Winter 2019 – The Greene Street Review

“Rules for Visiting” and the Dangers of Sentimentalism

By Paul Oliver

May Attaway, the fastidious narrator of Jessica Francis Kane’s new novel, “Rules for Visiting,” embarks on a journey to visit four old friends after her employer, a university in small-town Anneville, awards her a long leave from her job as a groundskeeper. Contrived inciting incident and possible underlying depression aside, May faces a rather common feeling of unrest: she is having a midlife crisis.

May visits her four old friends—Lindy, Vanessa, Neera, and Rose—to avoid the people closest to her, the people to whom she should dedicate her attention. These characters include her friend Leo (a budding love interest), her father, her coworker Sue, and her estranged brother. May prefers maudlin conversations with old friends to direct ones with the people who love her. She believes that “your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself and that’s what I’m after.” (Tony Soprano would tell May that“‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”) The thing May lacks, though, despite her contemplative nature, is a precise sense of self. She feels lonely because she doesn’t know who she is—she never recovered from her mother’s death, and Kane wants the reader to sympathize with May’s condition as a single, middle-aged woman. Only in the final pages of the novel does May begin to foster the important relationships, the perennial ones (Leo, her dad). In this sense, the novel gestures towards a restorative sentiment, but too little too late.

Lindy’s daughter tells May, “My mom says you’re sad because you’re too old to have children.” Vanessa asks May why she’s still single. Indeed, May lives alone with only a cat for a companion (well, sort-of—she lives with her ailing father in her childhood home, the same home in which her mother suffered a tragic death). She’s inept with social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram bewilder her. And she’s the type of person who has a name for her car. Bonnie.

The Frustrating Season Finale of “Euphoria”

By Eugenia Yang

HBO’s teen drama, “Euphoria,” has been in the spotlight since it premiered in the summer of 2019. The show has been called shocking and topical: it deals with drugs, sex, sexuality, and identity as its high school characters face problems like addiction, abuse, and teen pregnancy. The cast of characters includes: Rue, a recovering drug addict, who is home from rehab and back in high school; Nate, the spoiled star-quarterback; Jules, the young trans woman who is new in town; and Fez, a high school dropout turned drug dealer. The writers do a spectacular job of structuring each episode as an introduction to a character while simultaneously moving the plot forward without slowing down the pace. I find myself constantly on the edge of my couch, wondering when Nate will screw up the order of his dad’s porn discs, or when his dad, who hooks up with young men and trans women, will be exposed. We see the backstory and upbringing of each character and get a sense of why they are who they are. All the characters are far from perfect and they all make questionable life choices. The character who is the closest to making “morally correct” decisions is probably Fez and he’s a dealer whose assistant is a ten-year-old kid.

But that is exactly the beauty of “Euphoria.” And that’s why it resonates with young viewers. No, we aren’t perfect, and like Maddy, Nate’s on-and-off girlfriend, we tend to fall for the wrong people. No, we don’t always root for the most morally correct characters and are perhaps secretly on the team of drug addicts and drug dealers. We see pieces of ourselves in these characters’ flaws and understand that essentially, these imperfections are what make us human.

The Case for Honesty in Homosexual Art

By Alejandro Villa Vásquez

Before shows like “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” garnered infamy for their softcore-porn portrayals of gay and lesbian sex, no instance of homosexual film or television had successfully punctured the mainstream and (soon to be) unfashionably heterosexual conscious of the TV-watching American public. “Will & Grace,” with its gorgeously corporate cast of gay and straight Manhattanites, began to fascinate audiences when it premiered in 1998, so much so that it was resurrected after eleven years in the graveyard of primetime TV. But “Will & Grace” and its basic-cable virtues could never dive into the slutty depths like Queer as Folk” or the “The L Word.” The latter two were sometimes pornographic to the point of frightening.

Bilingual Insecurity in the Face of Loss

By Bailey Cohen-Vera

I didn’t go to the funeral. The previous Saturday had been the wedding; missing the busiest shift at the restaurant two weekends in a row was something I knew I couldn’t afford. My mother did everything she could. I could sense the frustration she tried to mask several times leading up to the weekend, when we talked on the phone and she reminded me to call Karine. “La mamá de Karine falleció el día de hoy, es muy posible que este fin de semana sea el funeral, apenas sepa que día te aviso,” she told me that Tuesday. It will probably be this weekend. I’ll let you know. I’ll admit, this should have been enough. I should have called out of work; I should have lied and said I was feeling terrible, gotten paid with the sick hours I managed to accrue exhaustively. I should have grieved.

A Bunny Hop Into Nazi Germany: A Review of “Jojo Rabbit”

By Oliver Fosten

Taika Watiki’s new satire, “Jojo Rabbit,” can be summed up with the dialogue between the titular character Jojo, a ten-year-old living in Nazi Germany, and his mother, Rosie. Upon seeing a neat line of bodies hanging for crimes against the Fatherland, Jojo asks his mother, “What did they do?” as he looks away. His mother physically forces his gaze back upon the dead, somberly replying, “What they could.”

