March 10, 2020 One Word One Word: Bonkers By Harry Dodge photo courtesy Harry Dodge 1. I want now to investigate bonkers (a word that strikes me as germane to our times), but the word busted (also a fine word) keeps popping into my head. Not at all interchangeable, busted suggests mechanicity and palpability while bonkers seems to indicate something mental and systemic. But they inhabit the same register; both words are punchy (is that a register or a tone?) and both words suggest mitigatability—they’re carrying little hope suitcases. Do you feel that? I wrote the word busted the other day to describe birds I saw in a book of photographs, impossibly bent-up birds captured during liftoff, during landing—weird contorted flight surfaces, tangled wings like flat hands, ruddering volte-face, cartoony dustups apparently necessary to occasion real-life avian landings. I like the word busted—not shattered, not completely demolished. BUSTED!, as in currently unusable: an ugly leg thrown out of the tub too wounded even to soak. But you know what? I’m a repairman. I’m a research assistant! Give me what is busted and I’ll take a look. Here. See how in the break or the torn area, let’s call it the rupture, something truly bent or baffling is sometimes lined with an undeniably fecund matrix, raw lamina where new stuff is now compelled to grow? Read More
March 9, 2020 In Memoriam On the Timeless Music of McCoy Tyner By Craig Morgan Teicher McCoy Tyner in April 2012 [Photo: Joe Mabel] There are many ways to understand the passage of time—it’s not just one thing after the next, the pinhead of the present gnarling the flesh of your foot as you try, impossibly, to balance upon it. Not just peering through the mist of memory. Not just cutting through the ice ahead. Time moves back and forth, slows down, speeds up, it eddies—it does a lot of eddying. It concentrates itself in one moment and becomes diffuse and vague in another. We’re always in the present, though we can never quite get there, nor can we leave. All of this is what the music of McCoy Tyner, who died on Friday at the age of eighty-one, teaches, though as soon as one tries to paraphrase music in anything other than other music, it’s robbed of some of its magic and much of its meaning. Tyner was one of the defining musicians of the jazz period that began in the early sixties and which, I’d argue, we’re still in: pure art music that renews its inspiration in the the last hundred-plus years of pop music. As the pianist anchoring the classic John Coltrane quartet, Tyner’s instantly recognizable style—pendular, percussive, full of melodic flights and returns—created, hand in hand with drummer Elvin Jones, the landscapes across which Coltrane’s solos famously and fathomlessly ranged. I’ve been gratefully lost for years somewhere between the interminable vamp of the 1961 studio recording of Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things” and the pounding sinews of Tyner’s 1976 solo track “Fly with the Wind.” The latter isn’t fusion, isn’t exactly jazz, but is all Tyner: intellect, melody, and abandon. Tyner’s art has guided my imagination, and now that he’s gone, and because the meaning of music is so slippery, I want to take a moment to say why. Read More
March 9, 2020 Arts & Culture Little Fires for the One Who Was Lost By Alejandra Pizarnik Alejandra Pizarnik’s work has long served as a touchstone for Latin American writers. The late Argentine poet has been cited as an influence by everyone from Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar to Octavio Paz, who described her writing as exuding “a luminous heat that could burn, smelt, or even vaporize its skeptics.” But this fervor didn’t reach the English-speaking world until some four decades after her death, with the publication of her collection A Musical Hell in 2013. Since then, translations of five more collections of her poetry have appeared to near universal acclaim, and several of her poems have been published in The Paris Review. Ugly Duckling Presse has recently published A Tradition in Rupture, which presents Pizarnik’s critical writings in English for the first time. In the excerpt below, she ponders the nature of poetry and the pain of revisiting past work. Alejandra Pizarnik. Poetry is where everything happens. Like love, humor, suicide, and every fundamentally subversive act, poetry ignores everything but its own freedom and its own truth. To say “freedom” and “truth” in reference to the world in which we live (or don’t live) is to tell a lie. It is not a lie when you attribute those words to poetry: the place where everything is possible. In opposition to the feeling of exile, the feeling of perpetual longing, stands the poem—promised land. Every day my poems get shorter: little fires for the one who was lost in a strange land. Within a few lines, I usually find the eyes of someone I know waiting for me; reconciled things, hostile things, things that ceaselessly produce the unknown; and my perpetual thirst, my hunger, my horror. From there the invocation comes, the evocation, the conjuring forth. In terms of inspiration, my belief is completely orthodox, but this in no way restricts me. On the contrary, it allows me to focus on a single poem for a long time. And I do it in a way that recalls, perhaps, the gesture of a painter: I fix the piece of paper to the wall and contemplate it; I change words, delete lines. Sometimes, when I delete a word, I imagine another one in its place, but without even knowing its name. Then, while I’m waiting for the one I want, I make a drawing in the empty space that alludes to it. And this drawing is like a summoning ritual. (I would add that my attraction to silence allows me to unite, in spirit, poetry with painting; in that sense, what others might call the privileged moment, I speak of as privileged space.) They’ve been warning us, since time immemorial, that poetry is a mystery. Yet we recognize it: we know where it lies. I believe the question “What does poetry mean to you?” deserves one of two responses: either silence or a book that relates a terrible adventure—the adventure of someone who sets off to question the poem, poetry, the poetic; to embrace the body of the poem; to ascertain its incantatory, electrifying, revolutionary, and consoling power. Some have already told us of this marvelous journey. For myself, at present, it remains a study. Read More
