Search Results for: The New Yorker

What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists

(Photo courtesy the Auping family)

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)

Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.

Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Workingby Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.

His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…

His Life’s Set Prize: The Story of Polar Explorer Henry Worsley

Unreleased picture date is Friday April 18, 2008. Left to right. Shipping lawyer Henry Adams, City worker Will Gow and Team Leader, Henry Worsley, 47, during a training session at Constable Point, Greenland. (Photo by Joel Ryan - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

At The New Yorker, David Grann tells the story of Henry Worsley, a British military man and “apostle” of polar adventurer Ernest Shackleton. Worsley earned fame by retracing Shackleton’s failed expedition to reach the South Pole. He, along with two teammates reached their destination on January 9th, 2009. A case study in the art of story pacing, this piece is a testament to the triumphs and perils of human ambition and endurance.

After Frank Worsley and other members of the expedition buried Shackleton, at a cemetery on the island, they found stones and built a cairn to mark the grave.

More than eighty years later, Henry Worsley, carrying a rucksack and a sleeping bag, pried open the cemetery gate and went inside. It was twilight, and he could just make out the cairn and a granite tombstone, which was engraved with a paraphrase of a line by Robert Browning: “I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.” Worsley put his sleeping bag on the ground and climbed inside it, facing the block of granite. “Reaching out to touch it I considered for a moment just how significant a moment in my life this was,” he later wrote, adding, “I was about to spend the night . . . beside the grave of my hero since childhood.”

Read the story

The Woman Who Helped Daniel Mendelsohn Become a Writer

Dave Thompson/PA Wire URN:32251193

All writers start their writing lives in different ways. Musicians who prefer writing poetry to writing lyrics; English majors obsessed with Charlotte Brontë; established doctors with stories to tell ─ but some beginnings are marked by subtler shifts of consciousness than others. For The New Yorker, critic Daniel Mendelsohn narrates the improbable origins of his writing career: by getting close with a worldly 70-year-old French women who liked to dance at the music clubs of Charlottesville, Virginia. When Mendelsohn met Ghislaine Signard de Poyen Bellisle Neale, aka Chouky, as an undergraduate classics major, the stories she told about her life were the first time he realized “that the things I’d read about in novels actually happened to real people.” Her influence on him wasn’t simply about finding material, though, or that she taught him how to write. She taught him to think differently about how he spent his waking life, and she showed him that, in his words, “If you open yourself to the world, there will be stories to tell.”

After a while, when she was off somewhere—the swimming pool (“I do my lap every day!”), or Foods of All Nations, the only place she could get certain things that she liked to eat—I’d force myself, as if doing a physical exercise, to do as she did: I’d sit at the table and stare at the patio. Of course, I felt foolish, and, at first, I wasn’t particularly moved; I wondered just what she saw in all this. But one day I found that I’d stopped thinking about what time it was, what I needed to get done, and was actually just sitting there looking at the lilies of the valley. When she got back from her shopping trip, I told her about my little epiphany. She beamed. “Dan_iel_,” she said, in her slightly croaking voice, pronouncing my name the French way. “See? You always are sinking about your life! But I sink about the muguet, and he make me happy.”

She didn’t let me stay home on weekend nights reading. Because she insisted that I take her dancing—straight clubs, gay clubs, tiny dives where rockabilly bands played, motel ballrooms where swing bands swang, she didn’t really care—I started to dance, too; this, inevitably, led me to the next step, which was talking to people in strange places. She took me to my first gay dance at U.V.A., held in a building that was papered with notices for meetings of the Gay Student Union; I’d walked by often but never had the courage to enter. That night, she sent me home with a tall and wiry Kentuckian who’d spent two hours fruitlessly smiling at me until Chouky marched me over to his car and introduced us. The Kentuckian’s father did business in Asia; he had beautiful, beautiful kimonos hanging by bamboo rods along the walls of his bedroom. Above the bed was a woodblock print of squirrels huddling on a winter branch.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Anti-death penalty activists march with a sign to free Jeff Wood
Family and friends of Jeff Wood and anti-death penalty activists march to deliver a petition with over 10,000 signatures asking the governor and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Wood's sentence. (Tamir Kalifa / AFP / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sabine Heinlein, Leslie Jamison, Ijeoma Oluo, Eric Newcomer with Brad Stone, and Jill Lepore.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Wallace Shawn’s Late Night

