Arts & Culture

“Dressed to Kill”: The Danger of Narrative

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Depending on whom you ask, Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill is either a brilliant reworking of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or a cheap style-over-substance rip-off. From IMDb message board shouting matches to painstakingly nuanced scholarly reappraisals, the debate (as part of a larger one regarding De Palma’s body of Hitchcockian films) survives in one form or another 35 years later. Yet what interests me, having viewed Dressed to Kill for the first time only recently, is the relative (not total) and conspicuous silence surrounding what should be a more important cinematic appropriation: the film’s representation of transgender identity.

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When a Television Series Forges Ahead Of Its Literary Inspiration

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As Game of Thrones approaches the finale of its fifth season, the show faces an interesting dilemma. It has caught up with its inspiration, George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and is set to outpace it in the upcoming sixth season, venturing into territory that the books have not yet explored. While Martin stated in an April 2015 interview that he hoped the sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter, would be published before the series premiered in 2016, the likelihood that the seventh book, A Dream of Spring, will be written before the series exhausts the material of The Winds of Winter is close to impossible.

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Lucia in the Spring of Her Discontent

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But Lucia was everywhere in Dessau for me. I have spent time with her posthumously, reading her diaries and letters kept at the Bauhaus archive, and looking through her photographs, which include a series of nude self-portraits she took in 1930 after she was “liberated” from Dessau, the Bauhaus, and László. I have been the voyeur she never intended to be leafing through her life with white gloved hands. I don’t take this privilege (for which I never asked her permission) lightly. Her story is now folded into me as we walk through the streets of Dessau, where she is a ghost, haunting the place in which she longed for the city.

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On Doubt and Not-Knowing in Fiction

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While one can imagine the lyric impulse of the poem or the meandering logic of the essay easily fits with the notions of doubt and not-knowing, the question lingers: what of fiction, the genre that is conventionally thought of as “plotted”? Should writers of fiction come to a story or narrative with a conceit or concern already crafted, or does writing through, around, and among the consciousnesses, characters, and languages of fiction reveal to these writers their ultimate uptake?

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Notes Toward a Letter with a Missing Half

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One Sunday at work, in the middle of a series of lectures and panels–a day-long affair with no planned bathroom or coffee breaks–a man stands up. He does so while I am moving a lectern across the stage, and I think recognize him, even before he begins speaking, as someone who lives under the weight of New York City’s constant renovation, someone whose patterns have long ago been papered over. At the institution I work for, a Jewish archive and library whose existence spans nearly a century and two continents, people like this come all the time, or call on the phone. They’ve woken up and started looking, desperately, for places they’ve lost.

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Unsolved Histories: Miracles, Meteorological Phenomenon, and Writing the Unknown

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On January 16, 1870, the New York Times published a brief article—no more than a few hundred words—describing a “meteorological phenomena” that occurred above my town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “The night was very clear,” the unattributed reporter wrote, “the stars shining brightly; but the mysterious light came out in a broad circular spot and spread slowly,”—wait for it—“like the moonlight coming through a cloud or the reflection of a prairie fire, putting out the stars nearest to it.”

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The Love Hate, Joy Luck Club

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My mother tells me that if I want the novel I’m writing to be a bestseller in America, I should put in a couple of ghosts. Americans love ghosts, especially Chinese ghosts. I stammer back that I’m not selling out, and that I will never write about ghosts, Chinese or otherwise. “Remember the fortune cookies you used to get all the time?” she says. “They said, ‘Listen to your mother.’” “I only got that fortune three times,” I reply. “Three times in one year,” she says, wrapping up the conversation.

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Through Her Eyes: Some Thoughts on Men Writing Women

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Julian Barnes once called writing across gender the “one basic test of competence.” This clearly isn’t basic: look how often movies, Hollywood and art-house alike, consistently fail the Barnes (not to mention the Bechdel) test. Whenever another disappointing, one-dimensional female character waltzes onscreen (from Grace Kelly in Rear Window to Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis), I know the first thing my partner will say afterward: well, that was obviously made by a man. Which is to say: what we just saw wasn’t an authentic person, let alone woman.

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On Blind Spots

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What is it about the anxiety of possibility and the possibility of creative work that seems so inherently linked? As we’ve seen, this is where Lerner’s poet (and Leaving the Atocha Station) arrives at lyricism. The poet’s fear of not understanding—but wanting to appear as though he’s understood—results in these beautiful, roving chords of possible meanings. But because the possibilities can’t all simultaneously be true, the only way to capture them (or gesture toward capturing them) is to move toward the hypothetical, the subjunctive—in other words, to turn toward language, to speak them.

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