Writing As Paying Attention: An Interview with MC Hyland

By Parmis Parsa

MC Hyland is a poet, scholar, publisher, professor, and public artist. Having published two-full-length books of poems: “THE END” (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010), as well as being a founding editor at DoubleCross Press, she is already proving herself a noteworthy critic and artist. I had the opportunity to take a class called Reading as a Writer with her at New York University, which has been one of the most enjoyable college classes I have taken to date. Being or aspiring to be a writer in the 21st century is not easy, but when we see success stories like Hyland’s—poets who are capitalizing on their positions as both artist and teacher—we begin to view this endeavor as less daunting and more inspiring. I conducted this interview over email.

Could you describe what it feels like to work on a creative project that is close to your heart, or your writing in general, and finally have it shared with the public? How do you begin to form themes from small pieces you’ve worked on; when does the full picture start taking shape? And once the final product is produced, how do you respond to the critical reception received from it?

So I think there are two parts to this question: one about writing and one about publishing. As a writer, I’m a poet who works at the unit of the group of poems. I hardly ever sit down, feel inspired, and write a single poem. Honestly, I know there are writers for whom “inspiration” is a thing, but for me, writing is more like a muscle–I have to keep it in shape, and I do that by working on projects. I tend to come up with an idea of how I’ll write something long before I know what it’s about, and I also tend to write long projects that take a few years to complete. When I was younger, I didn’t understand that was my pace–it was a huge relief once I realized I didn’t have to be stressed about finding a new inspiration every week, that I could just give myself an assignment and go from there. So, for example, my book “THE END,” which came out this past summer, was a project where I wrote 100 poems, all of which were called “THE END,” and all of which were composed of sentences with similar syntax. I told myself, at the beginning, that I’d write a hundred of these poems, and as I was working on the project, I often told myself that my job was just to write short sentences (on my phone or in notebooks or sometimes on my computer), and not to think about how they went together until later. Once I had a page’s worth of sentences, I’d sit down and assemble them into a paragraph, and move them around until I liked the ways they were talking with one another. Sometimes that editing process made individual sentences mean different things than I’d first intended–I always find it really exciting when a piece of writing opens up in that way. Because that project was about hitting a target (100 poems, each at least a half-page long), I could think about form and about process, rather than about content, and that helped me write about a lot of subjects that would have been harder to come at head-on.

Bravery Comes With Practice: An Interview with Alexander Chee

By Nick Fell

The following interview was conducted over email.

You probably get asked this a lot, but it feels like something that needs to be covered, especially in a publication for college students: what is/was your journey to the literary arts? Have you always been passionate about writing?

Most of this is in my essay collection, but maybe what isn’t perhaps is this: I was a passionate reader as a child, more or less compulsive. But I also loved inventing stories, for myself and then for others. The first book I made up was for a book report in grade school. I did it to see if I could get away with it—could I invent a book in a book report such that my teacher wouldn’t catch it? I got away with it, and while I never felt the need to do this again, I was hooked on the idea of making something up (and getting away with it). If this seems dark, it could have been.

What I found next was Dungeons & Dragons, as a Dungeon Master, which taught me the power of storytelling. And then a teacher in high school encouraged us to write journals, and that is where I learned to tell a story about myself that was true, as it were. I wrote my first poems in that journal, and he encouraged me to send them to a contest, which I then won.

Writing let me take the good (reading a lot) and the bad (seeing what I could get people to believe) and put it into the service of art. Using these powers for good, basically.

If You Are Ready for Language To Hurt, “Calling a Wolf a Wolf” is for You

Cover of "Calling a Wolf a Wolf" by Kaveh Akbar

By George Hajjar

I want poetry to fuck me up, and Kaveh Akbar knows how to do it.

Reading poetry is like going through a first breakup; you don’t always know what’s happening, but you do know you’re going to get hurt. Yes, I’m saying that all lovers of poetry are masochists. It’s true.

Young Adult Fiction Reminded Me How to Live

book cover of The Selection by Kiera Cass

By Olivia Liu

On my bookshelf sits a pale blue book. I have not yet read it in public without swapping out its dust jacket for another, more serious-looking one, preferably titled something very literary, like “To Kill a Search of Lost Pride and Prejudice in 1984.” This is what’s on the real cover: a princess, delicately beautiful, a tiara woven into her red hair. Flip through the pages and you’ll find the story is illustrated too: more princesses, more gowns, a map labeled in pink, girlish cursive. What is the book about? It’s part of a series, actually—“The Selection” by Keira Cass—and I own six of the books (I have yet to get my hands on the companion coloring book).