August 11, 2017 In Memoriam Sam Shepard’s Dynamic Women By Sylvie McNamara Joe Hanley and Rose O’Loughlin in the Abbey Theatre production of Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. I grew up in a house in which writing was for men. My mom didn’t read, and my dad—a physicist with an abstract admiration for rugged pursuits—preferred a strain of male writer known for pinballing between debauched parties and bouts of rural isolation: Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, and, of course, Sam Shepard. Shepard, who died last week, was my model of a writer for most of my adolescence: a grizzled, curt, heavy-drinking, self-taught genius who wrote plays about decaying American families and cowboy-types who got drunk in rundown motels. On the one hand, I was fascinated—I read all of Shepard’s work before I was eighteen. On the other hand, inheriting my dad’s favorite writers put me in an odd position. In high school, a friend and I would dress up as Hemingway and read his stories to one another, lamenting that we would never be old men. I have a picture of it, both of us in tweed caps with our hair ponytailed under our chins like beards. It wasn’t until after high school that I understood that there were women worth reading (or worth becoming). Until then, I had Sam Shepard. The Shepard character who most captivated my teenaged imagination was not one of the familiar Shepard archetypes—not an anachronistic cowboy, a jazz-talking rock star, a petty criminal with a monosyllabic name, or the drunken ghost of a patriarch. It was Emma, the brash twelve year-old from The Curse of the Starving Class. As her mother and father try to sell the family home out from under one another, Emma rants and screams and eventually rides a mean horse into a bar owned by one of her father’s predatory creditors and shoots the place up. I was the kind of adolescent who rolled over for anyone who asked something of me, and Emma has a Grecian fury: her dream is to be the only auto mechanic in a small Mexican town so that she can punish her stranded family by withholding expertise. I named my bike after her, and pedaled it with rage. Read More
July 31, 2017 In Memoriam Sam Shepard, 1943–2017 By The Paris Review Sam Shepard, 1983. Photo: Steve Ringman, SHN We were sad to learn that Sam Shepard died on Thursday, at age seventy-three. Shepard’s Writers at Work interview was published in the Spring 1997 issue of The Paris Review. In it, he spoke about endings: The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away. You can read more from the Art of Theater No. 12 with Shepard here.
May 30, 2017 In Memoriam David Lewiston, 1929–2017 By Brian Cullman From the cover of Nonesuch’s reissue of Music from the Morning of the World. Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought; carrying a small (but not that small) portable tape recorder, twenty or thirty reels of quarter-inch tape, a couple of microphones, cables, a week’s supply of batteries, a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts. The shirts have been lost to time and forgotten laundries—but the tapes, the recordings from those travels, still circulate fifty years on, filling listeners with pleasure and astonishment. David Lewiston was born in London in 1929 and graduated from Trinity College of Music in 1953. Already interested in the spiritual teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Lewiston moved to New York City to study piano and composition with Thomas DeHartmann, Gurdjieff’s aide-de-camp and musical collaborator, and an esteemed composer in his own right. From the Gurdjieff work, Lewiston learned about the many uses of solitude; from his studies with DeHartmann, who had helped Gurdjieff transcribe and notate Eastern hymns and dervish melodies, he learned to hear and appreciate music outside of the Western canon. These proved useful as Lewiston began traveling, but neither talent helped him support himself as a young musician in New York, and he reinvented himself as a financial journalist, working on staff for Forbes and then for an in-house journal of the American Bankers Association, a magazine so dull it practically walked to the trash bin and threw itself away. Read More
May 1, 2017 In Memoriam Jean Stein, 1934–2017 By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Brigitte LaCombe We were heartbroken to learn that Jean Stein, the writer and editor who chronicled the venal underside of celebrity, has died at eighty-three. Stein led a storied life. When she was still a teenager, she interviewed William Faulkner, an exchange that appeared in this magazine in 1956. By the time she was in her early twenties, she’d earned a spot on The Paris Review’s masthead as an editor; not long after, she worked with Clay Felker, of Esquire. With George Plimpton, she edited Edie: American Girl, an oral history of Edie Sedgwick; an excerpt appeared in the Review’s Summer 1980 issue. The pair also edited American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy. Read More
April 5, 2017 In Memoriam An Empty Saddle for Yevtushenko By Carson Vaughan The late Yevgeny Yevtushenko had an unlikely affinity for cowboy poetry. Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the 1995 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Photo: Sue Rosoff. Last Saturday, April 1, outside Mandan, North Dakota, the fifty-year-old Shadd Piehl cooked dinner for his family: lasagna, garlic bread, a simple spinach salad. The wind chimes whispered on his porch, the breeze parting the prairie grass and bare elms beyond the barn. With the table set, Piehl called his wife, Marnie, and their three boys to the kitchen. He raised a toast: “To the great Russian poet and witness to our marriage, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.” As unlikely as it seems, Yevtushenko—the internationally renowned poet, the voice of so many young Soviets crawling out from Stalin’s long shadow, the “angry young man” on the cover of Time in April 1962—cinches their memory of an era. Yevtushenko, who died of cancer Saturday, lived in Oklahoma, where he’d been teaching poetry at the University of Tulsa since 1992. His eulogies trumpet his defense of the Jewish people; they quote from “Babi Yar,” his most recognized poem, composed after his first visit to the unmarked mass grave near Kiev, Ukraine; they boast of the thousands who once flocked to hear him read. But few have mentioned his impact in the world of cowboy poetry, a genre in which Yevtushenko—unlike so many snickering journalists and dismissive academics—appears to have found common ground with Americans. Read More
March 29, 2017 In Memoriam Bob Silvers’s Vision By Adam Thirlwell Bob Silvers made his writers want to be equal to a possible image he had of a possible you. Robert B. Silvers I was thirty when Bob Silvers first sent me a book for review—a collection of Nabokov’s translations of Russian poetry into English. This was toward the end of 2008. I revered The New York Review of Books; it was an ideal supranational habitat. The unexpected FedEx package, with its accompanying modest note making the proposal, as if continuing a permanent—if ineffable—conversation, made me dazzlingly anxious. A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed—on New Year’s Eve, which was also, I would discover, his birthday—to say that while reading “with admiration” a book I had written, he had noticed an error in it that might be corrected in a paperback edition. I had quoted the duc de Saint-Simon’s portrait of “Madame” from his Memoirs and glossed this as a portrait of Madame de Maintenon. “Saint-Simon was referring not to Madame de Maintenon,” wrote Bob—or, as I was to find out, dictated Bob, “but to ‘Madame,’ i.e. Elizabeth Charlotte, Palatine of Bavaria, second wife of ‘Monsieur,’ duc d’Orleans. She was in fact German.” I felt a rush of total love. Read More