November 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Edward Gorey Lived at the Ballet By Mark Dery Edward Gorey near one of the Nadelman sculptures on the promenade at the NY State Theater, 1973. Photograph: Bruce Chernin. Image provided by the Alpern Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. On the evening of April 23, 1964, the New York City Ballet opened the doors to its new home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, with a gala performance of George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Stars and Stripes. It was, for all practical purposes, Edward Gorey’s new home, too, five months out of the year. As in all the rituals that governed his life, Gorey was compulsive in his devotion to routine, arriving for eight o’clock performances at seven thirty, when the doors opened. Yet he sometimes spent long stretches in the lobby if he didn’t like one of the evening’s offerings. Gorey “had to be there on time, partly (he would say) because maybe they would change the order of the program, but I think it was just his compulsion—he had to be there,” says Peter Wolff, a ballet friend of Gorey’s who now sits on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation. “It was all part of his insane routine.” During intermissions, Gorey could be found in the theater’s main lobby, the Grand Promenade, located above the orchestra level. Three tiers of undulating balconies overhang the room; Elie Nadelman’s massive, generously proportioned female nudes, sculpted in white marble, bookend it. Inevitably, Gorey was near a bench by the east stairs, at the center of a circle of gossipy, inexhaustibly opinionated ballet obsessives. Toni Bentley, a Balanchine dancer turned author whose Costumes by Karinska features a foreword by Gorey, recalls him “leaning in his full-length fur coat, in his full-length beard, against the left-side Nadelman statue at intermission every single night.” Gorey “was very breezy about his opinions,” tossing them off in an artless manner, Peter Anastos says. “He just sat back and proclaimed evident truths about the company from a lofty cloud.” He had a flair for the bitchy bon mot, dubbing Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, neither of whom he could abide, “the world’s tallest albino asparagus.” Asked about the moldy chestnuts of the classical repertoire, he sniffed, “Les sylphides? Where they’re all looking for their contact lenses?” That said, his pronouncements were never mean spirited. “Even if Ted hated something or somebody or some costume or set, and covered it with abuse, it was never really very fearsome,” Anastos emphasizes. (“You can often hear me bitching about somebody’s performance, but I’m bitching on a terribly high level,” Gorey said.) Read More
November 1, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: You Could Make This Place Beautiful By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Elis Rosen Dear Poets, After a long separation, I spontaneously invited an ex-fling to join me on a trip across Europe. Given our delightfully sordid past, I assumed the trip would be full of flirting and playful sex. Not the case. He showed up entirely disinterested in me, was boorish about my plans and ideas, and spent every spare moment texting other women back home. It was supposed to be a steamy jaunt with my favorite bad boy—but it was more like babysitting a sullen teenager for two weeks. Prior to this trip, I had some long-lingering feelings and hopes about us as a pair. Suffice it to say, I’m over it. So while I’m not exactly heartbroken—this is no breakup—I still feel like I’m mourning the end of a long fantasy and confronting the reality of his indifference. Do you have a poem for this type of finality: when you at last see the truth of a situation, swallow it uncomfortably, and move on at last? Sincerely, Wrong Girl Read More
November 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Scent of a Novel By Julia Berick While writing my master’s thesis on DeLillo’s Underworld, I reached a strange level of intimacy with the book. I realized I wanted to wear it around my neck—not as an albatross but as adornment. Some people want to consume the things they love; I want to be subsumed by them. I wanted the novel pressed against my skin at all times, all one thousand pages of it. It wasn’t the first or the last time I wanted to be submerged. I have wanted to bathe in Marguerite Duras and Henry James and, most recently, Night Flight, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was only relatively recently that I realized, to my enormous delight, that many books have been transformed into purchasable perfumes. Could these expensive vials contain the perfume equivalent of a tone poem? Could they transcend homage and become the synesthetic translation of the reading experience? As I am deeply dedicated to arguing for the deeply subjective, I realized I had a quest before me. I truffled up four perfumes to try. There were quite a few tempting perfumes I did not review, because I had not already read and loved the book in a way that would allow me to evaluate the scent. In every case, I made notes about what I thought the book should smell like before I smelled its tribute. Read More
