a Budding Grove. The other he published in Place-Names, in 1913.

I was also reminded by looking at the journals, manuscripts and galleys that while technology will change publishing, it will never alter the basic process of writing. Proust handwrote his drafts and typed his manuscripts. Now, most of us use computers to draft or revise, or both. But we still make notes to ourselves, move copy blocks and revise eternally, stopping only for deadlines or maybe for sanity.

Still, the most important exhibit of the whole show for me was the final box in the center of the room. Here Proust’s first published copies of In Search of Lost Time sat in a box. The binding is curiously simple: cardboard covers, only font shifts and size changes to doll things up. The caption reminds me that Proust published Swann’s Way with Bernard Grasset at his own expense, after being rejected by Gallimard, Fasquelle, and Ollendorff. Now that’s commitment, I thought.

Robert published the remaining three volumes of In Search of Lost Time in 1927, five years after Marcel’s death. Then, the novel was a smash hit, consuming Paris and parts of the educated world.

Edith Wharton wrote to Henry James: “I began to read languidly, and felt myself, after two pages, in the hands of a master, and as presently trembling with the excitement which only genius can impart.” She later notes that James, to whom she sent the book, “recognized a new mastery, a new vision and a structural design as yet unintelligible to him but as surely there as the hard bone under the soft flesh in a living organism.”

I left the room shivering, probably due to overly cool air temperature. But also I was moved. For in the end, I saw the design behind this show, as ambitious as any work in miniature. Like Marcel’s novels, which require time and attention to detail to truly appreciate, it built gradually to an illuminative end with lasting afterglow.

Proust said that artistic reality is “a relation, law joining different facts.” This is what I saw.

–
Beth Livermore is a MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in dozens of national magazines including Smithsonian, Glamour and Travel Holiday. She lives with her family in New Jersey on a hay farm.

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Through April 28, The Morgan Library and Museum,
225 Madison Ave, at 36th, New York, N.Y.
Hours: Tuesday through Thursday: 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Friday: 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

TBDC Dancers Leah Morrison and Neal Beasley | Photo © 2011 Allison Dufty

Two men in gray unitards squat forwards in unison and place their hands on their thighs, backs to the audience, faces towards a stage-sized canvas painted red. A girl dances in, also in a unitard—in fact, it’s not clear if she’s dancing or walking, one could say she’s walking in a fancy way, or dancing in a casual way. Either way, she bends forward in a movement reminiscent of yoga and then bends back again. The men begin to move. Another girl dance-walks out and then another and soon they are all dance-walking into yoga and back into dance-walking again. They seem to be made of nothing but muscles and springs.

There is a sound like an infinite foghorn. In the audience sit several hundred New Yorkers who would surely register strong complaints with the landlord if such a sound occurred in their own building. But this is a Trisha Brown Company performance, and the audience has lowered their aggression levels. Another canvas the size of the stage lowers down and obscures all but two of the dancers, who appear not to notice and keep doing their thing—a man and a woman, leaning towards and away from each other, both wearing identical grey unitards like some sort of mandatory earth-man uniform in an old sci-fi movie.

The foghorn noise stops.

The theater is so quiet that the soft grunts and heavy breathing of the dancers echo.

She balances on him, he balances on her. Give, Take. Give, Take.

The foghorn blares again suddenly and we’re jolted from the intimacy of the scene. Another painting

The dance-walking reminds me of ribbon dancing at the Olympics, which is an event that many people in my life (actually, mostly just the men) make fun of but which I enjoy. As a little girl in the 1990s I coveted a Kidpower Ribbon Dancer—the 1-800 commercial told me all I needed to know, “Ribbon dancer, having so much fun/Ribbon dancer, gotta get one!”—but when I got one for Christmas I only succeeded in tangling it around my ankles. I admire the dexterity of the Olympic ribbon dancers, and also their poise, which allows them to do something ridiculous without prompting the viewer to laugh.

While my mind wandered to ribbon dancers I missed something. Now they’re bowing—it’s intermission. I feel guilty but only for a minute. My lapse has given me an insight as to why I enjoy modern dance, at least of the choreographed Trisha Browne variety: these dancers are doing ridiculous things, things I would love to do in the middle of the crowded New York sidewalk to liven up a drab day, but never would because I would be afraid of being laughed at. But they’re not being laughed at. They’re living out a fantasy without having to pay the consequences. They’re the surrogate ridiculous.

