“When I was a student in the 1970s writing was a coveted profession – but at the same time there was something shameful in it. In Moscow and in Leningrad there were quite a number of informal literary clubs and groups whose members actually took pride in the fact that they didn’t want to be published. Those people would ask about a new name: “Is she a poet or a published poet? Is he a writer or a Writers’ Union member?”

That’s why my mother didn’t want me to become a writer. For her and her milieu it definitely wasn’t aclean profession.

But literary translation was.

Stalin’s directorship of the writing world was awful for Russian literature, which quickly lost all of its previous greatness, but it proved to be a blessing for literary translation.

When authors of talent, even of genius, were not allowed to publish their works or were afraid to write the way they wanted – they turned to translation. Boris Pasternak was secretly writing his “Doctor Zhivago” while surviving on translations of Shakespeare, Keats or Schiller; Anna Akhmatova, banned from publishing her own poems, earned her living by translating Chinese and Korean classics; Mikhail Zoschenko had to translate Finnish prose and he did it brilliantly. That’s what almost all the big guns did – they translated other authors’ works. As a result the school of Soviet translation rose to an incredible height. It had its own stars, even cult figures. A literary translator, even if he was a member of the despised Writers’ Union, was welcome in any underground literary club, even the most snobbish of them.

And still it was less clean than medicine. Here my mother was right again. The rose of literary translation was not without its thorns.”

Read More at #NewWriting.

Middle C, like most of Gass’s fictional works, is not read for its plot. This begs the question, why are his fictional works read at all? Other than the way he wields metaphor, of which he is by far one of the greatest wielders alive, we read him for his mind. We read him because it’s Gass that gives us something to read. His novels, and Middle C is no exception, are not for the passive reader, a category that seems to grow larger each year.  No, his novels are meant for those who would like to engage with the text. To do battle, in much the same way his main characters do. To fight with ideas. To disagree. To hate. To love. To think.

Middle C is more than a character-driven novel, another classification that ought be destroyed. More often than not “character-driven” is a nice way of saying “nothing happens”. But Gass has proven that even a life lived in a chair is full of happenings. […]

Kate Zambreno’s literary history-memoir Heroines is a work so full of fighting voices and channelled pasts, that to discuss it thoroughly, it seemed one mind would simply not be enough. Over the next several days, we will post an exchange between Jesse Miller (reviews editor), Annie Rebekah Gardner (writer), and Helen Stuhr-Rommereim (contributing editor), discussing the book. Please continue to check back to share in the conversation.

Dear Jesse and Annie,

I’m looking forward to hashing out this book with both of you! I suspect that few readers will have an uncomplicated reaction toHeroines, and for me there was a lot to admire, a lot that excited and informed, and also a lot that infuriated. So, to launch our conversation, I’m going to throw in your direction some things that I loved about Heroines, and some other things that I did not.

By way of introduction, Heroines is the stream-of-consciousness history of a large cast of marginalized female writers and would-be writers of the Modernist era, from Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Bowles to Anna Kavan and Jean Rhys, all intertwined with Zambreno’s own history of herself as suffering literary woman. The book reads like a combination of novel and manifesto. Whatever its faults, I’m not sure where else this particular history has been written, and it left me with about 15 books to add to my Goodreads “To-Read” shelf.

While I know it’s tired to call things performative these days, I couldn’t help but feel that in a variety of ways the book constituted quite an impressive performance. In a recent interview, Chris Kraus (who was the editor of this book) referred to her epistolary novel I Love Dick as a “stand up routine.” It’s a funny way to think about a seemingly confessional piece of writing, but it evokes a good image, and although Heroines isn’t funny, it carries a sense of vigorous recitation. It’s a performance of knowledge, a virtuosic delivery of the minute life details of an impressive number of forgotten women, cases of tragically squandered potential.

