TOBI'S DESK

Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum I went to the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim alone. It was my birthday. I had other obligations, but I snuck out of them. I don’t like birthdays, and I wanted to be alone with art made by a woman. I found parts of the show stunning and parts of it strange and underwhelming. I admired her ambition; I liked the idea of her. I liked the idea of her having finally been discovered, anointed, and I admired her faith that a more spiritually transcendent future class of people would appreciate the work that she knew would be misunderstood in her own time. I admired the scale at which she worked and its specificity: it almost seemed to exist outside of time. She painted landscapes and portraits to make money. On the side, she created ecstatic, massive works, taking her instructions from the “High Masters,” spirits from whom she received messages at the regular seances she held with four of her friends who referred to themselves as “...

On Feb. 5, William Morrow will release Snowden Wright ’s second novel, American Pop . Early reviewers have called it “supremely entertaining,” “not only excellent Southern Gothic fun but a panoramic tour of the American Century.” Snowden and I were college roommates, where we dreamed of one day becoming novelists and then manufacturing a public feud to help drum up book sales. We talk pretty much every day, about nothing and everything, but we have never been as formal as we are in this interview: The Millions: So, what’s the book about? Snowden Wright: I’ve always enjoyed describing  American Pop  with a hypothetical question: What would a novel about the Kennedys be like if they’d made their fortune by inventing Coca-Cola? Of course, the imprecision of that question often leads people to ask, “So it’s about the Kennedys?” and I have to say, “Well, uh, no.” Then they ask, “But it’s about Coca-Cola, though?” and, breaking out in a sweat and wrenching an imaginary neck...

Che Guevara reading the newspaper La nación . Photo: Diario La Nación. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Even Che Guevara, the poster boy for the Cuban Revolution, was forced to admit that endlessly trudging the Sierra had its downsides. “There are periods of boredom in the life of the guerrilla fighter,” he warns future revolutionaries in his classic handbook,  Guerrilla Warfare . The best way to combat the dangers of ennui, he helpfully suggests, is reading. Many of the rebels were college educated—Che was a doctor, Fidel a lawyer, others fine art majors—and visitors to the rebels’ jungle camps were often struck by their literary leanings. Even the most macho fighters, it seems, would be seen hunched over books. Che recommends that guerrillas carry edifying works of nonfiction despite their annoying weight—“good biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies” will distract them from vices such as gambling and drinking. An early favorite in camp, improbably...

“It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in as much as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration.” — Robert Louis Stevenson , “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature” (1905) When the first English poetry was given by the gift and grace of God it was imparted to an illiterate shepherd named Cædmon and the register that it was received and was alliterative. In the seventh century, the English, as they had yet to be called, may have had Christianity, but they did not yet have poetry. Pope Gregory I , having seen a group of them sold as slaves in the markets of Rome, had said “They are not Angles, but angels,” and yet these seraphim did not sing (yet). There among his sheep at the Abbey of Whitby in the rolling North...

Maurice Carlos Ruffin. Photo: Clare Welsh. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel,  We Cast a Shadow , is narrated by an unnamed black father who is desperate to protect his mixed-race son from white supremacy. His solution is to erase his son’s blackness. He applies whitening cream on the boy’s skin to burn out birthmarks, causing young Nigel to double over in pain. In the father’s mind, the son’s birthmarks are spreading, and his attempts to erase his son’s identity become increasingly frantic. I grab his shoulder and spin him around. The dark medallion of skin on his tummy is bigger. Nigel’s other blemishes cover his body. The greatest concentration of marks: belly and back. A dark asterism. Some flaws approach the size and complexity of the stigma on his face … My fear is that these islands will merge to form a continent. The boy’s white mother is vehemently against the treatments, and so they remain a secret between father and son. Almost everything the narrator does—his ...

The Rider-Waite tarot deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. One winter morning I shuffled a deck of oracle cards with my eyes closed, and I realized that despite the blackness, I could still see what was happening in front of me. Here were the details of my hands, with the movements of each finger, every twitch of every narrow knuckle, made plain; I could see the cards, which were not clear enough to distinguish completely, but showed their blurry, colorful faces in broad strokes. I decided to further test this ability by holding colored pens, randomly chosen from a pouch, before my shut eyes. The pen test indicated that I could also “see” the colors behind my lids—imperfectly, yes, but well enough to grasp whether I was looking at a light color or a dark one, and I called out the hot-pink one immediately. Journaling and drawing divinatory cards had both become routine parts of my life earlier that year, when I was fighting psychosis and struggling to make the world cohere; I’d...