April 23, 2021 First Person A Kind of Packaged Aging Process By Jan Morris Passengers boarding an ocean liner, 1925. Photo: Australian National Maritime Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. It was for convalescent reasons that I lately undertook a resolutely up-market Mediterranean cruise, with a Greek classical bias, and since I thought of such a cruise generically as being a kind of packaged aging process, at first I decided for literary purposes to rename our ship the Geriatrica. Later I changed my mind. It was perfectly true, though, as I had foreseen, that we formed a venerable passenger list, and sunset intimations were soon apparent. Hardly had we left the quay than a charming American senior citizen approached me as I stood at the rail, and said that since she heard I wrote books, she thought I might be amused by her favorite quotation from Groucho Marx. “It goes like this,” said she. “ ’Next to a dog, a book is a man’s best friend, but inside it’s too dark to read anyway.’ Isn’t that hilarious? I just love it.” I laughed politely, but I could not help thinking that with the passage of time the tale must have lost something in its telling. Of course the passage of time had to be a preoccupation on board such a ship as ours. “Facing Up to Rheumatism” was one of our first educational lectures, and for myself I felt that the ancient seas through which we passed, seas of glory, seas of fate, seas where young gods fought and heroes died, were themselves allegories of mortality’s challenge. “Facing Up to Decay,” in fact, might have been a more apposite mantra. Read More
April 22, 2021 At Work At Home among the Birds: An Interview with Jonathan Meiburg By John Jeremiah Sullivan Photo: Jenna Moore. Jonathan Meiburg was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1976 and grew up in the southeastern United States. In 1997, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked an enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Meiburg explores these passions in his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature, which traces the evolution of the wildlife and landscapes of South America through the lives of the unusual falcons called caracaras. Like the omnivorous birds at the heart of his book, Meiburg is more generalist than specialist. He’s written reviews, features, and interviews for publications including The Believer, Talkhouse, and The Appendix, on subjects ranging from the music of Brian Eno to a hidden exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History. He also conducted one of the last interviews with Peter Matthiessen. But he’s best known as a musician—albums and performances by his bands Loma and Shearwater have earned critical acclaim for many years, often winning praise from NPR, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Pitchfork. In 2018, Meiburg organized and performed in a three-night live reconstruction of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy for WNYC’s New Sounds program. He lives in central Texas. This interview was conducted electronically between there and Wilmington, North Carolina. INTERVIEWER Recently an anhinga started roosting by the tidal creek that runs through my backyard. It’s fun to watch—the long snaky neck and the way it hangs its wings out to dry like laundry. Once, when the creek was clear, I watched it hunt, and it flew along underwater like a fish. I’ve been told that anhingas aren’t really supposed to be here, or that this is north of their range, which is shifting due to climate change. MEIBURG To me anhingas are among the most beautiful birds, and maybe the most like their dinosaurian ancestors of any birds. A lot of people think they’re sort of goofy, and I can see that, too—the tiny heads, the absurdly long necks and flight feathers, the overall sense that they’re a prototype someone meant to refine later. They have wonderful nicknames like “snakebird” and “water turkey.” I love how you can see them soaring way up in the sky for no apparent reason, like ravens with long, skinny necks, even though they make their living wading around on the bottoms of rivers. They need to stay underwater for a long time, so they have very little oil on their feathers. This helps them sink and stay down. But it means they have to spend a lot of time standing on perches and holding their wings out to dry, which is usually how you see them, and it locks them out of places that get really cold. I was used to seeing them in the southeastern U.S., especially along that elevated stretch of I-10 that crosses the Atchafalaya Basin—but they were thick along the river in southern Guyana when I visited, and they seemed completely at home among colorful, feathered weirdos like parrots, toucans, and capuchin birds. Read More
April 22, 2021 Arts & Culture The Grace of Teffi By Robert Chandler The following serves as the foreword to Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints, a newly translated selection of the Russian writer Teffi’s stories, which was published earlier this week by New York Review Books. Teffi. Photo courtesy of New York Review Books. There are writers who muddy their own water, to make it seem deeper. Teffi could not be more different: the water is entirely transparent, yet the bottom is barely visible. —Georgy Adamovich It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and satirical sketches she wrote during her first years as a professional writer, from 1901 until 1918. Few critics have recognized the full breadth of her human sympathy, her Chekhovian ability to write convincingly about people from every level of society: illiterate peasants, respectable bourgeois, monks and priests, eccentric poets, bewildered émigrés, and public figures ranging from Lev Tolstoy to Rasputin and Lenin. Teffi also has a remarkable gift for writing about children, for showing us the world from the perspective of a small child. Throughout her life, Teffi was a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both Orthodox Christianity and Russian folk religion, with its poetic understanding of spiritual matters, were important to her. And she recognized that many of her finest stories were those inspired by these themes. In December 1943, she wrote to the historian Piotr Kovalevsky: “Which of my things do I most value? I think that the stories ‘Solovki’ and ‘A Quiet Backwater’ and the collection Witch are well written. In Witch you find our ancient Slav gods, how they still live on in the soul of the people, in legends, superstitions, and customs. Everything as I encountered it in the Russian provinces, as a child.” Read More