Wallace Shawn in 1988. (AP)

Troy Jollimore | Zyzzyva | Winter 2017 | 30 minutes (8,142 words)

More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn wrote:

A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are “sovereign” in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains — degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And so the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw those pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes which were witnessed by practically everyone throughout the entire world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept. And so now one has to ask, well, what does that portend?

Thirteen years later, we have a quite good idea of what such a thing portends. Thirteen years later we know much more than Shawn, or anyone, could have known at the time about just how much could be “assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept.” We know so much about this now that it is rather a wonder any of us can sleep at night. And in fact, some people tell me that they aren’t sleeping, that they have not been sleeping well for a while. Not since November. That’s what I keep hearing. Of course, there are those who lost the ability to enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep long before that. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Nurse whispering in Phaedra's ear
Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Moira Donegan, Leonora LaPeter Anton, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Linda Besner, and Geraldine DeRuiter.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Responses

We’re delighted to share three responses to Scott’s essay “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” from Paul Bloom, William Gatewood, and Daniel Raeburn.

Jump to responses by Paul, William, and Daniel.

* * *

The Arrogance of Empathy by Paul Bloom

I don’t regret calling my last book, Against Empathy, even when people tell me they are embarrassed to read it in public. But this in-your-face title does force me to do a lot of explaining.

The first problem lies with “empathy” — a word with far too many meanings. Some people take it to refer to morality and kindness and love, to everything good. And so I spend a lot of time explaining that I’m not against that — I’m not a psychopath! Empathy also has to do with understanding other people, and I’m not against that either, though we often forget how much damage this sort of understanding can do in the hands of a bully, a con man, or a sadist. Empathy in this sense of understanding is morally neutral; it is a form of intelligence and like any other form of intelligence, it can be used for good or evil.

The notion of empathy that I’m interested in is more visceral. It involves experiencing the world as others do, when you feel the pain of others. This capacity has a lot of fans, but I argue that it is a moral train wreck. It is narrow and biased and innumerate, giving rise to selfish and irrational and often cruel decisions. I won’t make the argument here; it’s in my book and elsewhere.

The second problem with the title has to do with the word “Against.” I’m against empathy, sure, but only its moral effects. It has other merits, and I end my book by describing one of them:

Empathy can be an immense source of pleasure. Most obviously, we feel joy at the joy of others. I’ve noted elsewhere that here lies one of the pleasures of having children: You can have experiences that you’ve long become used to—eating ice cream, watching Hitchcock movies, riding a roller coaster—for the first time all over again. Empathy amplifies the pleasures of friendship and community, of sports and games, and of sex and romance. And it’s not just empathy for positive feelings that engages us. There is a fascination we have with seeing the world through the eyes of another, even when the other is suffering. Most of us are intensely curious about the lives of other people and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be engaging and transformative.

In the last couple of sentences, I was talking about the pleasure of stories, and this brings me to Scott Korb’s fascinating discussion. I’m pleased to see that my work has had such an influence on his thinking — now it’s mutual.

Korb distinguishes between empathic engagement and “the sympathetic imagination.” Empathy is all about the other, while sympathetic imagination implicates the self; we lose ourselves in empathy, while the sympathetic imagination lets us retain some valuable distance — it gives rise to “an aloofness about the self that makes possible the very self-implication or dramatic irony, or what have you, that turns life into art, our ideas into stories.” In life and in art, such aloofness is better than the selfish immersion of empathy.

Korb talks about the moral problems of empathic engagement, and I agree with him too much to have a good discussion on this issue. But his analysis leads me to look at another worry about empathy, nicely illustrated by his remarkable quote from the novel Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee. Much of the book is about a controversial lecture series given by Costello — an elderly Australian novelist — and Coetzee’s book includes long excerpts from Costello’s lectures, including one in which she justifies her claim about appreciating the inner lives of animals.

