May 15, 2012 First Person As Ever By Sadie Stein To paraphrase Mr. Bennett, my life holds few distinctions, but I do have a really good sign-off. Since I was twenty-one, I have ended all correspondence As ever. I’ll give credit where credit is due: I stole it. I first saw the valediction at the bottom of a professor’s e-mail. This professor was something of a legend at the university I attended, a gregarious scholar who had trained generations of burgeoning linguists. By the time I knew him he’d been teaching at the university for some fifty years and was as known for his periodic open houses as for his engaging lectures. I was a senior before I was invited to one of these parties, although really, anyone could go. But that year, I was taking the professor’s seminar and so was added to the guest list. It was a pleasant e-mail to receive by any standards: warm, welcoming, and written with just enough informality to suggest friendliness while maintaining dignity. And there, at the end, “as ever” and the professor’s name. I was immediately enchanted. Read More
May 11, 2012 First Person My Mother’s Love By Albert Cohen Shortly after fleeing to London from Nazi-occupied France, novelist Albert Cohen learned of his mother’s death in Marseille. His grief took the form of a series of personal essays for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother. It was translated into the English by his wife. In honor of Mother’s Day, we bring you this excerpt. She waited three hours for me in that square. Three hours which I could have spent with her. While she was waiting for me, wreathed in patience, I chose to concern myself, stupidly enthralled, with some poetic amber damsel, abandoning the wheat for the chaff. I missed three hours of my mother’s life. And for whom, good God? For an Atalanta, an attractive arrangement of flesh. I dared to prefer an Atalanta to the most sacred goodness, to my mother’s love, my mother’s incomparable love. Incidentally, if some sudden illness had deprived me of my strength or merely all my teeth, the poetic damsel would have pointed me out and ordered her maid to sweep away that toothless garbage. Read More
May 3, 2012 First Person Memories of the Lakeside By Lorin Stein To East Villagers of a certain age, it came as a blow: after sixteen short years on Avenue B, the Lakeside Lounge has closed. For many of us, that bar was like our living room. I don’t mean that my friends and I spent a lot of time there—I mean it was a lot like our apartments. The Steve Keene acrylics on the walls, the mismatched bench and tables, the overflowing ashtrays. The fug. The great advantage of the Lakeside over one’s living room was the music. This isn’t the place to talk about jukeboxes in general, much less the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, but that jukebox was a big deal. I remember making a special trip to the Lakeside one night, alone, in the snow, just to hear “Sitting on Top of the World” as performed by the Mississippi Sheiks. I also remember stopping there for a beer by candlelight the night of the blackout. It was strange to sit there in the silence. Every other night the place was full of music. I never saw Iggy Pop or Dee Dee Ramone at the Lakeside, but I did hear Jason Morphew and the Reachers play whenever they came to town. It was there I first heard that verse, from Geoff Reacher’s “Paranoia Is Fame,” worthy of the Louvin Brothers: Slowly my mind opens more and more And when I’m dead it will be a beautiful flower Blooming, choking out the weeds Photosynthesizing starlight in the garden’s darkest hour The other great attraction of the Lakeside was its photo booth. That machine took magically good photos, photos for the photo averse, as, for example, the poet Frederick Seidel (shown here with my sister, Anna O’Sullivan). One of the pictures was so unflattering, so off-putting, so deeply dour, that Seidel put it on the cover of his collection Ooga-Booga.
April 18, 2012 First Person Underground Colonies By Will Hunt We are pupils of the animals in the most important things: the spider for spinning and mending, the swallow for building, and the songsters, swan and nightingale, for singing, by way of imitation. —Democritus, Fragment 154 I decided to go to Cappadocia after seeing an old illustration of one of the underground cities. The drawing, just a rough sketch, showed tiny people moving through a honeycomb of underground caverns, passageways, and winding staircases. The honeycombed cities, I read, had been hollowed from the region’s soft volcanic soil during the early Bronze Age. Cappadocia had been cobwebbed by trade routes in those days and was constantly under attack; the underground cities served as fortification from invaders. There were hundreds of them, one beneath nearly every modern settlement in the region, and some were as deep as ten levels, with space for thousands of people. What made me curious was that the ancient inhabitants were believed to have lived underground for months at a time. Read More
April 17, 2012 First Person On Gruck By Sadie Stein Stout toby jugs are gruckimish. So are the giant baby-head sculptures on the lawn of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Lollipop Guild, Hogarth cartoons, Captain Beefheart, and many parts of Petronius’s Satyricon, especially the verse about the insipid eunuch. Gruckimish is a word my best friend Elaine and I invented when we were approximately four years old, and one we’ve used ever since. To our minds, then and now, it fills a gaping void in the lexicon. Gruckimish lies somewhere between funny, grotesque, and cute. There is no exact equivalent in English; if there’s one in another language, I would like to know it. Gruckimish things are often anthropomorphic, but by no means exclusively. The main thing about something gruckimish is that gruck (the noun form) is always the unintended byproduct of the creator’s intention. Things that are supposed to be funny are rarely gruckimish. On the other hand, to call something gruckimish is never a value judgment: it is a simple statement of fact. Read More
March 29, 2012 First Person The Wizard of West Fifty-seventh Street By Claire Messud Robert Silvers in the New York Review offices. Our Spring Revel will take place on April 3. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating Robert Silvers, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. My first encounter with Robert Silvers was with his sonorous and elegant voice, with its precise, slightly British diction. It must be said that most of my encounters over the years have been with the voice rather than the man, as we’ve met in person only a few times. I first heard the voice in the summer of 1988. Back in the States after my first year of graduate school at Cambridge University, I somehow landed a job in the advertising department at The New York Review of Books. I can’t imagine I came by it entirely honestly, but I have no recollection of whose kindness may have opened the door. This was at the old address, 250 West Fifty-seventh Street, where entering the offices felt somehow like slipping in a back door, because you were immediately dwarfed by books. Mountainous, heavily laden shelves overhung the narrow, dark corridors, and people scurried quietly among them as if in fear—fear, I always thought, that like Leonard Bast they would be crushed by knowledge. In the several months I worked in those offices—in the domain of Catherine Tice, at the elbow of a brassily confident assistant named Kim—I never laid eyes on either Bob or Barbara. (I had, on the other hand, many mad and wonderful conversations with the late Bob Tashman, who roved the office with apparently much time on his hands and who, although balding, had an impressive corona of hair emerging from his shirt collar. His long-worked-upon American Decameron, alas, we will never now see.) Bob and Barbara’s offices were down long tributaries of the book-lined hallways, unenterable by the likes of me. But I did, upon occasion, hear the magical voice. It was like hearing the Wizard of Oz. Whether he was speaking on the telephone or to an assistant, his interlocutors were inaudible, the authority of his inflections absolute, and his physical presence purely notional. Read More