March 9, 2020 In Memoriam On the Timeless Music of McCoy Tyner By Craig Morgan Teicher McCoy Tyner in April 2012 [Photo: Joe Mabel] There are many ways to understand the passage of time—it’s not just one thing after the next, the pinhead of the present gnarling the flesh of your foot as you try, impossibly, to balance upon it. Not just peering through the mist of memory. Not just cutting through the ice ahead. Time moves back and forth, slows down, speeds up, it eddies—it does a lot of eddying. It concentrates itself in one moment and becomes diffuse and vague in another. We’re always in the present, though we can never quite get there, nor can we leave. All of this is what the music of McCoy Tyner, who died on Friday at the age of eighty-one, teaches, though as soon as one tries to paraphrase music in anything other than other music, it’s robbed of some of its magic and much of its meaning. Tyner was one of the defining musicians of the jazz period that began in the early sixties and which, I’d argue, we’re still in: pure art music that renews its inspiration in the the last hundred-plus years of pop music. As the pianist anchoring the classic John Coltrane quartet, Tyner’s instantly recognizable style—pendular, percussive, full of melodic flights and returns—created, hand in hand with drummer Elvin Jones, the landscapes across which Coltrane’s solos famously and fathomlessly ranged. I’ve been gratefully lost for years somewhere between the interminable vamp of the 1961 studio recording of Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things” and the pounding sinews of Tyner’s 1976 solo track “Fly with the Wind.” The latter isn’t fusion, isn’t exactly jazz, but is all Tyner: intellect, melody, and abandon. Tyner’s art has guided my imagination, and now that he’s gone, and because the meaning of music is so slippery, I want to take a moment to say why. Read More
February 21, 2020 In Memoriam National Treasure, Elizabeth Spencer By Allan Gurganus A PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH SPENCER FROM THE FILM LANDSCAPES OF THE HEART. When she died last December at the age of ninety-eight, the novelist Elizabeth Spencer was described as “a national treasure.” The author of nine novels, eight story collections, a memoir, and a play, she had mastered every mode of literary fiction. Her first novel appeared in 1948 and her most recent book in 2014. On the page, Spencer makes what’s technically difficult seem unusually clear, then psychologically inevitable. From the start, her voice was praised for its tonal nuance, its stratospheric empathy. Spencer had the gift for infusing social situations with a bullfight’s fatality. She was born in 1921 in the waning plantation culture of Carrollton, Mississippi. Senator John McCain was her second cousin. She grew up owning a horse and believing in ghosts. The subject of race was inescapable in the Jim Crow South and it figured strongly in her fiction. At her career’s very start, Elizabeth Spencer won the admiration of wise older writers, fine judges of talent like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty. They identified her depth of insight, her fellow feeling, and the warm richness of her character. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 allowed her to depart Mississippi for Italy. There she met and married John Rusher, an Englishman from Cornwall. The couple moved to Montreal in 1956. I first encountered Spencer when I published my first story at age twenty-six. She sent me a letter praising what I’d done. Beginner’s luck on all fronts. When Spencer became writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in 1986, she took up residence in Chapel Hill, where we became neighbors. Read More
February 5, 2020 In Memoriam Kamau Brathwaite: 1930–2020 By Vijay Seshadri Photo: repeatingislands.com The early notices of Kamau Brathwaite’s death yesterday emphasized the indisputable fact that he was a Caribbean and West Indian writer. The emphasis says something crucial about Brathwaite as a person and an artist. He wrote over thirty books of an astonishing variety and sophistication—history, anthropology, tracts and polemics, poetry and fiction (the poetry and fiction unique and radical in the way language and the technologies of language are understood and deployed). He ranged over three continents during his tremendous career. He went to college in England and studied with F. R. Leavis. He did not only live and work in Africa, he had an Africanist period in his thinking and took an African first name. He taught in New York. He never, though, separated himself from either his imaginative allegiance to the speech and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean or his physical allegiance to his birthplace, Barbados. The eulogies now pouring out of that island are rich with the kind of grief and pride that are triggered only by the loss of a beloved native son. It’s just as indisputable, though, that unless it is understood the right way, saying Brathwaite was a Caribbean and West Indian writer also obscures something crucial about him as a person and an artist. Brathwaite was born in 1930, only five years after Frantz Fanon and only twelve years after Nelson Mandela. He was one of the last surviving members of the first generation of postcolonial writers and intellectuals, the generation that witnessed Partition, Dien Bien Phu, Sharpeville, the Algerian war of independence, the Mau Mau Uprising, the Cuban Revolution, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. No other writer of that remarkable generation was more transparent to the inner process of decolonization; and no other writer among his peers was as committed to making literature align down to its very bones, down to its typefaces and orthographies, with the task of forging a new consciousness. Brathwaite’s experimentalism was never just experimentalism. Brathwaite’s insistence on his local idiom and his theories of “nation language” were as far removed as possible from writing in the vernacular for the sake of the vernacular. These elements in his art and craft were always a response to the largest problem of the postcolonial historical experience: the problem of rehabilitating the colonized mind and restoring it to its equilibrium. His solutions were radical and stunning, in both theory and practice. Those of us who share that history, whether East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean, American, are enormously indebted to him for the clear and steady way he confronted and clarified our understanding of ourselves. So are those of us who believe in the power of literature. Read Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Coral” in our Winter 2019 issue. Vijay Seshadri is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.