“If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Elizabeth Costello is an arrogant character, and this is an arrogant claim. How does she know that she has succeeded in thinking her way into the existence of Joyce’s character? She thinks it’s obvious from the fact that she has been invited to present in such a prestigious lecture series, but this just pushes the question back — how can she know that her audience knows that she got things right? But it’s the final sentence that really shocks. Perhaps we can have some success figuring out what it’s like to be someone very much like us (perhaps even someone imaginary), but it hardly follows from this that we can think our way into the mental life of bats or chimpanzees or oysters. (If I were in the audience, I’d ask, “So, fine, answer Thomas Nagel’s question: What’s it like to be a bat?”)

I’ve written about this arrogance elsewhere, describing psychological research by Nicholas Epley and his colleagues showing that while people are often highly confident in their ability to appreciate the thoughts of others — even highly similar others — they are wrong much of the time. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book Transformative Experience, takes this further, arguing that it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a person who has had certain deeply significant experiences that you haven’t yourself experienced, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. You not only can’t successfully think your way into a similar other, then, you also can’t even think your way into your own future self. Even the best descriptions won’t do the trick — you really have to be there.

I’m a fiction skeptic, then. I think novels and short stories and movies and the like can give us some glimmerings of the minds of others, some approximation of the inner life of — to give some examples from my favorite recently-read books — an autistic teenager, a black boy growing up in the South, or a small-town sheriff. But this understanding is nowhere near as much as we would hope. As for the claim that reading fiction somehow makes us better people, well, anything is possible, and the right fiction might lead certain moral qualities to flourish. But we should be mindful of Richard Posner’s point that there were no better readers than the Nazis.

With all of my cynicism about empathy, one might think, then, that I would resonate with Nabokov’s advice on how to read, quoted by Korb: “We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

But I’m not. Such advice reminds me of this series in Slate called “You’re Doing It Wrong.” (Typical article: “Stop Pretending Banana Bread Can Be Healthy. It Is Basically Cake”). It turns out that we love doing precisely what Nabokov tells us to avoid, becoming immersed in the lives of others, imagining ourselves (or better, foolishly believing that we are imagining ourselves) as Anna Karenina or Tony Soprano or Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert.

Maintaining aloofness may be excellent advice for writers, and is likely the better moral stance. But as readers we are naturally compelled to ignore this advice and lose ourselves in the minds of others. We like our cake and we should be left alone to enjoy it.

* * *

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.


Nothing But the Writing by William Gatewood

I’ve long operated under this assumption: not only is empathy inherent in good writing, but writing itself will make you more empathetic. Empathy is like a muscle, teachers, students, and blogs say (e.g., “Why Empathy is Key to Story”— the first Google result!). It can be trained, built up. Strengthened until the whole world fits on your shoulders. And writing, real high-minded literary writing, is the best way to get your reps in. Unfortunately for all of us, these beliefs are dogmatic in the purest sense, both in that they seem right and good, and that there’s no evidence to support them.

The idea that writing is empathy is so pervasive that I’ve yet to meet the beginning writer immune to its charms. I was especially guilty of this. For years, I wanted to believe that the more I wrote, the better person I’d become: less self-obsessed, more communal, hell, friendlier. So I wrote fiction that made it look like I was these things. I still do.

After two years engaged in an MFA, I’ve learned that what a writing workshop really teaches you is how to portray empathy. Whether the work is actually empathetic (can work even be empathetic?) is impossible to know. Peers and teachers in workshop can only judge and react to the performance. “This seems lived,” someone might say. Or, “You really captured this person’s essence.” And the tricks are always the same (they’ve been standardized over the last hundred years): specificity, proper names, the sensorium — “A Tropicana and a Kind Bar.” This is mimicry wearing empathy’s boots. But that doesn’t make it less beautiful, less meaningful, or less moving art.

