October 16, 2018 Arts & Culture A Lost Exchange Between Burroughs and Ginsberg By William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg Photo: Hank O’Neal. In 1992, five years before his death, Allen Ginsberg visited William S. Burroughs’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. Over the course of four days, the two Beats chatted about everything from shamanism to punk rock, from Jane Bowles to David Cronenberg. Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Steven Taylor and published this week by Three Rooms Press, collects for the first time this intimate, sprawling exchange. In the excerpt printed below, Burroughs and Ginsberg discuss the inspiration behind the infamous Naked Lunch chapter “The Market.” GINSBERG One thing I remember, actually, at some point or other, you and Lucien and Kerouac got me on a couch and took down my pants. BURROUGHS I don’t remember that. GINSBERG [laughing] ’Cause I … It was thrilling, and I got a hard-on, I remember. I was ashamed. Because it was Lucien there. BURROUGHS Should be. GINSBERG On the couch, in front of the window. BURROUGHS Yes. I know where the couch was. Typical railroad apartment, where they usually had the bathtub in the kitchen. Read More
October 16, 2018 On Uwe Johnson On Uwe Johnson: The Hardest Book I’ve Ever Translated By Damion Searls This week marks the publication in English of Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. This is the second of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the Daily. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen There are 367 chapters of Anniversaries. It spans a year, from 1967 to 1968, with two August 20s, and 1968 had a leap day. This adds up to a long book, almost seventeen hundred pages in the new translation. It is nothing short of incredible how much of a page-turner the book manages to be, because of the three different levels (German past, New York present, current-events news) and Johnson’s ability to set up a different way of bouncing between them in every chapter. A chapter might open with a Times report on the traffic, shift to the weather in Riverside Park outside the Cresspahls’ window, then move to the playground in the park where Gesine, a recently arrived German immigrant, and her daughter, Marie, made their first friends in America. Since this is the Upper West Side in the sixties, these are, naturally, a Holocaust survivor and her daughter. The chapter shows us Gesine’s guilt when they first meet, covers their shifting relationship over the years, and ends with Marie in the present running errands for her friend’s Orthodox family on the Sabbath, because this is a Saturday chapter. Four or five short pages, another jigsaw piece of the Cresspahls’ life and its anniversaries, and then on to the next chapter, which opens in 1931. I find that when I’m reading about Germany, I’m eager to get back to the New York story; when I’m reading about New York I want to find out what’s happening with Gesine’s family in Germany, on and on and on. Every few hundred pages, the Holocaust survivor and her daughter show up in the neighborhood. Read More
October 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Dick and Jane, Forcibly Drowned and Then Brought Back to Life By Ben Marcus Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. She’s a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever it’s being called these days. The stories are short. They defy logic. They thumb their nose at conventional sense, or even unconventional sense. But if sense is in short supply in these texts, that leaves more room for splendor and sorrow. These stories upend expectations and prize enigma and the uncanny above all else. The Williams epiphany should be patented, or bottled—on the other hand, it should also be regulated and maybe rationed, because it’s severe. It’s a rare feeling her stories trigger, but it’s a keen and deep and welcome one, the sort of feeling that wakes us up to complication and beauty and dissonance and fragility. It’s a sensation we can get only by reading (that’s the only place I’ve ever found it), and once you’ve had it, you want to keep having it again and again. This feeling avows the complexity of life; it does not flinch from our harder suspicions about how vulnerable and brutal our enterprise is. Such work feels—I don’t know how else to say it—brave. It is difficult to encounter the world as it is experienced by Diane Williams, but this difficulty seems necessary. So how does she do it? What is this literary approach? What is her trick? Williams’s unusual literary method reveals the thin rigging of most narrative, and then deploys that rigging to make spectacular shapes—abstract, maybe, or realistic. Who can say? Every shape is abstract in the end, and every shape is familiar and intimate in the right context. Yes, she’s using the tools of narrative, and her language often is plain in that it sounds spoken rather than labored over and page bound. There’s a Dick and Jane quality to the prose, if Dick and Jane had been forcibly drowned and then brought back to life, maybe starved for a while, induced with madness but warned, at pain of death, to conceal it. Read More
