I recently graduated from the California State University Northridge school of Cinema and Television Arts with an emphasis in film production. Currently I'm working for an online jazz station; McQsJazz.com and it's pretty cool. On the side I'm working on breaking into the industry. One step at a time.
Justin Timberlake (left) and Ryder Allen star as Eddie and Sam in the new movie Palmer on Apple TV+. Apple TV+
In the new film Palmer, Justin Timberlake plays Eddie, a former high school football star who comes back to his Louisiana hometown after more than a decade in prison. As he pieces together his new life, Eddie moves in with his grandmother and befriends her young neighbor, a boy named Sam.
Sam is funny and spirited, and is confident in his love of dolls and tea parties. When Sam’s mom disappears — as she often does — Eddie steps up.
“I grew up in the rural South as a young boy,” says Timberlake. “And I found myself relating to both of our lead characters — you know, being a young boy and being interested in the arts. And on the other hand, I found myself really relating to a guy like Eddie. … I knew guys like that growing up that were football gods or basketball gods in our hometown and then school ends and there’s this transition and they kind of don’t know exactly what to do with themselves.”
Interview Highlights
On casting Ryder Allen, the child who plays Sam
Believe it or not, this is Ryder’s first film. … Sometimes the naivete to a situation can give moments of genius, because there was something completely untrained about him, but also he just had an intuition. In the chemistry reads, we would play certain scenes out … and then I would just keep talking. I would just keep going. Coming from stage and having experience on shows like SNL and things like that, you know, you develop a level of improvisation that we wanted to try out on all the kids and Ryder … would just literally stay in character and keep playing. …
When you get an exchange like that between two actors … you start to feel like you’re just watching people; you’re not watching actors, you’re watching people. And that’s essentially what you want out of anything you’re doing on film.
On the message he hopes people take away from the film
We have to have open eyes, and open ears, and open hearts. … I don’t feel like I have an authority to tell people what to think or feel, but I guess I hope that the theme of acceptance comes shining through in this movie. … This boy is 8 years old and he likes what he likes and he shouldn’t be bullied for that, he should be accepted … supported and uplifted for that. … Really loving yourself and being able to see people in the world … for who they are and accept that, and love that — it has to come from within. Hopefully that’s what we accomplished with with my character, with Eddie. That finding that self-love can kind of lead you in that direction, it can be your compass.
On the criticism that he has appropriated black music
To be honest, I don’t know that I have an authority to respond to that. I can only tell you that where I grew up outside of Memphis, Tenn., … my mother introduced me to … so much beautiful art. She was that type of mother. I grew up listening to all types of music and, you know, the music that I write comes from an honest place of my favorite influences — and it’s as simple as that for me. …
All I can do is be true to my influence, because I think any musician, or artist, or actor, or director will tell you that we are a product of our influences, you know? I’ve met directors who say … “When I saw that movie in a theater, I wanted to make a movie like that.” And I felt that way. … I’ve responded in my childhood to certain songs like that, “Gosh, I want to write a song like that one day.” … I think you have to be true to your influence and then make your music your own — or your performance your own, or your movies your own.
Sophia Boyd and Melissa Gray produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
Hollywood portrayals of the American Mafia often focus on major cities, but writer Russell Shorto says there have been active mob organizations in countless small and midsize cities in the United States.
Shorto knows this firsthand: His grandfather was a mob boss in the industrial town of Johnstown, Pa. Shorto says his grandfather’s involvement with the Johnstown mob initially began as an offshoot of Prohibition, which opened doors for Italian Americans facing employment discrimination.
“When Prohibition happened, here was an opportunity,” Shorto says. “In this case, there was an old Italian guy in the neighborhood who seemed to have organized families to operate stills.”
When Prohibition ended, the Johnstown mob shifted its focus to gambling. It had a headquarters on Main Street, two doors down from City Hall, where it ran various operations, including card games, numbers games and sports betting.
“They had something like 100 people in their employ, most of them just sort of on the side, but some full-time bookies,” he says. “They made about $2 million a year over about a 20-year period.”
Shorto says his grandfather’s first arrest records were for running card and dice games out of the trunk of his car. He later rose through the ranks of the organization, eventually becoming its second in command.
Shorto writes about the Johnstown mob and the family havoc that resulted from his grandfather’s position in it in his new memoir, Smalltime. He says the family secrets he uncovered while writing the book were sometimes hard to stomach.
“The pain [my grandfather] inflicted on [my grandmother], the pain he inflicted on my father … that then colored my father’s whole life, which in turn colored my life,” he says.
Interview Highlights
On how the gambling operation was out in the open and paid off police and the mayor
[The mob] paid people off. … Periodically [the police] would have to raid for form’s sake. And so [the police] would give [the mobsters] a call and let them know, “OK, we’re going to send a guy down to raid.” And so the idea was you would leave somebody behind, everybody would clear out and you’d take most of your betting slips, but you’d leave one guy behind, usually an older guy who was kind of down on his luck and didn’t have anything to lose by going and hanging out in jail for a day or two, and he would be there to take the fall and then they’d kind of reset and start again.