April 21, 2021 Look Every Day Was Saturday in Harlem By The Paris Review As a child, the Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey marveled at the vibrancy of midcentury Harlem, where his parents had met and many of their friends and family members still lived. “Driving through the crowded streets, I was amazed by what appeared to be the many people on vacation,” he has written. “It seemed to me that no matter what the day, everyday was Saturday in Harlem.” In 1975, equipped with a camera, he began paying weekly visits to the neighborhood, walking the streets and capturing pictures. This approach—on the ground, studied, empathetic—led to his first series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” and would inform his practice in the ensuing decades of his career; much of his work feels grounded in the unmediated intimacy of these early street portraits. Bey’s Harlem photographs and a bounty of other pieces from his near half century at work are on display in “An American Project” (up at the Whitney Museum of American Art through October 3), his first retrospective in twenty-five years. A selection of images from the show appears below. Dawoud Bey, Martina and Rhonda, 1993, six dye diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid), overall: 48 × 60″. Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams. © Dawoud Bey. Read More
April 20, 2021 Redux Redux: Spreading Privacies on the Internet By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Milan Kundera, ca. 1980. Photo: Elisa Cabot. This week at The Paris Review, we’re spending too much time online. Read on for Milan Kundera’s Art of Fiction interview, Hiromi Kawakami’s short story “Mogera Wogura,” and Stephen Dunn’s poem “Historically Speaking.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off. Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81 Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984) Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write sonatas without a single original idea, just by “cybernetically” expanding on the rules of composition. Janáček’s purpose was to destroy this computer … My purpose is like Janáček’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning. Read More
April 19, 2021 Re-Covered The Novel as a Long Alto Saxophone Solo By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. The Flagellants, the American writer Carlene Hatcher Polite’s debut novel, is one of those out-of-print books that’s been lurking in the corner of my eye for the past few years. First published by Christian Bourgois éditeur as Les Flagellants in Pierre Alien’s 1966 French translation, and then in its original English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book details the stormy relationship between Ideal and Jimson, a Black couple in New York City. The narrative is largely made up of a series of stream of consciousness orations. Polite’s prose is frenetic and loquacious, and her characters fling both physical and verbal violence back and forth across the page. The French edition received much praise. Polite was deemed “a poet of the weird, an angel of the bizarre,” and the novel was described as “so haunting, so rich in thoughts, sensations, so well located in a poetic chiaroscuro that one [could] savor its ineffaceable harshness.” And while certain American critics weren’t so impressed—“Miss Polite’s narrative creaks with the stresses of literary uncertainty,” wrote Frederic Raphael in the New York Times, summing the novel up as a “dialectical diatribe”—others recognized this young Black woman’s singular, if still rather raw and emergent, talent. Malcolm Boyd, for example, declared the novel “a work of lush imagery and exciting semantic exploration.” It won Polite—then in her midthirties and living in Paris with the youngest of her two daughters—fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities (1967) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1968). Why, then, am I writing about Polite only now? Well, although the vitality and inventiveness of her prose is undeniable, there’s something about her characters’ long, drawn-out pontificating that wavers on the overwrought. For all the passion of their outpourings, Jimson and Ideal often feel one-dimensional. These reservations stood in my way, combined with the fact that Polite never really felt like my discovery. Compared, for example, to another subject of this column, Mojo Hand (1966)—J. J. Phillips’s woefully neglected Black Beat novel—The Flagellants is a book that appears regularly on lists of African American literature from the sixties. Yet, finally deciding to dig a little deeper, I realized that although Polite is widely acknowledged as one of the most important female artists to emerge from the Black Arts Movement, there’s been surprisingly little written about her or her work, especially her second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play. Read More