January 18, 2019 In Memoriam Francine du Plessix Gray and Sorrel Soup By Vasily Rudich and Gabriella De Ferrari By her own account, writing wasn’t easy for Francine du Plessix Gray, who died last Sunday at the age of eighty-eight. As she told Regina Weinreich in her 1987 Art of Fiction interview, “I’ve always had a terrifically painful ambivalence of love and terror towards the act of writing.” But this doesn’t come through in her fearless books, such as the novel Lovers and Tyrants, a semiautobiographical account of her childhood, and Them, an unsparing look at her tyrannical parents. She was born in 1930 at the French embassy in Warsaw, but after her father died in 1940, Gray and her mother emigrated to America. Gray arrived in the country knowing not a lick of English; fourteen months later, she won the school spelling bee. Gray thrived in tense situations—she studied under the poet Charles Olson, whom she described as a “terrifying guru,” and before coming to fiction, she worked as the only woman on the night shift at United Press International, where she was forced to file stories “in a matter of minutes—sometimes a matter of seconds, since we were always trying to beat AP to the radio wire.” She went on to become a New Yorker staff writer and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she taught at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown. However, despite her success, when asked whether she’d like to be a writer in the next life, she replied: “Hell no. Have you ever met a writer who’d want the same karma a second time round? I doubt if one exists. We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others. The next time round I’d like to be a great athlete with a political mission, like Billie Jean King or Arthur Ashe, or perhaps a lieder singer.” Here, we bring you two short memories from those who knew her: Francine du Plessix Gray. Photo: Frances McLaughlin-Gill. Read More
January 18, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Decadence, Doodles, and Deep Ends By The Paris Review Ana Luísa Amaral. Photo: Mattias Blomgren (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)), from Wikimedia Commons. If you think of poetry as a language at its purest and most distilled, and if you think of a language as, in a sense, a living thing, with a life story as unique and formative as any person’s, then the translation of poetry from one language (whichever) into another (whichever else) seems like the most impossible sort of transplantation: opportunity knocking twice, a miracle that repeats. A good way to see this lightning in a bottle is to pick up What’s in a Name, a collection of work by the Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral. (Margaret Jull Costa’s side-by-side translation of the book will be published in March by New Directions.) Amaral has a remarkable gift for making the personal universal and the universal intimate, but for me the real joy of this book is seeing the conversation unfold between the Portuguese and the English, reflecting each other from left to right and back. Like creatures in a myth, nouns become verbs and verbs, nouns; syntax circles back and forth; subjects and voice change. They aren’t the same creature, the English and the Portuguese, but something like each other’s what-if selves. Having the opportunity to hold both before you at once is a truly remarkable gift. —Hasan Altaf Read More
January 18, 2019 Hue's Hue Living Coral, the Brutal Hue of Climate Change and Brand New iPhones By Katy Kelleher Coral outcrop on Flynn Reef The color forecasters at Pantone have declared 2019 the year of Living Coral. In the press release, the company describes this orangey pink hue as “vibrant, yet mellow,” providing “warmth,” “buoyancy,” “nourishment,” and “comfort.” Reading the release is a bit disconcerting. According to Pantone, Living Coral can both release us from the grips of “digital technology” while retaining a “lively presence on social media.” This color reminds us equally of snorkeling and scrolling, the company seems to suggest. It’s a natural hue—and a digital one. Pantone calls the color “life-affirming,” a bitterly ironic statement, considering the continued annihilation we’re inflicting on these small animals. Read More
