This Week We're...

Reading

Underappreciated stateside despite critical acclaim, Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis hooked me from the very first sentence—a seven page sidewinder reminiscent of the book-length paragraph in Bolaño’s By Night in Chile. From there, the book traces the simultaneously seething and sedated underworld of Bombay/Mumbai through a series of unplotted, vignette-like sections each ending in pitch-perfect cadence. Sprinkled with occasional violence and ruminations on art and addiction, poverty and privilege, this poet’s novel is narrated with immense sympathy.

—Jack Saul

Watching

I recently came across Directors Notes, a Brighton, UK-based blog and podcast that features the "What, How & Why of Independent Filmmaking." DN's Vimeo channel showcases a multitude of beautifully shot, illustrated, and produced art films from around the world. Though I could link to dozens of interesting and visually appealing films from their channel, I'll include just one that particularly caught my attention: "grapheme" by German visual artist and filmmaker Robert Seidel. The above clip is a documentation of Seidel's permanent video installation at the Museum Wiesbaden. While the video excellently displays the creativity, delicacy, and intricacy of Seidel's stunning piece, the prospect of seeing it in person may very well merit a trip to southwest Germany...

—Brinda Ayer

Learning

African writing blurs into "world" literature

An interesting reflection on contemporary African literature and why we shouldn’t think of it all as “national allegory,” as well as on the health of the African publishing industry. 

—Alex Sarrigeorgiou

The (Difficult) Permission to Write: An Interview with Joanna Walsh, creator of #ReadWomen2014

Joanna Walsh is the author of Fractals (3:AM Press) and earlier this year, she sparked a global movement with a hashtag that allows social-media users to expand daily on a very worthy conversation about the scarcity of women and their voices in mainstream publishing. I’ve admired her work for ages, both online at her long-time blog, Badaude, as well as in person, in a way, from the portraits painted on the wall at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, which I recognized as her distinctive work. She was kind enough to discuss the latest buzz, and some mutual interests, over email between Oxford and New York. Hopefully next time it will be over a meal in London or Paris.

– Lauren Cerand

What was the spark for this project? Why this moment?

I'd been looking at the projects of Matt Jakubowski, a US reviewer who's reading only women this year, and Jonathan Gibbs, a reviewer the UK, who read only women for a period last year. The project was also prompted by the VIDA count, which logs the gender balance of reviewers and reviewed, UK and US literary journals.

But, more simply, it started as a celebration of the names I'd written on the back of some New Years cards. I posted them on Twitter and invited people to tweet more. I thought it might last for a few days, a week, but the response was incredible, so I guess other people thought it was the moment, too.

How does #ReadWomen2014 connect to your other projects?

I'm a writer as well as an illustrator (my collection of short stories, Fractals, just launched at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and is available here). It's always a difficult title to claim, as there are so many feminisms, but I consider myself a feminist writer.

What has surprised you most about the public response to this initiative?

The number of people willing to support it—including bookshops worldwide that sent me photos of their #ReadWomen2014 displays. Blackwell, Oxford, The London Review of Books Bookshop, and Shakespeare and Company, Paris, who asked me, and others, to choose books for display. I'm currently editing an all-woman edition of Five Dials, the literary journal of publisher, Hamish Hamilton. I'm delighted that the idea has support both from readers and from the industry.

How do you see the role of the feminist writer in this day and age? 

That's such a big question and one each writer might answer slightly differently. I think there's still a long way to go in delineating women's experiences—experiences that, of course, also become intersectional: for example, I can't wait to read Juliet Jacques' forthcoming book from Verso, about her life as a trans women. There's so little written on this subject; it's a great thing for everyone—all women and men—that she's doing it.

This doesn't mean a feminist has to to write autobiographically. I write a lot about (and in the midst of) the difficulties of using language to describe everyday experience. This might seem abstruse, but I find it connects with certain things—often quite small things—I find I've been asked to ignore, not to see, and not to talk about. These things are sometimes so tiny, so fundamental that there are hardly words for them. (Friedan used to talk about "the problem with no name" that afflicted housewives unable to express their frustration with their situation.)

Delineation and naming are not concerns exclusive to feminist writers. "What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest," (written, after all, by Alexander Pope) has long been the goal of male writers, too—of any writer. So maybe I'm just asking for the (difficult) permission to write. Perhaps one goal of a (woman) feminist writer is to be able to claim this permission for herself.

What parts of the publishing, media, and literary ecosystem do you hold most accountable for the lack of attention for women writers?

