February 11, 2014 On the Shelf Searching for Haruki Murakami’s Old Jazz Club, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: oldworldwisdom, via tumblr The Iowa Writers’ Workshop: brought to you by the CIA. (Also herewith: Frank Conroy’s derisive pronouncements on everyone from Melville to Pynchon. “Of David Foster Wallace he growled, with a wave of his hand, ‘He has his thing that he does.’”) Haruki Murakami had a jazz club. It closed in 1981. What you’ll find there today: “A drab three-story cement building. Outside … a restaurant had set up a sampuru display of plastic foods. Above it, an orange banner advertised DINING CAFE.” Jazz! Tracking the fluctuating sales of Library of America classics: “Who would have thought that Ben Stiller’s movie remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty would triple sales of the LOA’s James Thurber edition. Or that the film version of On the Road would increase sales of the Kerouac volume that contains the novel by more than thirty percent?” While we’re on Kerouac: a German college student took all the locations from On the Road and plugged them into Google Maps. The resulting driving directions—On the Road for 17,527 Miles—are available for free. My personal favorite part is “Take exit 362 to merge onto I-180 N/Interstate 25 Business/US-85 N/US 87 Business toward Central Ave.” A must for your reference shelf: every Prince hairstyle from 1978 to 2013, in one easy-to-read (and purple, of course) chart.
February 10, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Triumph of the Will By Sadie Stein Some years ago, the Museum of the City of New York mounted a fantastic show devoted to the work of the decorator and entertainment doyenne Dorothy Draper. Draper’s two books, Entertaining is Fun! and Decorating is Fun!, have been rereleased with the original splashy covers, and the firm of Carleton Varney, Inc. continues to use Draper’s exuberant prints and insouciant style. The museum had done up several rooms with Draper’s signature oversized roses, and replicated the decor of West Virginia’s famous Greenbrier resort, which Draper refurbished in the 1940s. The effect was determinedly cheerful and pretty darn fabulous. Museum of the City of New York The books are arresting, too: between bits of absolutely authoritative advice on color, proportion, and élan (presented with the assurance of many generations in New York high society) Mrs. Draper presents the reader with “case histories” of “A Lady Who Thought Formality Meant Fuss” or “A Young Man Who Understood Women” or “A Lady Who Gave Herself a Party Instead of a Pill.” Read More
February 10, 2014 In Memoriam Remembering Maxine Kumin By Dan Piepenbring Photograph: Water Street Books. Maxine Kumin died last week, at eighty-eight. A Pulitzer winner and former poet laureate, Kumin perfected a style that was direct, piercing, and gimlet-eyed—her verse was economical, maybe, but never austere. As the Times notes, “Though her poems and essays centered on the New England countryside, she trafficked in none of the sentimental effusions of traditional pastoral poets.” Her precision earned her plaudits, though she was sometimes chagrined by the extent to which her gender tinted her reception; she said in 2005, “I so resented being told by male poets, ‘You’re a good poet. You write like a man.’ When you drove them to the airport to catch that flight at the last minute: ‘You did a good job. You drove like a man.’ It was such a different world. The expectations were so different … I was not influenced by women writing poetry. There weren’t any women to admire. I could admire Marianne Moore, but I certainly couldn’t write miniaturist poems like her. And I admired Elizabeth Bishop, but she was very classical and held everyone at a distance. Mentor was not a verb at that time. I certainly wasn’t being mentored by anybody.” The Paris Review published one of her short stories, “Another Form of Marriage,” in 1976, and a poem, “Going to Jerusalem,” in 1981. The latter begins: Bedecked with scapulars,heavy with huge crossesand crying out abroad,Death to the Infidel!the Franks swept by in wavesriding their stone horses,big-barreled stallionsdeemed brave enough for battle You can read the poem in its entirety here.
