June 15, 2018 On Books Need a Father’s Day Gift? A Novel Proposal By David McGlynn If Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, Father’s Day is surely the hardest. What do you get for the member of the family—at least if your dad is anything like mine—who claims to never want anything? Peruse the mall in early June and the choices appear to fall into three categories: 1. yawningly boring shirt-and-tie combos, 2. assorted World’s Greatest Dad paraphernalia, and 3. gadgets. So many gadgets. Bluetooth-enabled titanium-alloy grilling spatulas. Bottle openers made from machine-gun rounds. Star Wars waffle makers. There are, of course, messages encoded in each category. A shirt and tie says, Keep working, Pops. Anything labeled World’s Greatest Dad is an overcompensation, either on your part or his. And the gadgets, no matter how futuristic or flashy, tell Dad he’s basically a child in want of a toy. For the last several years, my own father and I have sent each other cards with a one-dollar bill inside (basically a handshake by mail) and called it even. But the best Father’s Day gifts might be the most novel. I’m not talking about the Apple Watch or robot vacuum cleaners. I’m talking about actual novels. Books. Read More
June 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Autobiography of a Professor, Tattoo Artist, Gay Pornographer, and Sexual Record Keeper By Jeremy Mulderig Courtesy of the estate of Samuel M. Steward. When I pick up a biography, I have certain expectations about how the book I am holding came to be. I assume, for example, that the biographer has a broad and deep knowledge of his or her subject’s life and has approached the task of representing that life in narrative form with professional objectivity. My expectations for an autobiography, however, are quite different. Knowing from experience that all lives are shaped by a subjectivity that filters and orders our perceptions of ourselves, I can’t demand objectivity from the autobiographer. Nor do I wish to, for it is the very subjectivity of autobiography—that inevitably self-conscious construction of the self for an imagined reader—that draws me to autobiographies in the first place. But when an autobiographer writes two versions of his or her life—two narratives in which elements are selected and arranged and considered differently—how is the reader to regard the disparate selves encountered in the texts? Which account of a given incident should one accept, and on what basis? These are the questions that I faced in editing and blending the published and unpublished autobiographies of Samuel Steward (1909–1993), the English professor, tattoo artist, pornographer, and sexual record keeper whose important place in twentieth-century gay history and literature was established in 2010 by Justin Spring’s landmark biography, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward. The life that Steward sought to present in his autobiography was by any measure a remarkable one. When he sat down at his typewriter on August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, to compose it, no one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: he had been a popular university professor of English for more than twenty years; a close friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas as well as Alfred Kinsey and Thornton Wilder; an accomplished tattoo artist using the name Phil Sparrow; an essayist and short-story writer who published prolifically in European gay magazines under a variety of pseudonyms; and the author, as Phil Andros, of a series of widely circulated pornographic gay novels in the sixties and seventies. He was also a compulsive record keeper who maintained a massive journal and meticulous card-file index documenting his forty-five hundred sexual encounters with more than eight hundred men, including all the members of his high school basketball team, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, Roy Fitzgerald (later known to the world as Rock Hudson), a number of his university students, and many sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago. His books late in life included an edition of Gertrude Stein’s and Alice Toklas’s letters to him, a novel based on the life of the painter Sir Francis Rose, a book about the tattoo business, another on gay hustlers, and two murder mysteries featuring Stein and Toklas as sleuths. Read More
June 14, 2018 Look Illustrated Maps of New York Through the Ages By The Paris Review Since their inception, maps have been embellished with illustrations. Through July 16, a selection of illustrated maps of New York spanning six centuries is on view at the New York Public Library. A preview of the exhibition—along with captions written by its curator Katharine Harmon—is presented below. James Wolcott Adams, Redraft of the Castello Plan, 1916. The famed Castello Plan offers a rare view of New Amsterdam—located at the southern tip of what is now known as Manhattan—during the forty year period of Dutch rule. Surveyor General Jacques Cortelyou made a map of the Dutch settlement in 1660, which was subsequently lost, but an unknown artist happily made another copy. This is the earliest map of the city existing today. It was sold to Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, around 1667, and “rediscovered” 233 years later at the Villa di Castello near Florence. The American illustrator James Wolcott Adams redrafted the map in 1916; this hand-drawn copy of the original Castello Plan is housed in the library’s print collection. Read More
