January 13, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Slanderous Correspondence; Imitations By Lorin Stein I take great and perverse joy in reading insulting, inflammatory, and slanderous correspondence between authors, publishers, and celebrities. Could you recommend some particularly bilious rivalries? As Mr. Wilson so justly proclaims in the beginning of “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” we are indeed old friends. I fully share “the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation” that he says he feels for me. In the 1940s, during my first decade in America, he was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapaest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches. So begins the famous response, by Vladimir Nabokov, to a negative review by Edmund Wilson in The New York Review of Books. The book: Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. A fun game to play: Exactly where does Nabokov start to show his teeth? Is it “the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels”? Or “not necessarily pertaining to his profession”? Or even that “justly” in sentence one? Six years later, when Norman Mailer was attacked by Gore Vidal in that same magazine, Mailer took his case to the masses—on The Dick Cavett Show—with less sinuous results. The lesson, most publishers will tell you, is never respond. But it’s awfully good TV. I am taking a beginning poetry class and am expected to write imitations of poets on the class list. What should I be careful to do or not do? What should I pay attention to in an imitation? To get the most out of the exercise, try to make the meter sound exactly like the meter of the poem you’re imitating. And make sure the teacher checks your work. The meter will look and sound right to you—and if you are a beginner, it will almost certainly be wrong. (You will say your words out loud in your head as if they marched along ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, when in fact they will go baah-duh-dee, buh-dee-doo.) Don’t get hung up on matching the vocabulary of the old poems. You won’t get it right, and it will sound fake. Use words that are more or less natural to you. And have fun! Read More
January 13, 2012 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Keith Haring’s Journals, ‘Library’ By The Paris Review I could spend days nosing around the Guggenheim’s online publication archive. The museum has digitized a number of its rare and out-of-print publications and made them available for free. What bounty! Even in black and white, the abstract compositions in the 1940 catalogue for “Art of Tomorrow,” one of the Guggenheim’s first shows, still look revolutionary. —Nicole Rudick Of the many books I received over the holidays, the only one I have read cover to cover is the new edition of Keith Haring’s Journals. Self-analytical but never narcissistic, the artist writes insightfully about art, death, and his generation: “It’s not an easy time to be alive and maybe an even more difficult time to die.” —Artie Niederhoffer I moved to Berlin when I was twenty-one, just out of college, and I laughed aloud in recognition when Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in his forthcoming A Sense of Direction, described living in the city as “an infinitely long weekend with your parents out of town … The old crimes licensed you to ignore the claims of the past; the low cost of living licensed you to ignore the demands of the present; and the future was something that would happen when we moved back to New York, where many of us would once more live in uncomfortable proximity to our actual parents.” —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn I’ve been reading Tom Clark’s blogging on Vanitas—check out “Clean.” —Sadie Stein I can’t help but admire Trong G. Nguyen’s Library. Since 2007, the New York–based artist has been rewriting books, word for word, on individual grains of rice. Very little is lost in translation. —Eliza Martin I’ve been very distracted by Letterheady today. Gertrude Stein and Ray Bradbury both had particularly appealing stationery. —Emma del Valle If you’re interested in multifaceted companies, read Interview Magazine’s chat with Jean Touitou, the founder of A. P. C. clothing. Touitou is a sharp man, and he sheds light on his journey to the top. He began his career in fashion at age twenty-six, about which he says: “Basically a man at twenty-six is like a woman at sixteen … An adolescent.” —Jessica Calderon
January 12, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” By Robyn Creswell Thomas Sayers Ellis. Most of the poems stuck in my head are rap songs. Rap is the music I grew up listening to, and the lyrics from those days, the late eighties and early nineties, have stayed with me. I’ve forgotten most of the poems I had to memorize at school; of Keats’s “To Autumn,” I remember only the famous lines. On the other hand, Big Daddy Kane’s “Smooth Operator,” Rakim’s “Mahogany,” or Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind”—these are poems I know by heart, from beginning to end, and will probably never forget. Some people don’t believe raps are poems. They have a point. On the page, arranged into lines and stanzas, raps lose most of their appeal. I’m grateful to Bradley and DuBois’s enormous Anthology of Rap, if only because I now know what Raekwon is saying on “Triumph” (which doesn’t mean I understand it: “The swift chancellor, flex, the white-gold tarantula / Track truck diesel, play the weed, god, substantiala.” Can I get a footnote?). But when raps are spelled out like this they lose their fluidity, their life in three dimensions. Rap is not monotonous, though it is almost always composed in couplets and four-four lines. But the good songs always surprise you, leave you wrong-footed, put the emphasis or rhyme where you don’t expect it. There is no doubt that Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” is a poem, but it is one of the few that feels to me like a rap—an especially good one. This is because of the way it establishes a pattern and then continually breaks away from it. The poem is based on the repetition of or, but as we read through it, what seemed like a formal constraint becomes a principle of transformation, a hinge that keeps flexing. The poem begins, as I read it, by riffing on the either/or logic of identity questionnaires (“You could get with this, or you could get with that,” as Black Sheep once put it, in a different context). But it quickly ramifies into geography, history, poetics. Read it out loud a few times and you might find you already have it memorized: Read More
