January 23, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Houses By Amit Chaudhuri This is the first installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s new column, The Moment. When do we start noticing a house? We know it’s there, but don’t look at it. We might die without actually having seen it. I ask this because of my interest in Calcutta’s residential houses. Calcutta is where I was born, but I grew up in Bombay. I rehearse this sentence yet again for strangers to explain my discombobulated sensibility. I used to visit my uncle’s three-story house in Calcutta over my summer holidays as a child, and think of it as home—because my aunt and uncle and three cousins exuded a Bengali dysfunctionality that I associated with that word. But, in comparison to the twelfth-story flat where I grew up in Bombay, in Malabar Hill, and from where, when I was ten years old, I had an uninterrupted view of the sea, the house in Calcutta absorbed me. At some point, I must have gained clarity about two things: first, that the low houses of South Calcutta, and the opportunities they offered me to study the street outside and the houses opposite—to eavesdrop and spy—were preferable, to me, to the panoramic and godlike perspective that the twelfth-story flat provided. Second, I understood retrospectively that these Calcutta houses meant something not solely because of my personal memory but because they comprised areas that bore the imprint of a modernity that was to be found in some other cities, too—in Istanbul, Montevideo, Berlin, New York—though not, when I was growing up there, in the bit of Bombay in which I lived. These areas involved an encounter with the “historical.” Read More
December 21, 2017 Life Sentence The Being of the Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro There are so many ways to pin a sentence down: the completeness of its thought, the correctness of its grammar; its rhetorical purpose, its narrative closure. Does any of them touch its being? Night after night this message returns, repeated in the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, the being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes to be without, alone and desperate. John Ashbery is a poet of sentences. No one writing since Milton has had quite so much syntax at his disposal. “Soonest Mended,” the poem from which this sentence is taken, is composed in lines, which make for another order of punctuation—and they make a difference, as you can see if you read the original. Here, though, I want to set the prosody aside in favor of the prose of Ashbery’s commas, and the way the wandering structure sounds the question of what, after all is said and done, a sentence is. After so many formal queries in this column, after trying out so many different frameworks and idioms, permit me a moment of existential free fall. Read More
December 14, 2017 Life Sentence The Schizophrenic Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro The question: Are you ill? The answer: Kings do not collect the money, in this way the letters have been taken away from me, as I that at last of those that particularly believe as I at last chipecially think, and all are burned. A sentence, an ordinary sentence, is an image of sanity. It collects the wits. A sentence that doesn’t work out can usually be written off as merely careless, or rushed, or as the stumbling of a non-native speaker. Sometimes, however, the failure is more ominous. The question above was posed sometime early in the last century by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and the answer came from one of his patients; it appears in a 1913 study translated into English as Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia. Kraepelin, or whoever took down the words, must have followed the usual cues of spoken cadence in deciding where the sentence started and stopped. In between, the relation of the parts is unsteady. Imagine someone you love calling you up late at night and speaking that sentence; it would be very frightening. Read More
December 7, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro W. H. Auden was a compulsive aphorist. His poems and prose are heavily salted with wise maxims; here’s one from a notebook he kept when he arrived in America, in 1939, published much later as The Prolific and the Devourer: The image of myself that I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others that they may love me. It strikes home, yes? Perhaps because, for all my public bonhomie, I have so many more serious things on my mind. Or because the love I want from others will aways have a measure of fear in it, fear of my rigor or my temper—but really, all I want is to bring out the best in them. Or because I am so considerate, so habitually obliging and flexible—but I do have my own views, and when the time is right, I will make them heard. Whoever I am, Auden’s aphorism knows me, certainly better than others do, perhaps even better than I once knew myself. Read More
November 30, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Is a Story By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro The first thing I want to do is give you the sentence, so here it is. I typed it, and now you read it, in that order: And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray. Read More
November 29, 2017 Novemberance Death’s Footsteps By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fifth and final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which has run every Wednesday this month. Sharon Harper, Germany, mise en scene. 1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone. It’s a brown-red smell, deep and dense and fungal. I walked with someone who knew about plants, who’d tug at branches and look at the underbellies of leaves and show me what he knew. I felt lucky to learn, and tried to pay attention. The boardwalk footpath lead deeper into a boggy place, and the silence seemed to densify around us, and we tread with lighter steps. On the planked path he paused. “Sphagnum moss,” he said, pointing to a mound. I told him I did not like the word sphagnum, that it sounded like something you suffer from. “Feel it though,” he said. It was good advice. I crouched and pressed my palm into the moss. It was cool and damp and feathery, with a cushioned give, welcoming and soft. I wanted to lay my face in it, my whole body, to let the entire weight of me get absorbed into this cooling cloud of plant. Read More