October 15, 2018 Arts & Culture A History of the Novel in Two Hundred Essays By Morten Høi Jensen V. S. Pritchett As an undergraduate, I gave up trying to write fiction (my only completed story bore the decidedly unpromising title “Growing Marijuana”) and realized I wanted to write literary criticism instead. Troubled by the cavernous gaps in my reading, I sent a fan letter to James Wood, whom I didn’t know personally but whom I admired deeply, and asked him what he thought an aspiring young critic ought to read. He generously recommended the Complete Collected Essays of V. S. Pritchett. “Try to find this big book,” he wrote, “it has hundreds of essays in it, covering essentially the history of the novel. I learned a lot from it.” Read More
October 15, 2018 On Uwe Johnson On Uwe Johnson: Poet of Both Germanys By Damion Searls This week marks the publication in English of one of the great novels of New York City, and of the twentieth century: Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, by the German writer Uwe Johnson. This is the first of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris Review contributor and former translation correspondent for the Daily, on the book, its author, and what it means to translate a foreign book about your hometown. In 1961, the heads of six leading publishers—French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and American—created the International Publishers’ Prize, “meant to single out writers who were actively transforming the world literary landscape, and to rival the Nobel Prize in prestige,” in the words of J. M. Coetzee. That inaugural year, the prize was shared by two writers everyone has heard of: Jorge Luis Borges, whose international career it launched, and Samuel Beckett. In its second year it went to a twenty-seven-year-old German named Uwe Johnson. Speculations About Jakob had been published when Johnson was twenty-five, in 1959—the same year as the other canonical postwar pre-sixties German novel, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. It wasn’t Johnson’s first novel: he had started another in his teens, and in 1956 sent it to the legendary Peter Suhrkamp, publisher of Brecht and Hesse and so many others. The reader’s report read, in part: “Well, Theodor Fontane [the German realist master, comparable to Flaubert] is alive, he’s 23 years old, and he lives on the other side!” The East. Suhrkamp met with Johnson, encouraged him, but turned down his first effort as being too regional, too firmly locked in to the experience of Mecklenburg, northeast Germany: there was too much Plattdeutsch dialect, too much local color. Limited scope was not a problem Johnson would ever have again. Read More
October 12, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Potters, Porridge Bowls, and Pastries as Existential Truths By The Paris Review Kathy Butterly, Yellow Glow, 2018, clay and glaze, 6 1/2″ x 9 7/8″ x 7″. There are several things I miss about living in Louisiana, one of them being its proximity to Mississippi and the strange wonder of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, the Frank Gehry–designed pottery museum across the street from the Gulf in the south of the state. There resides a permanent collection of George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi, an artist who did strange and amazing things with form (some critics say he anticipated abstraction), wonderful and wonky things with color (see the shimmering multicolor glazes), and generally elevated mud into fine art. Lucky for me—lucky for all of us within spitting distance of West Chelsea—Kathy Butterly’s ceramics are on display at James Cohan Gallery through October 20 (with an artist talk this Saturday). Citing Ohr as an influence, Butterly takes familiar forms—she starts by pouring clay into casts made from store-bought vessels—then she smashes and smooshes them, layering on more clay, adding arms and antennae and other bits until she’s crafted a different sort of delight. Note the nooks and crannies of her pieces, the piping and edging and little leaflike appendages that dress her human-scale ceramics. And the colors: I held my nose close to a piece that was bubble gum and seafoam and moss, with these little rivulets of Gatorade orange—a swirl of glazes achieved by firing her creations again and again (sometimes upwards of thirty times). Pro tip: don’t miss the nail polish—it’s another way into the head of a master colorist. —Emily Nemens Read More