June 1, 2018 On Music Lonesome Together By Drew Bratcher On YouTube exists a rare video of Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson performing the song “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” The segment, which was taped in Los Angeles as part of a 1978 prime-time special, made for a very public reunion—it had been nine years since Cash first performed Kristofferson’s song on The Johnny Cash Show, his short-lived TV variety program featuring rock, blues, and folk singers alongside the Grand Ole Opry crowd. The original performance had been controversial. Cash’s producers, anticipating blowback from the song’s references to drug use, had asked him to switch the chorus from “On a Sunday morning sidewalk / I’m wishing, Lord, that I was stoned” to “On a Sunday morning sidewalk / I’m wishing, Lord, that I was home.” Cash said he’d give it some thought, but when the time came, he delivered the lines as is, putting the weight of his quavering bass-baritone behind a lyric that was at once a provocation (drugs were a Nashville taboo) and a personal confession (Cash really was hooked on pills). A live recording of the performance was released to country radio and quickly ran up the charts, eventually winning the 1970 CMA Award for Song of the Year. Read More
May 31, 2018 At Work Carnival and Chaos: An Interview with Herbert Gold By Robert Kaiser Herbert Gold, now ninety-four and still clacking away on his Royal typewriter, was once a famous author. His most successful novel, Fathers, was admired by critics and read widely: it was a best seller for many weeks in 1967. In the New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith called it a “beautiful … book, the best and most deeply felt that this talented, sensitive and dispassionate author has yet produced.” It was Gold’s seventh published volume of fiction; there would be nearly twenty more, plus six books of nonfiction. Saul Bellow was a personal friend and an admirer; he published short stories by Gold in his magazine, The Noble Savage. Vladimir Nabokov put one of Gold’s stories, “Death in Miami Beach,” on his personal list of favorite American short stories. When the success of Lolita allowed Nabokov to give up academia to write full-time, he chose Gold to succeed him as a lecturer on Russian literature at Cornell; and in 1967, Gold interviewed Nabokov for The Paris Review. Gold was neither as successful nor as famous as many of the Jewish American writers of his generation, but he was no slouch. He’s left his mark on twentieth-century American literature, even if he rarely made a splash, and has lived as a writer for nearly seven decades, outliving many of his contemporaries. He knows that his end is nigh, but he’s in no hurry to leave. He has been writing poems for the first time in decades, and has a new collection of verse called Nearing the Exit. An interview with Gold is challenging because—despite his remarkably good health—he is nearly deaf. This interview took place in Gold’s rent-controlled apartment on Broadway, near the top of Russian Hill, in San Francisco, where he has lived for half a century. It’s a quiet spot with a glorious view of the Bay Bridge. Gold won’t say exactly how much rent he pays but admits that it’s less than a thousand dollars a month, surely one of the best housing deals in the city, and a fitting spot for telling the stories he’s been telling for most of a century. Read More
May 31, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: I Wish You a Tongue Scalded by Tea By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, I have never felt this way about anyone before. At first, I didn’t understand what I was feeling, but I’m sure of it now. I have fallen in hate with someone. He hurt my friend, who loves him, and she’s still with him. I don’t wish him any pain, but I want him to cease being a threat to my friend’s happiness. It has taken up residence in my heart, and it feels like poison. Poets, this is the first time I have loathed someone, and I don’t know how I can go on like this. I was going to ask if you had any poems for hatred, but perhaps my real need is for a poem for unearned forgiveness. Sincerely, First Hate Dear First Hate, I don’t know if you inhabit the same corner of the Internet that I do, but my corner has been abuzz this week with new diss tracks flying between prominent rappers. In light of these diss tracks, some conversation has turned toward people’s favorite diss tracks of all time. The responses have been delightful and surprising, including “Be Prepared,” by Scar, in The Lion King, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” and “The Last Midnight” from Into the Woods. So while I am definitely not delighted to hear that your friend has been hurt, I am just a little bit delighted by your letter, because it gives me an excuse to share one of my favorite diss tracks of all time, the poem “Grief, Not Guilt” by Jeanann Verlee. In it, Verlee writes: I wish you a tongue scalded by tea. A hangover. Burnt toast. Stubbed toes. A lost job. I wish you weeping in the shower. Salt in the sugar bowl. A wish list of sorrows. Grief, not guilt. The list of hexes continues, ranging from the almost funny (“flat tires, soggy pasta, a