I never would have thought of that if I hadn’t zoned out, and I never would have zoned out if modern dance were more interesting. Say, if it had a plot. Or some flashy CGI images.

Brown has been in the business of challenging our ever-decreasing attention spans since 1970, when she formed the Trisha Brown Dance Company. A persistent presence in modern dance for over four decades, she’s never seemed to be afraid of appearing ridiculous, or of boring her audience: she might roll around on the floor, spread her butt cheeks, paint her hands blue, or just stand there. It’s all part of her creative process, which is so contagious that everyone in modern art seems to want to work with her: from performance artist Laurie Anderson to visual artist Robert Rauschenberg to choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Everybody has a different take on modern art; it’s been called both insightful and insipid, inspired the awe of New Yorker writers and the mockery of The Simpsons. I find a lot of modern art, and modern dance in particular, pretty boring—but I like that.

After all, there’s a boon to boredom. John Cage, (also a collaborator of Trisha Brown) once said: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

A lot of modern dance is intentionally boring. It is willfully boring because we modern people need it to be. We have no time for boredom otherwise. The Internet killed boredom, and its sidekick the smartphone delivered the final, killing blow. Et tu, Twitter?

“You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” That’s Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope, but it could just as easily be boredom. Because if John Cage is right—that if we submit to boredom for a significant length of time, then our senses will adjust to find excitement within the boredom—then the reverse is also true: if we avoid boredom by texting and emailing all day then by nightfall we might very well find ourselves truly and awfully and soul-crushingly bored. The problem is that this particular brand of boredom is all product and no process. We didn’t sign on to endure that boredom, and so we can’t possibly appreciate it.

Over the intermission I hear a woman in front of me say to her companion that Brown, at seventy-six years old, is stepping down as artistic director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Two out of the five dances performed tonight are new, and they will be her last. “She hasn’t been well as all,” clucks the lady in front of me, and her companion shakes her head sadly, as if Brown is a personal friend of theirs.

Set and Reset Photo © 2006 Nayoa Ikegani Saitama Arts Foundation

Big industrial fans are blowing on stage now. It looks like the dancers are wearing karate outfits. Same dance-walking is going on. No paintings this time. There’s a guy on a piano playing something that sounds just bananas. In the crowd a few faces are spookily lit by the glow of iPhones, which doesn’t seem to bode well for the future of beneficent boredom. I worry easily. But when I take in the whole audience—craning my neck to see everyone in the packed house—most are watching intently, eyes either rapt or glazed over in thought. It’s easy to imagine Brown, watching somewhere in the wings, also lost in thought; zoning out, perhaps, on one of her own famous quotes: “Value the process.”

This piece is based on a January 31, 2013 show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The dances performed were: Les Yeux et l’âme (New York premier), Set and Reset (1983), Homemade (1966), Newark (1987) and I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours (New York premier)

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Originally from Indiana, Mary Mann currently lives in New York City, where she is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. She is an essays columnist for Bookslut, and her work has also appeared in The Rumpus and New York Magazine, among others.

Review by Meghan Flaherty

In Harlem, distinguished professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak attempts to create a poetics of academic idiom. It is a handsomely illustrated hardback volume no bigger than a Kindle. The matte cover shows off two of her collaborator Alice Attie’s photos, in vivid urban hues. Spivak, to use one of her verbs, ‘locates’ Harlem as the site in which “African-American” as a concept remains under negotiation. She presents sixteen photos of that robust, resistant neighborhood now more than ever on the brink of gentrification and possible decay. The photographs contain no figures. They focus instead on what she calls “inscriptions”: text that, by accident or design, stands between the twin engines of ruin and development. The “space” created by the book aligns neatly with the idea of the “vanishing present,” one of the foremost subjects in her work.

As a philosopher and critical theorist of distinction, Spivak is best known for challenging the legacy of colonialism, and for examining the identity of the subaltern – used in this context to describe the person or group of people socially, politically, and geographically outside the hegemonic power structure (see her 1995 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”). Here, she centers on Harlem, arguing that “no amount of pious diversity talk will bridge the constant subalternization that manages the crisis of upward class mobility masquerading as the politics of classlessness.” In conversation with Du Bois, Gramsci, Kant, and Yeats, Spivak threads her questions about the changing cultural landscape of Harlem through her larger discussion of the changing cultural landscape of the globe – Harlem’s place, her place, Calcutta’s place, a New Yorker’s place, our place, their place, women’s place, and most urgently the subaltern’s place therein. She concerns herself with culture, with identity in megacities, and with “collectivities.” Her essay appears to posit several questions, most of which remain unanswered:

“What is it to be a New Yorker?”
“As ‘culture’ runs on, how to we catch its vanishing track, its trace?”
“In the face of class-divided racial diversity, who fetishizes culture and community?”
What does it mean to ‘memorialize’? If these inscriptions are messages, who sends and who receives?

