September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Tour of Diane Williams’s Art Collection By Zach Davidson, Madelaine Lucas and Liza St. James Diane Williams in her home, 2018 (All photos by Bill Hayward) Diane Williams is renowned for her short, distilled works of fiction. In addition to her work as a writer, she is also the founder and editor of NOON, a literary annual whose next edition will mark its twentieth anniversary. Diane’s curatorial vision extends beyond the pages of NOON, where we are the senior editors, to the walls of her apartment. Some of the treasures we have glimpsed during our staff meetings, which take place in her home: a portrait of a pangolin cross-stitched by her young niece; a watercolor by Henry Miller; original early ink drawings donated to NOON by Raymond Pettibon; as well as the many, often anonymous, artworks and other curios collected from roadside markets and the Outsider Art Fair. On a late August afternoon, over cakes and tea, we spoke with Diane about how her attention to art and to objects has informed her editorial sensibility and inspired her fictions. For the first time, we asked for a guided tour. Our tour lasted well over three hours, and a small fraction of it is reproduced here. In our conversation, as in her work, we began to notice a link between Diane’s penchant for living among sculptures made of broken dishes, stitching around stains in her clothing, and her editorial process at NOON where, she reminds us, all powerful sentences can be saved and made use of. When asked why a flaw or fracture can turn the familiar—in life, and language—into something more arresting, or frightening, or delightful, Diane responded: “We’re all walking around damaged, dirty, broken, and ashamed, and the challenge is—How do you live your life in this condition? It’s an important project to share this condition with others and thereby comfort them. Turning the wound into artwork—something that has magic in it, and extra life, is a very significant accomplishment.” Hubert Walters, “Walking the Dogs” (detail), date unknown I respond to almost everything that’s made by someone who has never been trained, but who is full of passion for what he or she is doing. It’s quite fortuitous if we can maintain what we are born with—a relation to objects that hasn’t been muddled up yet by any ideas about how we ought to see them. Walters was born in Jamaica and was a commercial fisherman and a boat builder for two decades. We bought this painting at The Outsider Art Fair in New York City from The Rising Folk Art Gallery in Tennessee. These are sinister, twinned white people with twin, energetic brown dogs. The yellow background seems to torpedo the bellies of these girls—women?—and the surround is murky and romantic. I will never come upon such a sight anywhere else and isn’t this what we’re on the look out for, too, at NOON?—surprise. Read More
September 24, 2018 Arts & Culture A Responsible Freedom: Patti Smith on ‘Little Women’ By Patti Smith Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy growing up in the gender-defined 1950s. Uninterested in preordained activities, I would take off on my blue bicycle, to a secluded place in the woods, and read the books I had checked out, often over and over again, from the local library. I could hardly be found without book in hand and sacrificed sleep and hours at play to enter wholeheartedly each of their unique worlds. Many wonderful books captured my imagination, but in Little Women something extraordinary happened. I recognized myself, as if in a mirror, the lanky headstrong girl, who raced on foot, ripped her skirts climbing trees, spoke in common slang, and denounced social pretensions. A girl who could be found leaning against a great oak with a book, or at her desk in the attic bowed over a manuscript. She was Josephine March. Even her name breathed freedom, a girl called Jo. Louisa May Alcott had wrapped herself in her glory cloak, labored at her own desk, and penned a new kind of heroine. A stubbornly modern nineteenth-century American girl. A girl who wrote. Like countless girls before me, I found a model in one who was not like everyone else, who possessed a revolutionary soul yet also a sense of responsibility. Her dedication to her craft provided my first window into the process of the writer and I was moved with the desire to embrace this vocation as my own. Her missteps, comic to bold, were enviable, giving permission for my own. Read More
September 21, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Book Festivals, Benefactors, and Broken Buttonholes By The Paris Review Terrance Hayes’s abiding interest in Etheridge Knight has perhaps long been established, but Wave Books just this month published To Float in the Space Between, a multifaceted, multi-genre work that ultimately lands somewhere between biography and criticism. Hayes’s meditation on Knight’s legacy and impact on American poetry and the Black Arts Movement is conveyed dynamically and with emotionally weighted nuance through excerpts, criticism, anecdotes, and illustrations. The true pleasure of this book is the perennial one of being allowed the clearance to standby and listen as a brilliant poet thinks deeply and at length about another brilliant poet. —Lauren Kane Read More
September 21, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Distraction By Amit Chaudhuri This is the final installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment. Last year, I commuted between Oxford and Norwich, where I teach in the autumn. On Mondays, I took a train via London; on Tuesday evening, I took the same route back. It’s a four-hour-journey: you travel south and then go up again. On the trains I read work by students, skimmed through the Guardian, charged my phone (the London-Norwich train is old but is allocated with power sockets), wrote emails, applied finishing touches to pieces I’d written, talked to my wife and a couple of friends, and, when I wasn’t doing any of this, which was a large percentage of the time, ranged over my collection of music on my iPhone. I never listen to music on earphones when I’m at home in Calcutta – or in Oxford, where I play songs on a small Bose Bluetooth dock that I carry with me. But, like many others, when I’m traveling I create a makeshift interiority. The temptation to create a portable archive presented itself with the introduction of the smartphone. I deferred carrying Walkmans and MP3 players for much of my life. The iPhone has changed our existence – as we think we know, though we can’t, really, because none of us can experience what it means to live in history. It has changed our children, those who were born at the end of the last millennium or at the start of this one: indeed, the smartphone has invented them. For a long time, we thought the personal computer was destined to take us over. Phones crept upon us unobtrusively. I can no longer recall when I got a Nokia. At first, odd though it may sound, my wife and I shared it. The idea of the personalised phone was still to grow on us. I came similarly late to the iPhone. I can now hardly recall what the words ‘sharing’ and ‘synhronising’ meant in the twentieth century, or for my parents. I have no idea what my daughter’s life would have been like had not the smartphone remade it completely six years ago. It’s useless to speculate on the nature of reality in that way. Read More
September 20, 2018 Look Deana Lawson: A Preview By Deana Lawson Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has created a landscape of found intimacy. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. A selection of photographs from her first monograph is presented below. Mama Goma, 2014 Read More
September 20, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Poor Deluded Human, You Seek My Heart By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am the daughter of two wonderful, loving Chinese parents, and I have a supportive boyfriend and caring friends. But still, I somehow find myself dealing with daily feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. I am a humanities major with an uncertain future and less-than-average academics, and I am faced with continual feelings of shame and embarrassment about the lack of effort I put into my studies. My parents are intellectual giants who came from nothing and worked their way up into high-earning jobs so that they could give me the best possible education and life, and I feel as if I have squandered the opportunities they have worked so hard for me to have. To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices, and are constantly caring and understanding. How do I deal with my fears that I will never be able to honor my parents by becoming more successful than them? Sincerely, Dutiful Daughter Dear DD, “To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices” is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance—I am smiling with affectionate recognition. What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).” Read More