On how the mob organization had political influence
One of the differences, I think, between the small-town mob and New York or Chicago is that it was really focused on gambling. People told me this over and over, and I guess I have to believe them that they did not get into, for example, prostitution or drugs. Many people told me that, “Your grandfather and Joe, his brother-in-law, had this rule: Drugs, that’s dirty stuff. We don’t mess with that.” So I guess I have to believe them, regarding payoffs and things like that.
They were very much involved in local politics. They engineered to get a DA into office who they liked, and they were involved in unions. So that sort of thing was part of their world.
On his grandfather’s lifestyle, which was paid for by mob activity
On the surface, it was plain. They had a “no Cadillacs” rule. You couldn’t be showy. They didn’t wear tailored suits. But when you got out of town, that was a different story. And so when they were in Atlantic City, where they spent much of the summer every year with the whole family, they would bring a whole entourage of cars down to Atlantic City, and they rented a suite in the swankiest hotel and they had waiters for everything. They were often in Florida as well. So they lived it up when they were out of town. … But my grandfather was a very quiet guy. He mumbled a lot. Some people said they thought he was maybe pathologically shy. So he was good at putting up that kind of front.
On how his grandfather got beautiful clothes for his wife
He was a brilliant cheat at cards. And he would organize big card games. And my dad said he remembered as a kid watching him — he would practice for a couple of hours beforehand at the dining room table, dealing from the bottom of the deck and dealing the second card. And so he would get into these big games with the owners of the department stores and the jewelry store, and he would take them to the cleaners. And he would agree to take their winnings in merchandise. And so he would just tell his wife, “Go down to April’s, go down to Mark’s furniture store and get whatever you want.” And the manager would have to walk behind her and pile up all these dresses on his arm and that sort of thing.
On learning why his own father didn’t follow in his grandfather’s footsteps
Somehow I had grown up with this story that my grandfather, the forbidding figure, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and my father refused. And as a child, I think I saw this as valiant: “[My father is] doing this for us. He’s keeping his family protected.” As I talked to more and more of the old guys, I kind of repeated this, and they looked at me like, “What are you talking about?” And one of them said, “Are you kidding? Tony” — my dad — “wanted nothing more than to get into it.” So it turns out finally that I confronted my dad with this, and he admitted it and he said that, in fact, he had desperately wanted to get into it and he would hang out at City Cigar, the center of the operation. And if his father caught him there, he would beat the crap out of him. And so, in this strange way, my grandfather, this dark figure in my childhood, ends up being kind of this hero who’s trying to save his son from this life that he doesn’t want him to have.
Investigating your family history is part of growing up, basically. It’s moving yourself to another level of maturity, which is why I think everyone ought to do it — if they dare.
Russell Shorto
On his grandfather’s infidelity and children from those affairs
My grandfather … acted like a medieval king or something. He did what he wanted. This woman had his child, and she was actually the housekeeper who cleaned his house and his [business] partner’s house. And he decided eventually, “You’re not going to keep the baby.” His partner and his wife were unable to have children, [so] the two men decided they would announce that this was their child whom they had adopted, and that’s who raised the child. He had another child with another woman.
When I talk about me having this sense of darkness, which came from my awareness of how the older people in the family reacted to my grandfather, it’s not so much about the mob per se. It’s more about the fallout from his personality and his behavior. This kind of thing really kind of colored — and, I think, to this day … colors — a lot of people in the family.
On the intensity of doing family history research
I’m now kind of a great believer in family history in general. … Research your family, but do it if you have the stomach for it, because generally speaking, you know certain stories about your family. Once you start researching them, you’re going to find out that’s probably not true — or there’s a veneer of truth there, but the reality is something quite different. … Investigating your family history is part of growing up, basically. It’s moving yourself to another level of maturity, which is why I think everyone ought to do it — if they dare.
Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
Photographer and explorer, Gemina Garland-Lewis has always been drawn to nature and wildlife. Garland-Lewis takes us through her journey of growing to love bird photography alongside her partner on their land, nicknamed “La Isla,” in Baja California Sur, Mexico.
As I sit with my back against a charred, fallen palm tree, I can’t help but hear my mother’s words in my head: “I hope you don’t like birds now just because of a guy.” My eyes alert as I scan for various woodpeckers and sparrows, camera in hand, and I wonder if there may be some truth in what she said.
I’ve been a photographer since I was 12 and have been deeply curious about the natural world and its creatures since about the time I could crawl. I have two degrees in conservation biology-adjacent fields. I’ve happily spent six hours of my day staring at the light changing on a glacier without ever feeling an ounce of boredom or impatience. But, birds? I’ve always appreciated them, but they never made me tick.
It was May of 2020 when my mother spoke those words about me liking birds because of a guy. The bird in question was a Wilson’s warbler, spotted in my front yard in Seattle, and the guy was my partner, Hiroshi.
The following month, amid the turbulences and uncertainties of the global pandemic, I had lost all my work as a photo instructor and a naturalist. I arrived at the Loreto International Airport in Baja California Sur, Mexico, to live with Hiroshi, Hiro for short, in the small town of San Ignacio. His family has been here for generations and he bought land next to them 4 years ago, but it wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that the opportunity to start building the dream for the land really presented itself.
Our land “La Isla” from the south end of the property. Our dog, Kipo, makes for an ever-constant yet also sometimes difficult birding companion.
