October 29, 2018 Arts & Culture The Trouble with All the Houses I’ve Lived In By Lucia Berlin Lucia Berlin called many different places home during her lifetime. The following is a list she made in the late eighties detailing the pitfalls of some of them. Lucia, Jeff, and Mark, Acapulco, 1961. Photo: Buddy Berlin (© 2018 Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP). Juneau, Alaska—Avalanche the day I was born, wiped out a third of town. Deer Lodge, Montana—No heat, just the oven. Earthquake. Helena, Montana—Splinters in the cellar door. Blizzards. Mullan, Idaho—River right outside, too dangerous to play. Mill right by. Stay inside. Flood. Sunshine Mine, Idaho—Paper-thin walls. Mama crying crying. Woodstove smoked. Avalanches. El Paso, Texas—Cockroaches, dark hall, three mean drunks. Drought. Flood. Read More
October 29, 2018 Arts & Culture The Draw of the Gothic By Sarah Perry To understand the literary gothic—to even begin to account for its curious appeal, and its simultaneous qualities of seduction and repulsion—it is necessary to undertake a little time travel. We must go back beyond the builders putting the capstone on Pugin’s Palace of Westminster, and on past the last lick of paint on the iced cake of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House; back again another six hundred years past the rap of the stone-mason’s hammer on the cathedral at Reims, in order to finally alight on a promontory above the city of Rome in 410 A.D. The city is on fire. There are bodies in the streets and barbarians at the gates. Pope Innocent I, hedging his bets, has consented to a little pagan worship that is being undertaken in private. Over in Bethlehem, St Jerome hears that Rome has fallen. “The city which had taken the whole world,” he writes, “was itself taken.” The old order—of decency and lawfulness meted out with repressive colonial cruelty—has gone. The Goths have taken the Forum. Read More
October 26, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cameras, Colonnades, and Countesses By The Paris Review John Chiara, “Pike Slip to Sugar Hill,” 2018. Installation view. Photography is an exercise in disappointment. How many times has my sight been arrested—by a mountain, a vista, a strange street juxtaposition—only for the resulting photo to be flat, featureless, uncommunicative? I sometimes scroll through old photos I’ve taken and can’t remember what I wanted to capture. Yet it seems the most effortless, natural art. Little manual strength or dexterity is required—you look, you click, and light impresses itself everywhere simultaneously on the film. Camera pressed to face, the lens ceases to be an object, becomes a perceived appendage of the eye. The “eye” of a photographer is often praised in the same manner as a pitcher’s arm, a singer’s voice, a painter’s hand. Yet in those cases the body part celebrated is actually performing the action, while the photographer’s eye does nothing but select—the camera does the work, and the camera is not an eye. An eye is connected to a brain, and vision is inseparable from thinking, from the gestalt of perception, the interplay of the senses. Photographs we take are so often disappointing because they have been denuded of ourselves, floating free from the pressure of our senses and cognition. The great pictures are those that feel made. They induce synesthesia—we can feel them, smell them, hear them. This ethic is embraced by the photographer John Chiara, currently showing his collection of large color-negative New York photos “Pike Slip to Sugar Hill” at the Yossi Milo Gallery. Chiara imposes himself on the processes cloistered in the camera by building his own, so large that he mounted it on the back of a flatbed. As a result, most of the photos are looking up at buildings, gawking. Within the camera he exposes the giant photo paper directly, physically manipulating the exposure in real time. The colors are ghostly and garish, the solid, darker things made bright, giving the photos the spatial clarity of a blueprint. Texture, by virtue of the print size, the volume of the colors, and Chiara’s hand, is palpable. The pictures are quickened by oxymoron. Pointed skyward, they feel subterranean. Defiantly unreal, they are utterly faithful to embodied sight. —Matt Levin Read More
October 26, 2018 Arts & Culture My Younger Brother Spreads His Palms, Maple Leaves: Yukio Mishima’s Haiku By Hiroaki Sato Yukio Mishima. Many are likely to be surprised to learn that Yukio Mishima—yes, the writer who chose to die by dazzlingly public disembowelment and decapitation in 1970—wrote haiku. When you think of it, though, if you go to school in Japan, you will automatically be asked to compose haiku in grammar school or, at any rate, in junior high school. Also, sometimes, but not often, your parents will meticulously preserve every scrap of your school compositions or the school magazines printing your stuff. Both happened to Mishima. As a result, we have about a hundred eighty of his haiku collected among his complete works. Mishima was a literary prodigy. With haiku, it also helped that his Japanese-language teacher in the Middle