March 3, 2011 Arts & Culture Mr. Mayor? Mr. Mayor? By Thessaly La Force The Armory Show kicked off today. Yesterday, The Daily’s special culture correspondent Jon Cotner was at the fair’s press conference with Mayor Bloomberg. Says Jon, “Reporters kept attacking Bloomberg for his education cuts. Eventually Bloomberg said in desperation, ‘If anyone wants to talk about art, I’m happy to talk about art.’” And so were we.
March 2, 2011 In Memoriam Open City By Lorin Stein We are all very sad to hear that Open City magazine has closed up shop after twenty years of downtown glory. We looked up to them as big brothers- and sisters-in-arms. As Thessaly put it just now, every issue got you on its wavelength—and that wavelength was a good place to be. Open City introduced many of us to writers like David Berman, Sam Lipsyte, Samantha Gillison, and Mary Gaitskill (not to mention Open City editors Thomas Beller, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Robert Bingham). It was the epitome of cool, from its design to the mix of fiction and poetry in its pages to its rent parties (price of admission: one copy). Even the readings were cool—as cool as the Aqua Velva eyes of head editor Joanna Yas. (We hope and trust another magazine will put those eyes to use, and fast.) The good news is that Open City Books will stay in business. The backlist may be small, but with early works by Berman, Lipsyte, Edward St. Aubyn, it is mighty indeed. We look forward to Open City Books’ next publication: Lara Vapnyar’s novel The Smell of Pine.
March 2, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Croissant Not Included By Lorin Stein Johnathan Wilhelmi of Everyman Espresso on 13th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. Wasn’t this a nice morning surprise! Everyman Espresso, in Manhattan’s East Village, is giving away free coffee with every purchase of our winter issue. If you want your local café to stock the Review, tell them to get in touch. We’ll be happy to set them up with an account.
March 2, 2011 At Work Adrienne Rich on ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve’ By Kate Waldman Photograph by Robert Giard. Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. One of the twentieth century’s most exhaustively celebrated poets and essayists, she counts among her many honors a National Book Award, a Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Hass has ascribed to her work the qualities of salt and darkness, praising its “relentless need to confront difficulty.” But Rich’s latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, ranges from dismay to joy, the outraged to the erotic. Over e-mail, Rich shared her thoughts on poetry and power, the search for a more nuanced wartime aesthetic, and the meaning of the “woman citizen.” Let’s start with the title, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. The book has an epigraph from Webster’s Dictionary: definitions of the verb “to serve.” It’s an interesting range of meanings, from the idea of obedient servitude to the authoritative (from law, the military, a prison sentence), to the meeting of another’s needs, to being of use. The title poem begins with an erotic moment registered in a world of torture and violence. It turns, midway, from the sensual and “poetic” to an official grammar, parsing violent policies as you might diagram a sentence in a classroom. The poem was inflected, you could say, by interviews I was hearing on Amy Goodman’s program, Democracy Now!—about Guantánamo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the “renditioning” of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured. The line “Tonight I think no poetry will serve” suggests that no poetry can serve to mitigate such acts, they nullify language itself. One begins to write of the sensual body, but other bodies “elsewhere” are terribly present. Read More
February 28, 2011 Arts & Culture Robyn Creswell and The Angry Arab By Lorin Stein We just came across this interesting exchange between our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, and the blogger known as The Angry Arab. TAA challenged Robyn to name “one important literary book written during the Sadat era.” Click here to see Robyn’s response.
February 28, 2011 At Work Justin Taylor on ‘The Gospel of Anarchy’ By Natalie Jacoby The Gospel of Anarchy is the debut novel from Justin Taylor. The story follows a group of anarchist hippies living together in Fishgut, a house turned commune in the college town of Gainesville, Florida. Philosophizing on religion, freedom, and happiness, they await the return of their Anarchristian friend, Parker, whose left-behind journals have become their own gospel. I met with Taylor to talk about the book. The Gospel of Anarchy is your first novel. Did you encounter any challenges in the process of switching from the short story format? One of the hardest parts of writing a novel is figuring out the structure. Mine went through a lot of different versions. The “zero draft” was all in first person, told by David, and then it was all rewritten in third, but still just about him. I wanted to include the others’ perspectives, so I tried doing it in a first-person round, almost like Rashomon or something, which didn’t work either, and somehow or other I came around to what you see now. The way in which the topic of faith is discussed in the book reminds me of Flannery O’Connor. Was she on your mind in writing this story? Were their other authors that influenced your writing? Flannery O’Connor was definitely an influence, especially her “other” novel, The Violent Bear It Away, which I actually like much better than Wise Blood. Violent is very funny but very dark, and the stakes of the entire book are basically whether this idiot child should be baptized. For her this is a matter of life and death, and the baptism might actually be more important than death, and I love that. Another author I really love is DeLillo. You can end up in some pretty murky waters trying to do your own take on DeLillo, so hopefully the book steers clear of imitation, but he was a big influence and there are a couple DeLillo shout-outs in the book. The first comes early on, when a character named Thomas sarcastically quotes the opening of White Noise in conversation. Later on, a couple characters compile a zine based on their friend Parker’s journal, which itself is a jumble of uncited allusions, quotes, and references to all kinds of political and religious thinkers mixed with Parker’s original thoughts. But there’s a line slipped in there about how “our faith makes us crazy in the world.” That’s from the Moonie character in DeLillo’s Mao II. Read More