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The Daily

 

  • First Person

    Cutouts

    By

     

    A few weeks ago I travelled to Israel to give some talks. Along with invitations to universities I had been contacted by the United States Embassy in Jerusalem and asked if I would participate in an event that would be part of “the cultural outreach program” before President Obama’s visit at the end of March. At first the terms of my employment were loose: I could discuss any aspect of my writing or writing life that I chose. As I was born in London and only came to America when I was twenty-six, I thought I might discuss the seductive appeal that American novelists, especially Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, held for me when I was a young man and how perhaps, more than anything, it was reading their fiction which stirred my desires to move to New York and become, if I could, both an American citizen and an American writer.

    The embassy thought this would be fine, but then someone higher up the ladder than the delightful and accommodating woman I had been dealing with decided to intervene. Would it be possible for me, in some way, to link my talk to the theme of “Great American Speeches?” I replied that while I had certainly admired and been impressed by President Obama’s Grant Park election victory speech, and while I had been thoroughly wowed by Aretha’s hat at the fist inauguration, I couldn’t really see how “Great American Speeches” had anything at all to do with my writing. Read More

  • On Food

    Drinking in the Golden Age

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    We live in a golden age of booze. I realized this a few weeks ago while doing shots of samogon at Speed Rack, a women’s bartending contest that had been described earlier in the evening as the “March Madness of boobies and booze” and the “roller derby of cocktail competitions.” While I swilled Russian moonshine across from a giant ice sculpture shaped like a bottle of Chartreuse, Jillian Webster, a dirty-blond Angeleno in a sleeveless Budweiser T-shirt, dueled with Eryn Reece, a dark-haired New Yorker wearing the black-and-pink-flame Speed Rack top. As they scooped and stirred to the sounds of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” the 500-strong crowd roared its encouragement. With frenzy of pouring and a smack of the buzzer, Reece pulled ahead, winning first place, bartender’s glory, and a trip for two to France. Read More

  • Arts & Culture

    Some Realms I Owned: Elizabeth Bishop in Manhattan

    By
    Elizabeth Bishop, "Interior with Extension Cord." Undated; watercolor, gouache, and ink.

    Elizabeth Bishop, “Interior with Extension Cord.” Undated; watercolor, gouache, and ink.

    There are thirteen addresses in Manhattan where devout readers can stalk Elizabeth Bishop’s ghost: seven hotels and six apartments. Because no historical plaques have been hung to mark them, vigilance is crucial. You could pass by any one of them without realizing one of America’s greatest poets once called it home, or some version thereof. If these locales are not enough, peruse the writer’s several thousand letters for additional jaunts. At the entrance to the public library’s main reading room, for example, you can sit on the bench where, in 1936, Elizabeth arranged to meet Marianne Moore. The city is dirty enough that a small remnant of the writer, if only the dust on her soles, might linger there.

    The compulsion to visit Elizabeth’s former residences is the same one that drives Shakespeare lovers to Stratford-upon-Avon and Thoreau converts to Walden Pond. Oscar Wilde’s lipstick-covered tomb proves such journeys are never simply educational field trips, but affairs of deep passion. Accordingly, I begin a pilgrimage: I will visit all these addresses. And so I set out on a cool spring day for 16 Charles Street, the poet’s first Manhattan residence, where she spent the fall of 1934. Bishop was then twenty-three years old, a would-be writer whose mind was as much a boxing ring for hope and trepidation as my own. She was sick that New Year’s Eve and spent the night on the floor, perusing a map of the North Atlantic. Doped up on “adrenalin and cough syrup,” she wrote:

    Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
    Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
    showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
    where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
    Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
    drawing it unperturbed around itself?
    Along the fine tan sandy shelf
    is the land tugging at the sea from under?

    As I examine the wide building where Bishop once lived, my own questions sound comparatively banal: Was this the same brass doorknob she turned every day? When Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber was renovated in the twentieth century, several of the queen’s dress pins were found wedged between the floorboards. I scrutinize the red-brick facade for a similar detail that might bring the poet into focus, but whatever she may have left behind cannot be seen through these stoic windows, all gridded neatly in white, each revealing less than the last. Read More