Posts From Author: Charles Arrowsmith
Paradise Lost
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i Susanna Moore Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 320pp “There is no little irony in recognizing that the speed with which [the near-annihilation of the Hawaiian people] occurred,” writes Susanna Moore in her engrossing new book, “serves as testimony to the generosity of spirit, patience, and adaptability of the Hawaiians themselves. In their grace lay their defeat.” Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i, which was a worthy nominee for this year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction, surveys the 120-year period between Captain Cook’s arrival on the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 and their annexation by the United States in 1898. In little more than a century, an entire civilization was stopped in its tracks, its ontological outlook completely overthrown. A native population estimated to be as large as 800,000 when Cook arrived was, by 2013, smaller than 90,000. A culture condemned as heathen by the missionaries who arrived in 1820 was, within decades, literate and largely Christian. Sailors, whalers, merchants and tradesmen radically altered the ethnic makeup of the archipelago. In the end, it was the grandson of one of the first missionaries who successfully petitioned the US Congress to annex the Islands. Moore is careful to position her history […]
Read MoreThe Emperor of Water Clocks
The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems Yusef Komunyakaa Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 128pp Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems are governed by a deeply anthropological sensibility. This allows the slips of time and geography that occur in his latest majestic collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks, to reveal how human rituals and behavior repeat themselves across time and space. In “The Gold Pistol”, the language of folk tales, legends and myths evokes a sort of timeless evil: “There’s always someone who loves gold / bullion, boudoirs, & bathtubs, always / some dictator hiding in a concrete culvert / crying, Please don’t shoot, a high priest / who mastered false acts & blazonry”. In these opening lines, one’s thoughts might flit to Hitler or Saddam (“in a concrete culvert”). But Komunyakaa’s subject is another, more recent dictator: “& this is why my heart almost breaks / when a man dances with Gaddafi’s pistol / raised over his head, knowing the sun / runs to whatever shines”. What causes the poet’s heart to break is the historical inevitability (“the sun runs to whatever shines”). The military intervention in Libya, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, may have prompted brief celebrations in some quarters, but the aftermath has proved cruel. Indeed, […]
Read MoreDispatches From Area 51
I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 Annabelle Gurwitch Blue Rider Press/Penguin Random House, 2014; 256pp “Maintaining a sense of humor is the final frontier or at least our saving grace as we age.” Every seven and a half seconds, an American turns fifty. In her latest hilarious book, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch opens up about the many implications that passing over the threshold of fiftydom has had for her. Whether it’s the unfortunate synchrony of menopause and raising an adolescent boy, the temptations and pitfalls of having work done, or the increasingly depressing career options left open to her in the film and TV industry, she has a brilliantly funny story or flight of fancy to reassure you that with a little laughter we can all get through this together. As subject matter, ageing offers boundless opportunities for excruciating self-revelation. Gurwitch never misses a trick, whether discussing the leakage she experiences when trying out her son’s trampoline or her tentative steps onto the slippery slope of cosmetic surgery. “I’ve filled, frozen and ultrasounded,” she writes, “all in the name of what is often referred to as ‘maintenance.'” Trouble is, she adds, once […]
Read MoreDid Dark Matter Kill the Dinosaurs?
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe Lisa Randall Ecco, 2015; 432pp In 1908, an object that may have been an asteroid or a comet exploded a few kilometers above the river Tunguska in the forests of Siberia. The blast was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima; the wave from the explosion went three times round the world, like Superman turning back time. It could be heard by people “living at a distance as far away as France is wide”. Windows shattered in a village seventy kilometers away. Two thousand square kilometers of forest were razed. It’s estimated that this exploding bolide (an object from space that disintegrates in the atmosphere) was maybe fifty meters wide. Rewind sixty-six million years. (You can probably see where this is going…) This impactor would have been an object the size of a major city moving 500 times faster than a vehicle on an autobahn… To put it in some perspective, an object of its size and speed would have released an energy equivalent to up to 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times greater than that of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima […]
Read MoreOnly In Dreams
Daydreams of Angels: Stories Heather O’Neill Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 368pp A girl and a boy sit in a kitchen listening to their grandfather’s absurd stories of Christmas past, when potatoes had eyes and lions could speak. “It was harder to tell the difference between when you were asleep and when you were awake. Children would sit and slap each other in the face, trying to wake one another out of a dream when things weren’t going right.” In Heather O’Neill‘s strange and fabulous new collection, Daydreams of Angels, we too find ourselves in the liminal territory between dream and reality (whatever that may be). Hers is an imaginary world where tigers and wolves prowl the streets, where a soldier shot fifteen times can be revived by a toymaker and a child playing Bartók, where ascetic twins shipwrecked on a cello case can become international causes célèbres. Beautiful, witty and deeply Freudian (there’s even a Québécois wolf-boy), these stories are truly fairytales for adults. O’Neill lays out her cards right from the start. In “The Gypsy and the Bear“, the characters in a child’s fantasy are abandoned mid-story when the boy is called to lunch. In the midst of life, they find themselves, like Dante, […]
