July 18, 2018 Look The Handwriting of Famous People By The Paris Review The Romans were among the first to develop a written script, and their penmanship was round and even. In the Middle Ages, the price of parchment soared, and handwriting, accordingly, became small and condensed. Years later, in the eighteenth century, elegant handwriting became a sign of refinement. Later still, in the twentieth century, American schools taught a standardized cursive by encouraging students to draw loopy letters through horizontal lines. Now hardly anyone writes anything at all. Through September 16, the Morgan Library and Museum is showcasing the handwriting of more than a hundred major artists, authors, composers, and historical figures drawn from the Pedro Corrêa do Lago Collection. A selection is presented below. Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking (1942–2018). Signed title page from A Brief History of Time (1993), with thumbprint signature witnessed by Hawking’s personal assistant, Judith Croasdell, inscribed by Croasdell to Philip Dynes, October 9, 2006. Read More
July 18, 2018 Revisited Glenn Gould Is Always on Fast-Forward By Katharine Kilalea Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Katharine Kilalea revisits Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major. Glenn Gould in the studio in 1978. Driving home from the swimming pool one day, I listened to famous people on the radio describing themselves as either happy or unhappy. They preferred, on the whole, to say, “I choose to be happy,” which irritated me, so I switched to another station, which was playing Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major. The partita’s gigue—meaning jig—had a kinetic energy about it. I danced with my head. It seemed, while listening to it, that everything was dancing. A cricket match was on in the local park and the Bach infected the game with its rhythm, giving the throwing and catching of the ball, the umpire’s gestures, and the batting an elegance and coordination. My fingers drummed along on the steering wheel, or tried to, because Gould was playing, and Gould is always on fast-forward, his hands skipping so quickly over each other it was hard to say which was which. The outlines of the sounds were unclear, also, because despite having poured olive oil into my ears for several days, I had swimmer’s ear, which gave even the smallest noise an unrefined booming quality. Perhaps I could play this myself, I thought. Perhaps I could order the sheet music off Amazon. The piano would appreciate the company. It hadn’t been touched since New Year’s Eve when a friend’s new boyfriend—who would commit suicide shortly after—subjected us to a performance of Rachmaninoff. It was odd, most people play Rachmaninoff with feeling—because Rachmaninoff is full of feelings—but he just played it very loud and very fast. Impressively fast, really, but hard on the ear. Read More
July 18, 2018 At Work Organized Chaos: An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer By Nnedi Okorafor “Narrative Life-Forms” illustration from Wonderbook. Jeff VanderMeer is the New York Times best-selling author of more than twenty-five books over a thirty-year career, including the best-selling Annihilation. He has won the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award (three times) and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award. His highly imaginative guide to what he calls “imaginative fiction,” Wonderbook, features diagrams, maps, and renderings by the illustrator Jeremy Zerfoss that break down the mechanisms of creativity without losing any of its verve. It includes sidebars and essays by George R. R. Martin, Lev Grossman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Karen Joy Fowler, and many more. First published in 2013, the recently released expanded edition contains an additional fifty pages of material, including a section on ecology and fiction as well as on the process of bringing Annihalition to the big screen. VanderMeer spoke about the project with one of its contributors, Nnedi Okorafor, an award-winning novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism for both children and adults. “I don’t actually remember how I came to know Nnedi,” VanderMeer says. “It feels like I’ve known her forever, even though it’s only from 2011 or so, I believe. I have always loved her affinity for owls and other creatures.” INTERVIEWER Wonderbook is one of the best books about writing I’ve ever read or experienced. And I’m not saying that because I’m in it, even though that certainly gives the book a kick! Wonderbook is a collaboration of many of the most creative minds in literature and art, it features examples of writing philosophies, methods, and styles, and it’s just plain fun. It also teaches about creativity by its very existence—it’s a beautiful book. How did you come up with Wonderbook’s spectacularly organized chaotic form? VANDERMEER Abrams Image came to me and gave me a suitcase full of money and said, “Come back with the world’s first fully illustrated writing guide, all laid out and camera ready.” Or something close to that. I hired the artists and the designers and commissioned