The Washington Post - 24.02.2020

monday, february 24 , 2020. the washington post eZ re c3

But then again, it’s also a ghost story. The ghost sides with the girl, lending an impalpable hand, and if that sounds funny — well, yes. These little dramas set you laughing even when the subject is downtrodden. Harsh economics often supply the punchline, so that the wit has a tinge of rueful sympathy. Even in one of the book’s happier marriages, the husband proves to be “good at leaving people alone.... He max- imized his time elsewhere.” What would you call such a partner, if not a ghost? Another story meditates on the “in- visible people” who “haunt the shops and strip malls of suburban America.” In her shorter pieces, sometimes the title alone takes us out of this world, as in the terrific two-pager “When the Husband Grew Wings.” most of these brevities play with point of view or whip up entertaining al- ternatives to standard narration. The wry “DEATH DESErVES ALL CAPS” takes the form of a set of instruc- tions for the author’s funeral. Just about all these assemblag- es wouldn’t l ook out of place in an Escher exhibition. one way or another, they subvert our expectations for fiction. During one of the longer standouts, “The Eyes of Saint Lucy,” Sparks kicks aside any notion of “a normal family tale,” r aising instead a rebel yell: “Things will happen out of sequence, because this is a family out of sequence. Lists will be made, dreams will be probed, jokes will be listed in alphabetical order.” The result includes all that, I’d say, and one thing more — a language that blooms (as another story has it) “like some strange, bloody, chaotic plant.” Sparks forges a rhetoric of such warmth and swagger, it may be the single most potent strain in her magic. Even when casting a cold eye on our current anomie, she’s never less than lyrical, concocting mash-ups of outrage and celebra- tion, archaic decorum and unbut- toned plainness. “I always thought of her,” she says of one major player, “as more unscript- ed than liturgy, more faery than faithful.” The passage strikes an exquisite balance and at t he same time speaks straight from the conflicted heart of this collection’s many heroines — hard- headed yet rapturous, besieged yet resilient. [email protected]

John domini’s fourth novel, “the color inside a Melon,” appeared on dzanc Books last summer.

BY JOHN DOMINI

It can be a knotty business, articulating what you love about a book — knotty, yet fun. Case in point: “A nd I Do Not forgive You,” the new collection of 22 stories from Amber Sparks. Every story pulls off a convincing blend of the ordinary and the surreal, and altogether they offer an eye-pop- ping range. one piece will tumble along full of event, and the next will stretch the mind, bit by bit. A single page may erupt in a cornu- copia of feeling: groans of heartache, yips of de- light, a fine wisecrack or two and the rage of a woman wronged. As a reader, I was so won over I pressed the book on strangers on public transportation. As a reviewer, tasked with making sense of the magic, I’ve got my work cut out for me. Not that I mind. Explanations could start, at least, with that rage. feminism per- vades everything here, both the fantastic and the mundane. It’s evi- dent even in the title, an echo of the closing line in one of the best and longest pieces, “We Destroy the moon.” Set during a time when “the rain is endless and heavy with sludge” and featuring an apoca- lyptic cult, “We Destroy the moon” might, like a few of the other stories, be termed science fiction. Ye t unlike a lot of sci-fi, the piece is all about feelings, and specifically the hurt feelings of its unnamed female narrator. She’s fallen under the spell of the cult leader (“I orbited you... your companion star”) and now must undergo a late coming of age. This delayed education takes sev- eral forms, including research into words and their derivations. Some, like “end,” have an obvious bearing on her crisis, while others are more abstruse, like “apo- phenia.” The term means seeing patterns where they don’t exist, and in the end, it too resonates. only when this woman sees through her Jim Jones, his coun- terfeit patterns, can she renounce him, in a final fury. A more ordinary initiation oc- curs in “Everyone’s a Winner in meadow Park.” The title refers to the local casino, where in fact “nobody’s a winner.” The narrator knows that much, though she’s too young to drive. Happily, her smarts carry over into a love of Shakespeare and an inkling of a better future, so long as she can steer clear of a predatory older man — or two. In a way, “meadow Park” presents this author at her most down to earth, its bad guys grimly familiar.