The inscriptions themselves consist of graffiti, hand-written signage, official interdictions, murals, storefront advertising, words reflected in a window, and tags on merchandise. The identities of the message-leavers and the intended recipients remain a mystery. Harlem is merely trying to provide a record. To catalogue certain of these bits of text as emblematic of a neighborhood perilously in flux. To mark the “moment of change.” It does not pretend to be empirical; Spivak disavows “archivization” in favor of a more imaginative approach. She and Attie “resolutely kept to rumours,” comparing their project to “poorly edited oral history,” and all the “boring authenticity” that goes along with that. The photos and text presented here make no claims to objectivity. This is precisely the idea – and what is so interesting about her work. It is history from the subaltern’s point of view, subjective, scrawled wherever possible among the artifacts and records of the dominant, colonializing class.

The sites photographed become case studies of development. A spray-painted message, “WAKE UP BLACK MAN,” shot through a chain-link fence, is replaced with an apartment building and a bourgey children’s gym. Corvette, once a flagship business in Harlem, is replaced with a Duane Reade. She describes the entire argument of her essay (in neat parentheses, no less) as “the fragility of the differantiating moment.” Differantiating does not mean differentiating. The term refers to Derrida’s concept of différance, coined in his 1967 de la Grammatologie, which Spivak translated in 1976 and again in 1997. You will not find ‘differantiating’ in the dictionary. And here is where the little volume may lose the reader.

Harlem, essay/art book/article, attempts to give us both a work of scholarship and an aesthetic object, and it really only fails at the latter. First, the visual elements don’t quite cohere. Spivak’s professorial enslavement to the visual aid allows other, more incongruous images to get through: archival photographs, digital enhancements, loosely relevant bits of illustration, which detract from the overall consistency of her argument-in-pictures. Perhaps this is an example of content influencing form—or lack of possible form given the content. Perhaps this was intentional.

Secondly, prose-wise, Spivak is an acquired taste. Without casting the slightest aspersion on her significant scholarly contributions, nor meaning to throw down another sister in the already unfair fight of published letters – the critical equivalent of a girl foul – I must warn the would-be reader that Harlem, at barely seventy pages, is a demanding read.

In our age of frankness and approachability in prose style, we often look to Orwell – and for good reason. Spivak, I regret to say, commits each of his cardinal sins: imprecision, staleness of imagery, verbal false limbs (set down by, coming forth to code), pretentious diction (globalized contemporaneity, allochthonic), dying metaphors (the gutted warehouse), and meaningless words (originary hybridity?). She overuses ‘stage’ and ‘locate,’ both as verbs. And she breaks Rule #5 repeatedly: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Her prose feels both dead and bafflingly, teeth-baringly postmodern all at once, as if she set out to create new words from older, bloodless ones to infuse them with new meaning. This she may have done. I admit to lacking the deconstructivist vocabulary necessary to fully parse her essay. And there’s the rub. Who is she writing this to and for? If she wants to reach anyone outside her wing of the academy, I’m not sure she succeeds. Even the most intrepid looker-upper stumbles here.

Then again, who was Orwell if not a member of the colonizing class? A white and wealthy man, stepping, dignified, into the canon with his quill held high. His principles of language, however pleasing to us, are still just one patriarchal point of view. If Spivak wants to wield her language how she pleases, she is well within her rights. My only question is: will she alienate her reader? Might there have been another way to phrase “abyssal specular deterity,” perhaps? A way to show us what she means? Though Spivak does meet each of Orwell’s four great motives for writing prose: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. He wrote in “Why I Write,” that attempting to separate politics from art “is itself a political attitude.” Spivak has fused the two together in this form: critical theory as art object, essay as ethnography, bibliographical collage.

