March 24, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Stephanie Burt By Stephanie Burt In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Untitled [There are more of us]” by Killarney Clary Issue no. 88 (Summer 1983) There are more of us. We came out of a time when birth was happy. We are prizes. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so important, so healthy. If any of us suffered war, we were pained less by the enemy than our ability to kill him. Our number seems a useless power. We were sold on dis-satisfaction—now we’re sold families but they’re no sign of survival this time. I am very lucky but that’s not life. And maybe no more than any person born in any year, I want but don’t know what, feel unsettled in a sea of similarly restless faces. The breadth of possibility makes choosing seem evasive. We decide but we are slow and small with doubts. It was 1954 when my parents moved to have room for me. I remember a box my mother packed for me to store at school, filled with canned milk and soup and Hershey bars. Two thousand good nights. My checked uniform on a hook. My face to the hall light because that felt like a day in the sun. Not fear, not loneliness, but my preference for sleeping near the window and near the floor, humming. Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, coeditor of poetry at The Nation, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. Her work appears regularly in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, and other journals. She lives in Massachusetts.
March 23, 2020 Arts & Culture A Brief History of Word Games By Adrienne Raphel Paulina Olowska, Crossword Puzzle with Lady in Black Coat, 2014 When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries—I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation. Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper’s FUN supplement, so he took advantage of new technology that could print blank grids cheaply and created a diamond-shaped set of boxes, with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of FUN. Nearly overnight, the “Word-Cross Puzzle” went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page. Still, the crossword didn’t arise from nowhere. Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words. Crosswords are the Punnett square of two long-standing strands of word puzzles: word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren’t necessarily using deliberate deception; and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don’t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through. WORD SQUARES The direct precursor of the crossword grid is the word square, a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its “order.” While 2-squares and 3-squares are easy to create, in English, by the time you reach order 6, you’re very likely to get stuck. An order 10 square is a holy grail for the logologists, that is, the wordplay experts. The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”). Sator square, Oppède, France The Sator Square is the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). It’s unclear why this meme was such a thing. “Arepo” is a hapax legomenon, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature—the best working theory is that it’s a proper name invented to make the square work. Read More
March 20, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Demons, Decadence, and Dimes By The Paris Review Ladislav Klíma. Prince Sternenhoch is lovelorn, despite his qualities: “Leaving aside my family and wealth, I may boldly say of myself that I am a beau, in spite of certain inadequacies, for example, that I stand only 150 centimeters and weigh 45 kilograms, and am almost toothless, hairless, and whiskerless, also a little squint-eyed and have a noticeable hobble—well, even the sun has spots.” He meets the silent Helga, whom he instinctively loathes and swiftly marries. She opens up, travels as a brigand, finds her métier as a demon, and starts to murder “like a doctor.” Ladislav Klíma’s (1878–1928) The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, styled as the eponymous noble’s edited journals, is a phantasmagoric freak-out, a work of consummate madness. It is gross and wretched; it is a Tinder date in a pandemic. Sternenhoch lives in a succession of ghoulish castles. He transcribes his titters and cackles and—after he is possessed by the spirit of his defenestrated Saint Bernard, Elephant—his barks. He schemes to make a gorilla cry and invests his fortune in a nut. Helga is killed, gains a swift promotion in hell, and visits to torment. Perhaps they reconcile, when she confesses, “My financial outlook is atrocious, my rabbits all died suddenly, and I have come to realize I lack artistic talent.” The truth is impossible to discern: the tale is all delusion, but for Klíma, delusion is all there is. In A Czech Dreambook, Ludvík Vaculík remarks that “Klíma’s horror stories have no more than a poetic effect on me. I can read them last thing at night and then have a nice peaceful bureaucratic dream.” For Vaculík, Sternenhoch might offer no relief from those anesthetic dreams proscribed by the state, but at present I could do with a good night’s sleep. Besides, I was moved. In Klíma’s “Autobiography,” which is appended to this edition—vividly translated, like Sternenhoch, by Carleton Bulkin—he writes of his life spent in “consistent divergence from all that’s human”: he eats only raw flour and raw horse meat, gobbles mice half eaten by cats, and “would glug down bathwater from people with smallpox.” At that, I put the book down and immediately washed my hands. Then I opened it again. —Chris Littlewood Read More