Read MoreAltered States
“We’re going to get very intimate very quickly,” promised the evening’s first speaker, Tony Award-winning playwright Doug Wright, at the House of SpeakEasy’s Altered States at New York’s City Winery on September 22. And he wasn’t wrong. Obscure Ken Russell movies, Donald Trump’s dangerous experiment in democracy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the home life of a comedy legend were the stuff of SpeakEasy’s latest #SeriouslyEntertaining foray into the world of literary cabaret. “‘Altered States’ makes me think of an overindulgence in alcohol or recreational drug use,” began Wright, “but there’s only one time in my life when I was truly at the mercy of a hostile foreign chemical — and that was adolescence.” Puberty, for Wright, unfolded in early-70s Dallas, a time when Mark Spitz’s speedos and “fabulous 70s porn moustache” might occasion titillation, anxiety, and confusion for a young man. The guardian angel of Wright’s sexual awakening, though, was no Olympic athlete. The day before his tenth birthday, Wright saw The Homecoming on TV and found himself enchanted by a boy with “a shock of blond hair, big doey eyes, and a mole just like that singer I liked, Peggy Lee. He wasn’t good at farming and he didn’t like to hunt; he […]
Read MoreIn Heaven, Everything Is Fine
Heaven: Poems Rowan Ricardo Phillips Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 80pp Heaven, Rowan Ricardo Phillips‘s new collection, dazzles. Nominated last week for the National Book Award, it’s a playful inquiry by an imaginative poet-critic into the nature of capital-H Heaven. While its formal satisfactions derive from its subtle internal symmetries and architectonic qualities, Heaven is also continually surprising, as Phillips’s lexical invention and disruptive perceptions lend each poem a unique flavor. Flitting nimbly between Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, from Malibu to Colorado, and with a referential field encompassing Mel Gibson, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the stage directions of Cymbeline, it’s a rich reading experience. “Who the hell’s Heaven is this?” asks Phillips in “The Empyrean”; it’s a question that echoes through the rest of the book. There are gods in Heaven for sure — Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, the deity of the Old Testament — but there’s also an underlying tension between the notion of Heaven as a place beyond and “heaven” as a function of ekphrastic poetry. In “The Barycenter”, natural beauty becomes a kind of heaven in itself: Alpenglow ripening the mountain peaks Into rose-pink pyramids steeped in clouds. How this light, like a choir of silence, Queues in the air […]
Read MoreThe New Greatest Generation: The Mission Continues
Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home Joe Klein Simon & Schuster, 2015; 320pp The mind, body, and spirit of the American soldier are at the heart of Joe Klein’s moving new book, Charlie Mike. Told in a brisk, anecdotal style, it’s the story of the men and women who came home from Afghanistan and Iraq. They came home to a country ever-more disenchanted with their mission, to families who didn’t understand them, to friends who didn’t want to see them, and to a Veterans Administration insufficiently equipped to help them readjust. Since 2001, the American soldier has existed at a point where politics, ethics, and civics meet, and has had to bear too much the burden of representation. Some of those whose lives Klein captures conform to type, but others do not. We meet men and women who joined up for all kinds of reasons, political and otherwise. Their attitudes towards the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are multifarious and complex; their experiences of those wars left them in very different physical and emotional shape. What unites them is their civic spirit, the adrenaline-boosting, community-building, get-shit-done-lust that they all seem to leave the armed forces with. Their lives back home continue to be lived at full volume, at a higher frame […]
Read MoreDoug Wright and the Erotics of Language
Doug Wright’s work is a broad church. He won an Obie in 1996 for the arch, racy Quills, which imagines the last days of the Marquis de Sade in the Charenton asylum. In 2004, he won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for I Am My Own Wife, a play about the German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a man who somehow survived both the Nazis and the East German Communists intact, which Wright dubbed “a one-woman show, performed by a man”. He penned the books for the Broadway musicals Grey Gardens, based on the cult film; Disney’s The Little Mermaid; and Hands on a Hardbody, a hugely entertaining show about an endurance contest to win a pickup truck. His most recent play, Posterity, performed earlier this year by the Atlantic Theater Company, had Henrik Ibsen as a central character. It’s hard to think of a playwright working today with a range as fabulous, as historically and socially broad, as Wright’s. He doesn’t always see it that way himself. When a friend remarked that his resumé made him a surprising choice for The Little Mermaid, Wright pointed out that the protagonists of both Mermaid and I Am My Own Wife seek to change “below the waist” to win the objects of their affection. […]
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