MoMA’s “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” refers less to a period of time than to a way of relating to time itself—of dealing with and mingling the past, present, and future. The show features items that have been invented anew, used for present needs, or re-appropriated self-consciously to signal one’s identity, for political purposes, for nostalgic reasons, or simply as irony. Together, the exhibition and catalog present what could be considered a fashion “canon” for contemporary life.
Books
Norwegian Woods
Edvard Munch was never simply a Norwegian artist. His appeal, like his own life, has always been both local and cosmopolitan at the same time. He may be best known internationally for his anguished paintings of the 1890s, especially for the group of works he created between 1893 and 1910 and called, in German, Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). In Norway, on the other hand, he is at least as well known, and deservedly so, for his monumental paintings in the Festival Hall, dedicated to the sun and its pale, oblique Nordic light. Two recent exhibitions, one just closed in Oslo, one just opening in New York, suggest the broad range of this complicated but consistently capable artist.
The B&N Podcast: National Book Award Winner Jesmyn Ward
We originally published our podcast episode with novelist Jesmyn Ward back in September. We’re highlighting it again as we congratulate the author on her win of the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Jesmyn Ward’s writing marries a devastating realism with a unique sensitivity to the long echoes of violence and trauma. Her National Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones brought mythic resonance to the ordeal of a family from a town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the days just before and after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Her new novel Sing, Unburied, Sing nods to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison with a tale of addiction, imprisonment, love and struggle — told by the living, the dying and by ghosts. In this episode, Miwa Messer talks with Jesmyn Ward about her electric fiction.
In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle.
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Click here to see all books by Jesmyn Ward.
Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.
The post The B&N Podcast: National Book Award Winner Jesmyn Ward appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2xTVUzx
Russia’s Gay Demons
Early in Vladimir Putin’s first presidency I spoke to a Moscow banker, with reason to care on this point, who said he detected no trace of anti-Semitism in Putin personally, but that Putin would encourage popular anti-Semitism in a second if he thought that doing so would serve his interests. So far, Putin has not felt the need to demonize Russia’s Jews. He has instead identified the enemy within as Russia’s homosexuals, whose persecution is one of the main themes of The Future Is History, Masha Gessen’s remarkable group portrait of seven Soviet-born Russians whose changing lives embody the changing fortunes and character of their country as it passed from the end of Communist dictatorship under Mikhail Gorbachev to improvised liberalism under Boris Yeltsin and then back to what Gessen sees as renewed totalitarianism under Putin.
Year One: Trump’s Foreign Affairs
Until a year ago, the US was setting a lead of a very different sort. America’s first black president seemed about to make way for the first woman president. Once again, the US was offering an example to the world, affording a glimpse of what twenty-first century democracy might look like. Instead, Trump has provided a glimpse into a gloomier future, one of lies, ethnic division, authoritarianism, and the ever-looming prospect of war. It’s fair to say that most outside the US are counting down the days, like a prisoner scratching marks onto the wall, waiting for Trump to be gone, so that the world might feel steadier, and safer, again.
Marseus in the Land of Snakes
No one quite knows what led Otto Marseus van Schrieck to the invention of the sottobosco, but it was certainly in the spirit of the times. Born around 1620, Marseus grew up amid the great scientific flourishing of the seventeenth century. This included, among much else, the development of the microscope, which soon led to a widespread enthusiasm for all things minute. Around when Marseus is thought to have been born, the poet and composer Constantijn Huygens looked through an early microscope, later marveling in his memoirs that, “It really is as if you stand before a new theater of nature, or are on a different planet.” The sentiment captures much of the joy of Marseus’s paintings, which at their best give the impression of seeing a world through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time.
The B&N Podcast: Annie Leibovitz and the 2017 National Book Awards
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
In this two-part episode we talk first with the world-renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz, about her new collection, Portraits: 2005-2016. There is perhaps no photographer whose distinctive style is so familiar — but her latest collection, which takes in Barack Obama in the White House, the singer Rihanna in a romantic Havana setting, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in a homemade hall of mirrors — offers a catalog of surprises. She spoke with us about the challenge of shaping the story of a decade out of these individual moments.
Later in the episode Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, joins us to celebrate a special day we’ve been waiting for— the arrival of the 2017 National Book Awards.
In this new collection from Annie Leibovitz, one of the most influential photographers of our time, iconic portraits sit side by side never-before-published photographs.
Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016 is the photographer’s follow-up to her two landmark books, Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, 1970-1990 and A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005. In this new collection, Leibovitz has captured the most influential and compelling figures of the last decade in the style that has made her one of the most beloved talents of our time. Each of the photographs documents contemporary culture with an artist’s eye, wit, and an uncanny ability to personalize even the most recognizable and distinguished figures.
Click here to see all books by Annie Leibovitz.
Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.
The post The B&N Podcast: Annie Leibovitz and the 2017 National Book Awards appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2zGZFvM
A Drowned World: Jon McGregor and Maile Meloy on “Reservoir 13”
Jon McGregor’s astonishing new Booker-longlisted novel, Reservoir 13, begins with a search for a thirteen-year-old girl who disappears while walking in the English Peak District. The people in the nearest village help with the search, and their lives are altered by her disappearance — they’re haunted by the presence of the distraught parents, by half-formed theories and suspicions, by secret teenage knowledge, and by recurring public scrutiny.
That the life of the village necessarily goes on, in the wake of an unimaginable private catastrophe, is the great subject of the novel. Love blooms and fails, seasons change, revenge is exacted, animals give birth and hunt and die. I’ve never seen the passage of time more intricately imagined, and the effect is profound and moving.
Reservoir 13 is a wonder, and expanded my ideas about what fiction can do. I finished it in simple awe — and then found I had a lot of questions about how it was done. — Maile Meloy
Maile Meloy: The reservoirs beyond the Derbyshire village where the girl vanishes are an attraction for walkers and a water source, but they’re also an ominous presence: all that water, hiding things, hiding a whole earlier village. I’ve just learned that there’s a genre called Reservoir Noir — crime fiction about drowned towns, as a niche in environmental fiction. Do you feel like a part of that tradition (now that you know it exists)? Why do you think people are drawn to write about reservoirs?
Jon McGregor: Well, that really is a niche within a niche. I had no idea there was such a tradition! Certainly, in the UK it does feel as though reservoirs generate an ambivalent creepy/beautiful response from a lot of people. They have become apparently natural features, nestled in the landscape, and yet people know that 100 years ago there were villages and communities living down there. During drought season, crowds will gather to watch the churches and barns resurface beneath the water. It’s all just a bit creepy. And yet at the same time, the reservoirs are a crucial part of our national infrastructure and classic pieces of engineering. And those are the sorts of things I’m drawn to write about: things where you can say, “Well, it’s this, but it’s also this.” In this book in particular, the reservoirs are also a good example of the way in which an apparently pastoral landscape is actually heavily industrialized.
One thing I didn’t think through: it turns out that I’m not all that great at pronouncing “reservoir,” which has made author events hard work.
MM: Wait, now I need to know how you pronounce it.
JM: Well, it’s more that I stumble over it. It comes out a little bit “wesevwoir,” but also I kind of swallow the whole word. I’ve started using it as a vocal warm-up and really stretching my lips around the word. That seems to help.
MM: The missing girl, Becky, is really the only character who’s physically described. And she has to be described, because they’re searching for her. Sometimes you get a sense about someone’s size or physical presence, but that’s it. Obviously that’s a very deliberate choice. Do your editors ever ask you for descriptions? (I’m asking because mine do, but I think I lead them to expect it.)
JM: I don’t know how deliberate a choice it was, really . . . I think I’ve just never had the instinct to describe a character physically in any detail. I tend to find my way into a character by thinking about the way they speak, the way they move through a space, the clothes they wear, the choices they make. Hair color and nose shape and jawline always seem less interesting to me. Although I have to say, there’s probably more physical description in this book than in any of my previous books. (For the record, my editors have never asked for physical descriptions. They’re too busy fixing other clunkers.)
And actually, here’s the thing: the whole point of the detailed description of Becky is that it’s a formulaic police description, and that the repetition of it actually renders her less visible and less real. Something I had in mind while writing this book was the way in which when someone disappears in a newsworthy way like this, they quickly become fixed in the public mind — a single photograph, a single description, the knowledge of where they were last seen. And the way the lack of complexity must be another loss for the family to cope with.
Maile Meloy
MM: You’re a master of the collective narrative. This novel is passed among characters and animals and bodies of water, within paragraphs. Did you start with primary characters and then work out from there? Did you have this whole village in your head? How did it begin?
