February 18, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Literary Video Games, Return of ‘Spy’ Magazine By The Paris Review The other evening at East Village Books I picked up a used copy of Dawn Powell’s 1936 novel, Turn, Magic Wheel, stopped at Second Avenue and Seventh, and settled in to the opening scene … only to realize that I’d been walking in the footsteps of the writer-hero, Dennis Orphen—and that he, too, had just come to a halt at Second and Seventh. I half expected him to walk in the door. Powell has a way of collapsing the decades between one literary New York and another. Orphen’s sin, to have used a friend as material, is as old as his profession and feels as fresh as Thursday night. —Lorin Stein I’ve been playing a lost Nintendo video game that was supposedly found at a yard sale and purchased for fifty cents. (In fact, it was recently created by San Francisco-based developer Charlie Hoey.) Why the mention? It’s modeled after The Great Gatsby. Says the Web site: “You’re not in the middle west anymore, son. Welcome to the Wild West Egg.” The Atlantic writes, “At least now we know why Gatsby couldn’t make it to the blinking green light: Sand Crabs.” —Sam Dolph It seemed like a good idea at the time: the full publication archive of Spy magazine is now available via Google Books. —David Wallace-Wells I’ve been thumbing through the pages of Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive, an illustrated biography about Marie and Pierre Curie. There’s a show of the book currently at the New York Public Library (where Redniss did much of her research as a Cullman fellow). Not long ago, Dwight Garner praised the book in the Times, saying, “Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris that’s become a dream city.” Spooky and beautiful—Redniss’s work is worth taking a look. —Thessaly La Force Read More
February 17, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Nico Muhly, Composer, Part 2 By Nico Muhly This is the second installment of Muhly’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. Photograph by Samantha West. DAY FOUR 10:15 A.M. While I slept, iTunes seems to have downloaded the complete collected works of MNDR. I must have gone on a pre-ordering binge, because it also is trying to download the film of Never Let Me Go. I’m listening to “I go away,” from the MNDR track. I like electronic-based slowish tracks; I loved that Capslock track off the MIA album whose title I dare not reproduce here. I wish there were a more poetic way to describe the rhythmic passage of time than “tick tock.” I’m looking at this queue: yet more SVU and the new Top Chef are coming! I fly tonight back to New York so maybe I can sneak one of these in on the plane. 3:00 P.M. Good God! The BBC has a story about the “history” of chai in India. The segment begins with a twelve-second history of tea that elides over the idea of Empire so quickly it feels like a blow to the solar plexus. I reach a Kiplingesque encounter with a terra-cotta cup maker in Kolkata just as we reach the rental car return, so I don’t have a moment to jot down who was responsible for this. They should write opera libretti! I do wonder who is responsible for radio’s “generic ethnic background noise.” I’m convinced that if you slow down the audio and remove the host’s voice, you’ll hear the same group of five people chattering—be it a story about Inuit fishing quotas or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. 9:00 P.M. A calm post-flight evening of take-out and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. I am preparing for Saturday night, which is when I will be seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s Nixon in China with a bunch of friends. I have the score perched next to my computer. I watch the first twelve minutes of an episode of Top Chef with Isaac Mizrahi saying outrageous things to the cheftestants and pass out. Read More
February 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Nico Muhly, Composer By Nico Muhly Photograph by Samantha West. DAY ONE 10:45 A.M. Reykjavík, Iceland. I wake up later than I want, and desperately read, again, the last twenty pages of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star. By this point, the plot has turned into a fun cross-Benelux car chase. I myself have just come from a slightly awkward but ultimately fun week in Benelux, where I was resident at a chamber music festival, and every time I go to the Netherlands I reread this book. I make special digital note, this time, of some good descriptions: “minatory Flemish motets.” 3:30 P.M. Oh my God, there is an Ali Farka Touré album I don’t own: Red & Green. I’m buying it right now. I am going to also take this opportunity to rebuy the Toumani Diabaté album Djelika. I am, as always, fascinated by the weird intervalic overlap between Morricone scores and Malian music. I’m making a note to go know more about this. It is also noted that Mio, the brother of Valgeir, both of whom I am making a ton of records with this week in Iceland, has pants very similar in cut to those featured on the cover of Red & Green. DAY TWO 5:45 A.M. I wake up in a panic—an anxiety dream about an e-mail argument, which is prescient given the early-morning realities of my inbox. To calm myself, I buy music online manically. The new Iron and Wine cover is neurosis-provoking neon, but I buy it anyway. While listening on headphones, I fall back asleep and iTunes continues and mysteriously plays Paula Deen’s “Thanksgiving Special,” in which she makes oyster dressing. I actually like her accent, although the way she pronounces the word for (as in, “I’ll let this fry up here for a minute”) strikes me as uncharacteristically Vietnamese. Read More
