October 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Bring Back Cortázar By Alejandro Zambra Argentine writer Julio Cortázar at home in Paris. Photo: Ulf Andersen / Getty Images. Sometimes I think the only thing we did in school was read Julio Cortázar. I remember taking tests on “The Night Face Up” in each of my last three years of school, and countless were the times we read “Axolotl” and “The Continuity of Parks,” two short stories that the teachers considered ideal for filling out an hour and a half of class. This is not a complaint, since we were happy reading Cortázar: we recited the characteristics of the fantasy genre with automatic joy, and we repeated in chorus that for Cortázar the short story wins by knockout and the novel by points, and that there was a male reader and a female reader and all of that. The tastes of my generation were shaped by Cortázar’s stories, and not even the xeroxed tests could divest his literature of that air of permanent contemporaneity. I remember how at sixteen, I convinced my dad to give me the six thousand pesos that Hopscotch cost, explaining that the book was “several books, but two in particular,” so that buying it was like buying two novels for three thousand pesos each, or even four books for fifteen hundred pesos each. I also remember the employee at the Ateneo bookshop who, when I was looking for Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, explained to me patiently, over and over, that the book was called Around the World in Eighty Days and that the author was Jules Verne, not Julio Cortázar. Read More
October 16, 2018 Arts & Culture A Lost Exchange Between Burroughs and Ginsberg By William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg Photo: Hank O’Neal. In 1992, five years before his death, Allen Ginsberg visited William S. Burroughs’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. Over the course of four days, the two Beats chatted about everything from shamanism to punk rock, from Jane Bowles to David Cronenberg. Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Steven Taylor and published this week by Three Rooms Press, collects for the first time this intimate, sprawling exchange. In the excerpt printed below, Burroughs and Ginsberg discuss the inspiration behind the infamous Naked Lunch chapter “The Market.” GINSBERG One thing I remember, actually, at some point or other, you and Lucien and Kerouac got me on a couch and took down my pants. BURROUGHS I don’t remember that. GINSBERG [laughing] ’Cause I … It was thrilling, and I got a hard-on, I remember. I was ashamed. Because it was Lucien there. BURROUGHS Should be. GINSBERG On the couch, in front of the window. BURROUGHS Yes. I know where the couch was. Typical railroad apartment, where they usually had the bathtub in the kitchen. Read More
October 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Dick and Jane, Forcibly Drowned and Then Brought Back to Life By Ben Marcus Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. She’s a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever it’s being called these days. The stories are short. They defy logic. They thumb their nose at conventional sense, or even unconventional sense. But if sense is in short supply in these texts, that leaves more room for splendor and sorrow. These stories upend expectations and prize enigma and the uncanny above all else. The Williams epiphany should be patented, or bottled—on the other hand, it should also be regulated and maybe rationed, because it’s severe. It’s a rare feeling her stories trigger, but it’s a keen and deep and welcome one, the sort of feeling that wakes us up to complication and beauty and dissonance and fragility. It’s a sensation we can get only by reading (that’s the only place I’ve ever found it), and once you’ve had it, you want to keep having it again and again. This feeling avows the complexity of life; it does not flinch from our harder suspicions about how vulnerable and brutal our enterprise is. Such work feels—I don’t know how else to say it—brave. It is difficult to encounter the world as it is experienced by Diane Williams, but this difficulty seems necessary. So how does she do it? What is this literary approach? What is her trick? Williams’s unusual literary method reveals the thin rigging of most narrative, and then deploys that rigging to make spectacular shapes—abstract, maybe, or realistic. Who can say? Every shape is abstract in the end, and every shape is familiar and intimate in the right context. Yes, she’s using the tools of narrative, and her language often is plain in that it sounds spoken rather than labored over and page bound. There’s a Dick and Jane quality to the prose, if Dick and Jane had been forcibly drowned and then brought back to life, maybe starved for a while, induced with madness but warned, at pain of death, to conceal it. Read More
October 15, 2018 Arts & Culture A History of the Novel in Two Hundred Essays By Morten Høi Jensen V. S. Pritchett As an undergraduate, I gave up trying to write fiction (my only completed story bore the decidedly unpromising title “Growing Marijuana”) and realized I wanted to write literary criticism instead. Troubled by the cavernous gaps in my reading, I sent a fan letter to James Wood, whom I didn’t know personally but whom I admired deeply, and asked him what he thought an aspiring young critic ought to read. He generously recommended the Complete Collected Essays of V. S. Pritchett. “Try to find this big book,” he wrote, “it has hundreds of essays in it, covering essentially the history of the novel. I learned a lot from it.” Read More
October 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The First Abstract Painter Was a Woman By Nana Asfour Hilma af Klint, Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17, 1915 In 1905, the Swedish female artist Hilma af Klint began cleansing herself, in preparation for a series of artworks that would be executed at the directives of someone named Amaliel. More than a century later, those paintings would force a rewriting of the history of abstraction. According to the notebooks the artist left behind, Amaliel was one of several guiding spirits who spoke to her from above (and within), instructing her and even leading her hand. During her lifetime, at the behest of the spirits, af Klint produced more than one thousand works, but they remained largely within the confines of her studio. Even though she toiled as a commercial artist, painting portraits and landscapes, she exhibited only a few of the abstract paintings and drawings she created. She worried that the world wasn’t ready to see them, and when she died in a tram accident, in 1944, at the age of eighty-one, her will ordained that they not be shown for at least another twenty years. Read More
October 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Lionel Trilling’s Hottest Takes By Lionel Trilling Everybody’s a critic, but in the past hundred years, few have reached the heights of Lionel Trilling. When he died in 1975, his obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times—a rarity for those in the thankless field of criticism. Through his essays for the Partisan Review and his books—including The Liberal Imagination—Trilling shaped and prodded the currents of American thought in a time of great social change. As Trilling himself once put it, his writing lies at “the bloody crossroads” of literature and politics, and this devotion to grounding literary criticism in real-world concerns made him one of the premier intellectuals of the twentieth century. Trilling was also a prolific writer of letters. By his own estimation, he wrote at least six hundred every year. In September, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, edited by Adam Kirsch. Below, we present a selection of Trilling’s choicest opinions, which show that even in his correspondence, the critic was always at work. On Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems Dear Allen: I’m afraid I have to tell you that I don’t like the poems at all. I hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite dull, for to say of a work which undertakes to be violent and shocking that it is dull is, I am aware, a well-known and all too-easy device. But perhaps you will believe that I am being sincere when I say they are dull. They are not like Whitman—they are all prose, all rhetoric, without any music. What I used to like in your poems, whether I thought they were good or bad, was the voice I heard in them, true and natural and interesting. There is no real voice here. As for the doctrinal element of the poems, apart from the fact that I of course reject it, it seems to me that I heard it very long ago and that you give it to me in all its orthodoxy, with nothing new added. Read More