Photo: James Gehrt.

The first time the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson met Emily Dickinson, he remembered five details about the way she entered the room: her soft step, her breathless voice, her auburn hair, the two daylilies she offered him—and her exquisite white dress.

Dickinson’s white dress has become an emblem of the poet’s brilliance and mystery. When Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Dickinson’s hometown in the 1880s, she gushed about the poet’s attire. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth … She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, believes Dickinson began dressing primarily in white in her thirties, and it was common knowledge around town that a white dress was the poet’s preferred article of clothing. Dickinson realized people gossiped about what she wore, and once joked with her cousins, “Won’t you tell ‘the public’ that at present I wear a brown dress with a cape if possible browner, and carry a parasol of the same!” Read More

Anna Karina

Anna Karina’s rehearsal for her first major scene with director Jean-Luc Godard ended early. The scene was for the film The Little Soldier (1960), in which the male lead photographs Karina’s character in her apartment, asking her questions and telling her to move around so he can get at her “truth.” Godard intervened and took the mock interrogation one step further, demanding to know when she had first had sex and how many men she’d slept with. She didn’t know whether the director was asking her or her character, and Karina’s face flashed from white rage to scarlet embarrassment. “Ça ne vous regarde pas,” she replied in hesitant French, It’s none of your business. The line is included in the final cut.

This exchange between Karina and Godard launched one of the most important partnerships in the history of cinema. A year later, they married, and Paris Match called Karina “the newlywed of the New Wave.” She went on to star in six more of Godard’s feature films, becoming the icon of a movement. Her body served as the visual anchor for his films, and her own language often appeared word for word in his scripts. Was there anything about her that was not his? Godard didn’t think so. When he worked on a tight budget, Karina went unpaid for her work as an actress, with the justification that they lived together.

The kind of intellectual attracted to Godard’s cinema has often remained uninterested in Karina, beyond the superficial planes of her face. In the catalogue of the National Library of France, there are 152 critical studies taking on his work, and seem to be none devoted to Karina. In the books on Godard, she is featured exclusively during his so-called Karina Years, disappearing after their last collaboration together, Made in U.S.A. (1966). There does exist a rigorous school of feminist criticism that takes on the representations of female characters in New Wave cinema (notably the work of Geneviève Sellier), but this line of inquiry considers the women in these films through the symbolic violence enacted against them rather than considering their personhood.

In the obituaries written after Karina’s passing on December 14 last year, critics have attempted to rehabilitate her life story. But these write-ups consistently refer to Godard to do so. Karina is cited explaining how she taught him not to slam doors; he is quoted calling her a “woman of action.” I started writing this piece with every intention of “finding” Karina, but fell into the same trap in my first draft: I occluded Karina’s voice by looking for it in the images Godard made of her.

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Jack Youngerman (photo: Hans Namuth)

Last week, my mother called to tell me, her voice wobbling, that the artist Jack Youngerman had died. He passed away on February 19, after a fall. He was ninety-three years old.

I was ten years old the first time I visited Jack’s studio. My father brought me—perhaps to pick up a print he’d bought, or perhaps simply to say hello. I recall the feeling of the space, the cool cement floors, the wide skylights, the bright colors dancing off the canvas-lined walls.

My family’s house sits approximately four hundred yards from Jack’s, at the end of a long dirt driveway in Bridgehampton, New York. As a kid, I passed his house and the adjacent studio—a small red barn nestled on the edge of a meadow—every day on my walk home from the school bus. Growing up, we had few neighbors and Jack was a friendly presence. Rosy-cheeked and white-haired, he would often drop by our house with his corgi, Winslow, trotting by his side. I would sometimes catch glimpses of him at work through the window; painting or measuring something at his big drawing table or laying a print out to dry. If he happened to be outside, we would exchange waves and quick hellos. Our relationship was friendly, if not particularly close. 

It was only after my father died, in 2015, that I got to know Jack a little better. Grieving and eager to learn more about my dad’s early life, I reached out to some of his old friends. Jack was high on the list. The two of them had spent quite a bit of time together in the early seventies and my father considered Jack something of a mentor. I composed a long, rambling email to Jack. Minutes later, I received a three-word reply: come on over.

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Center, one of the few remaining images of Violo Roseboro’, in her 20s

Viola Roseboro’ (apostrophe intentional), the larger-than-life fiction editor at McClure’s, haunted magazine offices from the 1890s to the Jazz Age. A reader, editor, and semiprofessional wit, she discovered or mentored O. Henry, Willa Cather, and Jack London, among many others. Today she is nearly completely forgotten.

She could often be seen walking through downtown Manhattan alone, recognizable from her preoccupied step, thick dark hair, gray eyes under arching brows, and her purported resemblance to George Sand. She declined to wear corsets and loved cigarettes, and insisted on getting as much fresh air as possible. Instead of occupying a desk, she liked to pack manuscripts into a suitcase and take them to a bench in Madison Square Park, where in all seasons she could be found smoking, reading, and strategizing about how to develop a protégé.

