May 20, 2013 Arts & Culture POSTERITY IS STUPID By Italo Calvino To Eugenio Scalfari—Rome March 7, 1942 […] I accepted the praise you gave me at the start of your letter with barely restrained grunts of satisfaction. Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious and at the slightest flattery I immediately start to strut like a turkey. The accusations you make later on are completely without foundation: the idea that there were thousands of youths with literary ambitions was something I knew even in the irresponsible days spent behind our school desks, and this thought has always filled me with terror: that I might be one of those people, that I might be only one of those people. And if I have decided to be merely a modest agronomist this was not just because my family’s destiny forbade me the contemplative life, but also and principally because I was terrified by the thought of one day meeting a crowd of people like me, each one convinced that he and only he was a genius. Up here in Turin I know only students of agriculture, medicine, engineering, chemistry: all good guys who are thinking about getting a job, without a head full of nonsense, no mirages of glory, often without much intelligence. And as far as they are concerned, I am one of them: no one knows who Italo Calvino is, who he wanted or wants to be. With these people there is little talk of dreams and the future, though they too certainly think about such things. This is what I am for the people of Turin, Pigati included, but except for Roero and Maiga, of course. Only in this way can the deluded man of Via Bogino live. I don’t know how you feel in the environment you say you’ve moved into. Apart from the fact that the literary or pseudo-literary world has always aroused a certain dislike in me, for me it would only be discouraging. But instead, living like this, I feel happy in the knowledge that I am different from those around me, that I see things with a different eye to theirs, that I know how to appreciate or suffer from the world in my own way. And I feel myself superior. I prefer being the obscure, isolated figure hoping for the victory that will see his name on everyone’s lips rather than being one of the pack just following the destiny of a group. And you certainly can’t say that this kind of behavior of mine is accommodating. I may be accommodating in life, I’ll let myself be carried away passively in the course of my actions, but I will not prostitute my art. Eh, am I not good? 8 March: I found this letter that I had started to write yesterday evening and I reread it with interest. Dammit, what a lot of drivel I managed to write! In the end it’s impossible to understand anything in it. But better that way: the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought. In fact, let me say: POSTERITY IS STUPID Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that! […] Excerpted from Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985, translated by Martin McLaughlin, published by Princeton University Press today, May 20th. © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
May 20, 2013 Arts & Culture Upper West Side Story By Sadie Stein I was delighted and relieved, recently, to run across the Tumblr Stoop Books of Brooklyn, which has been garnering some well-deserved Internet buzz. Delighted because the Tumblr is a fun sociological study, really well executed; relieved because (in my mind) its existence obviates the need for me to create something similar. You see, for some months now, I have been keeping track of the books left on the giveaway table of my apartment building’s lobby. (On my lackluster Instagram feed, I tag these images with the rather lame #uwsidestories.) I have long thought, vaguely, that they’d make a good “photo piece”—I suspect it would have to do with print media, or ideas of ownership, or maybe the isolation of urban life—but given the reception of a recent neighbor-based work by an actual photographer, this seems increasingly ill-advised. In any case, it would have taken energy away from my other hypothetical Tumblr, “Gnomic Utterances,” which will consist of pictures of gnomes with cryptic things written under them.
