November 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Fran Lebowitz Doesn’t Dance Anymore By Vince Aletti Smoking dance floor at New York, NY. © Toby Old. When I told Fran Lebowitz—the cosmopolitan wit and author of Metropolitan Life and Social Studies—that my editor had suggested we discuss nightlife while out in a club, she said, “Tell him, You know how difficult Fran is, and let’s just do it someplace we can actually talk.” That turned out to be Fran’s book-packed apartment on West Fifty-Seventh Street. We spoke after dark but before dinner, on a hunter green leather couch, while Fran sipped Evian and smoked one Carlton after the other. The ensuing conversation was originally published in the March 20, 1990, issue of the Village Voice. ALETTI When I mentioned the idea of an interview on the subject of nightlife, you said something like, But I never go out anymore. Yet we always see photos of you—in Vanity Fair, Vogue, W, and other magazines—out at night. Is that not nightlife? LEBOWITZ No. That’s not nightlife. That’s social life. There’s a difference. Nightlife is fun. Social life is business. I thought you meant clubs and things. I thought you meant fun. ALETTI Don’t you go out after these social events? LEBOWITZ To clubs? Very, very rarely. There are tons of clubs that I have never been to—because I have been to their recent predecessors. I don’t think they’re fun anymore. And I think there are a couple reasons why. I don’t, by the way, consider this an opinion. I consider this a fact. I don’t think they’re fun anymore—at least for people of my age—because of sex. Or lack of sex. Read More
November 21, 2018 Arts & Culture No One Has a Monopoly on Death By Inger Christensen Peder Severin Krøyer, Copenhagen: Roofs under the Snow, 1870–1900, oil on canvas, 7 x 9 in. January 1981 It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life. It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world. So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing. We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow. We see what’s happening, and we’re happy about what’s not happening. We compare what’s terrifying with what’s even more terrifying. We compare limited nuclear war with total nuclear war, and the comparison deprives us of the last remnant of our natural horror. We see thousands of dead birds, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, thousands of death wishes and their violent expressions, but as long as we see all this annihilation in all its well-known forms, at least we’re seeing something, and as long as we see something, total annihilation hasn’t happened yet. Read More
November 21, 2018 Arts & Culture The Moral of the Story By Anthony Madrid This is the second part of a two-part thing on Aesop’s fables. Part 1 can be found here, but you don’t have to read part 1 to understand part 2. Illustration from The Fables of Aesop (Jacobs) Were you told, as a child, that fables are stupid? I think I was explicitly told that. Look at these two quotes: (a) “Fables are literature before literature was even a baby. Fables are four-celled literature.” (b) “Fables are like the children for whom they are composed: primitive, annoying, and brutal.” Items (a) and (b) are not things that were said to me when I was a child. Those quotations are me, when I was first teaching literature, twenty-five years ago. I was distilling what I’d been told. I felt I must warn the young as I had been warned: “Lessons are bad. Talking animals are bad. Anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is bad.” Today I think the opposite, straight down the line. Lessons are good; talking animals, hell yes. And anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is probably my only reason for getting up in the morning. Read More
November 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Ghost in the Dirt By Rowan Ricardo Phillips John Lavery, Tennis under the Orange Trees, Cannes, 1929, oil on canvas. The clay season is a ghost story. It always has been. There’s a ghost in the red dirt. He ran hotels for a living, and oddly enough, given how things have turned out in tennis, he was Swiss. You have never heard of him. And no judgments, but he was a bit of a hustler. His tremendous ambition coupled with his creative bookkeeping forced him into bankruptcy twice. His name was Georges Henri Gougoltz. He spent the last decades of his life as a hotel proprietor by name but in reality owing important men a considerable amount of money. After they took his hotel from him, he was obliged to run that gold mine he had developed from the private castle it once was as though nothing had changed—a figurehead to smile at and arrange things for the ever-rising number of foreign elites who wintered there seeking out the sun, their social peers, and the increasingly famous red clay courts of the Hôtel Beau-Site in Cannes, France. When I tell you that he killed himself on a January morning in 1903 by shooting himself in the head not once and not twice but three times—you probably won’t believe that he killed himself. And you probably shouldn’t. We’ll never know exactly what happened to him, but when, in 2017, Rafael Nadal lifted La Coupe des Mousquetaires ebulliently over his head for a tenth year, standing proudly on a makeshift podium at the center of that rectangle of brick red in the middle of Roland-Garros’s show court, Gougoltz’s crushed-ceramic sand courts—the ones that once graced the foot of the hill of the Beau-Site just past the lush and sloped sculptured courtyard, like a mirage of politely placed tonnage of light-red dust at the edge of a politely placed jungle of imported greenery—were with him there, inhuman and yet veritably part of him, a hundred-fifty-year-old first idea. Read More