the sidebar articles, like yours. Then I turned it in to Abrams. No publisher has ever said anything as compelling or invigorating to me before or since. But the energizing thing was that no one had done a visual writing guide before—the closest thing would be Lynda Barry’s marvelous imagination carnival What It Is or, in another medium, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. It took three designers and dozens of artists across four continents and, a lot of stop-starts. It’s difficult, when you’ve written fiction for so long, to extract that muscle memory as a writing manual and especially to then translate it into visual metaphors, which hadn’t been done before in this way. Without Abrams letting me do the layout, it never would’ve happened. Because there was so much trial and error to get all the elements right. Read More
July 17, 2018 Redux Redux: Snared By Sin By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Doesn’t summer begin to feel … dull? Like, who can stomach all this tedious sunshine anyway? Before you go looking for some mischievous fun, consider Max Frisch’s definition of sin from his 1989 Writers at Work interview: “a lack of capacity for love”; read Yiyun Li’s “Persimmons,” a short story about punishment and drought; and learn what happened to a misfortunate youth in Greg Kosmicki’s poem “Lester Pyrtle Gets Snared By Sin and Caught in the Act By God in Old Man Mooney’s Barn, Summer, 1956.” Read More
July 17, 2018 Arts & Culture Why All the Books About Motherhood? By Lauren Elkin No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces. A question from the inside. —Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts I As the summer heats up and my due date approaches, I’ve been reading Pamela Druckerman’s cult book about French parenting Bringing Up Bébé. It’s a book people have been telling me about for years, I guess because I live in France and they want to know if they really serve Camembert in the crèches (from what I’ve heard, they do). But I had put off reading it until it felt, well, more relevant. If you don’t have a kid and have no immediate plans to have kids, reading about how to raise one isn’t going to be a top priority. This is not the case for readers of the spate of new books about motherhood that have been hitting the shelves over the past few months. Motherhood is the new friendship, you might say. These are books that are putting motherhood on the map, literarily speaking, arguing forcefully, through their very existence, that it is a state worth reading about for anyone, parent or not. There is no more relevant subject to every person in the world than motherhood. “All human life on the planet is born of woman,” as Adrienne Rich begins her landmark book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Or as my friend A. N. Devers paraphrased Rich recently on Twitter: “Moms are not a niche – they literally make ALL THE PEOPLE.” This is one thing I keep marveling over as pregnancy has its way with my body: for every single person you see and have ever seen in your life, some poor woman went through what I am going through now. It seems too extraordinary to be true. My friend Jean, who is due in December, put it similarly in her TinyLetter (to which you must subscribe; she is a genius): “On some of the worst days of the sickness I would look at people on the street and think: All of you did this to someone, every single one of you.” How could I ever have thought of parenting, or motherhood, as a niche concern? I find myself urgently needing to talk to other women about how incredibly momentous it feels, and yet how banal, and about the weight of the decision we’ve made—about what it all means. Read More
July 17, 2018 Arts & Culture On Stanley Kunitz and the Fine Arts Work Center By Geoffrey Hilsabeck The Fine Arts Work Center. When my wife and I first started dating, the poet Stanley Kunitz, one of the founders of the Fine Arts Work Center, visited her in a dream. She told him about our budding romance, and he said, with all the brightness and benevolence one would expect, “That’s wonderful! Wonderful!” (We later named our spaniel after him, though he turned out to be more like Stan Laurel than Stanley Kunitz.) That Stanley Kunitz might travel through the weird ether of dreams seems not wholly far-fetched. He believed in the necessary work done by the secret, sleeping self, busy “tunneling the purple sea,” as he puts it in an early poem. That belief was at the bedrock of his poetry and his teaching, and it continues to shape the institutions that he helped create, Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in particular. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Fine Arts Work Center. At its heart is its fellowship program, which from October to May each year hosts ten artists and ten writers in the early stages of their careers. Fellows are given a monthly stipend and a place to live and work. The Work Center also holds a robust summer program of workshops, readings, and artist talks, as well as online classes all year round. It is, as the name suggests, a place to work and was built, fittingly, on the site of a former lumberyard. Read More