But Zambreno also plays a part in the novel, performing herself as marginalized literary wife. It feels appropriate that she would place herself among the women that have so subsumed her life and work, but it was this characterthat I found to be the most frustrating part of Heroines. […]

Just as amusement parks are contextualized by both the zeitgeist and obscure historical fragments, they are also involved in a much darker, underlying process. They are haunted by the specter of death. The suggestion of death is part of what draws people to the rides, and like the parks themselves, the form of death that the rides present is inseparable from the parks’ cultural moment. In traditional amusement parks like Lake Chippewa, the death is literal, fondling the Freudian. The rollercoaster rider enters into a tacit agreement with the machine that they could be killed, but most likely will simply flirt with the sensation of nearly plummeting to their horrible (likely pointless) deaths. Anyone who has ridden a serious coaster will tell you that no previous knowledge of the track’s twists and turns can truly preclude the physical response to danger and imminent death. Each rider’s consent is an indicator of l’appel du vide.

The Lake Chippewa Park drew untold thousands of visitors seeking a brief taste of their own mortality. Born under the unwavering pulse of industrial America, these rides relieved their passengers of the burdensome American Dream. A ticket stub promised to briefly satisfy the warm drive back toward the cold embrace of the inorganic. To ride the Big Dipper was to take part in a collective volley against alienation. It served as a kind pressure release valve – a modernist iteration of a Shakespearean carnival tailored to the anxieties of the late 19^th century. A ride dependent upon a capitalistic, if not fascistic, faith in the machine. […]

In 1956, a young newlywed named Elizabeth Warnock Fernea traveled to Iraq with her husband, a field anthropologist.She knew no Arabic, and very little about the Middle East.Ten years later, her book about her experiences with Iraqi women, Guests of the Sheik, helped to make her a pioneering female scholar in the field of Middle Eastern studies. She taught at the University of Texas for 24 years, during which time she served as the director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the chairwoman of the Program in Women’s Studies, and the President of the Middle Eastern Studies Association.

Today we introduce guest correspondent Roanne Kantor. Roanne writes to us from Bihar, India, where she is assisting her husband, Hayden Kantor, with his anthropological field research. I invited Roanne, a scholar (like Fernea) at the University of Texas, to write about her experiences in the field. She suggested using Fernea’s groundbreaking book as a foil for her own experience. […]

People are so furious about Sonia running away from her family for two months, but she does come back in the end. Why do you think there aren’t more delinquent mothers in fiction? Why is that still such a taboo?

That’s society, that’s sexism. There are a few incidences of mothers leaving families in fiction — I think Ladder of Years by Ann Tyler is about a woman who leaves, but then, she really leaves. She just disappears and starts a new life. But no, I agree, there are way more fathers who leave. It’s just socially less acceptable for mothers to leave. Motherhood is more of a saintly thing than fatherhood. I’m not saying that in fatherhood there aren’t cultural pressures, but the pressures are different. And they still are, you know? It’s 2013 and certain things really haven’t changed.

And I do think that motherhood is the greatest thing in the world — you might not know that from reading my books — but at the same time, I also think about the implications of motherhood a lot. I’ve written two books chewing on what motherhood and family is all about, what it means to us. […]

[Michael Haneke] abuses his audience in order to make us self-aware and liberate us from bad habits. Critics have mostly taken him at his word, repeating the sleight of rhetoric that conflates the act of analyzing and violating movie conventions with bashing in the skull of an animal, or raping and beating a woman. And so a pattern, which has come to characterize so much serious European filmmaking, emerges: from the auteur, punishment; from the audience, praise. Haneke has become one of the most brilliant practitioners of an aesthetic that, although it has produced great films, now threatens to dead-end. Ascetic in its forms and rigorously unpleasant in its subject matter, the films this unacknowledged movement has produced suggest that the only honest and decent thing for art to do is inflict pain. We might call it “sadomodernism.”…

At his most ambitious, the sadomodernist aims to ruin not only the pleasure that a naive spectator might take in his film, but any visceral enjoyment that spectacle itself might ever offer. This is challenging, however, when the stakes are constantly escalating. When you adopt the techniques of the dominant culture—by, for example, presenting the viewer with titillating violence—and the dominant proves adept at reabsorbing them, then what? 

