April 7, 2020 Arts & Culture Sheltering in Place with Montaigne By Drew Bratcher Michel de Montaigne. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. By the time Michel de Montaigne wrote “Of Experience,” the last entry in his third and final book of essays, the French statesman and author had weathered numerous outbreaks of plague (in 1585, while he was mayor of Bordeaux, a third of the population perished), political uprisings, the death of five daughters, and an onslaught of physical ailments, from rotting teeth to debilitating kidney stones. All the while, Montaigne was writing. From a tower on his family’s estate in southwestern France, he’d innovated a leisurely yet commodious literary mode that mirrored—while also helping to manufacture—the unpredictable movements of his racing mind. Part evolving treatise, part prismatic self-portrait, the essai, in Montaigne’s conception, was the antidote to self-isolation, a recurring conference in the midst of quarantine, perhaps even a kind of textual necromancy—his best friend and intellectual sparring partner, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, had died of plague in 1563. “Of Experience” is about how to live when life itself comes under attack. Because life as we’ve known it is on hold at the moment, because sickness and confusion are everywhere, and because one of the things books are good for is reminding us that we aren’t alone in history or consciousness, reading “Of Experience” right now feels like an analogue to experience; not a cold study of a distant artist’s late style so much as wisdom lit for wary souls unresigned, as of yet, to world-weariness. Read More
April 6, 2020 Happily The Fairy-Tale Virus By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Paulus Fürst, Plague Doctor, c. 1656 Once upon a time a Virus With A Crown On Its Head swept across the land. An invisible reign. A new government. “Go into your homes,” said the Virus, “or I will eat your lungs for my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The city that never sleeps shall fall into a profound slumber, your gold shall turn to dust, and your face shall be pressed against the windowpane.” “And the elders, for fear of death, shall not embrace the young.” The Virus was colorless and cruel. Some believed it to be the child of a bat, but no one knew its origin for sure. Some said it reminded them of a dead, gray sun. The fairy tale I will write about this time is this one. The one we’re inside. All night I dream of buying a chicken. I am scared of us all getting sick, so I need to make jars and jars of bone broth to freeze, but there are no chickens left in the poultry section of our supermarket. Instead, just cold, empty shelves. They glow white like hospital beds. If I can’t find a chicken I should at least sew my sons’ birth certificates into their wool coats, but it’s springtime and there is pink dogwood blooming everywhere and where are we going? We are going nowhere. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see my mother again. “What day is it?” asks Noah, my eight-year-old. He wanders away before I can even answer. Read More
April 6, 2020 Conspiracy Behind the Mask of Corruption By Rich Cohen Still from Eyes Wide Shut “Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!” — Allen Ginsberg, Howl If you are stuck at home, if a disease has begun to eat away the face of your nation, if illness has tinged even the once reliably boring moments of your life with terror, you might start to go a little batty, and, if that happens, you might start to watch the same few movies again and again, the passing hours registered only by the shade of light in the window, at which point you will begin to notice hidden patterns, secret meanings. You will finally hear what such films have been trying to tell you all along. This is what happened to me in the last few weeks with the movies of Stanley Kubrick, which, on repeat viewing, have turned out to be lousy with portents. Even the most overlooked of the director’s films, Eyes Wide Shut, which he was fiddling with when he died, sounds a clarion call through time, revealing the actual nature of a society now being swept aside by the virus. Kubrick’s message is simple: you know nothing. It’s a truth demonstrated via allegory, the story of a powerful man beset by demons. Of course, to many, the movie was always more than a parable. It was an exposé written in code. It revealed a dynamic that had long played out in sectors of elite society but was not glimpsed until our own age, an age of scandal, the most telling being the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein. In short, Eyes Wide Shut is not fiction. It’s documentary. It’s a great artist, at the end of a brilliant career, uncovering hidden evil. What is the function of art? Is it to show us something diverting, beautiful, new? Or is it to tell us what we’ve always known but never admitted to ourselves? Read More
April 3, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cositas, Cosmos, and Concerts By The Paris Review Carl Phillips. Photo: Reston Allen. In the poem “Even If Sleep and Death Are Brothers,” Carl Phillips sketches an image: “Of beaten gold—gold beaten / to a thinness like that of paper—a woman’s funeral mask.” It recalls for me John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (in which death is not a “breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat”), a heartbreaking poem about loss and longing. So, too, does Phillips write poetry meant as a balm for wistfulness; in his latest collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, comfort and nostalgia are as closely related as sleep and death. The characters are returning to the places they came from or the places where they had been happy, and stretching briefly backward across time. This happens in small, sensually rich moments, in the titular field or during a swim at a spot from long ago. These are bittersweet poems, lovely homages to the precious penumbral moments when life seems to hang in stasis as we leave behind a past self. —Lauren Kane Read More
April 3, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with Varlam Shalamov By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Kolyma Stories and my extended time indoors offered me the opportunity to use up some obscure items that have been languishing in my pantry. The complete stories of Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), published by NYRB Classics in two newly translated volumes, contain some of the bleakest and most powerful writing we have about the Soviet gulag. They’re also terrifyingly and indelibly about food—that is, about starving to death. Shalamov was first arrested in the twenties, when he was a student at Moscow University, and then again in 1937 for Trotskyist activity. He spent the next seventeen years in labor camps, including on the far northern island of Kolyma, where he mined for gold in some of the most horrific conditions in all the gulag. He found no redemption in the camps, writing that they were “a negative school of life in every possible way. Nobody can get anything useful or necessary out of the camps … Every minute of camp life is poisoned.” Yet in the decades after his release, he boiled the horrors he’d seen down to their pure essentials and shared them via this extraordinary body of work. Shalamov is plainspoken—“he knew his material perfectly, and wrote in a way that everyone can understand,” notes the translator Donald Rayfield—but prolonged immersion in the work reveals him as a better Solzhenitsyn; the stories are compulsively readable despite their subject matter, as compressed and brilliant as the Arctic snow. The temptation would be to compare them to “metal number one,” as gold was called by the Soviet authorities—if Shalamov had not so loathed it. I was reading the first volume, Kolyma Stories, two weeks ago as New York City shut down due to the ongoing public health crisis. He was the only writer who didn’t feel frivolous—not because there can be any comparison between America’s sudden food insecurity and the Stalinist gulag’s conditions of prolonged starvation but because I have been depressed by the human behavior on display. To me, social distancing seemed to erupt spontaneously, and I found it heartbreaking. Even if it will later emerge as necessary and the best decision, I’m hopelessly stuck on the idea that distance is bad. I read a Leslie Jamison piece about being sick with the coronavirus and caring alone for her two-year-old, and on an emotional level, I’m outraged that I can’t bring her soup and human kindness. Read More
April 3, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Lynn Melnick By Lynn Melnick In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. Read More