March 20, 2020 Arts & Culture An Attentive Memoir of Life in Parma By Patricia Hampl © Olga Demchishina / Adobe Stock. How tempting to describe Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue as a page-turner, as it surely was for me more than twenty years ago. But really, it’s a page-pauser. The instantly trustworthy voice invites the reader to slow into its fine focus, its acute parallels and oppositions, the deft leaps from the frustrations of a Renaissance abbess commissioning Correggio to paint her room in Parma, say, to the homely act of buying bread at the corner store in the same city almost five hundred years later. Much underlining, notes and exclamations crammed in the margins. I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years. And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks. Wilde-Menozzi and her husband are “hunkered” (the new verb form of our lives) in Parma, where she continues to take her keen-eyed notes. In an email this week, she reports that the caskets wait in long lines and the nurses weep because they can’t find words to give to those who are frightened. The signal of a reliable reporter—journalist, memoirist, poet, historian—is the capacity to see oppositions and contradictions with unblinking acceptance: this is reality. Finally, she writes: “All in all, though, spring is unstoppable—after all, it, as well as the virus, is part of nature’s ways. Italy is doing a good job, with many people making sacrifices and being selfless.” Just now, in the midst of the growing pandemic, my latest consideration of her book underscores its uncanny immediacy. My enthralled first reading probably had something to do with its moment in modern literary history. Mother Tongue appeared in the early wave of personally voiced books in which the narrator is not a heroine, though she’s the protagonist, the seeking soul. This was nonfiction (wasn’t it?), but also lyric, essayistic, inquiring, thoughtful prose. Yet not dowdy “belles lettres.” Research underlay some of it, but it wasn’t scholarly—just reliable. There was even stealth poetry. A mind was revealing itself—to itself. And I, the reader, got to eavesdrop. Read More
March 20, 2020 The Last Year The Rooms By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June. It’s the middle of the night, or maybe it’s just dark in my memory. I’ve already put my daughter, Indie, to bed. She’s ten, maybe eleven, and we’re living in northern New York. I’m standing in the living room, hitting my palm against a wall and shouting, “Something has to change. Something has to change.” Not long ago, I asked Indie if she remembers that night. She said she doesn’t. But I can still summon the room, still feel the pinch in my chest. My weariness. At what, I don’t remember, but I can guess it was about a late check in the mail or not finding a permanent university position or maybe it was the snow falling outside the window in April. In our memories, there are rooms we’ll always be standing in, saying one thing or another. Or not saying what we should. In high school, before I had my driver’s license, I snuck my father’s Olds 98 out of the garage. I wanted to borrow an outfit from my friend, Amy, an outfit my mother would never allow. I can still feel the rush of rounding Riggs Circle, the windows down, the radio up. Later, when my parents pulled into the garage in my mother’s Cutlass, my father noticed pens and a notebook on his floorboard. I had forgotten to put the seat back (and turn down 97.1 FM, The Eagle). In the living room, I sat on the brick ledge of the fireplace, watching him yell. At fifteen, I was growing more defiant, more confident in my rebellions. “When you leave this house,” he raised his arms, “you’re going to go wild. Wild!” I stood up, arms by my sides, fists clenched. I yelled back, “I already have!” Read More
March 19, 2020 Comics Krazy Kat Gets the Spanish Flu By George Herriman George Herriman’s Krazy Kat ran in the Sunday papers from 1913 until 1944. The strip’s offbeat poetry and idiosyncratic dialect made it one of the first comics to be taken seriously by intellectuals and praised as high art (e. e. cummings wrote the introduction to the first collection of the comic to be published as a book). The premise is a deceptively simple love triangle: Ignatz the mouse despises sweet, simpleminded Krazy Kat, who nurses an undying love for him. Ignatz hurls bricks at Krazy, who takes each one as a sign of affection (“Li’l dollink, allus f’etful,” he says, as the bricks bounce off his head). Officer Pup, in love with Krazy Kat, attempts to protect him by thwarting Ignatz and jailing him. In the strip below, from 1918, Ignatz and Krazy come down with the Spanish flu, which apparently can be contracted by dreaming of bull fights. Page courtesy of Michael Tisserand, author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White George Herriman was a cartoonist, best known for the influential ‘Krazy Kat.’