July 15, 2013 Video & Multimedia Watch Richard Wright Act in Native Son By Sadie Stein In 1948, Richard Wright starred in this screen test for the film adaptation of his classic 1940 novel, Native Son. Says Studio 360’s Amanda Aronczyk, “if that sounds like a bad idea, that’s because it was”—not least because the non-actor was twice as old as twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas—but this clip remains a fascinating piece of literary and cinematic history.
July 15, 2013 History Required Reading for Bastille Day By Ted Scheinman Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of 30 June 1878. So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. It is the passionate printed advice of M. Marat, to abstain, of all things, from violence. Nevertheless the hungry poor are already burning Town Barriers, where Tribute on eatables is levied; getting clamorous for food.—Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution The old saw that “an army marches on its belly” was blunted on July 14, 1789, as a half-starved, bibulous mob overran the walls of the Bastille, the Bourbon kings’ infamous political prison-turned-armory. Leaders of the rabble were more excited about hoarding gunpowder and fusils than about liberating the prison’s seven remaining, apparently apolitical inmates. Over the next two centuries, La Fête Nationale (or simply “le quatorze Juillet”) has metastasized from a Gallic celebration of freedom to a worldwide excuse for holding a multiday anarchic party, ideally with decent wine and minimal casualties. Read More
July 15, 2013 On the Shelf J. K. Rowling’s Party is Over, and Other News By Sadie Stein By now, you are probably aware that J. K. Rowling wrote detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under the guise of Robert Galbraith, an ex-military family man. Quoth she, “It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.” Can’t imagine what anyone would stand to gain by revealing the truth behind the modest seller. The publishers who turned the novel down are, of course, kicking themselves. Related: a brief history of the pseudonym. For your alienated youngster: My First Kafka.
July 12, 2013 Windows on the World Rebecca Walker, Maui, Hawaii By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. I have been looking out this window for three years. I have stared out of these rectangular panes full of hope and also despair, giddy with inspiration to connect and overtaken with a throbbing desire to disengage. I suppose this is what writing is to me: gripping the rope that swings between reaching out and pulling in. But whatever my mood, I always love the light beyond this window. I love the quiet. I love my two empty chairs, sentinels awaiting their visitors, open to the promise of more. I feel at home in this spot, on this road to the small village of Hana, on this tiny piece of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I love the rain that pours down, thunderous and crashing, before sunshine, harsh and stunning, pierces through once again. —Rebecca Walker
July 12, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Neuroscience, Drugs, and Poetry By The Paris Review Our contributor Ben Lerner turned me on to an astonishing new book, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, by Michael W. Clune. A graduate student in the English department at Johns Hopkins, Clune led a double life as a junkie that in the late nineties took him from the slums of Baltimore to a Chicago jail, and, eventually, into recovery. But White Out is more than a recovery memoir. It is a phenomenology of heroin addiction—the single best thing I have read about the drug—and a deep, often beautiful meditation on the nature of memory, pleasure, and time. “In the timeless space of dope I discovered that time is the great enemy of thought … The teacup I hold in my hand is a bullet shot out of a gun. It’s no wonder that it’s so impossibly hard to think in these conditions. It’s no wonder that maggots grow in fresh meat, that an electric bill is overdue as soon as you open it, that the first time you try something you’re already addicted.” —Lorin Stein You may remember Samuel Delany from, among other things, our Spring 2011 issue. In that interview, he briefly mentions Dennis, his partner of more than twenty years. Among the photographs we considered to accompany the conversation were shots of Chip and Dennis on the couch in their Harlem apartment, and though they didn’t make the final cut, the images contained an intimacy that was, frankly, very touching. Little did I know that their relationship is the subject of its own book. First published twenty-five years ago and reissued this month by Fantagraphics, Bread and Wine is a graphic novella that gives their origin story, beginning when Dennis had been living on the streets in New York for six years. Loosely structured around Hölderlin’s elegy of the same name, the book is told from Delany’s point of view and is by turns realist and direct and revelatory and romantic. In the same way, Mia Wolff’s superb black-and-white art is alternately detailed and spare, drawing the most out of this honest and heartfelt tale. —Nicole Rudick David Searcy’s essay “The Hudson River School,” in the latest issue of Granta, is about a lot of things: western Texas, Google Maps, coyotes, the Jared Coffin House, and flossing. And just like his previous essays in the Review (here and here) and his fiction, Searcy leaves it up to the reader to put together the pieces. I’ve always loved that in books. My favorite section is his take on the theater of Google Maps, when you click from one point to another, sweeping “away to the rear like smoke in a wind before things re-materialize around the next coordinate” and the smudges in the distance could be anything—a sheep, a crying child, or, simply, emptiness. —Justin Alvarez I came across Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars on the bookshelf of the house where I’m staying. Sacks writes on the peculiarities of the human brain with both awe and humility; he trusted his patients’ accounts of rare achromatopsia, of reprieve from total blindness, and of anterograde amnesia when no other doctors would. The fact that it was published twenty years ago and still offers significant theories on neurology speaks to Sacks’s importance in the medical and literary worlds. —Ellen Duffer The small coastal commune of Cassis, located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of Southern France, is a hub of tourism, boasting a coastline of stunning inlets (calanques) and an abundance of venues for consumption of moules-frites. While visiting last week, I was surprised to come upon a poetry shop, selling nothing but customized and framed poems and boasting “plus de 4000 poèmes à votre service pour ceux que vous aimez.” A refreshing change from overpriced bottled water! —Kate Rouhandeh
July 12, 2013 Look Spoiler Alert: Why We Abandon Books By Sadie Stein This infographic on “the psychology of abandonment”—that is, why we don’t finish certain books—makes for fun reading. But even more interesting is the Goodreads list of those titles most frequently abandoned. We don’t want to spoil Stieg Larsson for anyone, but let’s just say that those who don’t persevere are missing out on some sexual sadism and computer espionage.