tax audit to fail”) to the truly haunting (“a room wallpapered with my photographs. / A chamber filled with empty bassinets”). The poem is so dexterous that even without details, we readers are still left suspecting that whomever this poem is directed toward must have done something truly horrible to earn such wrath. Our empathy never leaves the narrator. Such a poem feels cathartic to me. Sometimes having someone else’s diss track to listen to and sing along with is a way to force some loathing to exit my body so it doesn’t poison me with bitterness. I hope this poem gives you a thrill and maybe a laugh and maybe a place to pour some vicarious loathing into. Because then you do not need to actually wish bad things upon this specific man. Because the trap is that if you really do wish horrible things on the man who hurt your friend, the risk is that they might come true. And if your friend is the kindhearted person I suspect she is, she might feel inclined to tend to all his new hurts and misfortunes. Instead, know that the universe keeps track of the miseries we inflict on others. Don’t worry about him getting his. Worry about being a fierce protector of your friend’s heart, as you already are. In the meantime, start collecting great diss tracks to sing along to, for when you really need to let off some steam. When she’s ready to see him plainly, in her own time, you’ll be ready. With a playlist. —S. K. Read More
May 31, 2018 Arts & Culture A Black Artist Named White By Kerry James Marshall Charles White, Sound of Silence, 1978, color lithograph on white wove paper. All images: © The Charles White Archives Inc. I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are collected and made available to art-loving audiences. He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did. I saw in his example the way to greatness. Yes. And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach. The wisdom he dispensed to the many aspiring artists who gathered around him was always straightforward: do your work with skill and integrity, everything else is superfluous. It is a right time for him to be considered again in the fullness of his expertise. And fitting that he should be recognized with a survey in three of the best museums in the world. Read More
May 30, 2018 Literary Cities Thomas Bernhard, Karl Kraus, and Other Vienna-Hating Viennese By Matt Levin Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was unaccommodating and gruff in a manner that seemed, at the time, a piece of old-world charm. Across the street, washed hospital white, the Secession Building, house of Gustav Klimt’s luminous Beethoven Frieze, was wrapped in a mesh tarp and looked like the depression of a pulled tooth covered in gauze. I found it all beautiful. And yet, as I sat and sipped and sighed like a sentimental character in a nineteenth-century novel, the twentieth-century novel I was reading, Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, in which a narrator attends a dinner party with old artistic friends he despises, was heaping scorn on this very city: “This dreadful city of Vienna,” “Going for a walk in the Graben, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, means nothing more nor less than walking straight into the social hell of Vienna.” Adolf Loos, the architect and designer of the very Café Museum I sat in, I later learned, had derisively called Vienna a “Potemkin city.” I left the Café Museum and walked to the Inner City as dusk clasped around the metropolis, in a trance, blessing all the facades. Read More
May 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Muriel Rukeyser, Mother of Everyone By Sam Huber In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory. Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem,” originally published in The Speed of Darkness fifty years ago this month, is in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external: I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. Since 2016, “Poem” has become a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment, an equivocal fate for any artifact but one Rukeyser would not likely have chafed against. Throughout her career, she remained sensitized to a political and cultural landscape that was changing rapidly. When The Speed of Darkness appeared in 1968, that landscape was more crowded than ever and more vividly perceived: the civil rights movement had given way to Black Power, the women’s and gay liberation movements were coalescing, the Cold War raged on, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, despite being the most thoroughly reported and divisive military conflict since the Civil War one hundred years before it. The speaker of “Poem” can’t opt out of this deluge, as the vitality of her art depends on its responsiveness to the world it enters. But neither can art concede to that world’s terms: “Slowly I would get to pen and paper, / Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.” Rukeyser struggles, here and elsewhere, to write toward the poem’s divergent “unseen”: an anticipated future audience of poetry and that other living audience already in thrall to newspapers, TV, and the various devices through which the world tries to reach us. Read More