March 18, 2013 Arts & Culture Cult Classic: Defining Katherine Mansfield By Kirsten O'Regan In “Je Ne Parle Pas Français,” a short story by Katherine Mansfield, the narrator muses: “I believe that people are like portmanteaux—packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle …” Mansfield’s own Train has proved to be less Ultimate than she may have hoped. Despite sharp instructions to her husband to publish as little as possible after her death, the enterprising John Middleton Murry quickly set about curating her legacy. He perceptively noted (with, one imagines, a gleeful rubbing of hands), “Since Katherine Mansfield’s death, the interest in her personality has steadily increased.” It was, he explained, his duty to make known her private correspondence, the stories she was unsatisfied with, the journals in which she had recorded her thoughts. It has been a lively afterlife. In the ninety years since Mansfield’s death, her work has never been out of print; the same stories repeatedly reedited and reissued in newer, more “authentic” editions. Biographies have multiplied, clamoring for validation like conspiracy theorists. Scholars have greedily rummaged through this particular portmanteau, each emerging with quite irreconcilable portraits of the author. Read More
March 15, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: March, or Waiting for Redbird By Kelly McMasters “The sky was darker than the water—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.”—Elizabeth Bishop, “The End of March” On more Saturday afternoons than not this month, I’ve watched swirls of snow blow past the blue door of our bookshop. The parking lots in town have small mountains of mud-encrusted snow piled in their corners, monuments to the length of this winter. At home, the firewood is running low, our freezer is nearly empty of the lamb we split with our neighbors back in the fall, and the local farmer’s market offerings have dwindled down to the last rutabagas from the root cellars. This has been a long winter, and everyone who comes into the bookshop looks a bit tired, drawn, impatient for spring and the promises that come with it. My favorite customer came in three weeks ago with his pregnant wife, her hair and eyes glowing, everything about her bursting with her own impending spring. Her husband is my favorite customer because he is my good luck charm—on the bookshop’s first Saturday he walked in and poked around until he found our poetry section. He gaped, not believing our little cache of modern poets. He revealed he was also a poet, had written his graduate thesis on Franz Wright. He’d grown up in town and I thought the presence of a local poet on one of our first days open was an auspicious sign. Read More
March 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Festival Guide: A List of Don’ts for the Lady Music Writer By Natalie Elliott Image via jennwinter.com. Don’t be fun. “Fun” is your former life. Now you are expected to responsibly imbibe all of the complimentary beverages available to you over the course of the ten hours (per day) you are attending live sets (even if they are stone boring), factoring in an extra two to three hours set aside for the after- and after-after-parties. If you insist on remaining fun, you should be sober, like, one-beer sober or recovering-alcoholic sober. And if you’re sober and not semifamous, be aware there is a forty percent chance that band people will be less inclined to chat with you. It’s all right; they’re going to give the hastiest interview possible. It’s a festival. Don’t be a music journalist when you’re broke, even if it’s the primary way you earn income from your writing. Among other reasons, if you’re broke, you’ll drink the free alcohol. Too much of it, probably. Read More
March 12, 2013 Arts & Culture Street Haunting with Jean Rhys By Chloe Pantazi Illustration credit Joanna Walsh. The author Jean Rhys had trouble finishing her stories. Rhys told her editor and friend Diana Athill that “ending a novel based on things that had really happened … was difficult because a novel must have shape, and real life usually has none.” In Rhys’s later years, spent struggling with her autobiography and idly drinking in her Devonshire bungalow, her memory was faulty. The problem wasn’t just that she couldn’t remember; Rhys told Athill that she sometimes felt “more like a pen being used than like a person using a pen,” a startling insight that perhaps led Athill to write, in the foreword to Rhys’s unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, published posthumously in 1979, that her friend had “used up” her life in fiction. Wide Sargasso Sea (1967) was Rhys’s final book, the one that made her famous late—“too late,” she said. Set in the early nineteenth century, Wide Sargasso Sea was Rhys’s great historical vendetta, in which she furnished a life for the West Indian “madwoman” Charlotte Brontë dismissed to Rochester’s attic in Jane Eyre. I began where Rhys ended, reading her last novel at sixteen in an English class at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, England, a few doors away from the Perse School for Girls, the posh private school Rhys had attended on moving to England from Dominica in 1907. Jean and I went to school on the same street a hundred years apart, sixteen-year-old sisters in the same place at a different time. Cambridge had changed, but Jean stayed with me. Neither of us liked school, and we both knew what it was like to be derided by a Perse girl; Jean for her Creole accent, and I for being a Hills Road student (in keeping with informal tradition, our schools maintain an absurd rivalry). Read More
March 12, 2013 Arts & Culture The Underground Library By Sadie Stein Checking out books on the subway? We can dig it! (And those bookshelf mock-ups would make a pleasant change from Dr. Zizmor ads—not that we don’t love him, too.)
March 11, 2013 Arts & Culture Borrowed Time By Michele Filgate “You own every book,” my boyfriend often says to me. And sometimes it seems like that’s true. I now own enough unread books to last me at least ten years, and I keep adding to the collection every day. Books are meant to be read. This is what I say to myself whenever I, with some level of despair, glance at my many bookshelves. My personal library takes up a substantial amount of room in the Brooklyn apartment I share with two friends. I’ve read a lot of books that I own. I’ve also, truth be told, not read a good number of the books. I feel tremendous guilt toward the books I ignore. It’s no surprise, then, that Meriç Algün Ringborg’s “The Library of Unborrowed Books” exhibition at Art in General, in Manhattan, should catch my eye. I was intrigued by the concept: the artist had selected more than a thousand titles from the Center for Fiction’s library that have never been borrowed. Read More