JM: How did it begin? I . . . don’t really know. Wait, I do know. It started with a short story I wrote about the day when a search party goes up on the hill to look for Becky, in which there was very little of Becky and plenty of the lives of half a dozen of the characters involved in the search. Those were my core group of characters initially, and the story had already given me a sense of the landscape and the layout of the village; and I knew that I wanted to explore that world a lot more fully. There was just a natural opening-out process, from each of those original characters. Who are the brothers and sisters? Who are the partners or the ex-partners? Where are the children? And then beyond that: where does this character live? What’s in her garden? Where does she work? What does that involve? If there’s a blackbird in the garden, where does it nest, and when does it lay eggs, and when do those chicks leave the nest? If a fox catches the blackbird, where does it get eaten? Does it get taken back to the cubs? And when were they born? And if the fox den is in the woodland, what kind of trees are growing there, and how old are they?
I could go on.
It was just a kind of endless pursuit of curiosity, constantly asking these questions to try and expand my sense of the world, make it bigger and more detailed. By the time I was done with that pursuit of curiosity, I had hundreds of characters, if you count the animals and birds and trees and bodies of water as characters. Which I think I do.
MM: I love that you don’t feel you need to provide a kind of internal glossary about that incredibly detailed world, when specific terms and customs come up — you let the reader figure things out. There’s a woman who thinks, “How could you live in a well-dressing town and not know these things?” But it isn’t until very late in the book that it’s clear what well dressing is. We’re expected to know, too, or to learn, or to Google, and eventually we do. Can you talk about terms, and that kind of specific local knowledge?
JM: Well, I’m going to be a bit chippy here and say that my experience as a reader of American fiction has often been that of the baffled outsider who doesn’t understand all the terms and is expected to catch up fast. It was years before I knew what wainscoting was, for example, or bangs. I never really understood where a stoop was, or what the various horse-drawn vehicles in William Maxwell’s novels were. But it didn’t actually matter. It felt authentic, and it felt like something I could discover later on, and I would never have wanted an explanation from the writer to interrupt the story.
So that was my instinct with this book. I understood that, even in the UK, many readers wouldn’t understand well dressing (I barely understand it myself, to be honest), or the finer details of sheep farming, or some of the more technical reservoir-maintenance vocabulary. But my basic rule is that if the people in the book understand these things, why would they go to the trouble of explaining them to the reader? I hope that by the end of the book most of it is more or less clear, just by simple accumulation of detail, but I also want these things to function as details of a landscape — a world — in which the reader is only a visiting guest.
MM: The book is so beautiful, and such a fully realized world, that I kept wondering, “How did you do that?” The human characters each have stories that play out over seasons and years, but so do the badgers, foxes, buzzards, springtails, and sheep. I know you did a lot of research. Did you have a chart? Did you have seasons laid out? Did you have a fox narrative, and then break it up and figure out where to put it in? Or did you write each paragraph as it is?
JM: Oh, well now. There’s a short answer to this question, and a very long one. The short answer is that I wrote each narrative line separately, and that each narrative line followed either an arc or a cycle. So the human characters mostly had stories that, as you say, played out over several years (although some of those are stuck in repetitions and loops of a kind; poor old Geoff Simmons endlessly walking his slow whippet, for example). And the blackbirds had an annual lifecycle narrative of nesting, hatching, fledging, fattening. There were also working routines, across a day (milking the cows) or across a year (making the hay), as well as cycles of weather, season, water levels, and plenty more besides. Once I’d written all of that, all I had to do was put them in the right order.
(And that “right order” had something to do with an idea of accumulation as a narrative technique, of the relentless and measured passing of time, of life coming at you fast and from all directions. I liked the idea of using the non sequitur as a device, and working that pretty hard.)
Sorry, that was supposed to be the short version of the answer. Don’t let me get started on the long version. It involves ring binders, scissors and Sellotape, and a lot of floor space.
MM: Just reading that makes my head hurt. Although maybe the ring binders and scissors are important for a book that’s so much about process and physical work.
JM: Well, in the end I didn’t really have enough floor space for the physical cut-and-paste operation I had planned, and I ended up on these extended mental juggling sequences, trying to hold a whole series of decisions in my head while I frantically found the text and dragged it to the right spot. It was like those scenes in movies about socially awkward mathematics geniuses, where our hero solves a fiendish formula by scribbling all over a series of paper napkins. Only without the musical montage. Or the mathematics genius.
MM: Can we tell people that “Reservoir 13” is not a clue? Do you want to talk about the title? And does the number 13 really show up in your life all the time, as it does in your Instagram account?
