June 28, 2016 Our Correspondents Even the Chickens Dance By Jeff Seroy This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Jeff Seroy, who has written on ballet before for the Daily. “It’s got everything, including a Maypole.” I asked the choreographer Mark Morris—erstwhile bad boy of the dance scene, now about to turn sixty—as we were discussing a memoir he intends to write, to name a work by another choreographer he loved. His answer couldn’t have intrigued me more: Frederick Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Even aficionados of ballet may never have seen La fille mal gardée. It sounds antimodern and retrograde and frumpy and drearily clichéd. A comic ballet set in the countryside about a young girl in love with a shepherd whose bossy mother wants her to marry up? That reeks of mildew and lacks the authority of a canonical warhorse to excuse it. But trust Morris’s taste. La fille may turn out to be the best thing you’ve never seen—or you may wonder, as I now do, whether it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen. After many years out of repertory, American Ballet Theater has just revived their production of this masterpiece, and it’s perfection. Read More
June 27, 2016 Our Correspondents Unconventional, Part 3: Norman Mailer and the Pigs By Nathan Gelgud In anticipation of the Republican and Democratic national conventions later this summer, Nathan Gelgud, a correspondent for the Daily, will be posting a regular weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 DNC. Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2. Read More
June 23, 2016 Our Correspondents An Emotional Performance By Wei Tchou How the Internet makes memoirists of us all. Jean Alphonse Roehn, Portrait of an Artist Painting Her Self Portrait I can’t recall the last time I didn’t know a writer’s face. See me pasting bylines into Facebook to find an essayist’s profile picture. Watch as I dive through tagged photographs to find out which school a reporter attended, what his partner looks like. Is his Twitter account verified? Is he famous enough to justify being verified? Usually I’m less interested in the plain fact of, say, a writer’s ethnicity or what kind of pet she owns than I am in her presentation of those facts. Of course sometimes I’m just nosy, but more often, I’m looking for reasons to trust or distrust a writer’s work. I don’t really believe in objective narrators anymore, but I still care to look for reliable ones. Read More
June 21, 2016 Our Correspondents On a Certain Epigram by Anna Akhmatova By Anthony Madrid Detail of a portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1922. In my village it’s a famous epigram, but I wonder how many of you are familiar with it. Here it is, complete and unexpurgated, in Anna Akhmatova’s original Russian, from 1958: Могла ли Биче словно Дант творить, Или Лаура жар любви восславить? Я научила женщин говорить… Но, Боже, как их замолчать заставить! And now here is a transliteration, with metrical stress represented by bold type, so that the Russianless—or persons like myself with only a year of Russian, the might-as-well-be-Russianless—can have at least some chance of appreciating the sounds. (Note: iambic pentameter, with an inversion in the first foot of line 2.) Read More
June 20, 2016 Our Correspondents Unconventional, Part 2: Saint Genet Blesses the Hippies By Nathan Gelgud In anticipation of the Republican and Democratic national conventions later this summer, Nathan Gelgud, a correspondent for the Daily, will be posting a regular weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 DNC. Read Part 1 here. Read More
June 14, 2016 Our Correspondents I Saw the Figure 5 in Steel By Lucy Sante On the appeal of junk shops. This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today: Luc Sante, who is reviving his blog on pictures, Pinakothek. Luc was interviewed in our Spring issue. (He contributed the portfolio, too.) Junk shops are disappearing, victims of rent increases and online auctions, as well as human aging. Most of my remaining standbys have gone to glory in the past few years, and even if rents should somehow fall, it’s unlikely that replacements will come along anytime soon. For one thing, an important attribute of a great junk shop is longevity. It should accrue layers, like an archeological site. A junk shop is not an antique shop, where the focus is on merchandising and the display favors popular and expensive items. A junk shop, by contrast, will often give the impression that commerce is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. Some junk shops are a roiling chaos, down to being underlit and perhaps smelly, while others are highly and even compulsively organized—but generally not in a way that makes any sort of mercantile sense. The items in a junk shop may seem like components of a conceptual artwork or a vast personal shrine or an extraterrestrial museum of human culture. Read More