October 14, 2020 Arts & Culture The Death of Max Jacob By Rosanna Warren The following piece is excerpted from Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Company next week. Max Jacob was born in 1876 to a nonobservant Jewish family in Quimper, Brittany. After succeeding brilliantly at the lycée, he went to Paris for advanced studies at the École Coloniale and in law. He gravitated quickly, however, to a life in the arts. He met Picasso in 1901, and their intense friendship became the nucleus of the community of modern artists at the ramshackle studios in Montmartre, the Bateau-Lavoir. Jacob experienced a mystical vision of Christ in 1909 and formally converted to Roman Catholicism in 1915. He is most famous for his collection of radical prose poems, Le Cornet à dés (1917) (The Dice Cup), but he published many other collections of poems in verse and prose, novels, short stories, plays, and esthetic meditations. He spent two long periods in association with the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (1921–1928 and 1936–1944). He was arrested by the gestapo in February 1944 and died of pneumonia on March 5, 1944, at the camp at Drancy. His name was on the list for the next transport to Auschwitz. Max Jacob. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In late December of 1943, Max Jacob went to Orléans and Montargis to buy Christmas gifts for the children of the village of Saint-Benoît. He stayed for five days as a guest in the house of one of his doctor friends in Montargis, where he enjoyed the warmth of a cheerful family. He returned to Saint-Benoît for Christmas—the Mass celebrated in the basilica, the crèche with its plaster figures brought out year after year—followed by days of writing letters of New Year’s greetings and making ceremonial visits in the village. When he reported all this to Jacques Mezure on January 5, 1944, he didn’t yet know that his sister, Mirté-Léa, had been arrested. Mirté-Léa was seized on January 4 and taken to the internment camp at Drancy. Jacob was beside himself. He threw himself into a campaign to save her, writing to everyone he imagined might have influence with the Germans: Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, Misia Sert, Sacha Guitry, the Bishop of Orléans, the Archbishop of Sens. He consulted his friend Julien Lanoë about whether or not to ask Coco Chanel, who had a German lover. His letters were heart-wrenching. He described his little sister, the “companion of his childhood,” her suffering as a widow, her devotion to her mentally handicapped son. “Dear friend, permit me to kiss your hands, the hem of your dress … I beg you, do something,” he implored Misia. Sacha Guitry replied that he couldn’t help “some unknown Jew.” If it were Max, he said, “he could do something.” Drancy now contained men, women, and children. Transports to Auschwitz were leaving almost every week. Even as her brother sent his desperate appeals, Mirté-Léa was shoved into a train car on January 20; she went immediately to the gas chamber on her arrival. Max Jacob never knew what became of her. Read More
October 13, 2020 Arts & Culture Oath By Eileen Myles The following is Eileen Myles’s foreword to F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, the first anthology of its kind. F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry will be released by isolarii later this month. Galina Rymbu and Yes Women group (Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber), MY VAGINA, 2020. Only yesterday I think it was yesterday I drove here to Long Island from New York City and I stopped at a small farm that sells milk and eggs. The name of the farm is welsh—Ty Llwyd. The language excited me and I couldn’t stop telling the woman there about my trip to Wales same time she had moved to the states—’bout 1970. She showed absolutely no interest. Yeah, yeah. I was in Russia in 1995 and 2017. I digress. I’m queer, and most recently I’m thinking of myself as a they feminist. I was formerly a they lesbian wanting to suture the two groups dykes and transwomen in particular since there’s a growing sense in the trans community that lesbians and trans women are in opposition and I just don’t think it’s true. But I’m becoming more interested in attaching my transness to my feminism not my female body. I think the female body is every body’s business. Yet so much of the pleasure of this book (and my own work historically and today) is all the iterations of the things that happen to a female body. The pussy in time: Her vulva resembles a large gray rabbit – large, a bit fat and gray with long hanging ears, why Read More
