February 19, 2015 On History A Writer in the Family By Daniel Torday On writers, glass, Pliny the Elder, and the way families pass on their stories. Vesuvius in eruption. Since I started writing, I have sought forebears who might have had literary aspirations. Were there writers in the family? My great-uncle György, who was exiled to the Ukraine during World War II and afterward became a functionary in Hungary’s Communist government, was a novelist, but my father has always been dismissive of his work. He says György wrote a variety of socialist-realist novel that’s hard to take seriously, hard not to see as propaganda. His books have never been translated into English, and my Hungarian isn’t nearly good enough to understand what’s in them. The only existing copies I know of sit on a shelf in my Cousin Hajnal’s house in the Buda Hills. I don’t have the heart to ask to take them and have them translated. When I’ve asked her about them in the past, she’s simply said that they are books, yes, and that her father wrote them. In their stead I have purchased rare used copies of two books written by Frederic Neuburg, author of a large trove of letters to my father’s Aunt Traute that he keeps in an old teak box in his house in Los Angeles. My father is not Bellow or Updike, and I am not the son of Bellow or Updike, but it is the book I have, in two editions, an art book containing photographs of Neuberg’s glass collection and extensive commentary on the pieces. Read More
February 19, 2015 On the Shelf Hey, I Got You This Meaningless First Edition, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From The Boy Next Door. Feeling anxious? Depressed? Full of foreboding? Use fiction to overmaster your fears, and experience instant results. “In my books I get to create anxiety on my own terms. I can moderate fear and pass it on to other people. This creative, oddly communal form of anxiety feels very different from the kind I have in the back of my mind always—the fear about what will happen to my sight. There is something delicious—that’s the only word I can use to describe it—about recreating apprehension on the page.” Jennifer Lopez’s terrible new movie The Boy Next Door has inspired a misguided quest for first editions of the Iliad. “Lopez plays a divorced English literature high school teacher who has a one-night stand with her younger neighbor played by Ryan Guzman. In one scene, Guzman’s character gives Lopez a copy of The Iliad, which is described as a ‘first edition’ and apparently found for ‘a buck at a garage sale.’ ” Problems: no one knows for certain when the Iliad was even written. It was passed down by oral tradition first. It’s at least three thousand years old. It wasn’t composed in English for first publication in a handsome hardcover. On André Brink, a South African novelist who died last week: “Brink could write in a blocky, slightly cumbersome way, and some of his overlong later novels needed more editing. But the combination of his moral vision, psychological acuity, and insistent narrative force puts him, in my mind at least, in the company of Theodore Dreiser and Russell Banks.” I’m not sure if Victoria Sambunaris’s pictures amount to “a photographer’s version of the Great American Novel,” as the headline says they do—but they’re an affecting record of an American phenomenon: “the recurring sprawl of massive development and junctures where nature meets culture unexpectedly and surprisingly sublimely.” Supposedly, we’ve entered a new golden age for television, and for architecture, and some might say even journalism—what about art? “This is how we know precisely that we’re not in any Golden Age for visual art: There’s the spectacle of obsessive, laser-like bidding on lonely, singular canvasses by the few, but no broadly shared delight and conversation. ‘Excess of excellence’ or ‘intellectual credibility’ wouldn’t exactly be the first words from anyone in Contemporary art describing their own field, much less Miami art fairs.”
