April 5, 2019 Revisited Revisited: Guernica By Nathan Englander Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Nathan Englander revisits Picasso’s Guernica. Picasso, HEAD OF A HORSE, SKETCH FOR GUERNICA, 1937 When I was eleven years old, my mother took me into the city from our suburban Long Island enclave. It was 1981, and we were on our way to MoMA. We were going to say goodbye to Guernica, Picasso’s giant antiwar mural from 1937. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso lent the painting to MoMA, stipulating that it not be sent to Spain until liberty was restored. More than forty years after its creation, it was headed off to its Spanish home. It was an impressive thing to see. I can remember how that painting loomed. But it was the horse in the center—set under that giant, all-seeing eye—that drew my attention. Because that image and I, we already went back a long way. Out in suburbia, I’d stared endlessly at the version of it that Picasso had painted as a study for the mural. In the study, we see only the screaming gray horse’s head. The horse’s eyes, as in the larger painting, are tiny. But the head is set at a sharper angle, aimed up toward the heavens, as if seeking help that’s never going to come. The horse’s mouth is wide open, its nostrils flared. And between seven ground-down teeth, a horrible spear of a tongue sticks out. You can see the hair on the edges of the horse’s muzzle, which feels almost doglike, giving the face a domesticated warmth that makes the expression of fear all the worse. Read More
April 4, 2019 Comics The Corner of MacDoodle St. and Memory Ln. By Mark Alan Stamaty Mark Alan Stamaty’s Village Voice comic MacDoodle St. is unlike anything else in print. Each installment of the weekly strip, which ran from 1978 to 1979, is packed with sight gags and digressions, the panels near to bursting with recurring characters and critters. Through this chaos, though, zings an arrow of a plot. From week to week, Stamaty somehow finds a way to thread non sequiturs into a cohesive whole. Tossed-off jokes calcify into story beats, and Malcolm Frazzle, a doofy poet, bumbles his way into somehow saving the world. The final strip shows Malcolm and friends sailing out of the city on MacDoodle Airlines, promising to “be back after a while.” However, the strip never returned. This week, New York Review Comics has reissued the complete MacDoodle St. in book form. A new addendum, written forty years after the strip’s finale, reveals why Stamaty said goodbye to MacDoodle St. and how, in the process, he rediscovered the joy of being an artist. A portion of this addendum appears below. Read More
April 4, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: For My Lover, Returning to His Wife By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © ELLIS ROSEN Dear Poets, It’s 1 AM where I live now, and it’s yet another sleepless night for me. For the past four years, I lived in another country across the world, but I recently had to move back home due to some paperwork-related issues. My expat life was exciting and it transformed me. It pushed me outside of my comfort zone, and gave me my best friend and new hobbies and interests. But I’m now stuck back in my hometown, unable to make any future plans until the issue is resolved. I have no close friends here, there are no interesting events, and a good time for most people my age is to get wasted. My days are spent going to the gym and to the same two cafés (it’s a pretty small city) to study or read. I’ve been trying to stay positive, but the thought of wasting my life like this has been keeping me awake for quite a while now. Do you have a poem for people who feel left out of life? Sincerely, Stuck In Limbo Read More
April 4, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Etty Hillesum By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Etty Hillesum (Photo courtesy of the Etty Hillesum Research Centre, Middelburg, the Netherlands) In 1942, the year before she died in Auschwitz at age twenty-nine, the Dutch diarist and mystic Etty Hillesum wrote: “I have the feeling that my life is not yet finished, that it is not yet a rounded whole. A book, and what a book, in which I have got stuck halfway. I would so much like to read on.” She was in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and had decided to stay, voluntarily, at the Dutch transit camp Westerbork as a “social welfare” representative of the Jewish Council—Joodse Raad—that had been set up to mediate between Jewish citizens and the Germans. Unlike some, Hillesum didn’t expect her association with the council to save her, and she harbored no illusions about the tragedy engulfing Europe. What the Nazis wanted, she realized, was “our total destruction.” Still, she had hopes of coming through the war alive. She longed to channel her prodigious literary talent into writing Dostoyevskian novels, as well as documenting the history she witnessed. “I shall wield this slender fountain pen as if it were a hammer,” she declared, “and my words will have to be so many hammer strokes with which to beat the story of our fate.” Read More
April 3, 2019 Arts & Culture Limericks from beyond the Rings of Saturn By Anthony Madrid Illustration by Edward Lear I must write about Waterman. I must try to do justice to Waterman. Inclination, affection, and duty combine: I must speak and write about Waterman. 23 September 2017, I was in Chicago. I was in a bookstore I seldom visit: Open Books. Open Books does not often “speak to my concerns,” but that day was an exception. I had found, for six dollars, a hardcover of Kierkegaard’s Letters and Documents, volume 25: Princeton edition, jacket intact. I did not yet know that the book is neither rare nor valuable. Nor did I know that, in a year and a half of owning the book, I would not open it once. No, I was exultant: I thought it was probably worth forty-five dollars, and that I would start reading it in the airport on the way back to Texas. That day I found something else special. I found Paul Waterman. In particular, I found his 1965 book, Five Lines to Limerick. It has fifty-six numbered pages. It was warmly inscribed (“Best to Virginia Rick”) in ballpoint pen on 22 April 1966, in Worcester, New York. The book was published by Candor Press in Dexter, Missouri. Here is the cover: Read More
April 3, 2019 Arts & Culture In Search of William Gass By Zachary Fine William Gass teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine. In some late month of 1995, William H. Gass attempted a flight from New York to Saint Louis but was stalled by fog at the flight boards. He repaired to a small table at an airport bar, his socks pulped and moaning, and spent the night with a galley of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Gass ordered a glass of rosé, began reading, and observed the ways that the characters in the novel seemed to come and go like people in an airport bar. Time passes, and eventually civil servants and industrialists of 1913 Vienna wander into the bar itself, right alongside the airport castaways—or so Gass tells us in the essay he went on to write about Musil. After my plane lurched off the runway in New York, I took a folded copy of Gass’s essay out of my pocket and started reading. In September, I’d begun working on a review of The William H. Gass Reader, steeping myself in the life’s work, and now it was October, and I was uncertain about the direction of the piece. I declined the free snack mix and kept reading. I again tried to make sense of the beginning: there is a grounded flight in New York that occasions an essay in which an airport bar bleeds into an Austrian novel, and fiction into nonfiction, and then all sense of genre melts away as the review progressively constructs a lyrical world with its own logic and law. It struck me now that this was an uncanny echo of the most oft-repeated anecdote of Gass’s literary life. In October 1978, Gass was at a fiction festival in Cincinnati with the novelist John Gardner, and Gardner observed about their respective prose styles, “The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” Gass responded: “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there, solid as a rock, and have everybody think it is flying.” Asked decades later whether he would amend his words, Gass said, “I might put it differently, but the point would be the same. I would like my plane to be too beautiful to risk.” Read More