May 17, 2013 Arts & Culture A Visit with Patrick Leigh Fermor, Part 1 By Ben Downing Patrick Leigh Fermor, center, with members of the team that abducted General Heinrich Kreipe: George Tyrakis, W. Stanley Moss, Manoli Paterakis, and Antoni Papaleonidas. It has been said of Ulysses that, were Dublin ever obliterated, the city could be substantially rebuilt by consulting its pages. Along these lines, if all Europe were, God forbid, laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of its historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Patrick who? Although popular both in his native England, where his books are available in Penguin paperback, and in many other countries—he has been translated into any number of languages—Leigh Fermor (who died in 2011) is known to only a devout few in this country, where, scandalously, his work is not distributed. I myself came to him three years ago, when a friend pressed me to seek out A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), the first two volumes of a projected trilogy about his teenage walk across Europe in the early thirties. By chance, that very week I stumbled across a used copy of A Time of Gifts. I began reading straightaway, but after a few pages stopped and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. It couldn’t be this good. The narrative was captivating, the erudition vast, the comedy by turns light and uproarious, and the prose strikingly individual—at once exquisite and offhand, sweeping yet intimate, with a cadence all its own. Perhaps even more startling was the thickness of detail, and the way in which imagination infallibly brought these million specificities to life. In the book’s three hundred or so pages, scarcely a paragraph was less than spirited, cornucopian, and virtuosic. I am not given to idolizing writers or reading them entire, but this was a special case. Before long I had tracked down, whenever possible in their beautiful John Murray hardback editions, not only Between the Woods and the Water (which sees Leigh Fermor as far as the Iron Gates of the Danube) but also his remaining work—two travel books about Greece, one each about the Caribbean and Peru, a slim volume on monasteries, and a novella. Having devoured these, I started trying to find out more about Leigh Fermor himself. Piecing together information from his books and other sources, I came up with the following. A clever but unruly student, Leigh Fermor was expelled from a series of schools and at sixteen dropped out altogether. After a period in London halfheartedly cramming for Sandhurst and (far more eagerly) partying with the last of the Bright Young People, he set out in December 1933 on his journey to Istanbul, which took him over a year. At this point the picture grew vague; there was some improbable story about his tagging along with a Greek royalist army as it quashed a rebellion, another about his falling in love with a Romanian princess. Read More
May 16, 2013 Arts & Culture Sjón, Björk, and the Furry Trout By David Bukszpan Photo courtesy of the author. When Icelanders talk to Americans about Iceland, sooner or later talk is going to turn to fairies, or hidden people, or elves. And while it seems many Icelanders do truly believe in those things, often you’ll get a response like the novelist Sjón gave Leonard Lopate the other day: “If you actually lean on an Icelander, most of us will confess to believing that nature has the power to manifest itself in a form understandable to humans. So the hidden people, you know, we would say, ‘Well of course I don’t believe that there are actually cities inside our mountains, but it’s possible that nature has a way of manifesting itself in a human form to, you know, have an interaction with the humans.’” Similarly, when Americans talk about Iceland, sooner or later (probably sooner) we’re going to start talking about one specific fairy, or hidden person, or elf. And despite my not having any photos or videos to back it up, you’ll have to believe me that last week at Scandinavia House, the sprite-like Reykjaviker you’re thinking of did indeed manifest herself in a striking, stiff, white-and-purple dress for a ten-minute interaction with book-reading humans on behalf of her longtime friend and collaborator Sjón. It’s a young crowd, trendy, expectant, giddy even, though I’m surprised to see so many empty seats. It turns out Scandinavia House closed their RSVP list weeks earlier, almost immediately after announcing the event, grossly botching the numbers and no doubt needlessly turning away scores of would-be attendees. But it’s no matter to those of us here—in fact it makes the evening feel all the more intimate. It’s a coming-out-from-under-the-mountain kind of moment for Sjón himself. Although a well-known writer in Iceland, if Sjón’s name rings a bell at all in the States it’s been as Björk’s frequent lyricist—notably on her Biophilia album, her 2004 Olympic theme song, and Dancer in the Dark, her Lars von Trier