Photo of Breece D’J Pancake, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Breece D’J Pancake’s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time. Forty years of the author’s absence cast no shadow. The shadings, the broad arcs of interior, antediluvian time, are inside the sentences. The ancient hills and valleys of southern West Virginia remain Breece Pancake’s home place; the specificity and nuance of his words embody the vanished farms, the dams and filled valleys, the strip-mined or exploded mountains. His stories are startling and immediate: these lives informed by loss and wrenching cruelty retain the luminous dignity that marks the endurance of all that is most human.

Breece Pancake’s stories are the only stories written in just this way, from inside the minds of protagonists coming of age in the mountains of an Appalachian world closed to others. I’ve said, in a quote for an earlier edition of his work, “Breece Pancake’s stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners.” I meant not that the author’s style is similar to Joyce’s, but that the stories are a map of their physical locality, above and below ground, just as Joyce’s stories are a map of Dublin’s streets in Joyce’s youth. And that the links between the stories are as finely calibrated, and as naturally present in the material itself, as those in Joyce’s Dubliners. Colly’s mourned father in “Trilobites” is a literary relation to Bo’s dead father in “Fox Hunters” and foster son Ottie’s never-known father of “In the Dry”; the stories share a generational, nearly biblical sense of time. There is the long-ago time in which men and women brought forth their issue in the isolated, virginal hills they owned and farmed and hunted; there is the loss of the land, of living from it; there is industrialization, exploitation, ruin. Read More

In the fall of 1979, Jean-Luc Godard invited Marguerite Duras to appear in a scene for his film Every Man for Himself. Because Duras refused to be filmed, Godard recorded audio of a conversation with her instead, and later used a few lines of what she said as part of the soundtrack to a sequence in the film. As Cyril Béghin notes in the introduction to Duras/Godard Dialogues, a new book featuring three conversations between the pair: “Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing, and speech since his first films.” In the following excerpt from the transcript of their hour-long encounter, they discuss political speech, public appearances, the relationship between image and text, and much more.

Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard. Photo courtesy of Film Desk Books.

GODARD

If I asked you to do something on television, would you accept?

DURAS

If it was you, yes.

GODARD

What do you mean by “if it was me”? What does it mean to know me?

DURAS

But knowing you and knowing your films are the same thing.

GODARD

Well, for the moment, I’m no longer making a lot of films … Read More

Newsboys and newsgirls on Newspaper Row, Park Row, NYC. Photo by Lewis Wicks Hine from Library of Congress

The reporters would pant up five flights of stairs to reach their dingy, dim newsrooms, where light eked through the dirt-cloaked windows and the green shades over the oil lamps were burned through with holes. They wended through hobbled tables piled high with papers, walked past cubbies so chaotically stuffed with scrolled proofs no outsider could guess the system. The reporters reeked of five-alarm smoke, or had coat pockets bulky with notes and a pistol from the front, or were tipsy from a gala ball, or dusty from a horse race. If they held important news in those notebooks, a copy boy would crowd by their elbow as they wrote, snatch the ink-wet sheets from their hands, and rush them off to the copyholder to “put them into metal.”

The center of news in the nineteenth century lined the streets around City Hall Park, only a short sprint to Wall Street, close to the harbor. News sailed in on the wind. Newspaper schooners cut through the waves and fog to land their men onboard the arriving European steamers before the less affluent New York newspapers could get out there with their rowboats.

Amid recent renovations on Park Row, construction workers discovered artifacts of news reporters inside the walls—papers and typewriters. Who knows what ghosts might lurk there still?

“Journalism is the real Minotaur,” nineteenth-century reporter Stephen Fiske remarked, looking back on his career. “It demands every year a fresh supply of young men and women: devours them, destroys them, and is ready for another batch of tender victims from colleges or country towns.” He had begun as a columnist at age twelve. Other reporters jumped in audaciously in their twenties, such as Henry Villard, a German immigrant who rapidly taught himself English so as to cover the Lincoln–Douglas debates.

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