February 10, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Your Midterm Exam By Alexander Aciman Photo: Tom Woodward/Flickr This week, we pause our winter-long recap of the Inferno (read along!) to quiz you on all that we’ve learned thus far. This is an open-book exam; all grades are final. Good luck! Part I: Multiple Choice 1. Dante is(a) The poet’s first name(b) The poet’s last name(c) The poet’s performance alias, à la Madonna or Ginuwine(d) The owner of the peak in the 1997 Pierce Brosnan vehicle, Dante’s Peak 2. In canto 1, Dante encounters a Lonza, a beast best described as(a) A leopard-lion hybrid(b) Probably completely made up(c) An allegorical stand-in for Dante’s enemies in the City of Florence(d) All of the above 3. In canto 5, Francesca tells Dante that she was unfaithful to her husband after reading a love story. What story was it?(a) The story of Dido and Aeneas(b) The story of Lancelot(c) Ars Erotica, Ovid’s bodice ripper(d) Irrelevant. The story she was reading was merely a vehicle for the affair, not the cause of it 4. A Dantista is(a) The Italian word for dentist(b) A Dante scholar(c) A female Dante scholar with attitude(d) A superlative used to describe Dante’s best work Read More
February 10, 2014 At Work Everything Is Near and Unforgotten: An Interview with Tarfia Faizullah By Sean Carman In the 1971 Liberation War, in which Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan, the Pakistani army adopted the rape of Bangladeshi women as a military tactic. Over the course of the more than eight-month conflict, the Pakistani military raped or made sex slaves of between 200,000 and 400,000 Bangladeshi women. In 2010, the poet Tarfia Faizullah traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to interview survivors of that atrocity, whom their new government has given the name birangona, a Bengali word that means “brave woman” but might be better translated as “war heroine.” Seam, Faizullah’s collection about those interviews, and about the experience of traveling to Bangladesh to conduct them, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and will be published on March 6. Faizullah’s collection translates the Pakistani army’s atrocities against the birangona into poetry. It also investigates, and attempts to come to terms with, Faizullah’s own heritage, identity, and experience. One of her interview poems begins: “Each week I pull hard / the water from the well, / bathe in my sari, wring / it out, beat it against / the flattest rocks—Are you / Muslim or Bengali, they / asked again and again. / Both, I said, both.” Tarfia Faizullah and I spoke by telephone in January. The subjects of these poems have a striking, immediate urgency, and I wondered what inspired you to write them. In 2006, I happened to go to a poetry panel at the University of Texas at Austin, where I saw a Bangladeshi writer, Mahmud Rahman. He had translated an excerpt of a novel, Talaash, by a writer named Shaheen Akhtar. Her book is about the life of a woman who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War. It was the first time I had heard about such a wide-scale atrocity in Bangladesh. I became fascinated by it, and started researching and writing the first of the interview poems, just from imagination. What made you decide to travel to Bangladesh to interview the women yourself? Was there a particular experience that made you realize you had to go there? I realized very quickly there was only so far my imagination could go, and only so much research I could do from the States. So I applied for a Fulbright because it seemed—you used the word urgent, and it seemed very urgent for me to go to Bangladesh and record the voices of these women, and spend time in the country in which these atrocities occurred. I was struggling to articulate the difference between being seen as a whole person versus self-fetishizing. I was starting to reckon with what it means to be a South Asian Muslim woman from West Texas, and how sometimes it was very easy to identify as one thing or another. At the same time, something about the poems I was writing felt off to me. There was something wrong in my assumption that, even if the poems were imagined, I could claim to understand what a woman who had undergone something like that would be going through, and what it might mean to her. Even as I was trying not to fetishize my own identity, I was running the risk of writing poems that exoticized or diminutized the experience of being a victim, or being treated as a martyr, when a lot of the birangona haven’t lived their lives that way. That was when I knew I had to go. Read More
February 10, 2014 On the Shelf Eliot’s Darker Side, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Eliot in 1934, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell. “Everyone wants to be clever—it’s hard to give up that side and go blindly for stupidity. But even more frightening was the fact that it was so easy … I guess I have a talent for humiliation.” An interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard. On the shortlist for Britain’s new Folio Prize, open to all English-language writers: Rachel Kushner, Anne Carson, Sergio de la Pava, George Saunders, and more. Since T. S. Eliot has been lionized as Britain’s favorite poet, let’s all take a step back and remember: he was one of the most “daemonic poets who ever lived.” “O where are they now, your harridan nuns / who thumped on young heads with a metal thimble / and punished with rulers your upturned palms”: RIP Pulitzer-winning poet Maxine Kumin, who died last week, at eighty-eight.