June 26, 2024 Dispatch 37-08 Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s House By Eliza Barry Callahan Screenshot from Google Street View. Captured in April 2023. I said, What does it feel like in there? What do you mean, she said. I said, For example, is it light or is it dark? She said, It’s light by the windows. And then she said, It’s airy if the windows are open. Is that all? She said it was a bad time. She would rather I not come inside the house. Boxes were everywhere. Everything was in the boxes. She said that her brother had died on New Year’s Day. More boxes. And that it was fine. She said she really didn’t have anything to offer me. She said she knew nothing about the previous resident Joseph Cornell, other than that he’d existed—and that a different man had lived in the house in between them. That it had been remodeled in the nineties. She had moved there for the street’s flatness—she appreciated flatness in a street. Utopia Parkway. The artist Joseph Cornell lived a lot of his life at her home at 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Age twenty-six onward. The house is still small and gray. Gambrel roof. Clerestory windows. Sash windows. Tin door. Shingles and clapboard. Familiar, symmetrical face. Like the current resident, Cornell had a brother who died first, who lived there with him, in addition to his mother. Cornell, too, had had boxes everywhere. Read More
June 25, 2024 Lectures On Wonder By Srikanth Reddy Claude Mellan (French, Abbeville 1598–1688 Paris), The Moon in Its First Quarter, 1635. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, courtesy of the the Elisha Whittelsey Fund. I. The World Worlds It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself. Read More
June 24, 2024 First Person Swallowing: I Was Mike Mew’s Patient By Gabriel Smith Francisco de Goya, Out Hunting for Teeth, 1799. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two sisters, and brother, making six—were in a cult. I did not know they were in a cult. I just thought they were crazy Christians. The turbo type. I was forced, occasionally, to interact with Holy Jemima, because her little sister, Jessica, was friends with mine. The whole family had this shark-eyed stare. Holy Jemima would fix me with it and tell me that Harry Potter was evil, that they did not celebrate Halloween in their house because of Satan, and that the school church was getting it all badly wrong. “You’ve got to come over,” she told me once, “and watch these videos. You have no idea about the world. The school is not telling you about the real miracles that are happening. There is a preacher in Africa, a Black guy, and he is curing people. His name is TB Joshua.” “You watch videos of church?” “He has cured AIDS. On video. Exorcisms too. Have you ever seen a demon leave someone’s body? They go like this.” She rolled her eyes back in her head and waved her arms about as if having a seizure and started going aghnaghnahgnghgnghgnhgnhgn. A thing about growing up: you do not know what is strange until after. This was suburban England and the Holy Jemima’s hobby seemed about the same, to me, as my parents’ doctor friends’ African masks mounted on the walls above their CD towers of world music. Six streets down from them was Bellybutton Man, whose hobby was watching us leave school whilst silently smiling and lifting his blue T-shirt to finger his navel. And Bellybutton Man seemed about the same as Andy, eight minutes across town, who ran a pub and was a chess savant, who showed you newspapers and explained where the grandmasters were making mistakes. And Andy seemed about the same as Jake, whose hobby was that his parents let him drink as much Sunny Delight as he wanted. When you’re a kid it’s all just flora and fauna. You learn prejudices slow, like which plants are poison. Read More
June 21, 2024 The Review’s Review On Joanna Russ By Alec Pollak THOR, Pink Kiss, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Bury Your Gays: the latest tongue-in-cheek name for authors’ tendency to end queer relationships by killing somebody off, or having someone revert to heterosexuality, or introducing something that abruptly ends a queer storyline. The message: queer love is doomed, fated for tragedy. The trope has existed for decades, and although there are plenty of books and movies and television shows now that aren’t guilty of it, Bury Your Gays is by no means a thing of the past. In 2016, the death of The 100 character Lexa reintroduced Bury Your Gays to a whole new generation and reminded seasoned viewers—who could recall the infamous death of the character Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that the trope was alive and well. More recently, Killing Eve’s series finale reminded viewers yet again. Read More
June 21, 2024 Letters “Intelligent, Attractive, Powerful Lesbians Conquering the World” By Marilyn Hacker and Joanna Russ A letter from Marilyn Hacker to Joanna Russ. The following correspondence between Joanna Russ and Marilyn Hacker is drawn from a new edition of Russ’s On Strike Against God (1980), edited by Alec Pollak, to be published by Feminist Press in July. You can read Pollak’s introduction to the work of Joanna Russ on the Daily here. October 23, 1973 Dear Marilyn, Your letter is lovely—esp. since now I can write two letters where formerly I would’ve written one: one to you, one to Chip. Your book business is rather like my teaching, except teaching does leave more time & more ways one can cut corners, and so on. And you are beginning to sound just like Chip about London—I have this feeling that the two of you will turn up in NYC again—or I guess I should say the three of you. And goodness knows, you BOTH need separate rooms. And the baby ought to have a velvet-lined cell where it can be put when both grown-ups have other things to do. Mind you, a nice cell, and a nest, too, but having seen your flat, I agree that it’s crowded. Read More
June 20, 2024 First Person RIP Billymark’s By Sophie Haigney Photograph by Nikita Biswal. Billymark’s West was a normal bar. That was its greatest virtue, probably. It had a pool table, a jukebox, booths, a beer-and-shot special. It was a little dingy and dark. There was a TV and, somewhat oddly, a lot of Beatles-themed memorabilia. The prices were not so bad, by New York standards, though drinks weren’t as cheap as they could have been, either. There was graffiti in the bathroom. It was in some ways the Platonic ideal of a bar, such that it might seem familiar to you even if you’d never been. It had its own story, of course: it opened in 1956 and was taken over in 1999 by two brothers, Billy and Mark, one of whom was usually at the bar. They were the kind of guys you would describe as “characters” in part because they were playing a well-worn role. Billy—whom I saw more often—would call me “honey” and then charge me a price for my Miller High Life that seemed, each time, to be made up on the spot. Sometimes he was gruff, but mostly he was jovial, and it appeared as though he knew everyone in the bar, in a vague sort of way. The patrons of Billymark’s filtered in from the odd mix of places nearby: Rangers games at Madison Square Garden, galleries in West Chelsea, trains at Penn Station, and the offices of The Paris Review a few blocks away. I liked going to Billymark’s for a drink after work, though I didn’t go all that often. Still, it was always a place to go, a place in the neighborhood that stood out mostly for how normal it was. When I found out the bar had closed a few weeks ago, I was bereft. I understand that there are many people who are not always asking themselves, How can I get it back? But I am. Sometimes in fact this question feels like the animating force behind my emotional life—where did it go and how can I retrieve it? No one knows what it is, least of all me. Not long ago I was taking a train north toward Poughkeepsie and I was overcome with the memory of a previous train ride, on a Friday in July several years ago, toward a house in the woods where we stood one night on the porch and watched heat lightning and fireflies rise off the grass in the steam of a recent rain. Other more and less important things happened that weekend, but that is the image that came to me as I stared out the train window, along with the feeling that I could never get it back, any of it. I am speaking of what is generally called nostalgia, though I think the word is overused such that it conjures the gentle, moony feeling you might get listening to a second-rate James Taylor song. No, the feeling I am trying to describe is totalizing, characterized by sharp, surprising loss wrapped up with something like pleasure. That day on the train, I was so overwhelmed that I had to lie down. Read More