Sandwiched between two arroyos, our land is to some extent manmade. Known as “La Isla” for its prominence, which although naturally occurring, was given a boost with the help of many men years ago who piled dirt on top of dirt and removed an untold thousands of rocks along the way to make the land more suitable for agriculture — all for the pay of less than 5 pesos a day. La Isla covers close to 4.5 acres that were once filled with hundreds of orange trees, a lush desert orchard fed by water from the traditional irrigation practice of community-managed acequias.
Fast forward to November, my back against the charred palm. Above me, a male vermilion flycatcher keeps landing on a small mesquite branch. I raise my camera and focus, making as little movement or sound as possible. I look to my left and I see Hiro focusing on the same flycatcher from his hideout about 40 feet away. It’s Day One of what I’m calling our collaborative competition. We’d already been keeping track of the birds we were seeing with the help of a checklist from Avibase for Baja California Sur(a mere 462 bird species for this state alone) and The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America.
The day prior, Hiro had gone out with his camera to help build his confidence to identify warblers that often flit away before we can get a close look with the binoculars. After only about an hour, he returned with 14 bird species photographed. As we scrolled through the images on his LCD screen, for whatever reason — be it a competitive streak, a need for an accountability buddy or my inherent love of making lists and then checking things off — I got the spark of inspiration I needed. Bird photography, here I come.
We woke early on our first day of collaborative competition. It was cloudy, which was strange for our skies, and I almost bailed without the usual soft warm light. But Hiro nudged me on, and as I folded over in half to fit myself through an opening in the barbed wire fence that marks our property line, I spotted a loggerhead shrike atop one of the many old burned desert-loving mesquite trees. Soon after, a Gila woodpecker flitted past and landed on a nearby branch. When I turned to move places slightly, I accidentally scared up a group of common ground doves who kept low to the ground as they scattered in flight. The list went on until an hour later I had photographed 15 species.
By the end of that weekend, we’d photographed 27 species. A week later, that number rose to 42. Light, action and timing all have us vying for a better shot than the last time around. We’ve learned that some of it is just being in the right place at the right time, but you also have to know something about what those might be.
I’ll admit, we’re in a bit of a good place for birding. Sitting almost dead center on the Baja peninsula, San Ignacio is a genuine desert oasis. Bordering the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, its freshwater springs mean that you can see aquatic bird species here you would never think to identify with the Sonoran Desert. Conversely, it took me a good few months of being here before seeing a turkey vulture — a species I have always exclusively associated with the desert — flying among palm trees — a species I have always exclusively associated with ocean-adjacent tropics — seemed at all normal. There is certainly something of a cognitive dissonance here in birding because of the local ecology, which makes it a fascinating and unusual place to undertake our little project. Sometimes, even the double-crested cormorants will fly in from the ocean and take a perch on a fallen log in the freshwater.
At first, our goal was simple enough: identify as many species as possible. We’re working towards operating our own natural history and photography trips in the area, so it seemed like a good catalog to have to entice future potential guests. But as I sat there that first morning, watching and waiting for my window with the birds, I let the calm and quiet wash over me.
Our “campersito” wedged between the two trees that best exemplify this ecosystem – the mesquite and the palm tree.
I looked at Hiro, appreciating the feeling of doing something together yet at the same time alone. Slowly but surely, I found that I was starting to recognize birds just by how they fly, something I knew in theory but hadn’t internalized. It’s incredible how much you can learn from observation alone. When we see turkey vultures gathering above, we now know to look for a lone zone-tailed hawk among them mimicking the scavenger birds’ flight, camouflaged despite its smaller size and brightly banded tail. The more we observe and photograph, the more we know what to look for the next time.
Hiro and I are inspiring each other without particularly meaning to, and learning something new about the nature around us every day in the process. And so, perhaps there is some truth in my mother’s words after all. I do like birds because of a guy. But that’s only part of it. I’m out there with my camera by myself just as much as I am out there with him. I’m finding that I like the stillness and the need to be in the present moment that I’ve found our project requires of me. And I suppose it’s never too late to be a late bloomer.
Hiro looking out over the downtown plaza and mission of San Ignacio. HIstorical, place setting.
During the Cold War, the movies we saw from the Eastern bloc were steeped in politics. They critiqued, more or less obliquely, life under communism. More than 30 years later, the Berlin Wall is long gone, but the films from Eastern Europe haven’t lost their political edge. These days, they’re critical of post-communist societies that remain harsh and oppressive.
This criticism takes audaciously radical form in Spoor, a fiercely offbeat Polish thriller whose heroine is unlike any woman you typically see onscreen. Based on the terrific novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by the 2018 Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, it was directed by the celebrated filmmaker Agnieszka Holland along with her daughter, Kasia Adamik. The result is a film that’s strange, darkly funny and powerful. Imagine a pulpy murder story that’s also a utopian fable about feminism, social justice and ecology.
Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka stars as Janina Duszejko, a retired engineer who lives in the mountainous countryside of southwest Poland along with her two dogs. Devoted to astrology and the poetry of William Blake, Janina is an instinctive defender of the weak who is especially tormented by the suffering of animals.
