December 9, 2022 Dispatch At Proust Weekend: The Madeleine Event By Olivia Kan-Sperling Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called “ambrosia salad.” It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a “Proust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests”! Read More
December 8, 2022 On Sports What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Goals? By Jonathan Wilson The U.S.-Wales Men’s World Cup Match and Opening Ceremony in Doha, Qatar, on November 21, 2022. State Department photo by Ronny Przysucha, Public Domain. Not long after Argentina lost in a stunning upset to Saudi Arabia and hardly anyone outside the losing country was crying, I read a new book, Dark Goals: How History’s Worst Tyrants Have Used and Abused the Game of Soccer, by the sports journalist Luciano Wernicke. Evita, I learned, once tried to fix a game between two Buenos Aires teams, Banfield and Racing, first by force of will and, when that failed, by offering a bribe to Racing’s goalkeeper: he could become mayor of his hometown. Of course, that kind of behavior is behind us (FIFA? Bribes? Are you kidding?), although government pressure and reward still hover on soccer’s periphery: Emmanuel Macron famously called Kylian Mbappé the best player in the current tournament, and urged him not to move from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, because, he said, “France needs you.” After the Saudi victory, a national holiday was declared in the oil-rich kingdom, all amusement parks were free, and citizens could enjoy their favorite rides for as long as they wished. In Qatar, outside interference of another kind was exposed when it came to light that those bouncing, joyful, muscle-bound, tattooed Qatar supporters in identical maroon T-shirts were actually faux fans imported from Lebanon and elsewhere, all-expenses-paid. They had been trained in patriotic Qatari chants. Meanwhile, the Ghana Football Association appealed to a higher power and urged two days of fasting and prayer nationwide to give its team the necessary boost. This sounds quite reasonable; there’s been an awful lot of skyward finger-pointing and prostrations of thanks by players after they score a goal. Someone’s deity is clearly playing a part. No one, to be clear, ever thanks God for a loss. Read More
December 8, 2022 Poetry The Leap By Dan Beachy-Quick Starling. Photograph by Raman Kumar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. The poet Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer in Amherst, Massachusetts, a world away from the beloved Kashmir of his childhood, twenty-one years ago today. The title of the book he published that year, Rooms Are Never Finished, testifies to the unfinished work of a writer whose life ended too soon, at the age of fifty-two. In his first poem published in The Paris Review, “Snow on the Desert,” Ali wrote about another singer interrupted mid-performance: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens, air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died. Ali, too, continued to sing after darkness had fallen, with the posthumous publication of his landmark collection of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, in 2003. Few poets have done so much to further our contemporary appreciation of the ghazal—an ancient Arabic verse form that’s shaped the historical course of classical Persian and modern Indian poetry over many centuries. What Ali once called the ghazal’s “ravishing disunities” have been adopted by American poets from Daniel Hall to Reginald Dwayne Betts, Patricia Smith, and countless young writers in introductory poetry workshops today. I teach the poems of Call Me Ishmael Tonight, including “A Ghazal for Michael Palmer,” to my students every year. Though I never met Ali, it’s a way of remembering him. I learn something new from his poetry whenever I revisit it, and on the anniversary of his death, we’re fortunate enough to share a new ghazal by one of Ali’s own former students, the poet Daniel Beachy-Quick, in memory of the “The mind / Love rushes through.” —Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy, poetry editor Read More
December 7, 2022 Lectures Misreading Ulysses By Sally Rooney This text was delivered as the T.S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on October 23, 2022. In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published. Read More
December 6, 2022 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Winter Issue By Emily Stokes Friends sometimes ask me why I still bother going to the theater. It’s a fair question. Most of the time, I’ll mention a play only to complain about it at length—the pretentious set design, the hammy performances, the man in the audience who laughed very loudly to show that he’d understood the joke. Does any other art form have such a low hit rate? Yet I persist, because of the few plays that manage, in some way, to alter me—and on those rare occasions when they do, the years of disappointment only heighten my elation. Our new Winter issue is not actually devoted to the theater, but several of the pieces we chose do capture the same miraculous thrill I experience when plays go right. There is, for instance, Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude,” in which a London actor finds herself part of a troupe putting on Hamlet in the West Bank. You’ll also find an excerpt from Old Actress, a new play by Lucas Hnath. It’s set in the living room of a woman who is struggling to memorize her lines for a production of a play called Death Tax (also by Hnath) and who has enlisted a younger and far less successful actor to help her learn them. On the page, the script’s dialogue looks worryingly avant-garde—the punctuation and spacing are a copyeditor’s nightmare. But read aloud—my deputy, Lidija, and I tried it, surreptitiously, in my office—it is almost eerily naturalistic, such that you wonder why some playwrights pretend people speak in perfect paragraphs. Read More
December 5, 2022 First Person Summer 1993: Walter Gieseking, Debussy’s Préludes I & II, EMI (La cathédrale engloutie) By Helen DeWitt Claude Monet, “Rouen Cathedral,West Façade, Sunlight,” 1894. Licensed under CC0 2.0. I’m living in East London, in Cadogan Terrace, at the far end of Victoria Park. I work as a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph, typing in stories dictated over the phone. (This was a very long time ago.) Sometimes it is crown green bowls, sometimes it is a yachting regatta in Pwllheli. Sometimes it is a massacre in Bosnia. On a whiteboard are names we might find hard to spell: Izetbegović. Banja Luka. Srebrenica. I bicycle to Canary Wharf down Grove Road. The last of a row of terrace houses is in scaffolding, then gradually uncovered to reveal a concrete shell. For a long time I thought this was just the way houses looked beneath the skin, but this is, in fact, Rachel Whiteread’s House, which will go on to win the Turner before being demolished by the council. Whiteread makes casts of the space enclosed by ordinary objects, using the object as mold. (This generally destroys the object. Space repays the violence inflicted by the objects which imprison it.) Whiteread will go on to create Water Tower, a resin cast of a water tower, and Nameless Library, a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, of which more later. I have bought a small blond upright piano for £900 despite my low pay. Read More