Book world

‘And I Do Not Forgive

You’ is impossible to resist

And i do not Forgive You: stories and other revenges By amber sparks liveright. 192 pp. $23.95

your darkest premonitions by ver- balizing them. most rappers do. But not all. Another painful truth: This will keep happening. one reason death feels so incessant in today’s rap music is because our informa- tion age never quits. The relent- less social media apparatus that brings us so much bad news is the same one that allows us to feel close to so many artists in the first place. By the cruel logic of the era, an increasingly democratic medi- ascape will bring us more death, more frequently and more inti- mately. And as everything gets faster, it’ll be important to grieve slow- ly. Loudly, too. on Wednesday night, mourners gathered in the streets of Brooklyn, shouting Pop Smoke’s rhymes at the top of their voices. Digital video footage of the neighborhood vigil — a big crowd celebrating a big life with a big noise — felt instructive. rap music knows the deadliness of this world. Turning it up can feel like an affirmation of life. Still, no matter how much rap music teaches us about how to grieve, it doesn’t make the deaths of the past three years feel any less h arrowing. Instead, each one seems to hit harder than the last. maybe that’s good. maybe we aren’t as numb as we thought. We shouldn’t be. These artists should’ve been able to teach us how to grieve through their music, not through their deaths. They deserved to see the future their songs were shaping. It hurts to know they’ll never get to blow those bubbles with their children. It’s hard to even conjure the image in the first place. most of them weren’t far removed from being children themselves. [email protected]

tions for his funeral. Those lyrics may seem eerie now, but they weren’t death wishes when they were being composed. They were hedges against oblivion. It’s a common lyrical trope in rap, and the concept is as simple as it is sobering: maybe you can survive

blurry in the music it inspired. “We ain’t making it past 21,” J uice WrLD sang in 2018. “Doing drugs is just a war with boredom, but they’re sure to get me,” mac miller rapped in 2014. “Play a Stevie Wonder song,” Nipsey Hussle de- clared in 2016, leaving instruc-

American music at its most clear- eyed. Biggie and 2Pac had no illusions about a society filled with hatred and arbitrary violence, or their place in it. They were doing what great artists do. They were telling us the truth. It m ade fatalism a nd realism go

of the art form, rap music itself can feel as if it exists in a perpetu- al state of mourning. 2Pac, s lain in Las Vegas in 1996, frequently contemplated his own death in song. Biggie titled his 1994 debut album “ready to Die.” This wasn’t fantasy or melodrama. It was

drug overdose at age 26. In June
2018, XXXTentacion, 20, was fa-
tally shot in his car outside
miami. That very same day, Jim-
my Wopo, 21, was killed in a
drive-by shooting in Pittsburgh.
In November 2017, Lil Peep died
of an opioid overdose at 21.
These were different artists
who died under different circum-
stances. Some were treading wa-
ter in an ocean of drugs and
expectations. others were mur-
der targets. But cumulatively,
their deaths remain bound by a
question: Are we living through
the most lethal era in rap histo-
ry?
It feels that way. But regard-
less of whether that’s the case,
the important thing is to truly
feel each death individually.
Which isn’t easy. When a rapper
dies young, we might feel a
good-faith reflex to make sense
of the senselessness, to learn
some kind of lesson or surface
some kind of moral. for the
bad-faith crowd, it can be an
opportunity to superimpose rac-
ist stereotypes about drug abuse
and gang violence on a fresh
tragedy.
Either way, the impulse to fig-
ure out what a rap star’s death
tells us — about this generation or
this country or this music indus-
try or this opioid crisis or the
rivers o f blood continuously being
spilled by our unique American
gun violence — can be facile, and
it usually only returns us to feel-
ings of numbness and helpless-
ness. So how do you stop that
horrible death-rhythm from be-
coming routine background noise
in your mind?
for anyone who considers Big-
gie and 2Pac to be the twin pillars

notebook from C1

Trying to cope amid an unbearable volume of rapper deaths

Brynn anderson/associated Press Anneyah Lawson, 14 , holds up a sweatshirt with an image of slain rapper XXXtentacion, 20, before a memorial on June 27, 2018, in Sunrise, Fla. the deaths of fellow young rappers including Mac Miller, nipsey Hussle, Juice WRLD and Pop Smoke have followed.

BY MARK JENKINS

marc Anthony is a terrible flirt.
Which is to say, the salsa star is
really very good at beguiling a
stadium-size crowd with nothing
more than a lingering glance, a
cocked hip or a slow-motion
wink. Those were among the
many tricks Anthony employed
Saturday night at a full Capital
one Arena, where he elicited
screams, swoons and singalongs.
The vocalist seemed to be seduc-
ing listeners one by one, but he
also charmed whole nationalities
by hailing the various flags that
fluttered in the crowd.
Also, there was music.
Anthony’s tour is titled “opus,”
after his latest album. But the
100-minute show was more of a
retrospective, including songs
from most of his releases all the
way back to 1993’s “otra Nota
(Another Note).” one notable ab-
sence was any of the English-lan-
guage material he’s recorded.
(Aside from a few words of be-
tween-song patter, the concert
was entirely in Spanish.) Also
missing were the hip-hop, elec-
tronica and reggae influences
common in today’s Latin pop.
The beats and timbres were those
of 1960s and ’70s salsa.
The 51-year-old singer — who
looked elegantly scruffy in blue
jeans and a hip-length white
jacket, both shredded — was born
in New York to parents from
Puerto rico. Those are the two
places most strongly identified
with salsa, although the style’s
rhythmic foundation is Afro-
Cuban. on Saturday, many of the
tunes began as ballads, with
Anthony’s yearning, almost oper-
atic tenor supported principally
by piano, acoustic guitar or, in
one case, synthesized strings.