June 14, 2018 At Work What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson By Annie DeWitt Maggie Nelson defies classification. She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry, Something Bright, Then Holes. First published in 2007, Something Bright was Nelson’s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. Nelson’s nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. Those concerns are present in Something Bright. “I don’t have to be ashamed of my desire / Not for sex, not for language,” the narrator tells us in “A Halo Over the Hospital.” But in this collection, Nelson’s heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. “Live with your puny, vulnerable self / Live with her,” we are told. While Something Bright, Then Holes charts many landscapes—from the polluted Gowanus Canal, to a friend’s hospital room, to the inner tautologies of “leave-taking”—the collection centers around the issues of love and loss. “What part of this autonomy / am I not supposed to like?” the narrator expounds in “The Mute Story of November.” The self and the other (romantic, or intellectual) are like binary stars. They threaten to destroy or consume one another: “Yesterday we found something very hard / at our core, a fierce acorn. I don’t know / if we were born with it, or if its mass simply accrued / in the darkness.” INTERVIEWER I wondered if you could talk about the experience of having a book reissued ten years later. Is there a sense of Didion’s invitation to check in on the selves we once were? An old friend come to visit? Or, the sort of estrangement that one often feels as an artist from the work that came before? NELSON It’s a beautiful edition, so I feel very lucky. It’s also sweet to me that my dear friend Tara Jane O’Neil did the first cover and then did this one as well. I feel estranged from this book in the sense that it is my last book of poetry—not like, the last book of poetry I will ever write, but the last one I’ve written, and it’s wild that a decade has gone by since. But I can see many themes in these pages that have cropped up in my more recent prose books, so I feel a strong continuum of thought. There was kind of a magic splintering happening inside me at the time of Something Bright—very painful, but also magic. It’s also the last book I wrote in New York, and I can really feel that—all that time spent talking to and about strangers at the canal, all that looking outward, all the late nights, the wandering, the perching. My life isn’t like that anymore. Anyway, it’s nice to see these poems again. Read More
June 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? By James Frankie Thomas Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses. “Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College. No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it. It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. Read More
June 13, 2018 Weird Book Room A Disgruntled Federal Employee’s 1980s Desk Calendar By Ted Widmer On any given day, the rare-book trade can cough up anything from an illuminated medieval manuscript to the pages of an unfinished novel. This week, an unusual offering caught my eye: an illuminated manuscript that was not medieval at all. During the eighties, a nameless Cold Warrior grew frustrated in his job for the Department of Defense and poured out his feelings in an unusual way. He was a midlevel (GS-11/GS-12) analyst working at the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Every GS-11/GS-12 in that era would have been given a government-issue desk calendar, and this Kansas scribe made the most of his. Like a monk, he labored over his document every day, adding carefully crafted letters and elaborate drawings to what became, over nine years, a remarkably full chronicle of the decade. There were outbursts of anger, often directed at senior officials of the U.S. government, and joyful moments of exultation, generally following victories for the University of Kansas basketball team. Events of worldly and even otherworldly significance were described in passing: the end of the Iranian hostage standoff, the Challenger disaster, small upticks and downticks in the tension of the Cold War. There were tender moments as well: memories of a friend, or an anniversary of a magical night long ago. He noted the riots in Poland and demonstrations in China and other places where the people were beginning to make themselves heard after decades of government suppression. The anonymous employee’s irrepressible spirit seems to follow a parallel course, delighting in the creation of a secret treasure trove of writings in no way approved by his superiors. The full set of calendars is for sale from Boston Rare Maps for only five thousand five hundred dollars. Many faceless bureaucrats have secretly harbored dreams of novel writing over the years, only to see their dreams trampled by unreasonable bosses or unsympathetic publishers. It is not entirely clear what the Kansas scribe was trying to achieve with his nonstop writing—or why it survived. But deep within the deep state, he found a voice. Read More