Janina despises the culture that leads men to abuse women and to gleefully shoot deer, wild boar, pheasants and rabbits. When she complains about poachers killing game out of season, the police treat her like a crazy old bat. When she complains about it to the village priest, he tells her it’s blasphemy to care so much about animals.
Soon mysterious things start happening. Janina’s dogs disappear. Then she and a loner named Matoga discover the murdered body of the loathsome neighbor she calls Big Foot. As the police investigation proceeds, Janina spends her time with a small community of outsiders — including a police cyber-guy who has seizures, an innocent young woman forced to work at a brothel, and a visiting Czech entomologist who’s studying one of the local beetles. Meanwhile, more corpses start appearing, but there are no human footsteps surrounding the dead bodies, only animal footprints. Could these wild creatures possibly have done it?
If all of this sounds a tad delirious, it is — deliberately so. Rather like Taxi Driver, which showed us an infernal New York City that reflected Travis Bickle’s psyche, Spoor gives us rural Poland as it feels to Janina. Working with more stylistic panache than ever before, Holland does a superb job of heightening everything — the majesty of the mist-swaddled countryside, the thrillingly magical visitation of wild animals, the spiritual corruption of those in power.
And in Mandat-Grabka’s riveting performance, Janina dives deep into her own volcanic nature. Fueled by visions and moral rage, she lives with fearless intensity, whether teaching English to schoolchildren, yelling at the cops, flirting with the entomologist, or sobbing over a wild boar that’s been shot and simply left to die. In an earlier time, her weirdness might’ve gotten her thought of as a witch.
Janina’s rebelliousness is clearly understood by Tokarczuk and Holland, who both know what it is to refuse to go along with those in power. Now 72, Holland left Poland 40 years ago after her films were harshly censored by the Communist Party, beginning a remarkable career in the West that includes everything from Holocaust films to Henry James adaptations to episodes of The Wire. Despite her Nobel, Tokarczuk is hugely controversial in her home country for speaking out against the current Polish government run by the nativist, overtly authoritarian Law and Justice Party.
Although Spoor has one foot in classic noir, it steers clear of that genre’s attraction to defeat and destruction. Even as she plunges into the darkness, Janina won’t let herself be trapped there. Living her politics, she risks her life to fight what she thinks is a culture of death. Building to an ending worthy of a fairy tale, Spoor makes you feel just how monstrous human beings can be, yet it also suggests that fighting against cruelty can bring you back into the light.
“A lot of my stories are often based on several things,” Nnedi Okorafor told NPR in 2016, “but their foundation is in the stories of the women and girls around me and also within myself.” Okorafor was born in the United States, to Igbo parents from Nigeria, and her roots have unspooled themselves throughout her body of work — which has won the highest honors in the field of speculative fiction, including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Awards — while nourishing a fresh growth of African-influenced sci fi and fantasy. And while her acclaimed BintiTrilogy was set partly in deep space and on exoplanets, her gorgeous new novella, Remote Control, takes place firmly on Earth — specifically among the shea orchards and red soil of Ghana.
At the start of the story, Fatima is a young Ghanian girl who has taken on the mantle of the Adopted Daughter of Death. Renamed Sankofa — an avian symbol of the West African Akan people, one that embodies the idea of harnessing the past to forge a better tomorrow — she wanders the land, inducing dread and awe in the towns she encounters, a living legend wielding the power of annihilation. The dead pile at her departing feet. Following her at a wary distance is a fox she’s dubbed Movenpick — a moniker that isn’t taken from the pages of a fable, but from a real-life chain of luxury hotels.
The Movenpick thing is a small detail that comes across as amusing at first, but the cognitive dissonance it stirs up soon takes on a larger, more fascinating form. In Sankofa’s near-future, science-fictional Africa, yam farms teem beneath Taser-wielding drones, and hashtags rub elbows with folktales. She encounters a woman in a street market with “tattoos of circuitry” that “run up both arms like a disease;” she navigates a dreamlike landscape that’s equally at home to mud huts and robots. Corporate encroachment and age-old tradition clash. Technology operates like a form of magic, but it’s also a system of forces as omnipresent and inscrutable as the weather, one that fluctuates from village to village as Sankofa stalks the countryside.
Episodic and organic, the story winds along with a limber rhythm that allows every rich detail of Sankofa’s surreal world to surface.
She’s not stalking aimlessly. Sankofa has embarked on a quest to find out how she became the Adopted Daughter of Death, a transformation that’s still a mystery to her. A one-eyed man was involved, she knows, and her family died in the process. A seed in a box may hold a key to the secret, but its mechanism is unclear. This quest drives Sankofa’s actions, but it never coheres into a conventional plot. Then again, it doesn’t appear that Okorafor intends it to. Episodic and organic, the story winds along with a limber rhythm that allows every rich detail of Sankofa’s surreal world to surface. It’s a cumulative narrative, a slow burn that builds in emotional urgency even as the scope of Okorafor’s worldbuilding bursts into something breathtakingly vast.