February 18, 2015 Department of Sex Ed My Mother Taught Me By Dan Piepenbring A poet’s misadventures in erotica. GILBERT I’ve written prose. I’ve written several novels that no one has seen. Well, one was published. INTERVIEWER My Mother Taught Me, an erotic novel, wasn’t it? GILBERT It’s about sexuality. You have to understand, people were writing sex books but no one was writing them well. I thought pornography should be as much of a genre as cowboy stories. But pornography is boring. Childish. Unhealthy. I thought, Why not have a novel of sexuality that’s not paralyzed by the need for orgasm? So I wrote a good pornographic novel to show it could be done. An enjoyment rather than a momentary excitement. There were so many pornographic novels written; why weren’t they effective? A momentary spasm. Some people will have an orgasm if you say a dirty word or say, What he did to her body was . . . But what if you approach it as a real novel? The idea of entertainment intrigued me at the time—so I wrote one. —The Art of Poetry No. 91, 2005 Jack Gilbert, who would’ve been ninety today, actually published two erotic novels: My Mother Taught Me and Forever Ecstasy, both coauthored with Jean Maclean and published under the opaque nom de porn Tor Kung. Olympia Press, a short-lived purveyor of smut and other wonders, foisted both titles upon the unsuspecting public, and in time they became the most requested books in the publisher’s oeuvre. The premise of My Mother Taught Me, which appeared in 1967, is absurd, even farcical—and in its outlandishness, it seems designed to effect what Gilbert called “an enjoyment rather than a momentary excitement.” But what kind of enjoyment? Our hero is Lars, a naive Swedish schoolboy who was raised in an all-male orphanage. The place was so strict, so straitlaced, that Lars in his nonage had never so much as laid eyes on a woman—not even a photograph of a woman. Read More
February 18, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Cold Snap By Sadie Stein Max Klinger, Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove (detail), Second Etching, 1881. Now “happy” is something extremely subjective. One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy. Promptly I refastened the catch of my briefcase and betook myself to another publisher. ―Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire Much of the USA is in the grip of a cold snap, and so too the season of lost gloves. While some might rejoice at this random harvest, and the liberated gloves may be delirious with joy, it is dispiriting indeed to reach into your pocket and realize you’re going to have to brave winter temperatures with a bare hand. Every year I consider swallowing my pride and buying some of those elastic mitten-clips little kids wear—a small price to pay when you consider the accumulated cost of replacement gloves over the course of an adult lifetime. At least for the scatterbrained. Read More
February 18, 2015 From the Archive Philip Levine’s “A Sign” By Dan Piepenbring Philip Levine in 1980. This week, we’re celebrating Philip Levine by posting some of his poems from our archives. This one, “A Sign,” comes from our Spring 1981 issue. The last words the sea spokebefore it died, the last sighof the great wind that blewbefore we were born, the lastlight that dawns on the hillof our dying, skull hill wewould call it. Read the whole poem here.
February 18, 2015 On the Shelf Try Not to Write a Best Seller Before Puberty, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Barbara Follett. Photo via Farksolia/Lapham’s Quarterly Many twelve-year-olds write novels. Few of them garner attention from Alfred A. Knopf, who published The House Without Windows in 1926, when its author, Barbara Newhart Follett, was still young enough to write to a friend, “Daddy and I are correcting the manuscript.” The book attracted enough critical renown to make Barbara famous, thus ensuring that her life went to pieces—she disappeared in 1939, and no one close to her ever saw her again. Virginia Woolf’s turbulent final years were well documented in her correspondence, which is full of sorrow and incoherent lapses into a kind of bliss. “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock,” she wrote to Leonard Woolf, whom she later married. But then, later: “I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good … I don’t think two people could have been happier.” Frederic Tuten remembers his friend Roy Lichtenstein: “People were so shocked by Roy’s paintings in the beginning—it was almost as if he had committed a sacrilege … But the point was, if you make what you think is a work of art, you’re going to do what everyone does. If you make a painting as good as Cezanne or Picasso, so what? Nothing has been added, nothing has been brought forward, nothing has been made to change our conception of painting. This is what I, as a young writer … thought I had learned from Roy. No writer I knew personally at that time gave me the feeling that there was something yet fresh to be done in fiction.” What does it really mean to be creepy, at the end of the day? Does it have something to do with “displaced sexual energy”? “We can be creeped out by corporations, by places, by inanimate objects, even by periods of time (who is not vaguely creeped out by the 1970s?). We hesitate to say that these things are inherently creepy, and yet the judgment that something is creepy seems somehow more than simply ‘subjective.’ ” Time was, any major metropolis worth its salt had a splendorous cathedral on offer. But there’s a more important metric these days: “Cathedrals remain powerful statements of a culture and, to Christians, significant symbols of their faith, but if I were drawing up the rules for what made a city of any worth, my first point of reference would be its botanical garden. These days, I find I have no need of organised religion to guide me through the days. Yet as a denizen of what Henry Miller called ‘the air-conditioned nightmare,’ I find comfort in almost any exposure to the intricate order of the natural world.”