Women often feel their writing is treated differently from mens' by various branches of the media/culture: that their books are given "gauzy covers with shy titles" so "the literary establishment needn't take this work seriously" (says Lionel Shriver); that "it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry" (Claire Messud, in an interview about her book, The Woman Upstairs). Women have complained that they are evaluated on their appearance rather than their writing (UK classical historian Mary Beard was called "too ugly for television," while Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, a "chick" ). An aggregate of women's voices—and these are the voices of well-established, prize-winning writers—is saying that there is something wrong with the way their writing is perceived, for no other reason than that they are women. It's impossible to say that all these problems stem from one easily-definable source, but it would be wrong to ignore them.

Who would you most like to see support this endeavor next?

I'm pretty sure VIDA's onto something. Quotas are not the answer, but a willingness on the part of individual editors to be more adventurous might be. I'd like the main offenders on VIDA's list to think about branching out just a little. I love these papers, some of which provide opportunities for forms of writing scarcely available elsewhere, particularly in long-form journalism and essay. I'd like to see them using their experience, their expertise, their high standards, without the almost inexplicable current bias.

Which living woman writer would you most like to sit next to on a flight?

That's more or less happened to me already, when one of my favorite living writers, Deborah Levy (author of Black Vodka: ten stories, published by And Other Stories) turned up at the launch of my book, Fractals, at Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris this week.

But otherwise I think it would have to be Lydia Davis. She often writes about the spaces of travel (about spaces of all kinds—houses, too—and how they affect our behavior) and she wrote this story, "The Landing," about air turbulence. The readers of The Telegraph didn't think much of it, as you'll see if you read the comments below. I particularly like, "This is probably great if meaningless banality is your cup of tea," because, maybe it is.

Editor's note: Fans of #ReadWomen2014 should look for our new series on Women Travelers, reviving classic and little-seen narratives with contemporary introductions. The first title will be Edith Wharton's A Motor-Flight Through France with a new introduction by Lavinia Spalding, available in May.

My Stories are Posters: An Interview with Rubén Martínez

Emmy-award winning journalist, musician, and teacher Rubén Martínez is the author of Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond. Here, the writer weighs in on the American presidency and the significance of art in all its forms.

IS: Is Obama a disappointment?

RM: It depends on what aspect of his political presence we look at. Certainly presiding over a massive deportation campaign (upwards of two million) is a grave political and moral failure, a Machiavellian move that even the passage of the most progressive of immigration reforms could never justify. As of this writing, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act is a dispiriting mess but does not necessarily mean ultimate failure. And then there is the remarkably thoughtful—and literary—figure, the Obama who can still give extraordinary speeches, such as in Tucson after the mall shooting, and the moving, nuanced extemporaneous remarks in the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict. And then there are the intangibles. My six year-old twin daughters are growing up watching a black man work in the White House. The sheer symbolism of that counts for something. Oh, and I don't believe that "Obama" himself in the singular sense is responsible for the overall failure of American politics. His strengths and weaknesses mirror the promise and pitfalls of American democracy as it’s practiced in the early 21st century. 

Will you see a Latino president in your lifetime?

Wasn't Jimmy Smits the first, in The West Wing? Kidding. But I'm a veterano, well into my sixth decade. My daughters might well live to see it. Pero, Dios me guarde, que no sea Susanna Martinez o Ted Cruz. I must say, in a personal vein, that the question irritates me, touching, as it does, on a very sensitive existential issue: that I have been the "first" Latino in practically every professional setting I've worked in. I've always had mixed feelings about such milestones, in that they seem to redouble the very "racial" thinking that we're nominally trying to grow out of. There are old doubts about affirmative action lurking beneath the celebratory surface: was it more about race than talent? Such voices have receded in my head over the years, but the echo is still there. Perhaps the more important question is: which Latino will we elect, and what will they do to address the great inequities of our society and the role the United States plays in the world? 

How different would your identity be if you were a poster maker?

But I am a poster maker! My words paint pictures in the reader's mind. I write about people, mostly "ordinary" people, who merit a portrait for their struggle as much, or more than the usual "icons" chosen by the media gatekeepers, many of whom serve reactionary ideological purposes. Yes, my stories are posters, rendered in bold colors, with the occasional exclamation mark.

Can a poster change the world?

Yes. And a three-minute pop song can too.

Would you like the Taller Tupac Amaru to do a poster of you?

That's funny. Yes and no. I am a character in my writing—in the vein of subjective New Journalism or the "reflexive" writing of the last academic generation. I just don't think I can get completely comfortable with the idea of my image alongside that of Angela Davis and Steven Biko. But…it would be cool for my daughters to eat breakfast beneath a screenprint of their papá looking off toward the future.

Related: Read aconversation between Ilan Stavans and Jesús Barraza from the Taller Tupac Amaru here.