November 21, 2012 First Person The Witch and the Poet: Part 1 By Pamela Petro Toward the end of February, 1980, a witch told me I was a poet. This happened in the town of Galilee, in Rhode Island. Like the other Galilee, it was on the coast, and also like that Galilee, it was as good a place as any for a creation myth. I had to interview the witch for a newspaper my friend Allen edited at Brown. I don’t know where he found the witch or why he lent me his car to go interview her. I was nineteen and hadn’t written anything, though I claimed to “write,” as if writing were more a state of being than a practice. I got the assignment, I think, because Allen wanted to date me, even though I had no intention, ever, of going out with him. (Okay, I went once: a very cold winter picnic in a park at midnight, with blankets and a blindfold, but that was it. I suspected then that I wasn’t just uninterested in Allen—I was uninterested in picnicking with men in general—but hadn’t yet learned the vocabulary to explain what that meant, even to myself). When I went to see the witch I made my roommate Wendy go with me. No way was I going to see a witch alone at night. Read More
November 21, 2012 Video & Multimedia Animated Discussion By Sadie Stein We love illustrator Damien Florebert Cuypers and Benoît François’s new animated project, Stories of Philosophies. As he describes it, each episode is composed of two parts, each of which presents a philosopher reacting to the presence of an object in the manner of his well-known philosophical vision. The following features René Descartes and Nietzsche. Stories of Philosophies from Histoires de Philosophies on Vimeo.
November 21, 2012 First Person Letter from Tel Aviv: Love and Rockets By Rebecca Sacks It’s prime rocket-time in Tel Aviv and I have to pee. This is a totally legitimate concern, but one which I am still not able to bring up to my Israeli friends: bathroom timing. The last place you want to be during a rocket is the bathroom, I hear. The tiles and glass make it really, really dangerous. We only get one, maybe two sirens a day in Tel Aviv. So the chances are pretty slim. But can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to explain that to someone? “These scars I earned during the bombing of 2012, while I was on the can.” The first time I heard a bomb siren all I could think was “The VengaBus is Coming.” I was in a café in the north of Tel Aviv, trying to read a menu upside-down. (I’m learning Hebrew.) There had been news of escalated bombings in the south, but that was all very far from Tel Aviv. Well, nothing is particularly far geographically in Israel, but Tel Aviv is a world away. The city has a way of blocking out the din of conflicts within Israeli society, as well as pressures from the antagonistic forces surrounding its borders. The pathological determination of the Tel Avivi not to let anything fuck with their shit is hard to underestimate. It’s a bit like the way girls look straight ahead when they don’t want to acknowledge some creepy guy doing the “psst, psst” holler from a moving car. Read More
November 21, 2012 On the Shelf Stephen King: The Musical, and Other News By Sadie Stein It’s a David and Goliath story, if David were also pretty tall: the Tolkien Estate is suing Warner Brothers for a cool eighty million dollars over online slot machines and other digital merch that they claim violates copyright. In more literary retirement news: Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is also calling it a day. Jennifer Egan, Roxana Robinson, Philip Gourevitch, John Burnham Schwartz, Jane Green, Michael Cunningham, Nick Flynn, Mary Morris, and Darin Strauss all have a mammoth group cameo in Michael Maren’s forthcoming film, A Short History of Decay. Because numerous bookstores are refusing to stock titles from the Amazon imprint, one of its authors claims that his book The 4-Hour Chef is “poised to be the most banned book in U.S. history.” Dubious. Presented sans comment: “Elvis Costello and Sheryl Crow will both be singing on the soundtrack of a ghostly musical written by Stephen King and John Mellencamp.”
November 20, 2012 Arts & Culture Early Promise By Sadie Stein You may be familiar with Robert Bridges, who served as England’s Poet Laureate. But chances are, you are unfamiliar with the work of Digby Mackworth Dolben, a school friend of Bridges’s who died at only nineteen. An eccentric and a zealous Anglo-Catholic, long after his death Dolben continued to exercise a compelling hold over his circle, which included Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1915, Bridges had published a volume of his school friend’s poetry. As Carl Miller writes in the Public Domain Review, The Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben does have a curious interest of its own. The poems themselves are indifferent, at best the juvenilia of an artist whose promise had been thwarted by an early death, but Bridges introduced them with a lengthy memoir that depicts Dolben’s strangely troubled life with understated skill. After his premature death by drowning, Hopkins (into whose relationship with the young man many a scholar has looked) wrote, “there can very seldom have happened the loss of so much beauty (in body and mind and life) and of the promise of still more as there has been in his case.”
November 20, 2012 Arts & Culture The Art of Friendship By Jessica Vivian Chiu Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition. When I was thirty, I moved back to Philadelphia. I had only been gone a few years, and though I knew better, I had half expected it to be just as I’d left it. It was not: most of my friends had left the city altogether or moved, married, to the edges of town. Occasionally, I would run into people I had once known, encounters that produced deep and surprising embarrassment in me; unexplained life choices digested in fast, always alienating, appraisal. The more unsettling thing was that my close friendships were changing, too. Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give? And around this same time, I discovered the curious, decades-long friendship between the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and the sculptor Wharton Esherick. Their relationship seemed to me model in some ways; they were friends for over twenty years, mostly living in different cities. Each man was dedicated to pursuing his own line of work, and the insecurities and single-mindedness of ambition seemed analogous too to the ways that adulthood can separate us from our friends. Read More