October 15, 2019 In Memoriam Harold Bloom, 1930–2019 By The Paris Review Harold Bloom.(photo: Nancy Crampton) Harold Bloom, one of the most popular and controversial critics in American literature, died Monday at age eighty-nine. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the author of more than forty books, including The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and, most recently, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. His Art of Criticism interview, which appeared in the Spring 1991 issue, is stacked with opinions on writers and their place in the canon. In Bloom’s view, Alice Walker is “an extremely inadequate writer,” John Updike is “a minor novelist with a major style,” and Saul Bellow is “an enormous pleasure but he does not make things difficult enough for himself or for us.” INTERVIEWER Do you think that fiction—or poetry for that matter—could ever die out? BLOOM I’m reminded of that great trope of Stevens’s in “The Auroras of Autumn,” when he speaks of a “great shadow’s last embellishment.” There’s always a further embellishment. It looks like a last embellishment and then it turns out not to be—yet once more, and yet once more. One is always saying farewell to it, it is always saying farewell to itself, and then it perpetuates itself. One is always astonished and delighted. Read his Art of Criticism interview here.
October 15, 2019 Comics The Many Reincarnations of Kim Deitch By Bill Kartalopoulos Artist Kim Deitch wakes up at 4 A.M. every morning. In less than an hour, he is sitting at his drawing table, doing what he has done for more than fifty years: drawing comics. His latest—and most ambitious—graphic novel, Reincarnation Stories, reflects back on his long career while being utterly unlike anything he has ever done before. In this epoch-spanning pseudo-autobiographical book, Deitch leads the reader on a time-hopping, picaresque journey through his soul’s previous incarnations, tracing a mysterious thread that runs through his personal histories, real and imagined, back to before the dawn of recorded time. Read More
October 11, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Monsters, Monkeys, and Maladies By The Paris Review Patti Smith. Photo: © Jesse Dittmar. In her latest memoir, Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith writes of Sandy Pearlman: “We stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold onto him, keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal.” It’s the start of 2016, and Smith’s friend Pearlman—a producer and rock critic—has been hospitalized after a brain hemorrhage. As he lies in a coma, Smith recounts the tumultuous year that follows—the loss of friends (Sam Shepard is nearly bedridden), the horror of the imminent election and rise of nationalism, and the impending climate crisis. A reflection on mortality, the book retains Smith’s characteristically flat tone as she wanders through stretches of Arizona, California, Virginia, and Kentucky, stopping at diners for black coffee and onion omelets and conversations with strangers. She hitchhikes from San Francisco to San Diego and back, travels as far as Lisbon, and returns home to the quiet of her Rockaway bungalow to stare at the flowers. All the while, she describes the mundane details of life with incredible vividness: the contents of her suitcase (six Electric Lady T-shirts, six pairs of underwear, herbal cough remedies), how it feels to fall asleep in her coat, and chatty Cammy with her truck of pickles. Smith moves smoothly between the present, memory, and magic, urging us to ask, Is there really a difference? —Camille Jacobson Read More
October 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Eye of the Beholder By Alice Mattison Alice Mattison reckons with the impacts of macular degeneration … Rembrandt, self-portrait, 1660 (modified) My mother thought children should visit museums, and back in the fifties, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was free. The Egyptian tomb was satisfyingly frightening if I pretended it was large enough to get lost in; a knight on a horse pointed a huge lance straight at me. I didn’t exactly get interested in art, but I picked up the notion that looking at it is something people do, something I could do. When I was old enough to take the subway from Brooklyn by myself, I went to museums alone. They were conducive to fantasy life. Or I went with friends. We knew museums had a snobbish distinction. I liked being someone who didn’t travel to Manhattan only to shop. As a college student, I continued to live with my parents and sister in an apartment not big enough for everyone’s opinions. In museums, I could think alone in a warm place. I found the Frick Collection, also free. Soon my friends and I owned that imposing nineteenth-century mansion, and were annoyed when a painting was moved. We once walked through with our backs to the art, holding up the hand mirror I used to put on lipstick. We wanted to see how the paintings looked when seen backward. Not as good. Read More
October 10, 2019 Arts & Culture The Nobel Prize Was Made for Olga Tokarczuk By Jennifer Croft Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © K. Dubiel. I’ve been saying it for years! Every fall, the big night would come and I would set my alarm for four or six or eight in the morning, depending on my time zone, and then not sleep because I was sure Olga Tokarczuk would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This year it happened! At 4 A.M. High time, and perfect time. Olga has been charting her own course since the first. She has gone boldly wherever her curiosity led, never daunted by boundaries, be they constraints of genre—as in the case of Flights (first published in Poland in 2007), a “constellation novel,” to use Olga’s own term, that might not be a novel at all—or political and linguistic—as in the case of The Books of Jacob (2014), Olga’s twelfth and latest novel, which I am translating right now. It is this intrepid methodology, combined with her firm commitment to the reader’s engagement and enjoyment, that has brought her in line with some of the world’s most pressing current concerns. The Books of Jacob is a monumental novel that delves into the life and times of the controversial historical figure Jacob Frank, leader of a heretical Jewish splinter group that ranged the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seeking basic safety as well as transcendence. Considered by many to be her masterpiece, The Books of Jacob is also a suspenseful and entertaining novel that remained a national best seller for nearly a year after its release. Read More
October 10, 2019 First Person Voyage around My Cell By Ahmet Altan © Mathier / Adobe Stock. When I was eight my views on literature were precise and unshakable and my confidence in myself much greater than it is now. I had decided O. Henry was the world’s best author. During Prohibition, the folks who bought one of Andy’s two-dollar canes and had the wit to unscrew the head of the cane by two full turns to the right and hold it to their mouth had, as a reward for their acumen, a half pint of smuggled whisky trickle down their throat. If the man who wrote this wasn’t the world’s best author, then who was? And how about the decision the three grifters made when things got messy, wasn’t that wonderful? Things had come to such a fine pass that honesty was the best policy. One day at a tea garden, I shared my judgment of O. Henry with my uncle’s fiancée. A smile of such kindliness appeared on the young woman’s face that, along with the large parasol right behind her, the tablecloth in front of her, and the pebble-stone pathway on the ground, it became stamped onto my memory like a photograph. Even at that age I could sense that if someone smiles at you with such kindliness something has to be wrong. Read More