By story’s end, Okorafor pulls a neat trick: She uses the way in which legends morph throughout time to add another level of ambiguity to Sankofa’s origin and fate. It’s a delicious ambiguity, though, one that blurs the lines between worship and fear, between machine and flesh, between corporation and culture, and between death and reclamation. In more ways than one, Sankofa’s tale ponders the idea of alienation — and how that feeling can come from within as well as without. “I am Sankofa, I belong wherever I want to belong,” she says fiercely at one point during her journey of discovery, both of self and truth. Okorafor, with her multifaceted, cross-genre Remote Control, seems to be saying the same thing.
Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the new book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded. He’s on Twitter: @jason_m_heller
by Phillip B. Williams, Ana Bozicevic, Evie Shockley, Ken Chen, and Craig Morgan Teicher
It’s been a sobering week. But it’s a new year, we’ve got a new president, and, dare I say, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon despite the darkness of the past few days. With that hope in mind, it’s time for not just a new poetry preview, but a new kind of poetry preview. Since 2012, I have had the great privilege of kicking off the year in poetry coverage for NPR with an article that looks ahead at the next 12 months of poetry books. As I began thinking about this year’s preview, I felt more than ever that contemporary American poetry is far too multifarious for just one person to cover.
What excites me most about poetry right now is the fact that the mainstream has come to encompass so many kinds of poets, that many voices are now being heard loudly and broadly thanks to an engaged and expanding community of publishers and of younger and older poetry fans who pass poems around the Internet like the latest news. I want the preview, going forward, to include books that might fall outside of my particular sensibility. And so I have invited some friends and colleagues to help me.
This year’s poetry preview features four poet-critics in addition to myself: Ana Božičević, Ken Chen, Evie Shockley, and Phillip B. Williams. These are poets whose work spans aesthetic, political, and emotional spectrums. They are also all brilliant and incisive critics, and together, we have curated a list of books that speak about and out of the many challenges that we have faced over the last several years — though that’s not to say these are not permanent and lasting books. The preview will appear in three articles, including this one, over the next few weeks, and all five of us hope it offers renewal and truth-telling at a moment when both are profoundly necessary.
So, without further ado, here is the first installment.
Master Suffering CM Burroughs, January
In Burroughs’s brilliant second collection of poems, power and subjugation, voyeurism and witness, misogyny and sexual autonomy combat and converse through fiercely honed and honest lyrics. Burroughs removes the mask of innocence and gentleness from beauty, allowing the truth about suffering’s reach to come forward. Memory is weaponized against the one who remembers in a series of poems called “Incident for the Forgettery,” and several “God Letter” poems question faith: “If I could think of Him as formless, all energy and myth,/ I could believe better.” There isn’t a single poem that misses, which makes it all the more devastating to get through each of these 36 impeccable lyrics. Burroughs seems to ask: How does one master suffering not only by experiencing it, but by embodying it? Darkly humorous and deeply erotic, she writes with great precision and profound implications: “… apertures of her legs listing for light, breasts banked by sweat. She knows what it tastes like to taste her.” “Master Suffering:” is this an address or a command? It is both, and signals the kind of emotional force Burroughs is able to wring from ambiguity, allowing power and suffering to blur. — Phillip B. Williams
Train Music: Writing/Pictures C. S. Giscombe and Judith Margolis, April
Most of us wouldn’t make time for a cross-country train trip anymore (least of all during a pandemic), but Train Music allows us to follow the verbal and visual traces of two artists who do. Poet Giscombe and visual artist Margolis, an Ohio-born “cold-water Negro” and a Jewish “New Jersey girl,” travel together the way the rails of railroad tracks do: They cover the same ground, but on parallel rather than identical routes. Giscombe’s poetry — a characteristically playful and profound excursion through the social life of language — moves with him from his sister’s home in Harlem back to his life as a Bay Area academic. For him, the three-day journey is not strictly linear; as they hit station after station, he shuttles back and forth between the past and present of race in the U.S., in song and poetry (“How you gonna win, when you ain’t right within? Ms. Hill had asked”); in railroad history and folklore (“Pennsylvania shout, boys!”). Margolis’s drawings pursue a different line of inquiry, as recurring images of female figures–now trapped inside a house, now sleeping beneath open windows, now dancing on the rooftop in a Chagall-like surrealist scene–carry her towards “learning to live alone with only the moon for company.” Between them, the artists pull us into a compelling encounter with this nation’s terrain and the spatial, relational nature of identity. — Evie Shockley
SHO Douglas Kearney, April
The title of Kearney’s new collection could mean three things: a performance (show), an affirmation (sure, spoken in Black vernacular), and to appear (to show up). The book is raucous theater, a party whose rhythms contain a meditation on what it means to have a body in public space. SHO explores Black masculinity, police killings, and Christianity, often interrogating race through the metonymy of skin. If we show our race, our seemingly most fateful attribute, on our skin, does that mean skin is actually one’s interior? This is just one of the book’s Zen koans, to use Kearney’s characterization of his poems. A poem about Black achievement envisions his own flayed skin levitating as a kite, a macabre vision of racial uplift.
A charismatic creator of performance and print, Kearney is a contradictory artist: He writes from the vernacular and hip hop, slang, sprung rhythms and song riffs, but also mutates English into an intellectually dense, artificial language no one could ever speak: “What it ends to be ‘End,’ but claims hella outsets;/ cants ever was from amnesia worksheds.” Underneath the seductive rhythms, this is poetry as permutations, a puzzling configuration of linked puns, homonyms, and polyvalent bursts, as dense as John Donne or that magician of diction, Harryette Mullen.
