February 15, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Patrick O’Brian By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The discovery of a new series of novels to love is often accompanied by joy (a new lifelong friend!) and resentment (why did none of you tell me about this?). These were precisely my feelings upon finding the Aubrey–Maturin books, a series of twenty naval adventures written by the brilliant British historical novelist Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000). The books take place during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) and explore the friendship between Jack Aubrey, a jolly and bellicose naval captain, and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon, a laudanum-addicted naturalist. Most of the action occurs at sea—the first volume starts on the island of Minorca (at the time a British possession), with Jack waiting desperately to be assigned a ship and Stephen ducking out on his lodgings because he’s unable to pay the rent. Shore time, when it comes in the second volume, is set in the carriages and country houses of England. I realized about halfway through Post Captain that O’Brian is like a male Jane Austen, writing from the point of view of the soldiers who populate Austen’s fiction. As a newly minted O’Brian addict, I feel he deserves an Austen-like cultural renown and am sad that despite his cult status and best-selling run in his own time, it never quite happened. (Master and Commander, a 2003 movie starring Russell Crowe and loosely based on the books, failed to capture the magic.) I can conclude only that the extraordinary depth of the books’ historical detail—especially their verisimilitude regarding naval jargon, which is nearly impenetrable, though it creates a rich texture of “fo’c’sles” and “bosuns”—puts readers off. Read More
February 15, 2019 Look James Baldwin, Restored By Hilton Als Jane Evelyn Atwood, James Baldwin with bust of himself sculpted by Larry Wolhander, Paris, France, 1975, gelatin silver print. After the Alice Neel show I curated closed in 2017, David Zwirner asked me what I’d like to do next. I immediately said James Baldwin, for some reasons that were clear to me and some that revealed themselves only when I began to meet with artists and see their work. I wanted to give Baldwin his body back, to reclaim him for myself and many others as the maverick queer artist that drew us to him in the first place. It’s difficult to visualize those feelings—complex, almost nonverbal feelings—and, as it turns out, difficult to get the right mix that further articulates those expressions of thought and feeling. But I think what we have here in this show, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin” (on view through February 16), is exactly as I wanted, which is to say a myriad portrait of a significant figure. And as everyone knows, when an artist is making a portrait, they are also making a portrait of themselves. So to a very great extent, this is not a group show but, I hope, a new and valuable way of showing artists who are interested in exhibiting aspects of themselves, their thinking in relation to their times and the history that made them. Baldwin certainly helped make me, and in recent years I have been disturbed by the conversations around his work—largely, shall we say, heteronormative conversations that elevate the imitator and plunge the so-called liberal into a very comforting cold bath laced with guilt and remorse. These are reflexes, not thoughts, really, and so in order to help give Baldwin himself, I thought we had to start from the beginning. The first part of the exhibition is rooted in biography, and the second part is about metaphor: artists making the art Baldwin could not make himself. Read More
February 14, 2019 Arts & Culture Tove Jansson on Writer’s Block By Tove Jansson Tove Jansson During a recent trip to Stockholm, I came across a new collection of stories and essays by Tove Jansson in a bookstore. Though Jansson is perhaps best known as the creator of the Moomin series, her writing for adults is vast and varied. I have translated two of the essays from that new collection into English for the first time. The first, “The Island,” appeared on this site yesterday. The second, “Once, at a park,” here below, is a beautifully scattered, rhapsodic piece that defies genre conventions. Again, there are torsions in time and tense; again, the syntax can be somewhat shattered—and (again) there is a joyful disregard for the boundaries separating fiction, memoir, and essay. I have tried to retain, for the most part, the slight disquiet and disorientation the original sometimes conveys, because this carefully crumbling prose is directly related to the content of the piece. Written in 1997, toward the end of Jansson’s life, “Once, at a park,” starts out as a classic piece on writer’s block—by writing about the impossibility of writing. But there is much more going on. Despite its conciseness, the story can be read as a reflection on Jansson’s extensive career. It touches on some of her lifelong obsessions (“I can’t understand why I must drag the ocean into everything I write”). It also addresses multilingualism (she screams at the polyglot French clochard in Finnish but writes the story in Swedish). And, at a crucial point in the narrative, it connects writing and painting (Jansson, of course, was a brilliant visual artist as well). It is true that “Once, at a park” offers a bleak reflection on the craft, but the conjunction of candor and artifice at the heart of the piece reveals, I think, an enduring fidelity to literature. —Hernan Diaz A small park behind Saint-Suplice, in Paris I’m sitting comfortably parked on a bench in a little park behind Saint-Sulpice and I’m supposed to find something to write about. It’s very quiet here. Pigeons copulate on a patch of grass, some tourists catch their breath on the benches across from me, an organ plays behind my back, far away. Read More
