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The Daily

June 14, 2018
Look

Illustrated Maps of New York Through the Ages

By The Paris Review
Since their inception, maps have been embellished with illustrations. Through July 16, a selection of illustrated maps of New York spanning six centuries is on view at the New York Public Library. A preview of the exhibition—along with captions written by its curator Katharine Harmon—is presented below.

James Wolcott Adams, Redraft of the Castello Plan, 1916.

The famed Castello Plan offers a rare view of New Amsterdam—located at the southern tip of what is now known as Manhattan—during the forty year period of Dutch rule. Surveyor General Jacques Cortelyou made a map of the Dutch settlement in 1660, which was subsequently lost, but an unknown artist happily made another copy. This is the earliest map of the city existing today. It was sold to Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, around 1667, and “rediscovered” 233 years later at the Villa di Castello near Florence. The American illustrator James Wolcott Adams redrafted the map in 1916; this hand-drawn copy of the original Castello Plan is housed in the library’s print collection. Read More
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June 14, 2018
At Work

What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson

By Annie DeWitt
Maggie Nelson defies classification. She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry, Something Bright, Then Holes. First published in 2007, Something Bright was Nelson’s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. Nelson’s nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. Those concerns are present in Something Bright. “I don’t have to be ashamed of my desire / Not for sex, not for language,” the narrator tells us in “A Halo Over the Hospital.” But in this collection, Nelson’s heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. “Live with your puny, vulnerable self / Live with her,” we are told.

While Something Bright, Then Holes charts many landscapes—from the polluted Gowanus Canal, to a friend’s hospital room, to the inner tautologies of “leave-taking”—the collection centers around the issues of love and loss. “What part of this autonomy / am I not supposed to like?” the narrator expounds in “The Mute Story of November.” The self and the other (romantic, or intellectual) are like binary stars. They threaten to destroy or consume one another: “Yesterday we found something very hard / at our core, a fierce acorn. I don’t know / if we were born with it, or if its mass simply accrued / in the darkness.”

INTERVIEWER

I wondered if you could talk about the experience of having a book reissued ten years later. Is there a sense of Didion’s invitation to check in on the selves we once were? An old friend come to visit? Or, the sort of estrangement that one often feels as an artist from the work that came before?

NELSON

It’s a beautiful edition, so I feel very lucky. It’s also sweet to me that my dear friend Tara Jane O’Neil did the first cover and then did this one as well. I feel estranged from this book in the sense that it is my last book of poetry—not like, the last book of poetry I will ever write, but the last one I’ve written, and it’s wild that a decade has gone by since. But I can see many themes in these pages that have cropped up in my more recent prose books, so I feel a strong continuum of thought. There was kind of a magic splintering happening inside me at the time of Something Bright—very painful, but also magic. It’s also the last book I wrote in New York, and I can really feel that—all that time spent talking to and about strangers at the canal, all that looking outward, all the late nights, the wandering, the perching. My life isn’t like that anymore. Anyway, it’s nice to see these poems again. Read More
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June 14, 2018
Arts & Culture

Are We All Joyceans Here, Then?

By Frankie Thomas
Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses.

“Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway.

We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College.

No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it.

It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. Read More
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June 13, 2018
Weird Book Room

A Disgruntled Federal Employee’s 1980s Desk Calendar

By Ted Widmer
On any given day, the rare-book trade can cough up anything from an illuminated medieval manuscript to the pages of an unfinished novel. This week, an unusual offering caught my eye: an illuminated manuscript that was not medieval at all.

During the eighties, a nameless Cold Warrior grew frustrated in his job for the Department of Defense and poured out his feelings in an unusual way. He was a midlevel (GS-11/GS-12) analyst working at the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Every GS-11/GS-12 in that era would have been given a government-issue desk calendar, and this Kansas scribe made the most of his. Like a monk, he labored over his document every day, adding carefully crafted letters and elaborate drawings to what became, over nine years, a remarkably full chronicle of the decade.