Avoiding voice, metaphor, and any whiff of epiphany, these poems elide the ego and present the self either as a lexical robot (superego) or magnetic meat, the ignoble body of the id. Kearney’s prosody is miraculous. Explosive double beats launch the lines or hit the break like a hi-hat. Slant rhymes suggest infinite puns, but Kearney sometimes downshifts from complexity and just cruises around the neighborhood. Formalism as syncopation and signification: I can’t think of another writer as gifted as Kearney is at sound. — Ken Chen
The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems Arthur Sze, April
The recognition was long overdue when Sze won the 2019 National Book Award for his previous book, Sight Lines. This 500-page, career spanning retrospective is a fitting follow up, allowing readers to take in the full breadth of what Sze has achieved over ten collections published since the early 1970s. There are so many kinds of poems here, and so many truly extraordinary ones, that this work is tough to summarize briefly. Sze’s early work establishes his skill with poems that find spiritual resonance in imagery drawn from close and careful observation of the everyday: “To be still: watch a dog listen to sounds you cannot hear.”
In the middle books, Sze develops various kinds of loose sequences, chains of linked lyrics that meditate and vamp on various subjects. My favorite of Sze’s forms appears repeatedly in the later books: columns of single lines, each ending with an em-dash, like a bank of windows that open onto the sky, inviting questions: “in a past life, I played the clarinet in a marching band — / now the vault has cracked — / have we not meandered, bewildered, in a cloud forest? — “. This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet. — Craig Morgan Teicher
And a couple of shorter notes about books we couldn’t put down …
This poetry is filled with incantatory language and startling details; it ranges through history and the natural world, composing a compelling metaphysics of black diasporic womanhood. — Evie Shockley
Mphanza’s ambitious debut challenges the idea of a poem’s framework with gorgeously rendered centos and ekphrastic poems that breathe new life into the very ideas of composition, lyric, and witness: “To build the voice/ as an individual instrument.// To fashion a new air/ where breath becomes superfluous.” — Phillip B. Williams
Born in ’77 & raised in Croatia, living in Brooklyn since ’97, Ana Božičević is a poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer. She is the author of Povratak lišća / Return of the Leaves, Selected Poems in Croatian and other books of poetry and translation. More at www.anabozicevic.com
Ken Chen is the author of Juvenilia, a winner of the Yale Poets of Younger Series, and is working on a book about visiting the underworld and encountering those sent there by colonialism.
Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections are the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017); both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer and LA Times Book Prizes. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, IL and author of the book Thief in the Interior(Alice James 2016). A recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Whiting Award, he currently teaches at Bennington College and the Randolph College low-residency MFA.
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of several books, including The Trembling Answers, which won the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the essay collection We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. His next collection of poems, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey, will be out in April.
by Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, Bob Mondello, and Bilal Qureshi
We spent a lot of time watching movies in 2020. Plenty of our favorites ended up on this show, but with release schedules scrambled and publicity scattered, there are still things that manage to slip through the cracks. Today we are recommending a few of the films we really think you should see.
For members of Luminous Voices, a professional choir ensemble in Alberta, Canada, rehearsing and performing safely during the pandemic has meant getting into their cars, driving to an empty parking lot and singing with each other’s voices broadcast through their car radios.
This “car choir” solution is one that college music professor David Newman — an accomplished baritone himself in Virginia — came up with so that ensembles could sing and “be” together.
“I saw on my Facebook feed was friends either bemoaning the fact that we couldn’t sing together at all, or saying ‘Singing together is too important and we just have to do it no matter what,’ ” Newman tells NPR. “And I thought, neither of those is a good answer.”
Newman’s method uses a few simple tools — microphones, a mixer and an FM transmitter.
He started by getting some friends together in the spring to experiment with singing, isolated in their cars, their voices connected by wireless microphones attached to a mixer.
After some thinking, a lightbulb went off: attach an FM transmitter to the mixer. That allowed the singers’ voices to be broadcast back into their cars through the radio, without a discernable delay.
His YouTube videos about the process caught the attention of many singers and choir leaders. Newman figures about 20 choirs are using their cars and car radios for rehearsals — including Luminous Voices. The ensemble’s founder and conductor, Tim Shantz, says this new way of singing together filled a void.
“For us not to be able to [sing together], it’s like a whole part of our soul is sort of taken out. And we need to find ways to somehow fill that gap,” Shantz tells NPR.
In addition to using the system for rehearsals, Luminous Voices has also performed two car concerts. Shantz estimates about 200 people attended one in December, all in their cars. Audience members gathered in a parking lot and tuned in to the performance on their radios. Instead of clapping, audience members honked horns.
For Shantz, those concerts were as much about the audience as the singers.
“It’s not just about the performers and satisfying something for us. But there was this element of ‘Wow, the participation of an audience really brought the whole experience to the fore,’ ” Shantz says. “And you realize the importance of performing arts.”
