April 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Age of Wreckers and Exterminators By Andrea Barnet Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson. It was midnight when the lone auburn-haired woman arrived on the beach. Tall and stooped, just shy of fifty-five, Rachel Carson looked considerably older than her years. She swayed a moment as she sat, drank in the briny air. To feel the full wildness, she switched off her flashlight. Then, adjusting her eyes to the darkness, she turned her attention to the swell and roar of the sea. Tonight it was full of “diamonds and emeralds,” flecks of phosphorescence that wave after wave hurled onto the sand. The individual sparks were huge. She could see them “glowing in the sand, or sometimes, caught in the in-and-out play of water,” sluicing back and forth. This is what Carson lived for: bearing witness to the natural world in all its mystery, attuning herself to the earth’s rhythms and eternal cycles, feeling a part of the vast stream of time. It was why she’d spent the last four difficult years pushing so hard to complete Silent Spring. For all her travails, she had known from the moment she’d first read the field studies on the dangers of the synthetic pesticide DDT that she would feel “no future peace” until she shared with the world the gravity of what she saw. She had written the book because she wanted to change things, to alter the way people treated the natural world, to stop the mindless poisoning of it. Though Carson knew she had little time left to live, sitting on this beach tonight she had no regrets. She was filled with a sense that it had all been worth it: the years of isolation; the painstaking work; even her battle, now lost, against the cancer. The public’s reception of the excerpts appearing all summer in The New Yorker had been immediate and enthusiastic—greater, even, than she had dared dream. Especially cheering had been E. B. White’s kind note, commending her for—by now she had memorized the words—“the courage you showed in putting on the gloves and going in with this formidable opponent, and for your skill and thoroughness.” Silent Spring would be “an Uncle Tom’s Cabin of a book,” he predicted, “the sort that will help turn the tide.” Perhaps she could relax now. Finally, people were beginning to ask questions. They no longer “assumed that someone was looking after things,” that the mass aerial spraying of DDT “must be all right, or it wouldn’t be done.” They were beginning to understand that once these pesticides entered the biosphere, they carried the same hazards as nuclear fallout, the same capacity to alter our genetic makeup in grave and irreversible ways; these chemicals not only killed bugs but also migrated up the food chain to poison birds and fish and eventually sicken humans. Read More
April 16, 2018 In Memoriam Farewell, Sergio Pitol By Elena Poniatowska Sergio Pitol, the celebrated Mexican author, essayist, translator, and winner of the Cervantes Prize, died in his home last Thursday. He is remembered here by Elena Poniatowska, considered “Mexico’s grande dame of letters,” whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our Spring issue. Sergio Pitol was an Italian nobleman, an aristocrat who knew how to live, a connoisseur of furniture and of flavors, a maker of illusions, a bon vivant, the owner of stables filled with unicorns. He would appear, walking with his cane through his beloved Xalapa like the Marquis de Carabas, and gesture: “Those cane fields, those palm trees, those rivers are mine!” If ever there was anyone who did not shut himself away, it was Sergio Pitol. Perhaps his first confinement, that of his childhood, that of his solitude and his adolescent exasperation, launched him into the world. As a child, he saw himself as a frail, malarial orphan whom no one loved. The torrid landscape of Veracruz and particularly that of Potrero, the sugar mill where he spent his childhood, made him its serf, and he often spoke to the tall green stalks of sugarcane, the dark and fragrant coffee trees, the banana trees that would one day shade his garden in Xalapa where he would walk, cane in hand, accompanied by his dogs. From a young age, he would recount the vicissitudes of his life to trees and water lilies. First, he went to China. In 1962, he was offered a job as a translator from English into Spanish at a foreign-language publisher in Peking. Sergio had dreamed of China, and so he packed his bags. He never asked himself what might happen to him; Sergio knew how to adapt, to live the lives of others no matter how foreign their customs were. From the day-to-day to the age-old, he acquired the knowledge that is forbidden to mercurial tourists. And of course, the Chinese were grateful to him, and his observations on China went on to become a part of the great texts that were read at the time: The Long March, by Simone de Beauvoir; Keys for China, by Claude Roy; Les divagations d’un français en Chine, by Vercors. Surely, Sergio foresaw that China would rise like a giant, eventually destabilize the Western world, and become more open and more flexible than the Soviet Union. Read More