October 13, 2020 Arts & Culture The Second Mrs. de Winter By CJ Hauser Illustration for a Rebecca paper doll by Jenny Kroik for The Paris Review “The sexiness of [Rebecca] is maybe the most unsettling part, since it centers on the narrator’s being simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the memory and the mystery of her new husband’s dead wife.” —Emily Alford, Jezebel NB: This essay contains all of the spoilers for Rebecca. Rebecca had good taste—or maybe she just had the same taste as me, and that’s why I thought it was good. She loved a particular shade of vintage minty turquoise. The kitchen cabinets were all this color. As were the plates inside. The cups and bowls were white with dainty black dots on them. Not polka dots—a smaller, more charming print. I loved them. I might have picked them out myself. It made me feel sick that I loved them. I imagined Rebecca had picked out these cups and plates when she moved into this house, but the cupboards I was investigating, and the very lovely dishes inside them, now belonged to her ex-husband, my boyfriend. Rebecca lived fifteen minutes away. Of course, her name wasn’t really Rebecca. But grant me a theme. We’ll call him Maxim. * Every once in a while, a book will pass through my writers’ group, all of us swept up in reading the same novel. In the early days of my dating Maxim, that book was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. My friend Emily was rereading it to write an essay for Jezebel called “The Nihilistic Horniness of a Good Gothic Read: Ranking the Genre’s Sexiest and Scariest Secrets.” Rebecca ranks number one. Emily’s love for the novel was so persuasive the rest of us soon joined in. The basic premise of Rebecca is that our narrator, a naive young woman, marries an older, brooding widower and goes to live in his strange and beautiful house, where it rapidly becomes clear that the legacy of his dead wife, the titular Rebecca, is … potent. The narrator constantly worries over whether she can run the house as well as Rebecca did. At one point, Emily was in the bathtub with a scotch and the novel and somehow still had enough hands to text us: THIS WOMAN’S ONLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE SERVANTS ARE MEAN TO HER AND I WANT THAT LIFE. The servants do not like the narrator for the very good reason that she is not Rebecca. Beyond the servants, of course, the narrator is also concerned that she’ll never live up to Rebecca in Maxim’s heart, that in the wake of his great and tragic love, she stands no chance. Again, from Emily’s bath: EVEN THE DOGS DON’T LIKE HER. * I had never read Rebecca before. About fifty pages in I felt stupid because I hadn’t retained the narrator’s name. I flipped back through the opening and still couldn’t find it. Maxim was the husband. Rebecca was his dead wife. Mrs. Danvers was the housekeeper. Jasper was the dog. WTF, I texted Emily, THE DOG HAS A NAME BUT NOT THE NARRATOR? HE’S A VERY GOOD DOG, Emily said. For 410 pages, the narrator of Rebecca is only ever known as The Second Mrs. de Winter—and isn’t that just the whole story? CAN I TELL YOU SOMETHING HORRIBLE? I asked Emily. OF COURSE I’VE BEEN FEELING A LOT LIKE THE SMDW LATELY OH GIRL * The little white house in New York where my Maxim lived was no Manderley, but like Manderley, the house was an issue. The house with Rebecca’s lovely dishes in the cupboard. The house with art on the walls no man would ever pick. The red, floral, calico curtains, which Maxim eventually took down because, despite having sewn them himself, he had never liked the print Rebecca picked (I did) and after that there were no curtains at all. The kitchen where I cooked us dinner and accidentally used a special salt Rebecca had favored but left behind, which made Maxim look up from his meal and ask, What did you put in here? One afternoon I was working at a desk in the office and, playing with the drawer, found inside Rebecca’s birth certificate. I’d already known we were born a week apart because on our second date Maxim had asked my birthday and blanched when I’d said October. More than once Maxim returned an article of women’s clothing to me that was not mine. There were notes in Rebecca’s handwriting on the fridge and photos of her in the house, and this was right and good, because she and Maxim had a daughter, an eight-year-old girl who was funny and sweet and who I was very lucky to know for those nearly two years. I must leave her out of this—she is a still-becoming person—but of course she remains an invisible source of gravity in this story. There were photos of them at Disney World. Photos of them holding their daughter the day she was born. Read More
October 9, 2020 Arts & Culture Don’t Get Comfortable By Dana Levin On lessons learned from a long friendship with Louise Glück Louise Glück © Katherine Wolkoff My friend Mark texted me at 6:18 A.M. yesterday: Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize! All morning, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done much, since the pandemic hit this horrid election year: joyscrolling. Such recognition for a life in art! That life had changed mine, too: the minute, twenty-two years ago, that Louise plucked my first book manuscript from the submission pile for the APR/Honickman Prize. One year after that, in 1999, I met her for the first time at a reading in Santa Fe. I tapped her shoulder and introduced myself. She enveloped me in the warmest, beariest hug—it seemed improbable that such a hug could come from so petite a person. Grasping my arms, she leaned back and took me in: “You are not at all what I expected—who would have thought such a sunny personality could write such devastating poems!” It was a compliment of a high order, and one that troubled me for days. Was there some split between my self in the world and my self on the page? Louise seemed to me to be exactly herself, everywhere: in life and in art. Confounding, difficult task! So few truly accomplish it. Read More
