January 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Private Literature By John Vincler Seeing manuscripts after Susan Howe. Robert Walser, Microscript 215, October–November 1928. Courtesy Robert Walser-Zentrum, © Keystone / Robert Walser-Stiftung Bern. “Emerging from an Abyss, and re-entering it that is Life, is it not, Dear?”—a sentence written by Emily Dickinson, most likely in the year before her death, in a letter to her sister-in-law. The sentence also appears in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, her ode to archives, rare-book rooms, and research libraries. It appears in a sort of wave: first it is transcribed within Howe’s text, then follows in facsimile; we read the line, then we see it as it was written by Dickinson in her late, confident, sprawling and looping penciled hand. Howe has plucked this from the abyss and put it before us. We do not simply read Howe’s book; we see something of what she has seen. It is as if Howe has sought to take the experience of working in a rare-book room or a research library and enfold that experience into the space of her slim book. * Libraries and museums collect the objects of the past so that they can be brought forward into our present, so that they can be called forth as witness to some future. Perhaps also so that the past can be made more legible. Howe begins Spontaneous Particulars with an image of a single page from William Carlos Williams’s book-length essay-poem Paterson (which remained unfinished at his death). We look upon and read this lone typescript page, heavily marked up with its deletions and emendations made in pencil. No transcription is given. It reads, in part, “To drown the roar, stopped at the library / for peace … for a clue to the resolution of the turmoil.” Further down the single stanza, it continues, “A meaning, a meaning? What do they know / and feel we do not know?” Read More
January 11, 2018 Document Chateaubriand on Life in a Society Dissolving By François-René de Chateaubriand François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) was a French historian, diplomat, and writer. Long recognized as one of the first French Romantics, he was, in his lifetime, celebrated for his novellas. Today, however, he is best remembered for his posthumously published memoir, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, which will be republished by New York Review Books Classics as Memoirs from Beyond the Grave in February. In the selection below, Chateaubriand observes Parisian society dissolving and recomposing itself in the aftermath of the French Revolution. SOCIETY—PARIS Paris, December 1821 When, before the Revolution, I read the history of public disturbances among the different nations, I could not conceive of how people had lived in such times. I was astonished that Montaigne could write so cheerfully in a castle that he could not so much as stroll around without running the risk of being abducted by bands of Leaguers or Protestants. The Revolution made me understand how possible it is to live under such conditions. Moments of crisis redouble the life of man. In a society that is dissolving and recomposing itself, the struggle of two spirits, the clash of past and future, the intermingling of old ways and new, makes for a transitory concoction that leaves no time for boredom. Passions and characters set at liberty are displayed with an energy unimaginable in a well-regulated city. The breaches of the law, the freedom from duties, customs, and good manners, even the dangers intensify the appeal of this disorder. The human race on holiday strolls down the street, rid of its masters and restored for a moment to its natural state; it feels no need of a civic bridle until it shoulders the yoke of the new tyrants, which license breeds. Read More
January 11, 2018 Arts & Culture The Calla Lilies Are in Bloom Again By Lindsay Nordell The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died. Katharine Hepburn spoke this line for the first time in 1933. She had been cast in a now-forgotten play called The Lake. Jed Harris, the director, was a sadist, and the twenty-six-year-old actress did not flourish in the role. (Dorothy Parker’s famous barb, that Hepburn “ran the gamut of human emotion from A to B,” is said to be about this performance). After previewing several shows to declining ticket sales, tepid reviews and increasingly abusive behavior from Harris, Hepburn was desperate to leave the play. “My dear,” Harris told her, “the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.” She wrote him a check for her life savings and was released from her contract. In her 1991 autobiography, Hepburn writes of this time in her life, “It was a slow walk to the gallows.” Read More
January 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Radical Arts Collective By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. © Molly Crabapple A few weeks after Hurricane Maria, I visited Casa Taller for the first time. I knew about them from the Internet. AgitArte, the radical arts collective that calls Casa Taller home, had crowdfunded tens of thousands of dollars to distribute grassroots aid in the hurricane’s aftermath. Still, their two-story house in Santurce had no sign out front. I hollered upward until a man on the second floor heard me and descended to let me in. Casa Taller was just the sort of iconic, authentic DIY arts space that gentrification had smothered in New York City. Like all of San Juan, its power was off, but it had a luxurious layout—a small garden, wide white rooms filled with papier-mâché masks, Punch-and-Judy-inspired prints on the walls, battered couches on which one could peruse its small collection of books, and teetering piles of manikin heads, arms, alligator maws. Upstairs, an illustrator was designing prints about the government response to Maria. FUCK FEMA AND THE U.S. MILITARY, read the first of the series, which I later saw posted on Instagram. A helicopter, a downed electrical pole, a CCTV camera. Pointed toward them, a brown hand, raising a middle finger. Every tendon in the wrist was taut. Read More
January 10, 2018 Arts & Culture How Do We Bury the Writing of the Dead? By Adin Dobkin For over a hundred thousand years, we’ve buried our dead. Broadly speaking, the act has no functional purpose; according to the World Health Organization, only bodies carrying infectious diseases demand burial. Instead, it offers us, the living, a resolute end: a body in the ground. We cannot always, or even often, give literature that same assurance. If a writer leaves behind unpublished, unfinished works after their death, only the fortunate find that work disposed of according to their wishes. Carrion fowl descend upon the still-warm body, picking at even the smallest scraps of flesh. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Vultures, though not the most welcome sight, fill an important ecological role. Who are we to let them starve, even if a body wished it otherwise? Many conversations about posthumous publishing center around this question: Which is more important when considering whether to release a work, particularly an incomplete one, posthumously—authorial intent or obligation to the reader? More often than not, the latter wins the day. Read More
January 10, 2018 Arts & Culture The Man Who Spent Four Decades Interviewing Teen Stars By Susannah Jacob For more than forty years, between 1946 and 1988, Edwin Miller, the entertainment editor at Seventeen Magazine, conducted interviews with actors, musicians, and a few writers. His subjects were often in their teens or early twenties, poised at the cusp of their breakthroughs to fame. Many of them would go on to become the biggest stars of their time: Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Murphy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, Meryl Streep, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Elvis Presley, and the Rolling Stones. Miller died in 2004, but his archives at the New York Public Library opened in 2017. The collection includes forty boxes of transcripts and recordings from his interviews with young stars, long passages of which were never published. Read More