Iconoclastic humorist Fran Lebowitz used to be known as a writer. Back in the late 1970s and ’80s she released two popular collections of essays featuring her cutting observations and opinions about life. But that part of her career was cut short by a decades long case of writer’s block — now she’s known for talking.
The Netflix series, Pretend It’s a City, features Lebowitz in conversation with Martin Scorsese — who directed both the new series and the 2010 HBO documentary about Lebowitz, Public Speaking. Lebowitz has known Scorsese for so long she’s no longer certain of how they met — though she thinks it was probably at a party.
“Whenever I saw Marty at a party, I would spend most of the evening talking to Marty,” she says.
In the new series, Lebowitz talks about why she cleaned apartments in her 20s when her friends were making more money waitressing, working as a New York City cab driver in the 1970s, getting kicked out of high school in New Jersey, and her collection of 10,000 books. Many of her stories center on Manhattan — a place both she and Scorsese feel deeply connected to.
“We both have such a strong connection to New York that, in fact, when I made my deal with Marty for Public Speaking … Marty said, ‘OK, here’s the deal. We don’t leave Manhattan,’ ” Lebowitz says. “In Pretend It’s A City, we did go to Queens [and it was] something Marty talked about as if we were going to Afghanistan.”
Interview highlights
On living alone during the COVID-19 pandemic
Well, it still seems to me to be by far the best choice. I cannot understand how people who do not live alone have stood this last 10 months, because the only upside of having to stay in my apartment is at least there was no one else there. I would find that unbearable, I mean, truly unbearable. … At the very beginning [of the pandemic], this guy I know, this friend of mine sent me, like, one million dollars worth of orchids saying, “These are to keep you company.” And I thought, really? I mean, thank you. They’re beautiful, but I keep myself company. So I don’t feel that living alone is a drawback during this. I think it’s an asset. …
Truthfully, I really never get lonely. I mean, I certainly can say that there are people that I miss, specific people that I’ve missed in my life numerous times, some very grievously. But a kind of abstract loneliness? No.
The truth is, if I dropped the Hope Diamond on the floor of a subway car, I’d leave it there.
Fran lebowitz
On being comfortable as herself and not being envious of others
I’m always surprised that people, adults, look to other people — even for things like haircuts. I just never thought about it. I don’t know why. But that was true even when I was a little kid. I don’t have a habit of comparing myself to other people. … The few times in my life I felt deeply envious, the feeling was so repellent to me that I thought, “God, this must be what it’s like to be these people who are constantly envious of other people.” … It’s less surprising that, say, teenagers feel that way. But I know a lot of adults who feel that way, and I think it is just ridiculous.
On being a lifelong germaphobe
I’ve always been very careful about touching things. … I’ve never touched a single thing in the New York City subway system — ever. Usually I’m by myself on the subway, but a few times I remember … [I was] with someone, and he said to me, when we got out, he said, “You didn’t touch anything.” And I said, “No.” And the truth is, if I dropped the Hope Diamond on the floor of a subway car, I’d leave it there. I’d say, “Well, you know, it’s just the Hope Diamond.”
But I’ve, of course, seen people pick things up from the floor. I, at least once, was sitting across from a woman with a baby, and the pacifier fell out of the baby’s mouth. The woman picked it up, wiped it off on her shirt and put it back in the baby’s mouth. I really thought one of two things going to happen to that baby: Either he’s going to drop dead right now or he’ll live to be a million years old, because he’s just been exposed to every germ and virus on the planet Earth.
On getting elected class president of her all-girls school and then shortly thereafter being expelled
Well, the difference is that the kids elected to be president and the headmaster threw me out. … The official reason he threw me out was he said, “I was a terrible influence on the other girls and I was usurping his power.” Whatever that meant, I have no idea. …
I always felt that I was punished for things unfairly. In other words, when I got thrown out of school for years afterward, people say, what did you do? And I know I was expected to say, “I started a revolution.” “I set fire to the gym.” But I really didn’t do anything. And I really think that what I got expelled for was what my mother used to call “that look on your face.”
On driving a taxi cab in New York in her early 20s in the ’70s
I drove a taxi because I don’t have any skills. I didn’t know how to do anything else. … I also didn’t want to do the job that most of my friends did, which was wait tables, because I didn’t want to have to be nice to men to get tips or to sleep with the manager of my shift, which was a common requirement then for being a waitress in New York. So I didn’t want to have a boss, which you don’t in either one of those jobs. Cab driving as a profession was completely different than it is now, because there were these garages with big fleets. Someone would own, like, 40 cabs or maybe more. So you could pick up a cab any shift, you could always make money so that if you woke up in your apartment with no money — a frequent occurrence in my life — I could go pick up a cab. At the end of eight hours, I had money. So that to me was a great thing.
On working for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and not getting along with Warhol
I would say that Andy didn’t like me and that I did not like Andy. I noticed right away how many people around him died. … There was a tremendous amount of encouragement of people already teetering on the brink of sanity. … And Andy would feed these fantasies they had of themselves, because it amused him and it was also lucrative for him. And I just didn’t want to be really around that. I think that Andy realized that, or maybe I just wasn’t his cup of tea, but I didn’t have arguments with Andy, because I never had much conversation with Andy.
