Lethem’s Puking Cats, and Other News

Jonathan Lethem’s vomiting-cat collection. Photo: David Brandon Geeting for the New York Times

John Berger, whose keen, generous writing changed the way we look at and talk about art, has died at ninety. As the Guardian’s obit puts it, “Art and the wider world seemed to make more sense after watching Berger on the BBC, with his piercing blue eyes, steady delivery and groovy seventies shirt, eloquently explain perspective or the idealization of the nude. Susan Sontag once described Berger as peerless in his ability to make ‘attentiveness to the sensual world’ meet ‘imperatives of conscience.’ ” Berger told Geoff Dyer in 1984, “storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people … At any one moment it is difficult to see what the job your life is because you are so aware of what you lending yourself to. This is perhaps why I use the term ‘being a witness.’ One is a witness of others but not of oneself.”

We all dream of hitting the big time—and when you’re a writer, there’s probably no “big time” bigger than selling your papers to a library. (You have to take your pleasures where you can get them.) Jonathan Lethem has just sold his papers to Yale, meaning they’ve laid claim to his ephemera, his diaries, the very essence of his writerly being … including his rich stock of drawings of vomiting cats: “For about fifteen years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about two a.m., I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat … I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers.”

Arthur Fournier is in the business of library building, too. No, he does not have any vomiting cats to offer. But his cache of rare books has its own specialties: “These days my clients are a nice mix, including several private collectors who are serious, passionate, and devoted. They are building incredible collections on topics no one else is. For example, I have one client who is working in the area of counterculture and leftist groups in the U.S. and abroad in the 1960s with a special focus on armed struggle and liberation. Another client has asked me to help him build a very specific and unique library related to aviation and topics in experimental jet craft during and after the Second World War. And another is collecting French underground and New Wave magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s. It’s great to get into a synchronous groove with someone who has the vision to collect adventurously and help him or her find the best materials.”

Maggie Nelson closed out 2016 as everyone should have, by watching the “Darling Nikki” scene in Purple Rain: “Did I want to be Prince or be with Prince? I think the beauty is, neither. He made it O.K. to feel what he was feeling, what I was feeling. I wanted to be a diminutive, profuse, electric ribbon of horniness and divine grace. I bought a white shirt with ruffles down the front and wore it with skintight crushed-velvet hot pants, laid a full-length mirror on the floor, and slithered on top of the mirror, imitating Prince’s closing slither on the elevated amp in ‘Darling Nikki.’ Yeah, he’s telling Apollonia to come back, but you can tell he doesn’t really give a shit about Apollonia. He’s possessed by something else, his life force onstage. Half naked, wearing only black bolero pants and a black kerchief tied over the top part of his face, his torso slick with sweat, Prince is telling us a story. An important one.”

And Rajeev Balasubramanyam remembers listening to Wham! in the working-class Lancashire of 1984: “In contrast to the dull, rainy, post-industrial landscape around me, they always looked as if they were having the time of their lives. They were young, beautiful, tanned, and made spectacular pop music. Their first two albums were called Fantastic and Make It Big. After their first number one single, George Michael performed on Top of the Pops in a T-shirt with ‘Number 1’ embroidered in gold on it; in the video, he wore one with ‘Choose Life’ printed on it in bold black letters. In gloomy, northern, cold, racist England, this was what I wanted to hear. I wanted hope. I wanted fun.”

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