December 1, 2023 The Review’s Review A Pimp with a Heart of Gold By Liam Sherwin-Murray Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979). I watched the 1979 film Saint Jack on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee. Because the commercials often lurched on midsentence, I concluded that Freevee doesn’t pay people to insert the breaks between scenes. The deduction was sound, but being human, i.e., desperate for meaning, I nevertheless read intention into the placement of some of the ads. At the end of the movie, for example, when the main character must choose between collaborating with an occupying power or forgoing a fat check, Freevee broke to a spot for a skin serum by Vichy Laboratories. Unfortunately, the synergy didn’t last. The next commercial featured the socially conscious rapper Common, of the too-resonant baritone, shilling T-Mobile from a barber chair—a rich text, to be sure, but one without much relevance to Saint Jack, which is set in Singapore in the late sixties. Read More
December 1, 2023 Syllabi Syllabus: Unexpected Dramaturgy By Lynn Nottage LYNN NOTTAGE IN REHEARSAL FOR THIS IS READING (2017) AT THE FRANKLIN STREET RAILROAD STATION IN READING, PENNSYLVANIA, 2017. In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points. As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth. Read More
November 29, 2023 Car Crushes The Church Van By Caleb Gayle 1990 Plymouth Voyager. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Every Sunday morning would start the same way. Grandma Gayle, after her overnight shift as a nurse’s assistant, would walk into the room catty-corner from hers, knock, and yell, “Grandson!”—though Grandman’s yelling barely registered a decibel. So she would gently nudge my side and remind me that we had to get going. If there was time, bath; if not, shower. I’d make my dash to the kitchen, where Grandma would have prepared the kielbasa sausages fried, eggs fried, and cheddar cheese melted on a bialy or bagel bought from the deli up the street and accompanied by Tropicana Berry Punch in a glass. Church wouldn’t start for four hours, at least. But we started early—my grandma, grandpa, and me getting into the 1994 Plymouth Voyager, normally parked in the back lot of their home, which was wedged between where Brownsville and East New York meet. We traversed every borough to pick up congregants; on Sundays, the Voyager served as the church van. The bottom half of the Voyager must once have been a pristine teal, but it had faded into an odd mixture of light blues and grays. The top half was covered in homey faux wood paneling. The seating legally accommodated seven but in actuality the church van would fit as many people who did not mind sitting on laps and on the tan carpeted floor, or squeezing into corners. The cassette deck remained unused. As we got going, 1010 WINS would blast through the stereo with a crackle and a burst of static, a narrated mapping for Reverend Gayle, my grandpa, pastor of the church in the Bronx not far from Gun Hill, who would drive this first leg. Plus, a dissonant, semi-melodic mumble of hymns from Grandma, seated in the front passenger seat, as Grandpa—ever the nervous driver—would intermittently and suddenly press his right foot on the brake. Grandpa and I never understood what Grandma was trying to sing, but it always prompted Grandpa, after two minutes, to yell, “Marlene, ’top ya noise!” Read More
November 27, 2023 Letters Postcards from Elizabeth Bishop By Langdon Hammer Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved. Elizabeth Bishop delighted in the postcard. It suited her poetic subject matter and her way of life—this poet of travel who was more often on the move than at home, “wherever that may be,” as she put it in her poem “Questions of Travel.” She told James Merrill in a postcard written in 1979 that she seldom wrote “anything of any value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.” Since her death in 1979 and the publication of her selected correspondence, Bishop has become known as one of the great modern-day letter-writers. And yet inevitably something is lost when an editor transcribes a letter to prepare it for print: the quality of the correspondent’s hand (or the model of her typewriter), the paper used, cross-outs and typos, and everything else that fixes the letter in time and space. When it comes to a postcard, or a letter composed on a series of postcards (something Bishop enjoyed doing), we get none of the images, and even more is lost. But what exactly? “What do we miss by not seeing these postcards?” Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum ask in the catalogue for the exhibition of Bishop’s postcards they have curated at the Vassar College Library, on view through December 15, 2023. Vassar, which is home to Bishop’s papers, has published print and online catalogues of the exhibition. The print catalogue includes the curators’ richly suggestive introduction, front and back images of the exhibition’s sixty-three items, and appendices. The answer to the curators’ question is: quite a lot. There is always some dialogue between the front and back of one of Bishop’s postcards. Take the one to Merrill commenting on her restless habits of composition. The front of the card (“the nicest left of my postcards from the Eastman Museum,” she says) is a reproduction of the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study of a goat. Bishop doesn’t point out the analogy between her unsettled ways and the ambling goat. She knows Merrill will get it. Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved. But more often, the dialogue between the front and back of the card is explicit, and it plays with the difference between Bishop’s reality and what the postcard pictures. In the middle of one summer, Bishop sent the painter Loren MacIver an image of a stag in an icy stream, thinking “it might make you feel cool … to look at it.” Another postcard to MacIver features a photo of the University Inn in Seattle. The hotel is her “home away from home—temporarily, at least,” while she is teaching for a term at the University of Washington. Lest MacIver get the wrong impression of her circumstances, Bishop corrects the sunny image by drawing a line on the photo and noting that snow is currently falling into the swimming pool. Postcards began circulating in the late nineteenth century, at first in Europe. These cards carried the address on the front; on the back would be an etching of Salzburg, say, or the Tower of London, and space for a short, handwritten message. A simple but consequential redesign was introduced around 1900: the address was moved to the back of the card, the image to the front. With new visual technologies revolutionizing print media, postal rates falling, and the frequency of mail delivery rising (up to twelve times a day in Paris!), the craze for the postcard took hold. Like other consumer crazes, it seemed to many commentators to be a feminine delirium. Bishop’s own interest in the postcard began early in her life. In “In the Village,” a short story about her childhood in rural Nova Scotia during the First World War, she describes her mother’s collection of postcards. (Gertrude Bishop must have been one of those women caught up in the postcard craze). The child in the story is thrilled—“how beautiful!”—by her mother’s glitter postcards. “The crystals outline the buildings on the cards in a way buildings never are outlined but should be,” Bishop writes. Compared to those sparkling pictures of distant cities, “the gray postcards for sale in the village store” were a disappointment. “After all,” Bishop reasons, speaking from the little girl’s perspective, “one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full size, and in color.” Notice how young Elizabeth’s sense of reality has been subtly undermined by a taste for postcards. Now reality looks like a representation—a superior one “full size, and in color,” but a representation all the same. Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved. Bishop sometimes made greeting cards of her own with crayons and (in tribute to her early enthusiasm for it) glitter. She made her own collages, using, for example, a cigar-box label to create a Christmas card. Ellis and Rosenbaum compare her camp creativity to the collage art of John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, and Joseph Cornell. The rectangular frame of the postcard was for her a container something like one of Cornell’s horizontal box constructions. Underlining that association, the Vassar exhibition includes a postcard of one of Cornell’s works that Bishop sent to MacIver in 1977. In “Objects & Apparitions,” Bishop’s translation of a poem by Octavio Paz celebrating Cornell’s work, Cornell’s boxes are called “cages for infinity.” Postcards are, in their way, a species of propaganda. Whether they show grand public buildings, statues of military heroes, or clichés like a pot of Boston baked beans, they help to constitute a quasi-official discourse, a common image-repertoire that defines what we are supposed to find admirable, interesting, amusing, and so on. Bishop did not disdain popular images of this kind; she enjoyed them, even as she mocked them. That combination of participation and parody is expressed in a souvenir photo postcard that Bishop and her girlfriend Louise Crane posed for at a carnival in France in the early days of their romance. The young women’s faces, poking through a painted sheet, are joined to the burly bodies of two boxers taking swings at each other. While Crane stares coolly at the camera, Bishop makes eyes at her. Unpublished postcard sent by Elizabeth Bishop, from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved. Numerous postcards in the exhibition play with gender norms and suggest queer subtexts. Bishop once sent Merrill a card that wished him, in Greek, “Many Happy Returns on Your Name Day.” Like many of the cards she collected, she must have found this one in a junk shop or used bookstore (0r the Greek tea room she mentions on the card?) and picked it out thinking of Merrill, who spoke Greek and had had, she knew, more than one love affair with a Greek man. The sentimental card pictures a man’s cuff-linked hand shaking a pale, ambiguously gendered hand within a decorative ring of violets and roses. “I’m either congratulating you on yr. engagement,” Bishop types on the back, “or asking you to marry me … I think.” The cigar-box label that Bishop scissored and sent as a Christmas card to the Brazilian journalist Rosinha Leão pictures a gartered and bewigged eighteenth-century courtier labeled with the words “Our Aristocratic Friend.” This is most likely an affectionate reference to Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s upper-class Brazilian lover, who had introduced Bishop to Leão. Another postcard in the exhibition, this one addressed to Lota, is a reproduction of a Victorian painting by James Collinson of a showily dressed young woman—Ellis and Rosenbaum identify her as a prostitute—who turns to the viewer with a wily smile while holding an empty woman’s purse. Bishop wrote nothing at all on the card but twice underlined the title The Empty Purse. What exactly was she saying? It seems to have something to do with money and sex. Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved. The postcard is an object as much as a message, and sending one, for Bishop, was like giving a gift—it was an expression of attention and care in the form of a four-by-six-inch keepsake. Unlike a letter, which typically suggests a chain of communication, most postcards don’t call for a response. In this sense, the postcard has a one-off, standalone quality not unlike a poem’s. And if Bishop’s postcards are sometimes like poems, are some of her poems like postcards? The first postcard in the exhibition is a photograph from the 1910s, of Cumberland Road in Great Village, Bishop’s grandparents’ home in Nova Scotia. Elm-tree branches arch in a canopy above the road like guards of honor. Bishop never sent the card to anyone. Or we might say, because she kept it among her papers, that she sent it only to herself. She inscribed on the back, as if it were somehow helpful simply to say aloud—for herself? for posterity?—what she knew very well: “I drove the cow to pasture up this road.” Compare that postcard to “Poem,” from Geography III, the last collection of poetry she published. The subject of “Poem” is a landscape painting of Great Village by George Hutchinson, her great-great-uncle. “About the size of an old-style dollar bill,” the oil painting is small and rectangular. We might think of the painting as the front of a postcard and Bishop’s poem, describing and meditating on it, as the message on the back. Unpublished postcard written by Elizabeth Bishop from Special Collections Library, Vassar College. Copyright © 2023 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate. All Rights Reserved. The poem goes into considerable detail to describe the painting’s representation of Great Village, which was the scene of some of Bishop’s earliest and most powerful memories. In order to get at the reality she recalled, Bishop had to do her best to render the painting’s version of it. This means heightening our awareness of the artist’s medium. Thus the wild iris is “fresh-squiggled from the tube” (as if a first squirt of oil paint were the same thing as a flower blooming), and the “tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows.” “A specklike bird is flying to the left,” Bishop notes. “Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” This attention to the painting’s materiality emphasizes the artificiality of the image, its status as a representation. Rather than make the reality of the scene more remote, it awakens Bishop’s memories and brings her closer to her own experience of the place. How does that work? And what does it have to do with postcards? The poem and the painting both are pieces of correspondence. What matters for Bishop is an exchange between people: the way the painting triangulates her and her great-great-uncle’s relationship to a “loved” place, preserved by a manifestly artificial and not particularly valuable image. “Our visions coincided,” she says. Then she corrects herself: “ ‘visions’ is / too serious a word—our looks, two looks.” The art of the postcard, for Bishop, was an art of “looks”—shared glimpses and jokes passed from hand to hand, time-stamped, and postmarked. Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art.
November 27, 2023 Writers' Houses Lifesize Dioramas: At Carolee Schneemann’s House By Hannah Gold Photograph by Hannah Gold. Carolee Schneeman’s house near New Paltz. In 1965, a stone house near New Paltz was slated for auction. A cousin of the owners, a young and broke painter, begged them to let her buy it with her musician partner. She feared the house, which was limping along, would be torn down. Soon after the artists purchased the house, the painter heard a voice in her dreams: Take a chisel to the concrete stucco, and you will find golden stones beneath; use a crowbar to peel up the linoleum flooring, there are chestnut boards below; hammer at the drop ceilings, there are wide beams above. The painter did as she was told, and found what she was promised. The house began to breathe again. The painter lived in, or perhaps with, the house for more than five decades, long after the musician departed. There were other lovers, and a series of cats—some of the cats were reincarnations of the previous cats. She made films in the rooms and worked in a studio on the second floor. She became, in time, famous. Four years ago, she died in the downstairs bedroom. This is the story, anyway, as told by the painter, who was known to take creative liberties. Carolee Schneemann named herself. “I made it up,” she said of the surname, “I wanted a big masculine German name.” She was born in 1939, if not 1934. Her birth certificate seems to have been altered with one careful pen stroke, closing off the four into a nine. Census records concur. Still, even last winter, at her first retrospective in the U.K., the Barbican’s Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, the museum materials showed not just the factual date, but the later date, the one Schneemann used when she told her life story. Read More
November 22, 2023 On Children's Books In the Beginning By J. D. Daniels Photograph by J.D. Daniels. I don’t remember learning to read. There is a story in my family: I am still a small child, my mother carries me in her arms as she stands in line at the bank, the bank teller sees my long golden hair and says, “What a pretty little girl.” I say “I am a boy, Janice,” and Janice screams and faints. This was in the seventies in Kentucky, the years of The Exorcist and The Omen, the era of demonic children on-screen. Janice, primed by horror movies to see the supernatural in everything, was unable to imagine a less exciting explanation. It was impossible that a child so small could have read her name tag. It is not lost on me that this myth of learning to read frighteningly early is, at the same time, about my indignant insistence that I am a boy. Nor is its brimstone whiff of my family’s demonic flavor lost on me. When my mother’s brother Charles Edward died, she told me, “He was the devil, John David, and you are just like him.” Read More