There were outbursts of anger, often directed at senior officials of the U.S. government, and joyful moments of exultation, generally following victories for the University of Kansas basketball team. Events of worldly and even otherworldly significance were described in passing: the end of the Iranian hostage standoff, the Challenger disaster, small upticks and downticks in the tension of the Cold War. There were tender moments as well: memories of a friend, or an anniversary of a magical night long ago. He noted the riots in Poland and demonstrations in China and other places where the people were beginning to make themselves heard after decades of government suppression. The anonymous employee’s irrepressible spirit seems to follow a parallel course, delighting in the creation of a secret treasure trove of writings in no way approved by his superiors. The full set of calendars is for sale from Boston Rare Maps for only five thousand five hundred dollars.

Many faceless bureaucrats have secretly harbored dreams of novel writing over the years, only to see their dreams trampled by unreasonable bosses or unsympathetic publishers. It is not entirely clear what the Kansas scribe was trying to achieve with his nonstop writing—or why it survived. But deep within the deep state, he found a voice. Read More
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June 13, 2018
Arts & Culture

The Indignity of Celebrity Suicide

By Jill Bialosky

The day we learn Kate Spade took her life we are in Rivella, Italy, a small town on the Amalfi Coast—it finds us even in this small corner of the world, stamped on the front page of the International Times and in international papers that line the table where we breakfast.

The reporting is invasive and crude. Lines from Kate Spade’s suicide note, the last words to her daughter are printed worldwide. Speculation and implication of marital troubles at the bottom of it. Next news cycle. Kate Spade’s sister speaks out, saying that she was not surprised; Kate had suffered from bipolar depression but was afraid to get treatment lest the news break out. A life comes to a tragic end reduced by simplistic statements.

After breakfast, our plan is to tour the Villa Cimbrone. In Roman times, the brochure of the walking tour tells us, Villa Cimbrone was an agricultural estate that produced timber for naval use. At the end of the nineteenth century it was abandoned and later rediscovered by an English traveler, Ernest William Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe. He was a member of the group of intellectuals who made the grand tour to Ravello. His personal mission was to recuperate from a deep depression after the death of his beloved wife. The beauty of the estate, the joy it brought, led him to buy it in 1904, to restore it and transform it into his own artful creation. The estate became an elegy to his lost wife; a place where he could honor his grief and preserve her memory with its austere beauty. Carved into the wall of a stone bench are these words:

LOST TO A WORLD IN WHICH I CRAVE NO PART
I SIT ALONE AND COMMUNE WITH MY HEART
PLEASED WITH MY LITTLE CORNER OF THE EARTH
GLAD THAT I CAME NOT SORRY TO DEPART.

I’m drunk by the overpowering scent of flowers in the many gardens, along trellises and walls, by the views of the lemon groves and the Mediterranean, dust from the antiquated stones and walkways, by the history of this place embedded in every stone and wall and the ghosts of suicides that in this particular moment are unleashed. Read More

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June 13, 2018
Feminize Your Canon

Feminize Your Canon: Olivia Manning

By Emma Garman
Our new monthly column, Feminize Your Canon, explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.

The British novelist Olivia Manning spent her dogged, embittered career longing, largely in vain, for literary glory and a secure place in the English canon. Reassurances from friends that talented writers were often rewarded by posterity cut no ice. “I don’t want fame when I’m dead,” she’d retort. “I want it now.” Yet even the modest ambition of a solo review in a Sunday newspaper proved elusive, a snub that especially chafed whenever her archnemesis, Iris Murdoch, released a new novel to lavish coverage in the broadsheets. Manning was baffled by the praise heaped on the younger writer, whose novels she derided as “intellectual exercises.” Her own drew directly from real events and aimed to be “pieces of life,” which she saw as the proper purpose of literature.

Given the strength of her “hungering and thirsting after fame,” to quote one exasperated friend, it’s possible that no amount of recognition would have satisfied the woman known as Olivia Moaning. The nickname was not unjustified, as secondhand book dealers knew. Once, at a charity sale, Manning came across her novel School for Love priced at twenty pence. “You’re giving that book away!” she complained. “It’s a first edition. It’s worth far more.” Another time, a signed copy of The Spoilt City, the second volume of her Balkan Trilogy, was for sale in a secondhand bookshop for fifty pence. Buying it herself, Manning remarked, “I bet Iris Murdoch’s first editions fetch more than that.” The bookseller replied, “Well, Iris Murdoch’s a famous author, isn’t she?” Read More
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