February 14, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Valentine’s Day Edition 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, I’ve been in love with and dating a man for almost a year now. He’s vibrant and interesting in all of the ways that I admire—he pursues old hobbies, constantly seeks out new ones, and curates his time to be the best version of himself he can be. But oftentimes, this leaves me feeling left in the dust, like I am less than him, like I am a shadow in the wake of his constant transformation into a better self. Even when we pursue our mutual hobbies and interests together (even ones I know I’m quite good at), he somehow manages to surpass me in skill, making my achievements feel lesser. Even though I love him so much, every time I see him I end up feeling small. Do you have a poem for this feeling of love that dwarfs you? Sincerely, At the Pedestal’s Base Read More
February 14, 2019 Arts & Culture Sharing Love By Ross Gay Walter Crane, Jack and Jill, 1877. Illustration from Walter Crane’s The Baby’s Opera. I adore it when I see two people—today it was, from the looks of it, a mother and child here on Canal Street in Chinatown—sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles. It at first seems to encourage a kind of staggering, as the uninitiated, or the impatient, will try to walk at his own pace, the bag twisting this way and that, whacking shins or skidding along the ground. But as we mostly do, feeling the sack, which has become a kind of tether between us, we modulate our pace, even our sway and saunter—the good and sole rhythms we might swear we live by—to the one on the other side of the sack. Read More
February 13, 2019 Arts & Culture Pandora in Blue Jeans By Briallen Hopper Grace Metalious. Photo: Larry Smith. The photograph captioned “Pandora in Blue Jeans” is one of the most widely circulated portraits of a woman in history. Like most people, I first saw it on the back of a pulpy paperback book. A black-and-white fifties author photo that seems like a snapshot, it is a side view of a solidly built young woman in a prehipster buffalo plaid shirt and men’s jeans, sitting at a table with a typewriter on it in what looks like a kitchen. She’s not wearing makeup, her hair is pulled back in a lumpy ponytail, and she’s leaning forward with her hands folded anxiously or pensively in front of her face, so we can’t really see what she looks like. There’s a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray next to her typewriter and a messy stack of papers behind it. She is staring at what she’s writing, and she seems not to know or care that the photographer is there. Some author photos develop a life of their own, and those are often the ones that bend a gender or pose a challenge. Perhaps the first of these was the engraved daguerreotype of Walt Whitman from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The book didn’t disclose Whitman’s name on the title page, but it included his full-page frontispiece portrait as a personal welcome, his shirt unbuttoned and his undershirt showing, a hand on his hip, a hand in his pocket, his gaze direct, his head cocked. “I look so damned flamboyant,” he later said about this image, “as if I was hurling bolts at somebody—full of mad oaths—saying defiantly, to hell with you!” Flamboyant, yes, without a doubt, but the direction of the defiance is harder to read. Is he really saying to hell with us, or is he defying us to look away? Does he want his lightning bolt to fatally pierce us, or does he just want to electrify us? For his authorial debut almost a hundred years later, on the dust jacket of the 1947 first edition of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote went Whitman one better by draping himself on his back on a couch, one hand on his stomach and one on his crotch, and looking up at the viewer with a knowing gaze. Hilton Als reads this author photograph as both a metamorphosis and an expression of desire. The image turned Capote into “an American woman of style,” Als writes in White Girls, and “the woman he became in this photograph—itself better written than Other Voices, Other Rooms—wanted to be fucked by you and by any idea of femininity that had fucked you up.” The woman at the kitchen table in “Pandora in Blue Jeans” has undoubtedly been fucked up by femininity, as all women have, but she does not appear to want to be fucked by it or by us. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to want anything from us at all. If Capote’s photo is famously seductive and come-hither, “Pandora in Blue Jeans” is famously unsexy, telling us to go away. Circulating on the back of one of the most sexual and successful books of the decade, Grace Metalious’s scandalous 1956 mega–best seller Peyton Place, “Pandora in Blue Jeans” represents a white girl’s rejection of white-girl conventions, an unprecedented opting out of mainstream commercial feminine iconography that still managed to be wildly popular (if rarely imitated) and made an unlikely icon of a woman whose life seemed to consist of unglamorous obliviousness, unremarkable domesticity, and totally depraved thoughts. Read More