August 26, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: The Unseen Bestiary, The Avoidance of Love By The Paris Review From ‘Monstrorum Historia,’ by Ulisse Aldrovandi, 1642. Just in time for Borges’s birthday, Lindsey Carr is curating a collaborative art project documenting creatures that have never been seen. The project, The Unseen Bestiary, a sort of DIY Book of Imaginary Beings, is soliciting brief descriptions to accompany Carr’s drawings. —Mackenzie Beer I’m rereading Stanley Cavell’s great essay on King Lear (and everything else), “The Avoidance of Love,” in preparation for what I’m told is another great essay, by Mark Greif, in the new issue of n+1. (Some lifetime subscription that turned out to be!) —Lorin Stein I’ve been slowly working through the strikingly lyrical essays in City Dog this summer, so I was excited to see new poems by W. S. di Piero in the fall issue of ZYZZYVA. Something about them reminded me of the end of summer. “Starting Over” perfectly evoked that late-August feeling of everyone coming home: “here you are the nothing / that is the place, / and all the places are you, / none of them yours to keep.” —Ali Pechman I just learned everything I know about Batman from intern Cody, who puts the super back in superheroes. —L.S. Since I realized that Spotify has such a great collection of Alan Lomax recordings, I’ve been totally hooked. —Sadie Stein Moving books around in my house, I rediscovered my copy of Boulevard Transportation, a collaboration between Rudy Burckhardt and Vincent Katz. The former’s photographs—framing and juxtaposing country and city streets, architectural elements, faces—and the latter’s poetry—casual glances and delighted observations—are perfectly suited to each other. On one spread, Burckhardt’s closeup of reeds waving against sun-dappled water is set opposite this from Katz: “I put bare / feet to Terra / swim in the lake / all day long / there is nothing / to do / listen to wind in the trees.” —Nicole Rudick I was one of those lame kids without a rock collection, but Léonard Rosenthal, famed 1920s Parisian jeweler and author of The Kingdom of the Pearl, has reformed me. If you aren’t sold on reading about rocks, check out the Edmund Dulac illustrations that originally accompanied the text. —M.B. I’ve always felt more like a New Yorker than a Californian, but this video is amazing. — A.P.
August 25, 2011 Arts & Culture Collapse By Yevgeniya Traps Alexander Lobanov, Untitled, n.d. Collection abcd, Paris. The opening lines of “From a Great Mind,” a song by the Siberian folk-punk singer Yanka Dyagileva, run something like this when translated from Russian: From a great mind, only madness and jail,From a reckless head, only ditches and barriers,From a beautiful soul, only scabs and lice,From universal love, only bloodied physiognomies. A similar sentiment animates “Ostalgia,” the recently opened exhibit at the New Museum in New York. The name for the show is taken from the German neologism ostalgie, a portmanteau of east and nostalgia meant to evoke a longing for life in East Germany, particularly its daily rituals and their trappings. But the show—and this is probably true of its namesake concept—is not really about a longing for communism. It is rather about the hunger for the kind of meaning that can only emerge from meaning’s suppression. Repressive regimes raise the stakes: under them, art is not something artists are paid to create, but something that extorts a price—perhaps a terrible one—from the artist. Ostalgie is not for the totalitarian government but for the clarity that emerges from the knowledge that great minds risked the gulag, the madhouse, the blindfold, and the rifle with every act of artistic creation. Read More
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.