Roseboro’ forged an identity for herself as a tastemaker, claiming she was “plugged in on a stronger current.” Her originality was specific to the city. She was the kind of New York character later embodied in figures like photographer Editta Sherman (the “Duchess of Carnegie Hall”) and literary agent Roz Cole, who represented Andy Warhol and lived at the Waldorf Astoria for more than fifty years.

Roseboro’ did not leave a comprehensive archive, autobiography, or series of cohesive literary works. The most remarkable thing about her, what is worth trying to conjure even now, was her genius at the spoken word. “She was one of the greatest conversationalists of her time,” said magazine editor S. S. McClure, while journalist Will Irwin placed her, in this respect, “at the very top.” Irwin characterized her as a “kind of feminine Dr. Johnson without his touch of pomposity and without a Mrs. Boswell.” The Johnson comparison crops up again and again. Another friend once said of her, “Anybody who does not acknowledge that something is happening when Viola Roseboro’ is talking is stupid.”

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On Kawara, Moon Landing (detail), 1969, from the Today series (1966–2013), acrylic on canvas, three panels, each 61″ x 89″. Installation view, Glenstone Museum. © One Million Years Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy Glenstone Museum.

Not long ago, I volunteered to take part in a performance at the contemporary art museum near my home. Very little is known about the artist who created the piece. Even in a recent obituary, his date of death and the names of survivors were deliberately withheld, “in keeping with his lifelong penchant for privacy.” In death, as in life and art, his biography has remained publicly minimalist.

We do know that he was born on December 24, 1932, in Kariya, Japan. And so he would have been roughly four months from his thirteenth birthday when nuclear bombs were dropped on his country. In his late twenties, he moved to Mexico City with his father, the director of an engineering company, where he continued to study art, eventually moving to Paris, then New York, and wherever else he lived. His art-making turned from early figurative paintings to the conceptual and process-based works he became known for, along with his reclusiveness.

Private lives are always ordinary to someone. It is said that the artist enjoyed seeing friends, drinking, conversing, traveling the world (a lifelong passion). Over the years, he sent postcards and telegrams from distant locales with messages like I GOT UP AT 9:04 A.M. and I AM STILL ALIVE to galleries, artists, and friends, this becoming part of his artistic production, akin to the mail art conceived by others in his generation. He established permanent residences in at least a few of the most cosmopolitan metropolises in the world, either successively or simultaneously, though he never revealed anything about his own experiences of these places, his artistic persona more like a wandering ghost, floating around the globe, creating a sort of code that only he held the keys to, dispersing, or erasing, himself into matter-of-fact one-line messages, the monochrome dates, newsprint, and coordinates of his paintings, lists of names and years, color-coordinated calendars. Read More

Let me tell you something about children’s poetry: people tend to create it for the right reasons. I was taught this concept in connection to medieval lyric poetry. My teacher’s point was that art made in the modern world is under scarcely any obligation to be good. It can be interesting instead, or new. Or it can “bear witness.” Being good—actually good—is even considered a little passé.

The minute you bring a six-year-old into the picture, though, everything changes. She doesn’t care whether what you’re doing “serves as a useful critique.” She wants it to be good. Consequently, if I’m in a used bookstore and I see a book called Thai Children’s Poetry or Setswana Children’s Poetry or Inuit Children’s Poetry, I pretty much buy it on contact. One wants to know: Does Botswana have a Dr. Seuss? Does Thailand? ’Cuz if they do, I need to know about it.

Russia had a Dr. Seuss. Same deal as ours, except his hot decade wasn’t the fifties; it was the twenties. There’s a lot to be said here.

Name: Kornei Chukovsky. Dates: 1882 to 1969. Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve. His stuff is a lot like Green Eggs and Ham: about that long; rhymes bouncing around like popcorn; no real point in sight. (Of course, like with everything else, you can carry whatever point you like into his books and then pretend you found it there. It’s like cops planting weed in people’s cars.)

Chukovsky’s backstory is pleasant. He was a young father; his son was sick. I think he had dysentery, I’m not sure. Somehow, everyone thought the family doctor was the only one would could be consulted, so Chukovsky wound up on a train in the middle of the night with that poor kid, age like four or something, sick and moaning. To take the kid’s mind off the horribleness, Chukovsky got him engrossed in some kind of collaborative improvisation game, rhyming like crazy around a story of a crocodile who comes to Saint Petersburg and eats a dog and then a cop or something… there’s a war … the crocodile runs around … Chukovsky’s kid was just a teeny thing, but he knew inspiration when he saw it. He forgot all about his guts and helped Mozart compose his first symphony.

Next day, the two of ’em knew that what they’d made was too good to let go off, so they sat at a table and reconstructed what they could. Chukovsky took that reconstruction, fixed it up, made it make sense, and voilà: ready for the printer. I’m doing all this from memory.

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