The work of the mother and the work of the artist are undervalued and undercompensated. Creative work, after all, is “nonessential,” as the pandemic has made explicit. And while most everyone would affirm that the work of the mother is essential, her work is still largely taken for granted. Most communities lack substantial structures to compensate, validate, or buttress her in her labor. It is challenging to persevere in either vocation and especially challenging to persevere in both. Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life. Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen? How could she justify hiring childcare to do work that might not pay? Why would she abide in her craft, and how?
If you refuse to pass judgment on these decisions, if you walk around thinking you’re the Messiah, you’ll wind up settling for inferior decisions, by which I mean imprecise, contrived, solipsistic ones. If, on the other hand, you condemn your decisions, you’ll lose the improvisatory momentum upon which all narrative construction depends.
To unearth queer history, researchers like myself must work with absences, deliberate erasures – lives and relationships that were hidden, denied or disguised. Byron researchers usually face an overabundance of material, but his queerness is still a question of fragments. Researching his sexuality requires the slow process of learning to recognise and connect codes and threads through his prose and verse.
If you were going to choose an author to rewrite The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim/James, it would be difficult to find a better candidate for the job than Percival Everett, the dexterous master of multiple genres whose bitter satire Erasure became the outstanding film American Fiction. Everett’s reframing of Mark Twain’s novel involves a radical perspective shift, creatively filling in narrative gaps along the way, but for the most part it follows the structure of the original. The endings, however, couldn’t be more different
Reading Fosse is exhausting and exhilarating, refreshing and unlimited; a large paradox. He falls into a distinct and remarkable Norwegian literary tradition with the likes of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard (who happens to be my favorite) and Henrik Ibsen.
Fosse is not for everyone, which means he is the standout for some. I happen to feel this gravitation toward his work. Find out for yourself where you lie.
Caleb Carr visits the grave of his beloved Masha, whom he considers the love of his life, every day. “We have a little chat,” said Carr, best known for his 1994 crime novel “The Alienist,” during a video call from his home in upstate New York. It’s late at night — Carr is a longtime night owl who does most of his work after it gets dark — and the author, who now has a long white beard, is thinking about grief and dying — subjects that linger over his new nonfiction book, “My Beloved Monster,” and loom over what might be the final months of his life.
Throughout Knife, Rushdie also makes clear that freedom of speech – a freedom increasingly under threat from forces on both the Right and the Left – is no luxury. “Art challenges orthodoxy,” he writes. “To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of the time… Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.”
Emerging from the various entries is a reminder, both haunting and comforting, that despite how singular our experience feels, we are all grappling with just about the same core concerns; that our time is short and precious; that all of our confusions are a single question, the best answer to which is love.