January 18, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with the Strugatsky Brothers By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Yellow Bouillon #1, from a legendary Russian cookbook, approximates the broth served at the Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. The Soviet science fiction masters Arkady (1925–1991) and Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012) had that particular Russian knack for making humor out of tragedy, the first but not last reason their work transcends genre. Famous in Russia, the brothers are known in the West for the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, which the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker is based on. Roadside Picnic and another of my favorites, The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn (1970), have thrilling plots the way best sellers should, but they also have a depth of social commentary and layered metastructuring that are revelatory of the brothers’ Soviet world—and relevant to our times as well. To this end, I supped with the brothers Strugatsky, making some of the classic dishes mentioned in their books. Readers should be forewarned that the following article contains spoilers, though it offers blini and caviar in return. To return to sardonic wit: Roadside Picnic is the story of earth after extraterrestrial contact. The aliens came, did something mysterious, and then left, leaving a handful of sites contaminated with toxic but possibly useful junk. As one character explains, it’s as if “a car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios … A fire is lit. Tents are pitched. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … A roadside picnic.” The human survivors devote themselves to studying the alien detritus, but they’re like the insects and animals of the anecdote: unable to understand it. Roadside Picnic’s portrait of humanity isn’t particularly flattering, and it’s a spoof on the grandiose alien-contact science fiction of the era. As another character remarks, “Somehow this isn’t at all how I envisioned it.” Read More
January 17, 2019 In Memoriam Passing Mary Oliver at Dawn By Summer Brennan Mary Oliver (Photo © Mariana Cook/Penguin Press) I don’t know what to say about Mary Oliver’s death except that she was a great and beloved poet, and also my teacher and academic adviser, and that she was kind to me. She was absurdly generous. I first met her as if inside one of her poems: in a field of tall September grass, under a big bowl of stars just before dawn. It was my first week of college, and I hadn’t been able to sleep with excitement. I had thrown a Fair Isle sweater on over my flannel pajamas, slipped some hiking boots over fleece socks, and run out into the sleeping world. I was entering the field, by the reeds of the nearby pond, when I heard her coming along the path, a small, unknown figure walking with two dogs. Unassuming yet unmistakable. Perhaps I should not say that we “met” there, since we didn’t speak. We merely nodded as if it were normal to be up at that hour, passing in the dark. When I later introduced myself properly, I’d like to think that she remembered me as the girl from the field. Perhaps she did. As she wrote in her essay “Wordsworth’s Mountain”: But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me. As a teacher, Mary had almost no ego at all. In an act of generosity that I only now, as a “published writer,” can fully appreciate, she would bring into class her own failed poems—efforts at expressing some experience or sense or truth that would remain private and not be sent out into the world. She would talk about why they did not work. She was matter of fact about her failure. I remember one such poem she brought in, which she had called “The Pony Express.” Something about riders adrift in the landscape. She explained how she had tried but failed to express a vastness, and a loneliness, that were not coming through. Later, it would seem, she did rework this poem and publish it in her book Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010), under the title “The Riders.” It ends: Read More
January 17, 2019 Look Anni Albers’s Many-Threaded Masterpieces By The Paris Review Weaving is a tradition older than the concept of art itself, but in applying the realm of abstraction to a handloom, Anni Albers created thoroughly modern studies in textiles. Although she initially wanted to paint, the nominally egalitarian structure of the Bauhaus, where she studied, pushed her toward more “feminine” forms of expression, and she enrolled in a textiles workshop. She found joy in weaving as a “craft which is many-sided.” “Like any craft,” she writes in a 1937 essay, “it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to the level of art.” She often plotted out her designs on paper before turning to the loom. And just like the weavers before her, Albers was committed to passing on her knowledge. She wrote an instructional book, On Weaving, and taught classes at Black Mountain College and Yale University along with her husband, the artist Josef Albers. Her ambitious, carefully woven constructions are feasts for the eyes, though she maintained that they were “only to be looked at”; their lustrous stitches ask to be touched. A major exhibition of Albers’s work is on view at the Tate Modern through January 27. Below, we present a selection of images from the book Anni Albers, which accompanies the show. With Verticals, 1946. Cotton and linen 154.9 x 118.1 cm. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Study for Camino Real, 1967. Gouache on graph paper, 44.4 x 40.6 cm. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Read More