January 12, 2012 The Culture Diaries A Day in Culture: Jeremiah Moss, Blogger and Writer By Jeremiah Moss It’s the final weekend for Ray’s Pizza, the true original, which has been on Prince Street since 1959, so I head down for a last slice. 3:55 P.M. From the East Village I take a roundabout way, across Houston Street, where the two artists known as Faile (Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller) are putting the finishing touches on their giant mural, a comic-booky collage that brings to mind the organic degradation of street advertising and art, layer upon layer, ripped and peeled. The city is like this in places, one stratum revealed beneath the next, except in the places that have been excavated down to bedrock to make the past disappear. I end up talking to one of the Patricks while the other Patrick is pasting a Chairman Mao to the wall. Patrick tells me how the images and text have all been pulled from comics, movie posters, and other ephemera. He says, “We consider ourselves scavengers” of pop culture. And then Chairman Mao needs direction. “Tear it a little more,” Patrick tells Patrick. “A little more. That’s right.” 4:05 P.M. Houston takes me to Eldridge then to Stanton, where I think to detour into the Fusion Arts Museum, one of those places I’ve been meaning to visit but never have, only it’s not Fusion Arts anymore. It’s a new gallery, something called Lambert Fine Arts. The once colorful gate of bicycle parts, propellers, and bombs has been painted solid gray. I go inside anyway and check out Terrenceo’s paintings on pizza boxes, portraits of people taking their own photos in mirrors with cell phones, our tepid new expression of despair. Downstairs, Allison Berkoy’s spooky dolls are muttering to each other with their talking video faces, none of them listening to what the others have to say. Read More
January 11, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. The joy of books. The Hatchet Job of the Year. What Bill Clinton reads. What Michelle Obama doesn’t. “And maybe it’s trivial to know that Salman Rushdie loves Carrie Fisher, quotes Clive James and is looking forward to seeing Hari Kunzru and Tom Stoppard at the Jaipur literary festival, but knowing random bits of information about people one admires just is, for whatever reason, enjoyable. It’s like being friends with them, except they have no idea who you are, but it doesn’t matter because this is still closer than you’d ever normally get.” Random House acquires Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart. Roald Dahl goes postal. Tolkien is snubbed. “First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.” Joanna Newsom, novelist? McBooks. “If Norman Mailer likes me, I’ll kill myself.” Sayonara, Nook.
January 11, 2012 First Person The Escape Artist By Chris Wallace Graham Greene stole the title of my memoirs. Rueful and proud, ringing of a boastful confession, imaginary maps, and the magician’s exegesis, his Ways of Escape would have been a perfect header for my career of flight—from reality, relationships, and, finally, the country. It is a series of escapes in which Mister Greene, who made so seductive the life of an exiled libertine, is not entirely innocent. But he needn’t take all the blame. At least part of the credit for my fleet-footedness is due to a childhood spent shunting between single parents and rival school districts (or is it the other way around?). I was always arriving, never staying too long, and, with another departure constantly looming, my relationship to home became abstracted to fungible goods, dispassionate. As an only child, I spent a lot of time by myself. But I never ran with imaginary friends, opting instead to invent imaginary versions of myself. I dreamed constantly of flying (by mastering the basketball double pump), climbed ficus trees, and read Dragonlance books. Their rogues and wizards enchanted me, wandering far from their homes, always in search of a tree city called Solace. In the fifth grade, I asked the girl I was crazy about to go steady with me, only to call back five minutes later to explain that I’d had too many Jolly Ranchers, and, unfortunately, it was over between us. I’ve left every relationship since—be it of five months or five years—in a similar fashion. It really isn’t them. It’s me, and I have to leave all that I know to get rid of him, to start over. Like a writer in the movies, with a pile of crumpled paper in the bin beside him, I am forever beginning anew. This next draft is going to be the keeper—the real me. Meanwhile, I’ve inherited my father’s method for home improvement: moving. At the end of my chapters I pull up stakes like a fugitive and purge everything, from beds to furniture to collectibles and clothing. A stack of my first-edition Gavin Lambert books now lives in a baby nursery in Culver City, an espresso maker is in Echo Park, and a few dozen ties are reentering circulation from an Out of the Closet on Fairfax. Jobs are no different. At least four times I’ve gone home from a day’s work without a word, never to return. I’ve left schools, left my position as starting quarterback for a college football team, and left this piece a half dozen times. My distinguishing feature is a pair of taillights. Read More