April 16, 2018 In Memoriam J. D. McClatchy, Darlingissimo By Henri Cole J. D. McClatchy. Photo: Henri Cole. We must have met in 1980, when I was twenty-four. I was a graduate student in New York City. Sandy was teaching in New Haven. This was before email, Facebook, and Twitter. Poets wrote letters and talked on the telephone (landlines!). Sandy had just published his first collection of poems, Scenes from Another Life, and he and his partner had invited me to dinner in New Haven. They were being kind to a young fan who’d published only one poem. I was not really a poet yet or out of the closet. There was also a young Mexican poet at the table, who would later drown while swimming in the Pacific. After a delicious dinner cooked by Sandy, a joint was passed around. There was not any talk of AIDS yet, as there would soon be, like a hatchet falling through the room. But a profound sense of freedom. Openness. New friendship. “I cannot remember a moment of my life when I didn’t know I was gay,” Sandy said. For him, being gay was simply a fact, like being a poet. This was the era of new formalism, and Sandy was “a painstaking and brilliantly adventurous craftsman,” to quote Stephen Yenser, “the epitome of the writer with savoir faire” and “outrageously candid.” His poems were eloquent yet rueful, a combination I loved. He was not afraid of being difficult. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” Wallace Stevens wrote in “Man Carrying Thing.” In my own poems, it was the “raw power” he praised. Sandy wasn’t prim. I think he was the first real man of letters I knew. A gay man of letters—what a fine thing to be, I thought. Could I be that? He was always up to his ears in teaching and projects, running between this task and another: “I still feel like the baby Achilles, being dipped by my heel into the waters of busywork,” he wrote. Read More
April 16, 2018 On Art David Hockney’s Improbable Inspirations By Lawrence Weschler David Hockney, A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017. David Hockney’s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, “Far from cutting corners, I was adding them.” In Lawrence Weschler’s catalogue essay, Hockney suggests what he means by reverse perspective by way of an allusion to an experience he once had coursing through the arrow-straight eighteen-kilometer St. Gotthard Pass road tunnel, the tiny pinpoint of light ahead epitomizing “the hell of one-point perspective.” “I suddenly realized,” Hockney tells Weschler, “how that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel everything suddenly reversed with the world opening out in every direction … and I realized how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to capture.” In one of Hockney’s first experiments in his recent series, he took Fra Angelico’s San Marco fresco The Annunciation (a masterpiece of one-point perspective)—a poster of which used to grace the upper corridor of his elementary school—and turned it inside out, offering a sense of what it might have looked like in reverse perspective. Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1450. David Hockney, Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico, 2017. Weschler’s catalogue essay, from which we will be publishing two adapted excerpts this week and next, goes into further detail on the taproots and implications of Hockney’s current reverse-perspective passion. The first, below, involves an improbable recent mentor. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
April 16, 2018 On Poetry I Have Wasted My Life By Patricia Hampl Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow, 1872. “I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.” But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity. Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never “be alone.” Read More
April 13, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway By The Paris Review Photo: Carl Fuldner and Shane DuBay. In 2009, Edwin Rist stole hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring, which holds one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Among the collection were a number of specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist whose work is often credited with goading Charles Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species. Why did Rist steal them? To tie the world’s most exotic and expensive fishing flies. So begins Kirk Wallace Johnson’s charming The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, a truly bizarre tale that traces the history of exotic-bird collecting and the feather trade through scientific harvesting, millinery fads, the Victorian era’s fly-fishing boom, up to Rist’s caper and Johnson’s own attempts at retrieving the stolen feathers with the help of some international fly-tying elites. There’s a lot to Johnson’s book, and he ties it together well, reeling you into disparate historical subjects in a thrilling catch-and-release style. The book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set: worth its weight in exotic bird feathers, which you’ll learn are very expensive. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More