film. Things have changed for him in a hurry though, as Farrar, Straus & Giroux sent the poet/novelist on a U.S. tour (Seattle, Portland, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and New York) to promote the three simultaneously released books: the full-length From the Mouth of the Whale and the novellas The Blue Fox and The Whispering Muse. Move over Blue Lagoon, Americans are about to have a new second-favorite Iceland reference. The five-city, three-book, one-author tour culminates in the event at Scandinavia House, where Björk treats the assembled to the kind of intimate, I-knew-him-when introduction usually reserved for siblings at wedding parties. Then again, it quickly becomes clear that there’s a sort of brother-sister camaraderie between the two. Read More
May 14, 2013 Arts & Culture Romance of the Rose: On Jay DeFeo By Yevgeniya Traps DeFeo, 1960. Photo via the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Civilization,” Gertrude Stein says, “begins with a rose.” And also: “It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.” You understand what she means when you stand before Jay DeFeo’s massive painting The Rose, a two-ton, twelve-feet-tall canvas sculpted in oil, wood, and mica, a bold burst of grisaille. At the Whitney Museum of Art, where the work is part of the permanent collection, it hangs like an altarpiece, the focal point of a retrospective of DeFeo’s art. Read More
May 14, 2013 Arts & Culture In Patagonia in Patagonia By Sandy Allen While I was traveling in South America, a friend, a writer, heard I was heading down to Patagonia. At the end of an e-mail he broke into all caps: “DRINK LOTS OF WINE FUCK SHIT UP RIDE A HORSE AND READ SOME BRUCE CHATWIN.” Fortunately, my boyfriend and I had been drinking wine and fucking shit up plenty in Argentina already. While I like horses in theory, I haven’t had the desire to get on one since I saw National Velvet as a child. His last command, though, made me curse myself—I’d meant to buy a copy of the Chatwin before leaving the states. I figured it was now unlikely I’d find a copy in English. The next afternoon, we entered a Palermo Viejo bookstore. High on a shelf in the brief English-language section, I excitedly located a shrink-wrapped copy of the Penguin Classics edition of In Patagonia. In his smart introduction, Chatwin biographer Nicholas Shakespeare describes his own experience of reading In Patagonia in Patagonia: “One morning, in a gesture soon to be repeated by a generation of backpackers, I was waiting for a bus in the dusty scrubland west of Trelew when I dug out a book I’d brought with me … I’d never heard of the author, but his was the only contemporary book I could find about my destination. I opened the first page and I read the first paragraph and that, really, was that.” Shakespeare summarizes the oft-told circumstances surrounding the book’s inception: There had been a bit of mangy, ancient hide in Chatwin’s grandmother’s cabinet of curiosities when he was a boy. It was from a brontosaurus, he’d been told, from Patagonia. This scrap—which actually belonged to a Patagonian ancient sloth—ignited a spark that lingered in Chatwin’s imagination. As an adult he’d already been Sotheby’s auctioneer and an archeologist before turning to writing. After years of work on an unsuccessful manuscript, he was reminded of his desire to visit Patagonia by octogenarian designer and architect Eileen Gray. It had long been her dream to visit Patagonia, as well, and she told him to “go on my behalf.” So he did. It is said—perhaps mythically—that he sent a cable to his employer, the London Sunday Times Magazine, stating, “Have gone to Patagonia.” He wasn’t heard from for months. The manuscript he delivered to his editor, which was published in 1977, was career defining. It has been credited with reviving the moribund “travel writing” genre. It’s also safe to say it birthed intrigue about Patagonia in the minds of his many readers—Shakespeare’s “generation of backpackers.” In a story about hiking in Chilean Patagonia from early this year in the New York Times, Ondine Cohane writes that she’d wanted to travel to Patagonia ever since she’d read In Patagonia twenty years before, in high school. She writes that the book “drew me both to the place and in no small way to the profession of travel writing itself.” While Shakespeare is an exception to this trend—he had visited Patagonia in his youth before returning with Chatwin in tow—he states that of all the authors he’d read on the place, “none had validated my Patagonia as Chatwin had.” I admittedly didn’t know much about Patagonia before going there; it was my boyfriend’s dream more than it was mine. Back home, I had glanced through some Lonely Planets and Rough Guides and only half-pictured lots of empty space and perhaps some beautiful peaks. By the time I’d finished Shakespeare’s introduction to the Chatwin, I felt convinced I’d never needed a book as badly as I needed In Patagonia in Patagonia. Read More