February 15, 2011 At Work Kevin Young on ‘Ardency’ By Elizabeth Hoover Photograph by Kate Tuttle. In Ardency, the poet Kevin Young chronicles the experiences of fifty-three Africans who mutinied aboard the Amistad slave ship in 1839. After killing two of their Spanish captors, they sailed up the coast of the United States, only to be intercepted by a naval brig and thrown in a Connecticut jail. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the earlier court’s decision: because the international slave trade had been abolished, the men and women aboard the Amistad were not legally slaves and thus had been illegally captured. They were entitled to use force to secure their freedom. The Amistad mutiny would be one of the many events that gave the abolitionist movement traction leading up to the Civil War. In this book, Young conjures their voices in letters, poems, and songs, documenting their violent capture and eventual return to Africa in 1842. Young has tangled with the complexities of American history in his six previous collections, including For the Confederate Dead and Dear Darkness. He recently edited the anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing and is finishing The Gray Album, a nonfiction work about music and history, forthcoming from Graywolf next year. You spent twenty years working on Ardency. What originally drew you to the story of the Amistad? I stumbled on letters the Amistad prisoners wrote from jail. I was struck by their poignancy and how the prisoners spoke in this new language of English. But I was struck by what the letters didn’t say, what was permitted of them to say, and, then, what they did mange to say because of or despite those limits. What was so great about working on this book was that no one knew about it. I didn’t know if I was ever going to do anything with it, but I knew that there was this story I wanted to learn more about. Also, I knew that I wanted to write in the voice of Cinque, who led the rebellion, but wasn’t ready to write in his voice yet. There are many strangely beautiful phrases in the letters—“be my dear benefactory,” “Cold catch us all the time,” “I am your perfect stranger”—that have the urgency of someone really trying to master the language. Master is an interesting verb. They had masters who bought them in Cuba and forged documents giving them new identities saying they were born in Cuba. Though he international slave trade was illegal, you could still purchase slaves who were born into slavery. So they were learning English to become free, but there is a sense in the letters that they are trying to free themselves from English. Read More
February 14, 2011 Studio Visit Lawrence Weiner By Thessaly La Force The artist Lawrence Weiner lives on a quiet street in the West Village, in what was once an old laundromat built in 1910 and is now an unobtrusive five-level town house designed by the firm Lot-Ek. You may recognize some of the architecture: Lot-Ek is often cited for it inventive reuse of prefabricated objects (like shipping containers) and other industrial materials. In fact, the penthouse floor of Weiner’s home is built from discarded truck bodies. The floor below is the bedroom, the floor below that houses Weiner’s archives, and the first floor is the kitchen and dining room. At the basement level, Weiner keeps his studio, where he works. Not long ago, I stopped by to take photographs of his home and talk. I didn’t come from a background that had any idea about what contemporary art was, it was not anti or pro, it had nothing to do with it. I do remember something my mother said when I was sixteen. I was going off to college, and I said, “I think I’m going to be an artist, not a professor of philosophy.” They all assumed I would be a professor because I’m good at logic, and she looked at me and she said, “Lawrence, you’ll break your heart.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Art is for rich people and women.” Read More
February 11, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Ibrahim Aslan, Tina Fey By The Paris Review When I’m able to tear my eyes away from al-Jazeera, which isn’t often, I’ve been reading Ibrahim Aslan’s classic The Heron. Set on the eve of the 1977 bread riots, in a working class Cairene neighborhood, it’s essential reading for anyone who’s been riveted—as who has not?—by the uprising in Egypt. It’s also a great read, expertly translated by Elliott Colla. And if you can get your hands on the film adaptation, al-Kitkat, you’re in for a treat. —Robyn Creswell I read every word of Tina Fey’s essay in The New Yorker this week. “I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all ‘crazy.’ I have a suspicion—and hear me out, because this is a rough one—that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” —Thessaly La Force In preparation for our forthcoming Ann Beattie interview, I decided to check out her collection What Was Mine. Beattie is a master of the short story. I could imagine her as being much like a character in her story “Windy Day at the Reservoir,” writing characters and stories that “declare their necessity, so she would not feel she was just some zookeeper, capturing them.” —Janet Thielke Anne Enright’s graceful reminiscence of her former tutor, Angela Carter, isn’t just a fitting tribute to the woman Salman Rushdie once described as “the benevolent witch-queen” of English letters. It’s a vicarious travelogue, a wry investigation into the significance of mirrors and a tartly candid disquisition on the firm difference between wanting to write and needing to write. Clearly somebody was paying attention in class! —Jonathan Gharraie Poetry editor Robyn Creswell’s essay for The New York Times Book Review on the writer in Egyptian society. —Lorin Stein I like to imagine I’m an ambitious reader, but for the true book nerd, try keeping up with the National Book Critics Circle’s “31 Books in 31 Days.” If anything, it makes one appreciate how good criticism can be an excellent excuse not to read the book! —T. L.