November 11, 2016 In Memoriam Leonard Cohen, 1934–2016 By Adam Shatz Leonard Cohen died on November 7, a day before the election, at eighty-two. Readers of David Remnick’s extraordinarily moving profile in The New Yorker know that he had been preparing for death. Still, it felt like an act of cruel and unusual punishment after Trump’s victory, and like many Cohen fans I couldn’t help connecting his death to the election. Was it a sign of some sort? Had Cohen been so dejected that he decided to call it quits? Did Trump kill him? You may laugh, but it’s no less plausible a theory than pretty much anything from the president-elect’s mouth. When I heard the news of Cohen’s death, my first thought was: Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye. Then I remembered that Neruda, one of Cohen’s favorite poets, died as Pinochet established his grip on power. Neruda was spared the sight of Chile’s grim descent into torture and extrajudicial killing, and the imposition of a regime of murderous silence. But he did not vanish: his poems of revolutionary love were like fireflies in Chile’s dark night, providing sparks of hope that the day of liberation would come. Read More
October 14, 2016 In Memoriam Dario Fo, 1926–2016 By Dan Piepenbring Dario Fo, sweater game on fleek. If you’ve exhausted the Internet’s rich store of Bob Dylan think pieces, you might turn your attention to another Nobel laureate: Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, who died this week at ninety. The Vatican once declared his play Mistero Buffo, a kind of one-man political-satire revue, to be “the most blasphemous show in the history of television.” (If you’re confused, this was in 1977, well before the undeniably satanic Pretty Little Liars hit the airwaves.) As the New York Times has it, Fo and his late wife–collaborator, Franca Rame, did more to upend the art of political theater than anyone in their generation: “Basing their art on the tradition of the medieval jester and the improvisation techniques of commedia dell’arte, Mr. Fo and Ms. Rame thrilled, dismayed and angered audiences around the world. Together they staged thousands of performances, in conventional theaters, factories occupied by striking workers, university sit-ins, city parks, prisons and even deconsecrated churches.” Read More
September 18, 2016 In Memoriam Edward Albee, 1928–2016 By The Paris Review A manuscript page from A Delicate Balance. Click to enlarge. INTERVIEWER If one can talk at all about a general reaction to your plays, it is that, as convincing and brilliant as their beginnings and middles might be, the plays tend to let down, change course, or simply puzzle at the end. To one degree or another this complaint has been registered against most of them. ALBEE Perhaps because my sense of reality and logic is different from most people’s. The answer could be as simple as that. Some things that make sense to me don’t make the same degree of sense to other people. Analytically, there might be other reasons—that the plays don’t hold together intellectually; that’s possible. But then it mustn’t be forgotten that when people don’t like the way a play ends, they’re likely to blame the play. That’s a possibility too. For example, I don’t feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward. If I’ve been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that’s the way I find life. —Edward Albee, The Art of Theater No. 4
August 10, 2016 In Memoriam The Landlord from Ioway: James Alan McPherson, 1943–2016 By Cynthia Payne Photo by Tom Langdon. Although I didn’t yet know of his dying, I was thinking of James McPherson in the hours afterward, as I listened to President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. I wanted very much for him to explain how these two lodestars of our current political life, Obama and Trump, could exist in the same galaxy. Years ago, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I had witnessed Jim’s unerring ability to find the pulse of the weakest story. Similarly, during the reigns of Reagan and Bush the First, he had listened intently to the whispering of a far right wing not easily heard in the din of that era’s culture war. I knew I had neither Jim’s wisdom nor imagination, and the night of the convention I could only sense that he again, in a way that most of us could not, would understand the spiritual impoverishment that drove this most incredible of political narratives. I had to content myself with remembering the rumble of his laughter, the way it could start from the tips of his splayed feet and rise up to his fraying straw cap. I thought, too, of the hesitations in the murmur of his hushed voice, the result perhaps of a stutter long mastered, or the refusal to speak anything other than the truth—his truth perhaps, but a truth that many of his students learned to rely on. Read More
August 8, 2016 In Memoriam Mahasweta Devi, 1926–2016 By Shivani Radhakrishnan Mahasweta Devi. “Please don’t write more books. I can’t read so many books,” a little girl once said to Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate. The little girl was Mahasweta Devi, who grew up to be one of India’s best-known writers and activists. When Mahasweta died, on July 28—Devi is an honorific—she left behind no small collection herself: she had written more than a hundred books, including fiction and nonfiction about India’s tribal communities, Maoist insurgents, and women. Read More
July 4, 2016 In Memoriam Elie Wiesel, 1928–2016 By Jeffery Gleaves Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan at the age eighty-seven. Best known for Night, an autobiographical account of his experience in Nazi concentration camps toward the end of World War II, Wiesel, “more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience,” wrote the New York Times. When asked in his Art of Fiction interview, published in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review, where his “quest” was leading him, Wiesel responded, Read More