November 22, 2017 Novemberance All This Blood and Love By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fourth installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. Jennie Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914. The field where I played soccer before I had breasts was called Metacomet Park. A nylon net full of balls would be spilled on the field for drills, and we ate orange wedges at halftime. Metacomet, known otherwise as Metacom or King Philip, was a Wampanoag chief, and in 1676, fifty-six years after the Pilgrims dropped anchor in Plymouth, he was assassinated in a swamp. The Puritans dismembered him, tore apart his limbs, hung his body parts in trees. The man who shot him got his hand as a trophy. For over twenty years, his head was displayed on a stake in Plymouth. Around the time that I played soccer at Metacomet, I also took walks with my mother in the fields near our house. Now those fields are no longer fields; they’re a subdivision where houses rise out of the land like crops, lined and alike, and the driveways arc at the same angles and the cars in the driveways are large and the bushes are tidy and round and all is neat and safe and lobotomizing. When my mother and I walked in the fields, no road or roof in sight, I thought about arriving on a land with no houses, with no streets or sockets or sinks, with no supermarkets to buy Fruit Roll-Ups or grapes. I imagined myself stepping onto the sand, seeing trees and high grass at sway in the wind. Now what? You’d have to be brave, I thought, facing that space. How do you just create a whole new world? I learned later that wasn’t the right question. A world had already been created in that place. How do you steal a world? How do you destroy it? How do you rewrite the story so it sounds so uncomplicated? Read More
November 17, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Five By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this fifth installment, Nabokov wakes from an erotic dream to bloody sheets. Dec. 13, 1964 8.30 am 50. Skipped four nights (Did not take down the banal dreams I had lately). Intensely erotic dream. Blood on sheet. End of dream: my sister O.,[1] strangely young and languorous. Then V. tells me I must not forget to go to the oculist. I find his street but cannot remember the house number. Am agonizingly searching in the telephone book but do not recall his name and, moreover, do not know how to dial the vague number I have in mind—something ending in 492. Then stand near a window, sighing, half-seeing view, brooding over the possible consequence of incest. Read More
November 16, 2017 Life Sentence The Insouciant 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 each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. © Tom Toro Americans are particularly bad at lying, thought Oscar Wilde. Whatever he would say of us today, his views in 1891, when his essay “The Decay of Lying” was published, were clear enough: The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. Read More
November 16, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Four By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this fourth installment, Nabokov has a confrontation with his father. 38. 22 Nov. 1964 3.15 am In a kind of lecture-hall during an informal performance or rehearsal of lecture. On the platform my father seated at a small table is reading and discussing something. Several people between the stage and me. Am eagerly taking down what he says. My mother is among the four or five people sitting in front of me. My father is now elucidating a point. I see and appreciate it and clear my throat a trifle too loudly while trying to jot down his argument as fully as possible. From the stage he suddenly addresses me—I nod my head supposing he is making the possible objection I have foreseen; but instead, he says to me: “Even if you are <new card> bored you might have the decency to sit quietly.” I feel deeply injured and reply (textual words [transl. from Russian], chosen and uttered with great care and dignity): “I think your observation to me is most unjust. I was listening attentively and with enormous interest.” I get up and start to leave hoping I shall be called back. But I hear behind me my father’s voice resuming his speech with a little less force than before. I visualize in a medallion of light to-morrow morning’s interview with him—imagine him in his beige dressing—<new card> gown. Shall I ignore what happened? Will he refer to it? I decide philosophically—a similar case has come up before within dream experience—that time will decide (curious that I saw myself imagining the future in my dream and vaguely recalling a past and that a sense of future, of time, clearly though somewhat crudely existed in my mind, i.e. I distinctly perceived the degree of difference in comparative reality between the dream vision and the dream prevision). It is odd that my father who was so good-natured, and gay, is always so morose and grim in my dreams. Read More
November 15, 2017 Novemberance The Alchemy of November By Nina MacLaughlin This is the third installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. Anselm Kiefer, Nigredo, 1984, oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on photograph and woodcut, mounted on canvas. Three uncarved pumpkins the size of candlepin bowling balls stud the mulch in the front garden of a neighbor’s house on the short street where I live. City creatures—squirrels, raccoons, rats—have chewed coin-size circles through the tough outer rind and into the stringy pale flesh below. These sections of gnaw are now ringed with black. The black of rot, a black that looks at once dusty, as though charred by the flame of time, and slick, like the vegetal squelch of something long forgotten in a drawer of the fridge. It is a definitive black, the black of something making slow return to a different state. Along the river, the milkweed pods have split and pour forth their seeded snow-white silk. I walk south along the river when the sun is in the final stages of its work, and scramble down the banks to look. Off tall stalks, desiccated pods spill a thrilling and climactic white. White like rabbit fur, like pearl, white that holds rainbows when the light hits right. The leaves of the young gingko trees that grow out of the sidewalk fell all at once. A few days ago, the fan-shaped leaves with their crenulated margins glowed gold from the branches and fluttered with nonchalance. The following morning, I gasped to see it: branches all but bare and the trees seemed to grow out of puddles of gold. At the cemetery nearby, a twisting Japanese maple is aflame, its feathery leaves a deep red, a bodily red, a red that blazes between wine and blood. Those leaves will grip the branches much deeper into the month than most of the trees around it, almost tauntingly, in a flare of lingering crimson. Read More
November 15, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part Three By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this third installment, Nabokov tries to console a girl, with sympathy that is “genuine” but “not free from desire,” and contemplates Dobuzhinsky’s autobiography. Nov. 13, 1964 6.30 am 31. Poignant bitter-sweet dream permeated with tenderness and hopelessness. Short girl, rather dumpy, slatternly dressed, bare-necked, face very attractive but not flawlessly pretty, broadish jaws, flattish nose, wonderful complexion, smooth, warmly colored skin, pale-blue eyes, bedraggled fair hair. Am trying in vain to console her: she has been badly hurt by faithless heartless young husband, a shadowy gay-dog figure in the background. I am doing my best to make her understand how dreadfully sorry I am for her, but she is completely wrapped up <new card> in her taciturn grief, is absolutely impenetrable no matter how I strain to “reach her,” «пробиться к ней»,[1] as I tell her in Russian—but all in vain, she looks up at me with apprehensive hunted gaze, ready to stiffen, bothered, resenting my sympathy which is quite genuine but not free from desire. (The young man is—a very obscure feeling—related to me—perhaps Dm.?!) Read More