On her longtime friendship with Toni Morrison
So if you didn’t know Toni personally, you would not know how much fun Toni was. Toni was really fun. … Most of the time we were laughing. She was really fun. In fact, when I first knew Toni, she was still working at Random House as an editor, and … at that point, my publisher, and my editor called me and said … “[The President of Random House called] me and you have to stop hanging around in Toni Morrison’s office because [the president] was complaining because you’re hanging around in there and the two of you are laughing all the time and she’s not getting her work done.” …
I even once, not that long ago, met a man who taught at Princeton and Toni taught at Princeton much after this, and he said, “I used to have the office next to Toni Morrison. And you and Toni Morrison really annoyed me with all your laughing.” So apparently, the fact that we are laughing is what really annoys people. Of course, men always don’t like to hear women laughing together, because they think you’re laughing about them. But I would say that’s probably the thing we had in common was liking to laugh.
Heidi Saman and Kayla Lattimore produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
As the market for graphic novels has taken off lately, so have graphic adaptations. That’s no wonder — they let publishers simultaneously recycle existing content and snare an all-ages audience. Fortunately, the profit motive can sometimes manage to coexist with good art — and even a new kind of art criticism. Peter Kuper’s Heart of Darkness, P. Craig Russell and Scott Hampton’s American Gods,Odyr’s Animal Farm and Miles Hyman’s The Lottery are all far more than just illustrated versions of well-loved stories. Deploying a formidable arsenal of cartooning techniques, these creators comment on, interpret and unsettle familiar narratives — all without writing a word.
It’s not surprising that John Jennings should achieve a comparable feat with After the Rain, his and David Brame’s interpretation of a short story by Nnedi Okorafor. Besides teaching Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside and writing extensively on cultural representations of race, Jennings drew two recent graphic adaptations of works by the great sci-fi author Octavia Butler. Like 2018’s Kindred and 2020’s Parable of the Sower, After the Rain is far more than a well-rendered tribute to a trailblazing black female writer. In this case, it’s also a kind of visual incarnation of the story’s theme.
Okorafor’s story is about crossing boundaries — some tangible, others emotional or mythic. Chioma, the 39-year-old protagonist, navigates several such divides in the course of the book. Nigerian American (like her creator), she’s made acutely aware of her in-between status when she goes on a two-week visit to her grandmother’s village. In her regular life she’s a Chicago cop, making sense of the world’s strangeness and danger through “cop’s logic.” But on her ancestors’ turf, cop’s logic is no match for the deeper truths of the supernatural world. Chioma is first stalked by a spectral boy — the double of a youth she saw die back in Chicago — and then tortured by a horde of traditional Igbo spirits called Mmuo. “They had large eyes, wide-nostriled noses, cheekbones like granite,” Chioma says. “Many of them were familiar to me, also. Even more were not … Spirits, masquerades, ghosts and ancestors — these were deep, deep Mmuo! I was actually seeing Mmuo!” Chioma’s ordeal is harrowing, but with the help of her grandmother and great-aunt, she comes to see why it was necessary. Eventually she’s able to face long-buried memories and imagine a radical new destiny for herself.
Jennings is credited with writing After the Rain, and Brame with illustrating it. As such, it’s hard to know who’s responsible for the book’s most interesting aspect: Its unorthodox treatment of the comic’s panels. Panels are, of course, central to the look of a comic — sometimes they’re the only way you know it’s a comic at all — and critics talk a lot about how the little squares set the medium apart. They give the reader a lot of agency, for one thing: It’s up to you how long you linger on each panel and how you choose to imagine (or ignore) what might be happening in between them. Their orderly geometry is subconsciously reassuring, too. They serve as boundaries for the eye, containing and controlling everything inside.
The overall effect is of a primal struggle between sense and chaos. You don’t simply observe Chioma’s unwilling confrontation with the world her ancestors mythologized, you experience it.
In After the Rain, though, the panels wake up and run amok, just like the Mmuo who torture Chioma. Jennings and Brame continually vary their size, arrangement and number. Sometimes the panels are scattered across the page at weird angles; elsewhere they vanish altogether. Even the spaces outside the panels’ borders are crowded, so the reader gets no breathing room. Weird, organic growths fill every cranny and press on every edge, just as the spirit world presses up against civilizati1on in Okorafor’s story. The overall effect is of a primal struggle between sense and chaos. You don’t simply observe Chioma’s unwilling confrontation with the world her ancestors mythologized, you experience it. The art is very straightforward otherwise, with conventionally accessible character designs and a palette (by Jennings) that’s both vivid and expected. And yet, thanks to the compositions, every page seems to seethe with primordial energy.
Abrams’ editors and designers deserve mention alongside the artists for all they’ve done to make After the Rain appealing on a strictly physical level. The book’s brilliantly colored jacket adorns a coordinating cover, with black-and-white-patterned endpapers further heightening the sense of drama. Inside, the pages are printed on heavy paper that’s matte — not shiny, as has been the case with too many comics aimed at mainstream audiences lately. Besides giving the colors depth, the subtly textured stock embraces the gaze in a way shiny paper almost never does. As a result of such choices, After the Rain has an aura of heft and potency that’s disproportionate to its length.
Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She tweets at@EtelkaL.
