June 25, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, Who Gave His Life to Work and Eros By Henri Cole Donald Hall in 2014. Photo: Henri Cole. He worked hard and now can rest. He was one of America’s best-loved poets and won all the literary awards. At eighty-six, he had his first New York Times best seller, with Essays After Eighty, celebrating the indignities of growing old. I once gave him a terrible review, and we didn’t speak for years. “I know I was pissed at you for ten or twelve years,” he wrote. “I take it back. You are good.” He was a judge for the Pulitzer the year I was a finalist. We became friends. He wrote dozens of books: poetry, short stories, children’s books, criticism, and textbooks. He was devoted to the art and craft of writing, and his discipline was an example to others. He seemed to give his life over to work and Eros. He was also very funny and very particular (“I love chicken salad, egg salad as long as it has onion, turkey and salami. I don’t like tuna”). The horrors of antiquity—a “black fatigue,” congestive heart failure, “a hundred and fifty colonoscopies,” walking more slowly with his “rollator,” falling down, the loss of words—did not exclude joy and love. Read More
June 22, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Creek Boyz, Mechanical Chickens, and Trash Heaps By The Paris Review Jorja Smith’s debut full-length, Lost and Found, has taken up residence in my mind since its release last week. Between tracks, the twenty-one-year-old R & B singer wrestles with her self-worth (on “Tomorrow”: “The hardest thing I have learned is I can’t help myself / If I can’t trust my worth / Then I can’t trust my words”) and with the gaze of the UK police state (on “Blue Lights”: “I wanna turn those blue lights into strobe lights / Not blue flashing lights, maybe fairy lights”). Being young in the summer is difficult, but it’s easier when you have someone else living through it alongside you. Last year, there was SZA’s gentle Ctrl; this year, Jorja Smith takes on her demons with a jazzier vibe, more melancholy than anxious, and very, very matter-of-fact—almost like a diary entry. —Eleanor Pritchett On October 25, 1977, Roland Barthes lost his mother, Henriette Barthes. The next day, he began a “mourning diary,” writing each entry on a slip made from typewriter paper cut into quarters. He maintained the diary until September 15, 1979—a little under two years. Five months after this final entry, Barthes was hit by a laundry truck while crossing the road. He deteriorated in the hospital for a month before succumbing to his injuries. In the foreword to the English translation, we learn that Mourning Diary is “not a book completed by its author, but a hypothesis of a book desired by him.” This is borne out in the tangled reading of observations that range from the philosophically speculative to the quotidian. His suffering repeats, swells, and subsides, seemingly without design or reason: “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” At times, our participation in that mourning feels like an invasion—these notes were not intended for publication in their current form—and if anyone were to tell me they read this book for purely high-minded reasons, I would distrust them. But past the rubbernecking is something more significant, for here is grief at work on a brilliant mind. The result is disordered, clumsy, and at times prosaic. It also has the virtue of being true. —Robin Jones Read More
June 22, 2018 On Film Witches, Artists, and Pandemonium in Hereditary By Dorothea Lasky Still from Hereditary. I had been sitting in a lovesick fog, waiting to see Ari Aster’s Hereditary, ever since I first heard about it. I don’t usually follow new movie releases too closely, but I found out about the movie back in January, when people at the Sundance Film Festival lost their minds about how good it was. As soon as I saw the words The Exorcist and The Shining attached to the film’s publicity materials, I knew I had to see it. I spent six agonizing months memorizing its trailers, watching YouTube fan movies (and considering making my own), talking to my friends about it until they began rolling their eyes, and dreaming about its possible endings. I fell madly in love with the idea of what it could be and what it might do to my imagination. For a poet, this is a movie’s greatest gift. The film came out on June 8, and I’ve already seen it twice. The first time, I saw it only through my fingers. I kept my hands plastered on my face, trying to avoid any jump scares (something I wish I had done when I first saw The Shining nearly twenty years ago and the ghost of room 237 began her lifelong emblazonment on my psyche). The second time, I wrote notes in a green notebook in the dark, scribbling half-words that I can barely read now. It reminded me of the way I first started writing poems in the darkness of my bedroom when I was a little girl. Read More
June 22, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Eileen Chang By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The 1940s wartime Shanghai in Love in a Fallen City, a book of short stories by Eileen Chang (1920–1995), is a bitter and glamorous world of cruel relatives, opium addicts, poor and angry students, Japanese invaders, and young women discreetly selling themselves in “jaunty, clopping” wooden clogs and beautiful clothes. These stories were written when Chang was enjoying a burst of literary stardom in her twenties and are considered to be some of her best. But even at the time, the world they captured was “being pushed onward … breaking apart already, with greater destruction still coming,” as Chang writes in the introduction to the book’s second edition. And of course it was wholly destroyed. The Communist revolution followed the war, and there was no place in Chinese letters for Chang, who was an impoverished daughter of the Chinese elite. She immigrated to Hong Kong in 1952, and though she never stopped writing, she died in obscurity in Los Angeles in 1995. Read More
June 21, 2018 In Memoriam In Memory of Stanley Cavell By Patrick Mackie While driving back from a party through the warm London night last Monday evening, I decided to tell my girlfriend about Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Macbeth. The story does not reflect any better on me, if you know the essay in question. It centers on a description of the Macbeths as a portrait of a marriage gone perfectly, metaphysically wrong, one where the sharing of thought and passion has become ghastly and vampiric. But the play was on my mind because I was due to see it the following night, so maybe I can be forgiven my conversational choice. The production felt strikingly close to Cavell’s account. So I was thinking the next day about emailing him about it; instead I heard the news of his death. I am still reeling from that news as I write these brief thoughts. Read More
June 21, 2018 In Memoriam A Space Cowboy’s Curriculum By Gary Lippman Ten things I know about John Perry Barlow: 1. John Perry Barlow died this past February at age seventy, but people have been trying to describe him for decades. Among the attempts: “Internet guru,” “the thinking man’s Forrest Gump,” and “an oracle of the unusual” (this last phrase from his dear friend Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, one of Ken Kesey’s original Merry Pranksters). His New York Times obituary described him as “a former cowpoke, Republican politician and lyricist for the Grateful Dead whose affinity for wide open spaces and free expression transformed him into a leading defender of an unfettered internet.” Barlow himself, on one of his business cards, presented his job title as “Peripheral Visionary,” which was typically waggish of him but too modest. His vision, as he grooved through cyberspace and “meatspace” (which is what he called real life), could be direct, just as it could be X-ray or cosmic. 2. The first time I hung out with my friend Barlow, the year was 2008, and he was cavorting around a party in Manhattan, cackling like a bedlamite as he shot colored lasers from the knuckles of the high-tech black leather gloves he wore. Witnessing this, I thought of the chorus to a song he’d written, a chorus I already knew by heart: “I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.” Read More