June 14, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Joe Ollmann, Cartoonist By Joe Ollmann DAY ONE I live in a neighborhood in Montréal called Parc X. Now, I confess this sounds a lot more ghetto-y and gangsta than it actually is. It’s really a hard-working, largely immigrant neighborhood that is in imminent danger of being overrun by white hipsters. We do literally go through a hole in a fence from our slum to take our son to his school in the neighboring wealthy Anglophone area, but the fact that he wears a fancy school uniform does slightly tarnish our street cred, I admit. Montréal’s ostensibly a French-speaking city, but the French language is rarely heard in my mostly Greek and Pakistani neighborhood. I am neither French, Greek, nor Pakistani and speak none of their languages with proficiency, so I’m perpetually an outcast, though I am, by nature, a bit of a Zelig, attempting and failing to ever fit in. Always the pale, white, cultureless bridesmaid. It was Easter recently, which this year not only coincided with Greek Easter, or “Greece-ster,” as I sensitively and cleverly have named it, but also Passover. In the French-speaking world of Quebec, Passover is noted on French calendars as “Paque Juive,” or Jewish Easter (!), which my Jewish homeys find offensive based on the fact that Passover preceded Easter and therefore should not be relegated to Easter-spin-off status. Oh people, why can’t we all just get along? Read More
June 14, 2011 Poetry Poem: Pomme By Rachel Jamison Webster Today’s poem is a reimagining of Persephone’s mistaken choice to eat a pomegranate in Hades—every seed she ate condemned her to spend a month in the Underwold, leading her mother, Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, to mourn. For this reason, according to Greek myth, we have winter. Here, appropriately, the old myth is submerged in a bemused interrogation of female independence, and the ways that desire—deep physical desire—can threaten that. —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
June 13, 2011 First Person Part 1: Nathaniel Rich’s Trousers By Clancy Martin The Van Cleef & Arpels exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. I was standing shirtless in a black-and-white houndstooth blazer and wing tips with no socks at the corner of Marengo and Saint Charles watching the trolley cars rattle by. I still had my cell phone and was trying to think whom to call with a gentle heart and moral imagination in this occult, steaming city. I had a number. I dialed. “Hello?” “Hello. Is this Nathaniel Rich?” A hesitation. “Yes?” I hurried to explain who I was and how I’d obtained his cell-phone number. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m in a bit of an odd situation. I have to meet someone in an hour or so, and I don’t have any pants. Or shorts. What I’m trying to say is, frankly, I’m not sure how to explain it, but, to cut to the chase, all I have is a towel. That’s what I’m wearing right now.” It was a blue terry-cloth towel that I’d taken from the B&B when they threw me out. They’d held the rest of my clothes hostage until we settled a dispute about the bill. Fortunately it was a short walk from the house to Saint Charles where I thought, given that this was New Orleans, a cab might dare pick up a seminaked man with his wallet in one hand and his cell phone in the other. It was about a nine-block walk to Nathaniel’s duplex. Happily, it was a warm, clear day, cloudless sky and all. The birds were singing in the pink bougainvillea and the calm palm trees. I tucked the towel snugly around my hips, put my phone and my wallet in the pockets of my blazer, and stepped gingerly—feigning boldness—across Saint Charles. Read More
June 13, 2011 Events Tonight! Celebrate the Nonfiction of Roberto Bolaño By Sadie Stein To celebrate the publication of Roberto Bolaño’s collected nonfiction, New Directions and Galapagos Arts Space host translator Natasha Wimmer, novelist Francisco Goldman, writer and Believer editor Heidi Julavits, Harper’s contributing editor Wyatt Mason, and our very own Lorin Stein as they they read from and discuss Between Parentheses, a collection of the late Chilean author’s essays, reviews, speeches, and personal musings. The event is free; doors open at 7:00 P.M. Galapagos Arts Space, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn, New York. Further details here.
June 13, 2011 Arts & Culture Chess and Madness By Yascha Mounk Early on in Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (A Chess Novella) the narrator, a casual chess player, expresses his worry that a serious devotion to chess might bring on madness: How impossible to imagine […] a man of intelligence who, without going mad, again and again, over ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, applies the whole elastic power of his thinking to the ridiculous goal of backing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board! On Monday, I settled down to watch Bobby Fischer Against the World, an entertaining new HBO documentary, directed by Liz Garbus. Besides chronicling the career of one of the greatest chess players of all time, it is also a rumination on the cold war, on political extremism, on youth prodigies and the dangers of sudden fame, and on loneliness. Finally, perhaps most hauntingly, it is about the relationship between chess, genius, and madness. Bobby Fischer grew up on Lincoln Place, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the son of a single mother who spent much of her time agitating for communism. A lonely, awkward, uncommunicative boy, he immediately became obsessed with chess when, at age six, he learned how to play from the instructions of a cheap set bought at a candy store below his apartment. Soon, Bobby was staring at his chessboard for hours on end, playing both white and black, engrossed in the absurd attempt of beating himself, and of not letting himself be beaten by himself. When he was no older than thirteen, this obsession, which at first had worried his mother, seemed to pay off. At the 1956 Rosenwald Memorial Tournament in New York, Bobby’s first appearance at a major chess event, he played a game of such daring and brilliance that he instantly became a sensation in chess circles. Within a year, he had won the prestigious U.S. Open; within another year, he won the U.S. Championship; and within a year after that, he was well on his way toward a lucrative career as an internationally renowned master. Read More
June 10, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: John Cassavetes, Giant Marbles, Terry Castle By The Paris Review Last Saturday I caught a midnight showing of John Cassavetes’s Faces. Shot in LA in the mid-sixties, Faces is a movie about sex, booze, and aging—or, you might just as well say, about the faces of John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel, and Gena Rowlands. It is absolutely sad, absolutely tender, and absolutely unsentimental. You won’t cry, and for days you won’t be able to get it out of your head. Not, at least, by reading The Pumpkin Eater (1962), Penelope Mortimer’s fictional account of her marriage to Rumpole creator John Mortimer: “We didn’t love each other as most people love: and yet the moment I have said that I think of the men and women I have seen clasped together with eyes full of loathing, men and women who murder each other with all the weapons of devotion.” —Lorin Stein I’ve been enjoying Caroline Preston’s ingenious The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, a novel made up entirely of vintage images. It’s nifty and fun—but the plot moves along, too! —Sadie Stein Jon-Jon Goulian on Robert Silvers, venerable founding editor of The New York Review of Books: “A man who can field a call like that with such composure is a man, you might say, whose head is still full of marbles, and yet that would leave open the possibility, inconceivable to me, that Bob might one day lose a few. That leaves only one alternative: Bob’s head contains one giant marble, one only, and you will have to behead him to make him give it up.” —L. S. Maybe the summer is provoking more wanderlust in me than usual, because this week I read two novels about runaways. First up was Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten. I moved on to Denis Johnson’s Angels. Reading it late at night in the immensely humid heat and borderline-nonexistent light of my tiny bedroom seemed to underscore every bizarre and frightening episode of Johnson’s book. —Natalie Jacoby Prior to reading Terry Castle’s collection The Professor: A Sentimental Education, I was only familiar with her jaw-dropping Sontag reminiscences—but I’m sorry it took me so long: all her essays are that funny, pithy, and unexpected. —S. S. Wesley Yang’s remarkable n+1 essay about Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at the Virginia Tech massacre, is now available as a Kindle single. —Thessaly La Force On the lighter side, I recommend our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, on how to survive Disney World—minus the fear and loathing. —L. S. A George Plimpton video game? —T. L.