August 25, 2011 Poetry Poem: Episode By Jennifer Michael Hecht Jennifer Michael Hecht. It’s Thursday, as good a day as any for an incisive and surprising poem by Jennifer Michael Hecht about a hangover. We liked it because of the way it evokes the light mantle of head-clouded shame that follows too much bourbon or rum; its wrapping, self-analyzing lines convey the cloudiness and the strange clarity that come the day after drinking too much. Who hasn’t vowed that “nothing that ever happened/ will happen again?” —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
August 24, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. A cultural news roundup. New York poet Samuel Menashe has died at 85. James Salter wins the Rea Award for short fiction. Would Joyce have tweeted? One biographer thinks so. BookLamp: it’s like Pandora, for books. “Writing about sports the way that smart people talk about sports is a simple idea, and a good one.” E-books, now with sound tracks. “Now the fact that the president of the United States apparently doesn’t read women writers is not the greatest crisis facing the arts, much less the nation—but it’s upsetting nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their manifestations may seem relatively benign.” Publishing is experiencing an upswing. But are there too many books being published already? The Berlin library will return books confiscated during the Third Reich—including a Communist Manifesto that may have belonged to Friedrich Engels. Google celebrates Borges. Being immortalized by Julia Roberts isn’t enough to save one London bookshop.
August 24, 2011 Arts & Culture Gerard Malanga By Lars Movin Gerard Malanga, 2010. Photograph by Asako Kitaori. © Asako Kitaori Born in the Bronx in 1943, Gerard Malanga started writing poetry in his late teens. His first volume, 3 Poems for Benedetta Barzini, appeared in 1967, and he has since published roughly a dozen collections of poetry. Since his start in the New York art scene of the sixties, Malanga has also worked extensively in film and photography. He is primarily known for his emphatic black-and-white portraits of fellow writers, poets, and artists as well as Screen Tests, a series of silent film portraits he produced with Andy Warhol. The following is an excerpt of a conversation that took place via e-mail over several months in the fall of 2010 between my home in Copenhagen and Malanga’s in upstate New York. You’re a photographer, filmmaker, and poet. Which of these is primary for you? I’ve always considered myself a poet in everything that I do, whether it’s photography or movie-making. The one thing that unites all three is the image, the language of the image. Jean Cocteau was my inspiration and model as a polymath. His works were evidence of what one can do in a number of mediums. When I started writing poetry in my senior term of high school—I was sixteen—I felt in touch with a secret language. It gave me a sense of identity. I suddenly discovered I wasn’t alone. I saw that I was part of a tradition. I truly believe I was fated to become a poet and that I was guided by some mysterious force. I was a kid of the streets. There were no books to speak of in the apartment where we lived. The neighborhood library was my home away from home and on weekends I’d go to the movies, absorbed by the magic of the big screen. All that I’ve done in my life thus far, all the poems and all the pictures, are not so much an intermingling of my life with art but a divine accident. Read More
August 23, 2011 Bulletin James Salter Wins the 2010 Rea Award By The Paris Review Photograph by Lan Rys. James Salter, winner of The Paris Review’s 2011 Hadada Prize, has been given the 2010 Rea Award for the Short Story, a lifetime-achievement prize bestowed annually on “a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made a significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form.” This year ’s jurors praised Salter as “the most stylish and grave and exact of writers.” Past winners of the prize include Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, and John Updike. To read more, see our complete coverage of James Salter month.
August 23, 2011 Odd Jobs Rubbish Collector; Barman By Chris Flynn Detail from Jean-François Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure, 1855, oil on canvas. Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs. Sophie Cunningham: I was once a “Do the Right Thing” girl for the Environment Protection Authority. This meant that I roamed the beaches of Victoria for an entire summer in, I think, 1985, wearing a “Do the Right Thing” T-shirt, with a robot rubbish bin controlled by a puppeteer hiding behind trees. The robot would say, “Please put your rubbish in me,” or, for larks, “Fuck you.” I would smile and hand people a “Do the Right Thing” rubbish bag. Michael Cunningham: I worked in bars for years. Most prominently, a gay bar in Laguna beach, which featured bartenders who all looked more or less like Michelangelo’s David and wore only slightly more by way of costumes. I, however, did not look anything like any sculpture I had ever seen. I learned early on that the bar manager always hired one odd man out—specifically, a boy who was more clever than he was beautiful, who functioned as comic relief, who was, as I gathered, meant not only to entertain the patrons but to assure them that the wall of air between them and the men behind the bar was at least semipermeable; to be their animal familiar in a world of robust male camaraderie they were invited to observe but not ever to enter. My predecessor had been a sweet, Rubenesque boy they called Bubbles. The bar sported a South Seas theme. Brown palm fronds strung with white Christmas lights curled down from the ceiling. Tiki heads scowled from the walls. The bar top was made of glass and, under it, bug-eyed Japanese goldfish swam in listless confusion over a bed of blue gravel. Every now and then one of the fish expired, which would not be good for business in any establishment but was especially unfortunate there, where reminders of mortality did not play well to the generally elderly crowd. If one of the fish went belly-up during a busy night, as they were mysteriously wont to do, we covered the corpse with a pile of napkins or a dish of peanuts, though throughout the night it was necessary to keep moving the napkins or peanuts, as unobtrusively as possible, because the deceased tended to float in unpredictable directions. Chris Flynn is the books editor at The Big Issue and the fiction editor at Australian Book Review.
August 23, 2011 At Work Cathy Park Hong on ‘Engine Empire’ By Robyn Creswell The summer issue of The Paris Review includes a series of poems by Cathy Park Hong. Hong has published two books of poetry, Translating Mo’um (2002) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. The poems published in this issue come from a longer work, entitled “Fort Ballads.” How does it fit into your forthcoming book, Engine Empire? “Fort Ballads” is part of the first section in Engine Empire. The poems in the collection range from a trilogy, ranging from Western ballads to love poems set in present-day industrial China to poems set in a virtual future. “Fort Ballads” follows a band of outlaw fortune-seekers who travel to a California boomtown during the 1800s. The boomtown isn’t real; it’s full of strange, violent, sometimes surreal happenings. It’s my own way of mythologizing California, which is where I’m from. The main character is “Our Jim,” who’s half Comanche Indian. In creating him, I was thinking of the typical iconic Western guys, like Billy the Kid, but his story is also reminiscent of Huck Finn and maybe a little of Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. He’s an orphan, a cipher, a boy trapped between identities, both innocent and vengeful. But the section isn’t all narrative—there are sound poems in there as well, where I let myself wallow in kitschy Western vernacular. Read More