November 16, 2016 Arts & Culture A Poem Is a Naked Person By Dan Piepenbring From the poster to A Poem Is a Naked Person. I’m tired of writing about dead people, but people keep dying. Now it’s the musician Leon Russell, who died on Sunday at seventy-four. He’s the archetypally long-haired Southern dude who had his hand in a million hit songs without the public ever growing wise to him. He wrote “A Song for You.” He played piano on the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Elton John called him “the master of space and time,” which I just learned from the New York Times obit. His solo work is an easy slurry of rock, country, and blues: it has an aw-shucks accessibility at first but soon reveals its raw edges and winsome tattered patches. Here’s his song “Hummingbird,” later covered by B. B. King: Read More
November 11, 2016 Arts & Culture Dostoyevsky’s Empathy By Laurie Sheck Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871 I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press. For the seven months following his arrest, he’d been kept in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva, his cell window smeared with an oily paste to prevent any daylight from seeping through. Read More
November 9, 2016 Arts & Culture “I Will Pass Through This … ” By The Paris Review Shunsuke Matsumoto, Landscape with Bare Trees, 1938. In light of the sad outcome of yesterday’s election, here are some excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that might offer solace, or inspiration, or a cudgel against complacency. People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege. —Marilynne Robinson, 2008 Read More
November 7, 2016 Arts & Culture Have You Read Schlump Yet? By Volker Weidermann Fritz Fuhrken, Granate trifft englischen Panzer, Somme Schlacht, 1918. In 1928, Hans Herbert Grimm published his first and only novel, Schlump. It is the latest offering from the NYRB Classics Book Club. Schlump describes the violence, chaos, and absurdity of World War I, experienced firsthand by its author. The book was critical of the German government and military and presents graphic depictions of the high cost of human sacrifice in war; Grimm published it anonymously. The novel’s witness is Emil Schultz, nicknamed Schlump, a wandering tailor who, despite experiencing the horrors of battle up close, remains an optimist, eager to get back to the job of living: “he was determined to make something of his life, because surely there would be peace again now, soon, peace! Peace and decency—how lovely life would be! What a golden era was beginning now!” Schlump’s hopefulness would have been short-lived: Five years after the book’s publication, the Nazi party came to power in Germany. A decade after its publication, Germany was again at war, and Grimm was sent to the Western Front. A pale wall in the living room of a gray house with a pointed roof in the thousand-year-old Thuringian town of Altenburg. The sun is shining through the large windows. Against one wall is a blue sofa, at the other end of the room a grand piano, while a colourful Bauhaus carpet adorns the floor. Cups and small porcelain plates sit on a round coffee table. A closer look at the pale wall reveals a fine crack in the plaster. Here, on this wall, in this house, a strange German fairy tale began. Or is this where it ended? The house, with its large fir trees in the garden and white bench beside the front door, was built at the beginning of the 1930s by doctor of philosophy and schoolmaster Hans Herbert Grimm. Some of the money to finance the house came from a book he’d written, although nobody here in Altenburg nor anyone anywhere else was to know he was its author. Schlump—Tales and adventures from the life of the anonymous soldier Emil Schulz, known as ‘Schlump’. Narrated by himself: the book of his life. Grimm was worried that he wouldn’t be able to go on living normally if it became known that he’d written the novel. It would spell the end of his career as a teacher, and of his peaceful existence in his beloved Altenburg, if word got out that he was the author of a book that described the German soldiers of the Great War as less than heroic, German military strategy as misguided, senseless and foolish, the Kaiser as a coward, and the entire war as a cruel, bad joke. Read More
November 1, 2016 Arts & Culture The Oblivion of Adam By Abdelfattah Kilito What if you could remember every poem in the next life? From the cover of The Tongue of Adam, available now from New Directions The dead play a sly trick on the living: in dying, they pass on the duty of interpreting what they thought, of arguing over what they said—or might have said, or even what they never said. This is how we get the fantasy, as stubborn as it is unrealizable, of interrogating the dead directly and without an interpreter. To meet them, just once, and to ask them to clarify what they’d said—or even, in certain cases, to ask if they said it at all. If only they would speak, all outstanding claims would be resolved, the contradictions smoothed over, the ambiguities explained. Confronted with the light of truth, all men would agree and no argument would be possible. This fantasy has produced an entire genre of literature: the dialogue with the dead. One example of the genre in Arabic is The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-ghufran) by the eleventh century poet al-Ma‘arri, which narrates a journey to the life. Following the Day of Judgment, the hero Ibn al-Qarih is admitted into paradise, where he meets the poets he most esteems, or those whose verses have especially provoked his philological curiosity. During a sojourn in hell, he’s also permitted to interview the poètes maudits. And finally, returning to paradise, he meets Adam. The Epistle of Forgiveness is a work of tremendous richness. My aim here is merely to examine what it says, directly or otherwise, about poetry and the forgetting of language. Read More
October 28, 2016 Arts & Culture Something in the Blood, Part 2 By David J. Skal To celebrate the spookiest of holidays, we’re publishing a selection of excerpts from David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood, a biography of Bram Stoker, published this month by Liveright. Today: a love triangle between Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Florence Balcombe. Florence Balcombe, around the time she met Oscar Wilde. On one of his visits or summer vacations in Ireland, Oscar Wilde made an acquaintance of an “exquisitely pretty girl” of seventeen, he wrote to a classmate. Though unnamed in the letter, she has generally been identified as Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe. Wilde described her as having “the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.” He escorted her to an afternoon service, presumably at the ancient Christ Church Cathedral in central Dublin, which had only very recently been restored to a fashionable semblance of its medieval glory. It may have been there that he made her a Christmas gift of a small gold cross engraved with his name. At five foot eight, the willowy Florence was a good match for the six foot two Oscar, at least for the purpose of Sunday promenades, and Merrion Square was a favorite outdoor location for regular romantic parading. The gated gardens, then accessible by key only to the adjacent residences, was a haven from the unpleasant sights and persons of Dublin’s city core. Read More