November 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Pugilist at School By Mark Jude Poirier Thom Jones’s first collection of stories, The Pugilist at Rest, was published in 1993, when he was in his late forties. He died in October 2016, at the age of seventy-one. This October, Little, Brown and Company published Night Train: New and Selected Stories, a definitive posthumous collection of his work. Thom Jones (Via Little, Brown and Company) On the first manuscript I submitted for critique at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop back in the fall of ’95, Thom Jones, my professor, crossed out the word breasts and replaced it with sexy milk jugs. He didn’t offer much more advice, written or verbal; he let my classmates do all the work. A few days later, as I sat in his office, watching the eyes of his shiny black Kit-Cat clock roll back and forth, listening to him talk about his psychiatric meds, his father’s suicide, and how Sally Field’s publicist kept hounding him to meet with Sally, I was mildly entertained, but wondered whether we’d ever get around to discussing my story. We didn’t. I was cynical and miserable that first month of graduate school in Iowa City. I lived in one of two apartments above a drywall company, behind a soon-to-be-defunct Godfather’s Pizza, next to a vast lot of brand-new mobile homes. Beyond the mobile homes were a litter-filled swamp and the biggest Walmart I’d ever seen. My next-door neighbors were bikers, one of whom vomited in the washing machine we shared. They had very loud and very frequent sex that they narrated with porn clichés. I was grateful that I never heard them scream or moan the words sexy milk jugs. Most people in the workshop lived within walking distance of one another, and within stumbling distance of the Fox Head and George’s, two of our favorite watering holes. I lived three carless miles away on Highway 1 West, in what felt like the epicenter of everything that was wrong with America. Read More
November 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Starvation and Suffering Also Get You High By Eileen Myles Can Xue. “Have you always treated the whole world as your home, Fourth Uncle?” “Not the whole world—I’m always wandering nearby.” Books have lighting, I think. And I speak as a dedicated and conflicted reader lured hopelessly away from the page by television and the entire history of film available now on various sites—yet some books drop me nicely in the middle, right in between the modes of reading and watching, to live alongside me in the dilemma. Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium is lit a lot like Tarkovsky’s Solaris. The astronaut wanders through the weeds and trees of his dacha before he heads off on his voyage. Yet he is already gone. We are leaving the earth but that is the earth. It’s got this crazy nostalgic light. I mean, it’s not exactly that. Maybe it’s the light of uncanniness that follows our departure from a movie theater during the day, maybe that’s the version of lighting or reality that Can Xue’s book shares with film. I also think of Fellini’s Satyricon and its use of the ancient mode of storytelling in which a character begins to speak and the narrative darts swiftly after them down the rabbit hole of the story. In Can Xue’s Love, all the characters are connected to each other. There’s no one story I can tell. And they are laughing about it, too. At their own inconstancy, their changeability. At the outset, you meet Cuilan, a widow, so you think it’s about her. No … but it’s way more about her lover Wei Bo. Wei Bo appears at her door to say that something has come up and he can’t keep their date. Weeks pass and he never returns. Cuilan treks off mournfully to her ancestral home. Her relatives (who have all become mysteriously mangled and wizened since the last time she saw them) are hardly welcoming. Then they begin speaking about Wei Bo, which feels inside out, but the world already is. The countryside is destroyed. In the relatives’ house there’s an ambient, estranged type of hearing that’s become commonplace. People chattering out the window, there’s a banging upstairs even if there isn’t an upstairs. At night her relatives are in a tree fighting and laughing and one falls, hits the ground with a thud. She goes out to investigate and everything goes silent at once. Next day (while practically pushing her out the door) her cousin offers this, “Our daytime and nighttime are two completely different days. If you always lived here and never left you’d be able to sense this. It’s too bad you won’t have the chance.” Read More