November 5, 2018 Senses of Dawn The Touch of Dawn By Nina MacLaughlin This is the first installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. Original illustration by Jackson Joyce. What first? The touch. Dawn arrives not rosy-breathed, not rosy-voiced. She arrives with rosy fingers. She arrives in touch. Homer told us so, over and over, as new days took shape during Odysseus’s long, wandering journey home. Here are light’s first moments as described in Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey: “When early Dawn shown forth with rosy fingers” “Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses” “When rose-fingered Dawn came bright and early” “Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming” “When newborn Dawn appeared with hands of flowers” “Then Dawn was born again; her fingers bloomed” Dawn is born again, just as we are. We emerge from the warm womb of sleep and it registers first in the body. Soften your eyes and feel it. Dawn runs her fingers along the softness of your flank, over your shoulder, in the hollow behind your knee. She touches your clavicle and your neck. Fingertips petal-soft. She brushes your breast, the inside of your thigh, moves up your spine and against your scalp, your jaw, your brow. Awareness accumulates. You feel, These are the boundaries of my body. Here’s where I start and the pillow stops. This is the blanket, this is my skin. This is the mattress, this is my chest. All that touches me isn’t me. I am separate again. Read More
November 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Shirkers, Sculptors, and Space Ghosts By The Paris Review Still from Shirkers. Little did Sandi Tan know, her first (and only) feature film, Shirkers, would escape her in the exact way its namesake prophesied. In 1992, Tan wanted to write a movie that preserved her punk adolescence in Singapore. Nineteen-year-old Tan and her friends fancied themselves iconoclasts, abrading against a stiflingly conservative art scene; they led dozens of minor revolutions, from chewing gum (which was against the law) to watching bootleg copies of Blue Velvet via a “clandestine videotaping syndicate.” Inspired by the “unusual” and “unpopular” films of French New Wave and independent American cinema, Tan concocted an idea for her own: a guerrilla-style road movie in a country that takes only forty minutes to drive across. It would be bold and bright and fizzling with youthful energy, exuding all the naive ambition of a sure-to-be cult hit. Only it never was, because Shirkers was never finished. After filming was completed, all seventy reels were stolen by Tan’s mentor and director, Georges Cardona. It took more than twenty years for Tan to be reunited with Shirkers. She sprinkles the surviving footage into a breathtaking Netflix documentary in which she spends remarkably little time pathologizing Cardona, choosing instead to entertain a more nostalgic, meaningful subject: how Shirkers (and its absence) has rippled through the lives of its creators, cast, and crew. Tan in particular feels that she has been permanently fissured by the vacancy that Shirkers left behind, not only in regards to her own childhood but also the place her work should have occupied in Singapore’s film history. Alongside her crew members, Tan wonders if it is possible for the lack of something to be felt, even something that never really existed in the first place. But in the end, Shirkers isn’t just Tan’s wish for what could have been; it’s a beautiful and backward odyssey, chasing down and interrogating her past to find out precisely how her innocence fell by the wayside. —Madeline Day Read More
November 2, 2018 Eat Your Words A James Salter Dinner Party By Valerie Stivers James Salter (1925–2015) wrote about food and about sex—and sometimes about the combination of the two—in short, elegant sentences. In Salter’s hands, the topics weren’t just transient pleasures but the stuff of life. “Life is weather. Life is meals,” he writes in the book Light Years, and he later took the phrase as the title of a nonfiction book about food. It was his life’s work to evoke his characters’ fleeting moments, the picnic lunches and afternoons in bed, to assign meaning to them as they flooded by, and also to mourn the gaps between what can be lived and what can be recorded, contemplated, captured. All of this is another way of saying that James Salter was an intense guy who liked a good dinner party. More on that intensity: Salter was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, an experience that became the foundation of his first novel, The Hunters. He gave up a bright future in the military in order to become a writer, eventually scaling the heights of literary New York. On the side, he became a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He had four children from a first marriage and, in later years, living with a second wife in Long Island, New York, scooped up many prizes, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award and The Paris Review’s 2011 Hadada Award for lifetime achievement. Read More
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