There’s a fantastic moment in “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass”: “when we write, we’re engaged in another sort of activity, tapping into a different…mode of being.” Yes, we are, if we’re lucky, but terms like “sympathetic imagination” lean too close to those value judgments meant to validate writing, to explain the why of it all: after-the-fact explanations. Instead, what happens to me once in a while is what Paul Bloom has described experiencing himself: a “flow state,” wherein all that exists is the next word, the next sentence. Gone is the self, gone the room. Gone, especially, are other people. My mind amalgamates its stolen ideas wildly, haphazardly, rearranging them piece by piece. How could any kind of relationship survive in this vacuum? Sure, everything comes back, but for a time: nothing but the writing.

I suspect that “aloof detachment” (to the self, to others, to the work) is only truly possible following a lifetime of obsession and isolation. It’s the best possible outcome (and there are a million terrible ones). The swordsmith folds steel for decades until they’re lost in folding. The baker in baking. The painter in painting. So too should it come for the writer, lost in her verb. That trick Scott recommends at the end, “resisting whatever need I have to know immediately what a thing means to me” — this is important. Since hearing this line when he first delivered his talk, it’s become my standard definition of artistry. This is how you lose yourself in the work, and it is the getting lost that matters.

* * *

William is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, with his wife and Cocker Spaniel.


Can Empathy Lead to Theft? by Daniel Raeburn

Before I read Scott’s piece I felt certain I’d start my response with my long-standing distinction between sympathy and empathy, one I explain to my writing students. Sympathy, I always say, is fellow-feeling. Commiseration. Empathy, on the other hand, is understanding. It’s not only putting yourself in another person’s shoes, but her head, as well. It allows you to see her point of view without necessarily sharing it. It allows you to have shared emotions — despite, perhaps, not knowing whether the emotions are actually shared — but it’s ultimately more cerebral than sympathizing, and I’ve long maintained that it’s what you’re really after in writing.

But after reading “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” I think I might have it backward. Perhaps my confusion boils down to semantics: if you draw a Venn diagram of sympathy and empathy there’s a lot of overlap. The two are like fraternal twins, similar enough that their differences seem magnified by comparison. I’d call it the narcissism of minor differences except that Scott’s a) making a crucial distinction and b) clearly arguing on behalf of a mindset that’s the opposite of narcissism. When he says empathy I think he means what’s sometimes called emotional empathy: feeling, almost against your will, what the other guy is feeling — which is what I meant by the word sympathy. When he argues on behalf of what he calls sympathy I think he’s arguing for what’s sometimes called cognitive empathy: thinking what the other guy is thinking. Grasping his perspective. Going from reading the words on the page to reading someone’s mind — which is what I want in writing, and what I meant by empathy.

In other words, Scott and I agree. At least I think so. I think he’s arguing on behalf of Coetzee’s “sympathetic imagination” for the same reasons that Bloom argued, in Against Empathy, the book that apparently started all this, for replacing emotional empathy with rational compassion. With a cooler, more distant care and concern. Caring that keeps your identity, and thus your ability to function (and write), intact. One of the many problems with purely emotional empathy is that that way lies identification with or, God help you, confusion of your self with the other. That way lies all kinds of sins, including Rachel Dolezal — remember her? — and other white people with dreadlocks.

I think this is what identity politics is pointing out, at least in literature: the inherent limits of empathy. People pride themselves on it a bit too much, and readers and writers are especially susceptible. Especially so-called liberal readers and writers like me. I think what traditionally marginalized writers are saying is that you may think you feel me, Straight Man or White Woman, and therefore may in fact feel me, but you don’t know me. You can’t. Try as you might, you can’t, and that’s why you need to listen to me and my story. Writing it required less empathy of me, its author, than your version of it would, and that’s why it’s better. No, not better: more integral. More authentic. Truer.

Or not. Any diehard believer in imaginative truth — what Tim O’Brien famously called story-truth — can and perhaps should come back at the identity politicians with Elizabeth Costello’s maxim: “There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. I can think my way into the existence of . . . any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” The problem is, that way lies others’ sins, including Lionel Shriver — remember her? — and other white people in sombreros and glue-on Zapata mustaches.

