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Surprise—It’s Dylan Thomas, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Two of Lilliput’s 1942 covers.

  • A lost poem by Dylan Thomas, published originally in a magazine called Lilliput in 1942, has been recovered from a torn-out page; this weekend, in an act of poetic resuscitation, the actor Celyn Jones will read it aloud in public. We know the poem is called “A Dream of Winter,” and that it “features eight verses of three lines and focuses on imagery of a birdless wood, snow, and ‘singing statures.’ ” Anyone who can reconstruct it word for word based on these parameters will receive the entirety of my checking account.
  • The novelist H. L. “Doc” Humes helped to cofound The Paris Review in the early fifties—an often delicate enterprise, apparently. “Doc’s essential contribution to the founding of The Paris Review was his gusto and charisma; he was the first managing editor, but he prioritized his own writing … Doc was embarrassingly demoted to ‘advertising manager’ at the first issue’s release in spring 1953—a slight that prompted him to stamp his name onto the masthead of as many copies of the first issue as he could. In future issues, Doc was restored to the masthead as a founding and contributing editor, in spite of his laissez-faire style.”
  • Today in mourning through psychogeography: “When’s the last time you’ve spotted someone you know on Google Maps? I never had. And my mother, besides, is no longer alive. It couldn’t be her … By moving the camera position up and down the street, and using the zoom function, I could trace my mom’s movements on that day as the Google car drove by. In the first frame, she’s a few paces from the door, with her back to the street; she was probably just returning from work … I took screenshots of my mom from every angle available on the site, saved them to my hard drive, and e-mailed copies to myself, just in case my hard drive crashes at some point. Then, like a living, breathing grief-complicating cliché, I e-mailed the images to family and friends, in order to simultaneously brighten and ruin their days.”
  • Jim Shaw is working a vein that you might call “crackpot gothic”: his retrospective at the New Museum features his own work as well as the thrift-store paintings, UFO magazines, and wooden theatrical flats he’s recovered from various ends of America. “Like the surrealist Max Ernst, Shaw eschews a single signature style in favor of an elaborate, somewhat hermetic personal mythology … Shaw’s show may be titled ‘The End Is Here,’ but he appears to share our national optimism. Although his obsessive faux naïve work dares you to find it creepy, it is more often strangely cheerful, as well as enigmatic. How nice to see a swarm of gnat-sized Superman clones in pink capes fly through a giant keyhole.”
  • Growing old blows. Art and literature know this—in fact, they know it better than science, or at least better than dermatology. And so dermatologists, in their textbooks, turn to art: “The authors of Surgical Anatomy of the Face … conclude their efficient run-through of the changes that occur from approximately age thirty to seventy by referring their readers to a few seventeenth-century oil paintings. ‘These changes,’ they note, ‘can be clearly seen in the sequential self-portraits of Rembrandt.’ And indeed, in the four that the authors have selected, we can trace the Dutch master’s transformation from soft, luminescent youth to jowly, faded old man. More precisely, we can observe as ‘the melolabial lines deepen, forehead lines appear, and undulation of the mandibular line becomes noticeable,’ observe ‘the nasal tip descend, and the rhytids of the forehead, the perioral area, and the neck deepen … ’ ”