October 8, 2020 Arts & Culture The Children of the Appalachians By Rebecca Bengal Ruby Cornett, ‘I asked my sister to take a picture of me on Easter morning,’ from ‘Portraits and Dreams’ by Wendy Ewald. Courtesy the artist and MACK. In 1976, twenty-five-year-old Wendy Ewald rented a small house on Ingram Creek in a remote landscape in eastern Kentucky, hoping to make a photographic document of “the soul and rhythm of the place.” As she writes in an essay included in the expanded new edition of Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories By Children of The Appalachians, originally published in 1985, her camera landed on the “commonplaces” of Letcher County. Set in the Cumberland Mountains at the edge of Kentucky and Virginia, Lechter Country is in the rural, rolling, rugged, coal-mining heart of the still sprawling and still vastly misunderstood and frequently mispronounced region known as Appalachia (the correct pronunciation is Appa-LATCH-uh). More than a decade before Ewald’s arrival, the publication of Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, by local lawyer and environmental crusader Harry Caudill, had helped spur John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson to declare war on poverty in Letcher County and regions like it. But Ewald did not intend to photograph “poverty,” or to photograph the place in the reductive way it had come to be depicted. She was interested in the way the people pictured themselves. She went to speak with a local school principal and, during the years 1976 to 1982, taught photography in three elementary schools, including a surviving one-room school called Kingdom Come, which was heated by a coal stove that the students took turns refilling. She sold Instamatic cameras to her students, “So they would value them as things they had worked for” as she put it, for the price of ten dollars, or its equivalent counted out in odd jobs. In the classroom she guided them toward a way of seeing born out of feeling and imagination, inviting them to photograph around themes of family, animals, self, and dreams. The resulting pictures, made in a mentored creative collaboration and collected in Portraits and Dreams, call up a music of the place only Ewald’s students could hear and access; and thus the book amounts to a reliquary of a magic hour in the children’s own lives, fleeting and resonant. Read More
October 8, 2020 Arts & Culture The Language of Pain By Cristina Rivera Garza Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Hoofd van Medusa, ca. 1617, oil on oak, 24 x 44″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. On September 14, 2011, we awoke once again to the image of two bodies hanging from a bridge. One man, one woman. He, tied by the hands. She, by the wrists and ankles. Just like so many other similar occurrences, and as noted in newspaper articles with a certain amount of trepidation, the bodies showed signs of having been tortured. Entrails erupted from the woman’s abdomen, opened in three different places. It is difficult, of course, to write about these things. In fact, the very reason acts like these are carried out is so that they render us speechless. Their ultimate objective is to use horror to paralyze completely—an offense committed not only against human life but also, above all, against the human condition. In Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence—an indispensable book for thinking through this reality, as understanding it is almost impossible—Adriana Cavarero reminds us that terror manifests when the body trembles and flees in order to survive. The terrorized body experiences fear and, upon finding itself within fear’s grasp, attempts to escape it. Meanwhile, horror, taken from the Latin verb horrere, goes far beyond the fear that so frequently alerts us to danger or threatens to transcend it. Confronted with Medusa’s decapitated head, a body destroyed beyond human recognition, the horrified part their lips and, incapable of uttering a single word, incapable of articulating the disarticulation that fills their gaze, mouth wordlessly. Horror is intrinsically linked to repugnance, Cavarero argues. Bewildered and immobile, the horrified are stripped of their agency, frozen in a scene of everlasting marble statues. They stare, and even though they stare fixedly, or perhaps precisely because they stare fixedly, they cannot do anything. More than vulnerable—a condition we all experience—they are defenseless. More than fragile, they are helpless. As such, horror is, above all, a spectacle—the most extreme spectacle of power. Read More