March 6, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cinema, Sebald, and Small Surprises By The Paris Review Still from And Then We Danced Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire captured critics’ hearts, and seemed a sure shot to capture mine. An acclaimed French lesbian film? Made for me! And yet, though I did like looking at Adèle Haenel’s incongruously contemporary face in period garb, the overblown, gestural romance left me un-aflame. “Do all lovers feel that they’re inventing something?” Heloise asks Marianne before they first sleep together, and I wished that something more precise, more personal, were being invented. I found that specificity in a different international gay film, And Then We Danced, which follows a delicate-boned dancer as he tries to keep his hands from fluttering during traditional Georgian dance, his only path out of a country where he cannot survive. Shot in four weeks on a minuscule budget, the film received a standing ovation at Cannes. In Georgia, it was met with such violent far-right protests that it closed after three screenings, but a queer Georgian youth movement has mobilized around the film, and its soundtrack, as a beacon of hope. The movie’s portrayal of first love made me bite my lip, but even more vivid were the moments of tenderness between two brothers, between grandparents and grandchildren, and the spaces the camera inhabits in Tbilisi, from nightclubs to cramped apartments to ballrooms. It’s a love letter to Georgia that asks simply: Love me back. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
March 6, 2020 The Last Year The Envelope By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments and seasons before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June. My daughter, Indie, has been on a college tour her whole life—riding in her stroller through the snow in Boulder; rolling down a hill outside the English building in Utah; peering from the passenger window while football fans swarm sidewalks toward a blue field in Idaho; sitting under my office desk in Oklahoma, silently passing me notes or drawing pictures; climbing the three stories to my office in northern New York to race her Razor on the shiny hallway floor; spinning in the revolving doors of a building in Chicago as the El barrels overhead; snapping photos of red-tile roofs in New Mexico; thumbing through the books in my office on a Texas campus covered by trees. Indie was the first student to show up for kindergarten. Her teacher pointed to a ball of clay on a table, and Indie immediately sat down. I slipped out the door but stood just beyond it, watching her play through the window. Days later, she hopped into the car holding something small and misshapen, painted purple and green. “Here,” she said, handing it to me, “I made you a bowl.” In first grade, Indie asked if school could be her space. Because it’s always been the two of us, I understood it was important for her to have a world she did not have to share, one she could move through alone. How young she was to ask for this, but as the years have disappeared behind us, I recognize it as a claim my daughter has always made for herself. She will do it alone. I agreed not to interfere unless I had reason: a call from a teacher, a pattern of bad grades, missing work. I kept my distance, allowed Indie her own. Read More
March 6, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with Cesare Pavese By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Characters in Pavese’s work follow the unchanging traditions of the countryside, including eating much polenta, easily made from medium-grind cornmeal, like this. Film buffs will know the Italian modernist writer Cesare Pavese (1908–50) because his novel Among Women (Tra donne sole) was the source for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Le Amiche. But I came across his work in the unlikely location of a cookbook, English food writer Diana Henry’s How to Eat a Peach. Pavese, Henry writes in a chapter entitled, “The Moon and the Bonfires (and the Hazelnuts),” was born in Piedmont in Northern Italy, and his native landscape was “almost a character” in his work. She quotes him as saying that, if you live there, you “have the place in your bones like the wine and polenta.” How to Eat a Peach is formatted as menus drawn from Henry’s travels and interests, and her Pavese-Piedmont menu, inspired by the 1949 novel The Moon and the Bonfires, offers an ox cheek stew, white truffle pasta, and a hazelnut-strewn chocolate cake. She suggests an accompaniment of the local Barolo or Dolcetto wine. This was intriguing to me, and more so because Henry’s book had already been something of a journey. It falls into a category that’s strangely frequent in my life: cookbooks that at first I don’t use, but then I do. The book is beautiful, broody, and atmospheric. I certainly imagined myself cooking from it, but in practice the menus felt obscure and the titles too specific and unalluring—“Darkness and Light: the Soul of Spain” or “I Can Never Resist Pumpkins.” Is that really what I want for dinner? Do I have to cook the whole menu? How to Eat a Peach ended up on the shelf where it remained, mocked occasionally by my children for having a stupid title, until months later I did what I should have done in the first place and read the introductory essays. Henry’s writing is vivid, personal, and seductive, and contains gems like the introduction to Pavese. Now that I know the backstory, I do want “the Moon and the Bonfires (and the Hazlenuts)” for dinner. And now that I’ve read Pavese, I’m delighted by Henry’s idiosyncrasy in choosing him as inspiration for a meal. She acknowledges that his writing is “not cheerful”—and this turned out to be an understatement. Read More