January 1, 2020 In Memoriam Eating Oatmeal with Alasdair Gray By Valerie Stivers Alasdair Gray as a young man. Photo provided by the author in 2016. The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray died on December 29, at the age of eighty-five, four years after a fall from the outside steps of his house left him with a spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair, and almost three years after I went to Glasgow to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with him for The Paris Review. Gray was a Whitbread Award–winning author, best known for the weird, speculative work, Lanark, an autobiographical tale in four out-of-order books (two of them nonrealist), and several volumes of short stories, but also for his painting, for illustrating his own work, and for cutting a wide and eccentric swath in the Glasgow arts scene. He was a socialist, an advocate for Scottish independence, a fierce proponent of friends’ work, and a tireless critic of the craven or pompous. Rereading my interview with him now, on the occasion of his death, I’m amazed by how cool and professional it is, and how much it leaves out, as I suppose it had to, of what Gray was really like, and what he meant to me. Read More
October 23, 2019 In Memoriam Just Enjoy Every Fucking Blessed Breath By Rob Tannenbaum Photo: Kate Simon It’s hard to imagine Nick Tosches ever having been young. His interests, the way he dressed, the language he used, his love of cigarettes—everything about Tosches was out of time. He wasn’t so much from a different era as he was from a different sensibility, one that refused to distinguish between highbrow and lowbrow, didn’t countenance small talk, wore ties and stood when a lady entered the room, but also trucked in ethnic slurs. He saw no contradiction in being both courtly and vulgar. Tosches, who died on Sunday at the age of sixty-nine, began his writing career as a record reviewer for Creem and Rolling Stone. Throughout the seventies, he wrote about music with audacious flair, mixing Latin phrases and Biblical themes with a sailor’s vocabulary. Album reviews couldn’t hold him, and in 1988 he published his first novel, Cut Numbers, about a loan shark. In 2012, he published Me and the Devil, a novel about a writer named Nick who lived in the same downtown New York neighborhood Tosches lived in, and had the same opinions, friends, and outlook, and who regained his waning vitality by drinking the blood of young women during violent sexual bouts. “It’s the vampirism of trying to regain something of youth through young flesh,” he said when I visited him, on a magazine assignment, in his brick-walled apartment. We talked for two hours, sometimes about his book, but more often about vanity, technology, illness, how New York had changed, and old age. Tosches was observant, restless, and hilarious. Our conversation remained unpublished—here’s a small part of it, in tribute. INTERVIEWER I think this is a book that no one under the age of forty or fifty could have written. TOSCHES No matter how gifted, or what powers of imagination they had, no one under forty or even fifty could pull it off. It’s a book about aging as much as it is about anything else. And seeing the world change. It’s a book about love. And it’s always, in a way, about books, because there are certain small parcels of ancient wisdom I’ve been fortunate enough to discover through the years, and have held closely. And I keep trying to spread them. I don’t even know if people are looking for wisdom these days. Read More
October 21, 2019 In Memoriam Nick Tosches in a Trench Coat By Brian Cullman Nick Tosches, music writer and biographer, died at the age of sixty-nine on Sunday. I spent an awful lot of time around Nick Tosches in the late seventies. We’d wind up in the same places, we were published in the same crummy magazines, and we’d stumble into each other at St. Mark’s Bookshop or the Bells of Hell or Gem Spa. It was always midnight, and he almost always had a book in his pocket, maybe The Twelve Caesars or Ovid, and a wrestling magazine. I lost touch with him, but kept up with his writing, or tried to. After Hellfire and Dino and a few other astonishing books, his prose got overheated, but somehow undercooked. He’d throw a handful of twenty-dollar words and twenty-five-cent ideas up in the air, sort of hoping they’d take wing, but if they didn’t, he’d get bored and just watch them tumble to the ground, stare at them sadly, kick a few over to see if they were still breathing, then wander off to get a smoke. Though he wrote some of the best and most evocative books on music, his real gift was for rooting around the back rooms, the hustles, the shadows and the half-truths that make up the underbelly of show business. If the devil was in the details, he was perfectly happy to dig through the devil’s briefcase and read the fine print of the love letters and girlie magazines he found inside. He was part accountant, part private eye, part stumblebum, but his passion was contagious, and he always listened to the B-sides. Read More