Division of the Peers School was Kurō Iwata. Iwata didn’t just encourage his students to write. After the war, he established his reputation as an authority on Edo haikai. He published, among other things, a large compilation of commentaries on all of Bashō’s hokku. One of Mishima’s earliest haiku dates from when he was seven years old, and it reads: おとうとがお手手ひろげてもみじかな Otōto ga o-tete hirogete momiji kana My younger brother spreads his palms, maple leaves The “younger brother” here is Chiyuki, two years old at the time. He went on to become a diplomat, serving as ambassador to Morocco and Portugal. Now in English translations, Mishima may not be known too well as a playwright, despite Donald Keene’s translation of Madame de Sade and Ingmar Bergman’s famous staging of it, my translation of My Friend Hitler and Other Plays, and a few others. But he wrote more than seventy plays, beginning with the ones he wrote in his early teens, and most of them were staged in his lifetime. In fact, as Donald Richie observed, “life was but a stage” to Mishima, his staging of his own seppuku the most meticulous construct he pulled off. Read More
October 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Bad Genre: Annie Ernaux, Autofiction, and Finding a Voice By Lauren Elkin Annie Ernaux “When I was twenty-one,” wrote Zadie Smith at age twenty-five, “I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.” What is a writer’s voice? Surely, as in life, we all have many voices, different ones for different occasions. For the young Zadie Smith, Kafka’s voice established a norm: this is what literature sounds like. Different genres—fiction, academic articles, general nonfiction—conjure certain expectations. I write differently in all of them. But over the last couple of years, I’ve started to feel the strain of singing so many styles on the page, and I’ve started to wonder: What does my own voice sound like, freed from the mold? Do I even have one? As any classically trained singer or actor can tell you, trying to make your voice sound like someone else’s can do all manner of damage to it. Voicing relies on friction between the breath and the folds of the vocal cords, but the cords can wither or be damaged from being struck too harshly. This can spill out into the body as well, and tension can build in the jaw, neck, shoulders. “Good voice work,” writes Cicely Berry, former RSC voice director, “should always aim to use the voice that is there and stretch it and open up its possibilities.” Read More
October 25, 2018 At Work The Library Fire: An Interview with Susan Orlean By Brent Katz Susan Orlean Susan Orlean stood in a crowd facing the Los Angeles Central Library. We were supposed to meet in the rare books room, but as I was setting up and Orlean was arriving from her son’s dentist appointment, somebody pulled the fire alarm. At the LA Central branch, fire alarms trigger deep memory. On April 29, 1986, this dignified and eccentric building in the center of downtown burned for over seven hours. Four hundred thousand books were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands more were damaged, by the fire and by the water used to fight it. Orlean, the author of The Orchid Thief and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend and a New Yorker staff writer since 1992, learned about the fire when a librarian lifted a book to his nose, inhaled, and said, “You can still smell the smoke in some of them.” Then she found Harry Peak, the “ditzy” out-of-work actor who confessed to some friends that he had started the fire. His story, and that of the 1986 fire—the largest library fire in American history—makes up one of the central threads in Orlean’s newest work, The Library Book. Orlean had already been interested in how modern libraries function, with their complex networks of departments and branches, but the 1986 fire gave her book a center. From that year, she moved forward into the present day, and back to the nineteenth-century origins of the LA Public Library, providing an alternative history of a city known more for movies than for books. The library also became a portal into Orlean’s personal history. The book is dedicated to her son—her future—and to her mother—her past—who first brought Orlean to the Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library, outside Cleveland, when Orlean was a young girl, and who died during the writing of this book. After a few minutes out in the sun, Orlean and I decided to cross West Fifth Street to a Starbucks. It was Yom Kippur, and Orlean was, as she later tweeted, “fasting except for coffee. I know that’s technically cheating but believe me you would not want me without coffee.” By the time we got our drinks and settled into a spot in the Starbucks courtyard, the fire department had arrived, and a PR person from the library texted that it was safe to reenter the building. This interview was conducted in the rare books room, with a brief follow-up over email. ORLEAN A very eventful way to begin an interview. INTERVIEWER If one knows you only through your writing, it seems like this kind of thing happens to you all the time. Read More