October 31, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing in Blood By Erica X Eisen In the spring of his thirty-second year, the wandering monk Hanshan Deqing (1546–1623) returned to the monastery of Mount Wutai after a period of absence. “At this time,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “I recalled the benevolence of my parents and the care they had given me. I also thought of all of the obstacles that stood between me and the Law.” But his thoughts were so fixed on the debt he owed to his mother and father that he was no longer able to make spiritual progress along the path to enlightenment. In his pain, Deqing resolved to undertake an act of extraordinary penance: copying out the sūtra known as The Flower of Adornment using ink made from his own blood. “Above, this would tie me to the karma of prajna [wisdom],” he explained, “and below it would repay my parents for their benevolence.” Among the constellation of ascetic practices in Chinese Buddhism, one of the most common was blood writing. According to The History of the Chen Dynasty, blood writing began in the year 579, when a prince known as Shuling used his own blood to make a copy of the Nirvana Sūtra. The practice continued into the early twentieth century; men and women, laypeople and clergy copied texts in this manner, pressing to the page brushes dipped in blood, mixed with gold or soot ink or nothing at all. Cutting themselves in ritually potent places—at the tip of the finger, the root of the tongue, or above the crest of the heart—scribes would painstakingly execute stroke after stroke in a medium that, it was believed, represented the state of the soul: a dark color indicated sinfulness while a paler shade of ink betokened the writer’s purity. The production of religious texts was not the only end of bloodletting—early Chinese chronicles furnish many accounts of solemn pacts secured with blood. Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655), a patriarch of the Pure Land sect, is said to have used it to compose a letter to his mother. Approval for the practice was hardly universal: the poet-monk Jiaoran (730–199) found the mingling of sacred text with profane material blasphemous, while others argued that the necessary self-harm constituted grave filial impiety, even if undertaken for the salvation of one’s parents. And yet blood writing received broad enough acceptance that when Deqing made up his mind to copy out The Flowers of Adornment, the paper for the task was furnished by the Empress Mother herself. Read More
October 31, 2018 Arts & Culture The Horror of Geologic Time By Aaron Worth Arthur Machen. In 1895, the editors of a new magazine, The Unicorn, sought to make a splash by engaging a pair of literary hot properties to contribute parallel series of tales. The two writers were Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells, both fresh off recent publishing triumphs (in Machen’s case perhaps scandal is closer to the mark), and their contributions were to offer readers distinct modes or flavors of what we today would call genre fiction. The magazine, unfortunately, folded after a mere three issues, in which only one of Wells’s stories, and none of Machen’s, appeared. Machen related the episode, nearly three decades later, in characteristically self-deprecating fashion: ‘The Great God Pan” had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called ‘The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill [sic] and Mr. Girdlestone, a paper that was to be called ‘The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror stories. This obscure episode in late-Victorian publishing history is intriguing for a number of reasons. It would be interesting to know, for instance, just how Raven-Hill and Girdlestone phrased their offer; perhaps they requested “more stuff in the ‘Pan’ line.” Writing in the 1920s, Machen speaks of “horror stories” and “tales of horror,” but it’s unlikely that these were the expressions used at the time (unlikely, too, that the editors asked the young Wells for more “scientific romances,” let alone the entirely anachronistic designation “science fiction”). This was, after all, precisely the period during which the still fluid conceptual boundaries of emergent genre categories like science fiction, fantasy, and horror were beginning to be negotiated, shaped, and defined. But a more tantalizing question is this: If The Unicorn, and its editors’ scheme, had been a success, would the trajectory of Machen’s reputation have more closely resembled that of Wells’s—triumph after triumph, as well as worldwide celebrity, in the years to come? Machen’s star, by contrast, sank slowly back toward the horizon line of relative obscurity, then followed an irregularly wavelike course throughout his later life (and afterlife), ascending and again declining at periodic intervals. For Wells, 1895 marked the beginning of fame; for Machen it meant something like the end of it, until the next century at any rate. But what if Machen had become, as it were, the H. G. Wells of horror? Read More
October 31, 2018 Hue's Hue Blaze Orange, the Color of Fear, Warnings, and the Artificial By Katy Kelleher It started with a gunshot. I had just moved into my new house in the woods of Maine, a log-sided cabin surrounded by miles of “public access” forest that were owned by logging companies and managed, as far as I could tell, by no one. It was October, and I was working in my bedroom, with my dog lying heavy on my feet. Suddenly, a shot rang out. It was close. Then another, and another. It was the echoey boom of a shotgun, a sound I’m familiar with, thanks to hours spent skeet shooting under the tutelage of an L2L. Bean instructor in the woods of Freeport. As I listened to the sound of gunfire, I slowly became aware of the stench of urine. My elderly dog, a sweet husky-hound mix named Deja, had pissed all over the floorboards. She was shaking from fear, trembling like an autumn leaf. I didn’t have the heart to discipline her. This has become an annual occurrence. People trek out into the lumber-land to shoot their guns. I become tense and resentful. Deja pees. And repeat. I no longer walk outside in the fall without carrying my fear with me. I’m always a little wary of hunters, but I’m more afraid of the drink-and-shoot types. Every year, people die in the woods, hit by stray bullets or mistaken for deer. And so I wear a blaze-orange Carhartt hat. And so my dogs wear orange bandannas around their necks. And so we nail signs to the trees, glowing, neon-orange signs that tell shooters to stay away, keep off our property. I have no way of knowing whether any of this works. Read More