JM: Oh boy . . . “Reservoir” 13 is really not supposed to be a clue. There are no clues in this book, although there are plenty of possibilities and a lot of speculation. It’s been interesting to me, having set out to write a book in which there would be little in the way of resolution, how many clues readers say they have found. Readers have been trained to find resolution, I think; trained to see a book as a puzzle to be solved. I have a lot of time for that kind of reading experience, and admiration for the writers who do that work; but I’d like there to be space for the lack of resolution and the lack of closure which life so often offers us.
The title was a kind of placeholder title for a long time — ah, this is the project with all the reservoirs, and all the instances of the number thirteen — and then eventually I just became very fond of it. I like the way it alludes to a kind of 1970s abstract art title, or a Richard Brautigan−era tiny literary magazine. It has no real meaning, but readers are looking for one.
And yes, ever since I started this project, the number 13 has been remarkably prevalent. My marriage ended after 13 years. I moved into an apartment numbered 13. My membership number at the local subscription library is 13. I book a train ticket and land in carriage number 13. I end up on the Booker Prize longlist, and there are 13 books; they announce the shortlist on the 13th of the month. What does it all mean? It means nothing.
MM: We met at a writers’ retreat where I got nothing done and you wrote every day, and I was very envious, and then I was shamefully pleased when you told me you’d thrown what you’d done there away. How much do you throw away, in relation to what makes it into a book?
JM: You realize this was 13 years ago? Thirteen years ago?
I was so young and anxious then. I remember we were in Italy, in a beautiful house in the Tuscan hills, and there should have been long, lazy days of walking and drinking fine wine and finding little family restaurants, but I was desperate to hide in my room and write in some very puritan way. Like, this is called a writing retreat, so if I don’t write the whole time I am a fraud.
I wrote a lot of rubbish that month. I’m sure you had a much nicer time. Writers’ retreats are a funny thing, aren’t they?
It’s hard to say how much I throw away. It’s not like I get to the end and have whole abandoned chapters. But I’m pretty fussy at the point when I’m putting sentences together. Things are crossed out and rewritten often in the early stages. And then I get to the point where most paragraphs are improved by lopping off the beginning and the end. But a lot of the time it’s not so much throwing something away as constantly reworking it. Do you want a percentage? Thirteen. I throw away 13 percent of the text that goes toward a finished book.
MM: That’s a really good retention rate — 87 percent stays in?
JM: Oh, I should make myself sound more heroic or puritan or something. Okay: I keep 13 percent of the text, and the rest gets thrown away.
MM: How do your Reservoir Tapes for BBC Radio 4 relate to the novel?
JM: Well, I’m glad you asked. They’re a set of 15 short stories (each 15 minutes long; I asked if I could 13 stories at 13 minutes each, and they wouldn’t have it), which are all set in the same village as Reservoir 13, in the weeks and months before the girl goes missing. I have no shame in calling it a prequel. It’s been a real challenge — and a perverse kind of fun — to retune my writing ear to the radio. There’s a perilous sense that a listener could turn the radio off at any second, and so each line has to give them a reason to keep listening; and each line has to follow a clear narrative, because the listener has no chance to glance back up the page, or slow down. There needs to be more space in the text, and less density.
The stories could be read as a kind of prelude to the novel; or they could be read afterwards to fill in some gaps; or they could be read completely separately. I tried to keep those options open. They’re available as a podcast from the BBC now, and Catapult Books will be publishing them late next year.
Author photo of Jon McGregor (c) Jo Wheeler.
The post A Drowned World: Jon McGregor and Maile Meloy on “Reservoir 13” appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2hvmuYW
Year One: Stress Testing the Constitution
Trump’s lawyers deny that the president’s continued receipt of business from foreign, federal, and state governments violates the Constitution. They may be right. And it may be difficult to persuade a court that anyone has standing—the appropriate injury—that would permit a lawsuit in the first place. But while profiting from the presidency may not violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses, refusing to follow routine conflict of interest practices shows a contempt for norms. We might quibble about what counts as an emolument, but we should raise questions about a president unconcerned about mixing private profit and public duty.
Year One: Rhetoric & Responsibility
The Trump problem is probably somewhat self-limiting, he and his ilk being so very strange. But there are older, deeper problems. A substantial part of the American public seems to have lost interest in ideas, therefore in substantive controversy. This worrisome depletion has affected the whole of society, universities included. In saying this, I am making a criticism of institutions I value profoundly, as I do the politics of democracy, more for their splendid potential than for their present influence.
Sig Nordal 