With Attie’s sixteen photographs, Harlem provides a visual testimony to “anonymous unclaimable delexicalized collectivities” free from the “humanism of human faces.” This is important work. I now have a better idea, for example, of what ‘teleopoesis’ means, which is to say: “to touch a past that is historically not ‘one’s own.’” We want to imagine ourselves into the ‘other,’ and we sometimes use the binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ to blur the lines between them. This is the work of the imagination and, from a literary perspective, this is what we do as readers and as writers. This is the pursuit of empathy. When empathy is not enough, Spivak asks us what becomes endangered by development and multiculturalism. More baldly put, “What are the implications of corporate promotion of culture as a tax shelter in today’s Harlem?”

Terry Eagleton, for all he also criticized her prose style, has written that Spivak “has probably done more long-term political good in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia than almost any of her theoretical colleagues.” Judith Butler came even more forcefully to her defense, lambasting Eagleton in the process, when she said, “The wide-ranging audience for Spivak’s work proves that spoon-feeding is less appreciated than forms of activist thinking and writing that challenge us to think the world more radically. Indeed, the difficulty of her work is fresh air when read against the truisms which, now fully commodified as ‘radical theory’, pass as critical thinking.”

To think the world more radically. That’s just the kind of construction we could find difficult to parse – certainly the eye stalls; we blink to make sure we’ve read correctly – but it is not. To think the world. This works. The preposition is omitted, ‘think’ becomes a more fiercely active verb, and ‘radically’ modifies the thinking process, rather than the necessary adjective we imagine will come next. No further explanation is offered, but none is necessary. It’s just a different kind of language use. Butler also wrote that cloudy style, by questioning language’s grip on reality, “can help point the way to a more socially just world.” No doubt Spivak aims at this. She leaves us with the swelling crescendo of a plea to our imagination, to try and touch the distant other, to “honour what we cannot ever grasp.” She strikes her augmented seventh at the end. But could she have foregone, along the way, a bit of her opacity to open up the hardbound covers of her fiery little book to those who wouldn’t otherwise have the definition of différance at their fingertips? In future works, I hope she finds some happy middle ground between her fearless coinages and spoon-fed clarity. For now, we’re left to squint sideways at the jargon and hope we can make sense of it.

Meghan Flaherty is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction and literary translation at Columbia University. You can find more from her at meghanbeanflaherty.wordpress.com. She lives in Bushwick with philosophers.

Review by Jaime R Herndon

For such a young writer, Karen Russell has shown imagination and a freshness of writing that separates her from her peers. Since receiving her MFA in fiction from Columbia, Russell received the “5 Under 35” award in 2009 from the National Book Foundation, was named on The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list, and was a Pulitzer Prize fiction finalist for her novel Swamplandia!, alongside David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson. Her newest book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, is a book of short stories set in a variety of locales that was published by Knopf in February. Full disclosure: Swamplandia! was not my favorite. The novel’s characters and plot had Russell’s distinctive magical realism, but the fantasy became tedious at a point, stretching the reader too far, which does not happen at all in her shorter works. Russell really shines in her short stories. In the stories, her lyrical imagination is showcased in beautiful ways that let you lose yourself in the words. No matter how inventive the story, it surprisingly easy to suspend disbelief because of Russell’s craft in these short spaces.

In the title story, two vampires who have been together for hundreds of years suddenly face a problem when one of them develops a fear of flying. The relationship between the two vampires and the way they interact in the world is intricately described, with lines like “…You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories.” A disturbing piece entitled “Reeling for the Empire” weaves the story of women transformed into silkworms and held captive in a factory, who discover personal agency and the power of their relationships in their attempts to transform and free themselves. As the main character Kitsune says, “…In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next. We’ll have to wait and learn what we’ve become when we get out.”

Perhaps the most haunting tale in Russell’s collection is “The New Veterans,” a story about a tattooed war veteran visiting a massage therapist. As the two work together, the therapist begins to realize the tattoos come to life on the Vet’s body, and are malleable under her hands. Questions of healing, hurt, memory and honor are all explored in this love story of a different sort.

The approaches of these eight stories are so different from each other and have such lives of their own that this is a book that almost defies description, in the best way possible. Who else could tell a story about a massage therapist working on a war veteran whose tattoos come alive and change the lives of those involved, or make your heart hurt for a vampire? The way Russell can manipulate fantastical images and make them almost mundane is a gift, and one that makes you carry the characters around in your head, long after you’ve turned the last page.

Jaime R Herndon is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University.