So where do we draw the line? When does the sympathetic imagination become a kind of minstrelsy? The truth is that I don’t know and probably never will. Which is the most exciting place to be, as Scott pointed out, and I’m grateful to be put in it by his piece. If I had to draw one conclusion, and I guess I do, this being a response, I’d say that some kinds of empathy are arguably theft. Let’s take fiction, for example. It’s theft to write what you don’t know, to pretend to be someone you’re not. Which isn’t a bad thing—fiction is lying, after all. The question is whether or not you can get away with it, and that depends on how good you are, not just technically but morally. By morally I mean tonally. Tone makes the difference between borrowing and stealing. When Walt Whitman said, in 1855, in Song of Myself, that he was a runaway slave, it was cultural appropriation, sure. But it was also an act of radical empathy:

I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

This is appropriation insofar as Whitman’s borrowing the African-American’s experience, but his horrified—and horrifying—tone makes it plain that he’s repaying that debt with interest. With empathy. As Whitman put it one line later, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” That’s what happens when we read, and it’s radical.

Then there’s Lionel Shriver. When I read her speech on paper her words seemed reasonable; it wasn’t until I listened to her speak them aloud that I understood why people were upset. Her tone wasn’t just snarky, it was sneering. Whitman’s tone made it clear he was inhabiting someone else, but when Shriver put on that sombrero, her body language made it clear: she wasn’t advocating becoming a Mexican, she was advocating impersonating him. Using him. It was the difference between emulating someone and plagiarizing him. Between good writing and bad writing.

Speaking of which, I’m off now to draw up my own course on empathy, called On Empathy, to teach my writing students next year. Because this is a debate that should never die.

* * *

Daniel Raeburn is the author of Vessels: A Love Story and the monograph Chris Ware.

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2018

Author Han Kang
Author Han Kang (Roberto Ricciuti / Contributor / Getty Images)

For years, the #longreads hashtag on Twitter has been filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.  Read more…

Smell, Memory

Chanel N°5. Illustrations by Tamara Shopsin

By Rachel Syme

Racquet and Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Our latest feature is a new story by Rachel Syme and produced in partnership with Racquet magazine.

Tennis, to me, smells like chlorine and white sage and tuna fish. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the courts always wheeze dust when you walk on them and the dry heat shimmers off the net in the middle of summer. Our family belonged to a tennis club, but not the kind with rolling hills and security gates—instead, our courts were somewhat dumpy and gray, down near the university area filled with tattoo parlors and ratty cafés that seemed progressive in the ’90s for their hummus-forward menus. The club was made mostly of cement and gravel and funnel cakes, and its pro shop featured six-packs of tube socks and fresh cylinders of key-lime-colored balls and not much else. It may very well be fancier now, but my family stopped paying dues two decades ago.

We moved to the base of the mountains when I was 13, and my father now plays tennis every day at High Point, a gym filled primarily with active seniors and women doing Zumba. When he does go downtown to play, he meets my brother at one of the college courts near the hospital, where my brother spends most nights sewing throats back together as a resident in facial surgery. My father, who also cuts people open for a living, started playing a lot more tennis when my brother became a doctor; it is how they communicate wordlessly about what bloody traumas they’ve seen during the day. I imagine hitting something really hard back and forth is useful in this regard. Read more…

Under Trump, A Hard Test for Howard University

Longreads Pick

For The New Yorker, historian and journalist Jelani Cobb dives deep into the history of Washington D.C.’s Howard University, one of the nation’s largest HBCU’s. Howard alumni include Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, and Toni Morrison, and the school has played a large role in facilitating the social mobility of blacks in America since the Civil War. Cobb speaks at length to Wayne Frederick, the university’s current president, whose pragmatism during the Trump era has drawn ire from student activists. But similar tensions have arisen before.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 8, 2018
Length: 29 minutes (7,383 words)