Read the rest at n+1.

In the days I spent talking with dancers, instructors, and administrators at the Bolshoi, it was clear that everyone had accepted some version of this theme: “What happens in the theatre reflects what is happening in the streets.” Russians, in the contemporary version of their fatalism, see their country as a landscape of endless bespredel, lawlessness, a world devoid of order or justice or restraint. One disaster is of a piece with another. The acid attack on [director of the Bolshoi ballet] Filin was of a piece with recent events like the broad-daylight assassination of Aslan Usoyan, also known as Grandpa Hassan, a renowned mobster. One afternoon, I visited Tatyana Kuznetsova, a former dancer and now the dance critic for Kommersant Daily; her parents had been dancers at the Bolshoi and she lives not far from Filin, in a building full of dancers and artists. “I just heard the news about one of our legislators!” she said. “They found him encased in a barrel of concrete! It’s just like what happened to Sergei Filin.” …

This was Russia. Only the naïve flinch at brazen corruption. When I asked another member of the board of trustees about bribes, thievery, and waste at the Bolshoi, he shrugged. We were at a café near the theatre that was a hangout for dancers, models, and the businessmen who love them. The board member was shocked no more by the notion of financial malfeasance than he was by the fact that the young woman at the next table was evidently applying manual pleasure to her date.

“I could care less,” he said. “Either you are one of the top three theatres in the world or you aren’t. If you spend an extra fifty million dollars, who cares? What’s a few hundred million for a country like ours?”

Read the rest — about the attack on the director of the Bolshoi theater and the relationships between the Kremlin, money Russian ballet — at The New Yorker.

In his best stories, Gonzales skillfully constructs believably lived-in realities, appropriating supernatural premises to explore emotional situations — personal angst, political detachment — commonly found in realist fiction. “One Horned & Wild Eyed” is narrated by an unemployed father whose best friend from childhood purchases a unicorn. Over the course of the story, both characters develop disturbing obsessions, sitting in thrall to the unicorn for days on end. The story vividly reflects middle-aged dissatisfaction and simultaneously conveys the sense of childhood longing for magic which cemented the two friends’ relationship. “Farewell, Africa” refrains from broad political commentary, focusing on the artistic struggles of an American speechwriter to explain the inexplicable natural disaster. As the protagonist gropes for words to account for the loss of an entire continent, Gonzales examines the tragedy’s subtle psychological effects on people worlds away from Africa. In “Escape from the Mall,” the zombie apocalypse presents the main character with a chance for reinvention as a self-sacrificing hero.

The Miniature Wife suffers when the surreality of Gonzales’s premises overwhelm the stories’ applicability to everyday human experience. Gonzales’s best stories unfold like skillful documentaries, building immediacy and energy through careful focus rather than dramatic narrative. “Wolf!” — arguably the collection’s least effective story — dramatizes a father’s transformation into a vicious werewolf who devours all but one of his children. The story’s onslaught of gruesome violence distracts from Gonzales’s more acute commentary on the cruelty of familial pressure. While a few insightful details — such as the werewolf’s insistence on consuming only family members who resemble him — reflect realistic emotional struggles between parents and children, the situation’s overwrought horror prevents readers from empathizing. “Wolf!,” a rare dud in an excellent collection, serves to highlight the carefully constructed characters of Gonzales’s other stories. […]

Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins, chronicles Hitch’s obsession with making Psycho, at the cost of alienating his wife and everyone else in the film industry. The Girl, darker still, follows Tippi Hedren’s account of how Hitchcock, played this time by Toby Jones, routinely subjected her to mental and physical torture on the set of The Birds and beyond (the shooting of Marnie is also featured in The Girl, though from its promotional campaigns, you would hardly know it).

Since watching both movies, I’ve become fascinated by the idea of Hitchcock being cast as his own controlling boyfriend/husband characters from Vertigo and Marnie, respectively. And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the personas of Scottie Ferguson and Mark Rutland underlie the characterization of Hitchcock in last year’s biopics. […]