These passages, which represent- ed the music’s Iberian heritage, didn’t last long. Anthony soon turned the song over to the thunderous yet agile band, whose 16 members included four drum- mers. Briefly, there were five, when Anthony himself added some syncopated thumps to the lengthy percussion break of

“Contra la Corriente (Against the Current).” other songs featured hard-rock guitar solos or free- jazz horn bleats, neatly integrat- ed into the arrangements and the overall presentation, which included a mix of live and prere- corded video. Anthony conduct- ed the band, which included three backup singers, but also cued the fans, who eagerly sang

refrains and even whole verses. The star’s energy appeared to falter during the show’s last half- hour, and he took longer breaks between the final few songs. Performing the encore, “Vivir mi Vida (Live my Life),” Anthony relied heavily on his band and his audience. Both exuberantly deliv- ered. [email protected]

Music review

Marc Anthony seduces concertgoers one by one

lisa a. Walker for the Washington Post Marc Anthony performs at Capital one Arena on Saturday. the 51-year-old singer’s tour is named for his latest album, “opus,” but the concert was more of a retrospective of his past hits.

BY MATTHEW GUERRIERI

on Saturday at S trathmore, the
National Philharmonic and con-
ductor Piotr Gajewski marked
Black History month with a con-
cert of “Black Classical music
Pioneers,” featuring African
American composers past and
present. The program offered in-
triguing stylistic variety. Some-
times, it challenged the orchestra.
In the end, it occasioned a wish
for freer movement across classi-
cal music’s historical and institu-
tional borders.
Things got off to a shaky start
with Wynton marsalis’s “Wild
Strumming of fiddle,” an excerpt
from his vast, blues-grounded
1999 oratorio “A ll rise”: a stylized
hoedown, the harmonies stacked
higher, the polyrhythms com-
pounded. The group had per-

formed it before, as part of a 20 17 production of the entire work, but here, the accents were heavy- footed, the backbeat was adrift and the rhythm never came into focus. The rest was, happily, more solid. florence Price’s Violin Con- certo No. 1, with soloist melissa White, put the musicians on more traditional European-classical ground. Like much of Price’s r ecently rediscovered catalogue, the 1939 concerto takes 19th-cen- tury models — Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, especially — as jumping- off points. White was an excellent advocate, prioritizing ease and fluency over intensity, suiting the music’s lyric and episodic nature. The finale, a harmonically twisty triple-time scherzo, felt a little logy, lateral energy dissipated by vertical emphasis, but the rest

had a flowing warmth. George Walker’s precisely rhapsodic 1946 “Lyric for Strings” received a dignified reading, a well-paced build of fine-control counterpoint. In the most familiar work, William Grant Still’s 1931 “A fro-American” Symphony No. 1, Gajewski and the orchestra came down very much on the symphonic side of symphonic jazz. The rhythms were right-an- gled — syncopations waiting for downbeats rather than comple- menting them, swinging sections more conscientious than carefree — but the colors were bold and vibrant. Walker, an uncompromising craftsman with an aversion to categorization, once called the “black composer” label a “two- edged sword”; on Saturday, the pleasure in hearing the music

was coupled with the frustration of hearing it isolated from the larger repertoire. Price’s individ- uality might sound more clearly, for instance, alongside her ro- mantic prototypes, Still’s thesis more singularly contrasted with the jazzy efforts of contempo- raries — milhaud, ravel, Gersh- win (the latter pointedly quoted in Still’s t hird-movement “A nima- to”). In prefatory remarks, Ga- jewski acknowledged that or- chestras — the National Philhar- monic included — have too rarely programmed composers outside the largely white and male en- clave of the classical canon, and suggested casting a wider future net. one hopes Saturday’s concert launches more music into dia- logue with the rest of the t radition. [email protected]

Music review

National Philharmonic celebrates black composers

The Washington Post - 24.02.2020

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