October 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Foul Matter By John Kaag Edwaert Collier, Vanitas, 1663. I nearly deleted it. The email’s subject line was “FoulMatter”—an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some “foul matter” and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in “a guinea foul farm”? No. That wasn’t it. The email was from my publisher, from the heart of my publisher—the editorial department. Now I really didn’t want to open it. Maybe I’d missed a deadline. Maybe they’d changed their mind about my contract. Or found an error so grievous they were recalling my books. Or found a new and more appropriate term for my writing. “Dear John,” the editorial assistant had written, “would you like to keep your foul matter from American Philosophy: A Love Story?” My foul matter? As if I had a choice. American Philosophy, published last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a memoir about facing a father’s death, a divorce and a remarriage, and how American philosophy (the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James) helped me survive. I am now in the weeds of writing my second book, another hybrid of memoir and intellectual history, this time about parenthood and Friedrich Nietzsche. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you are largely stuck with yourself, most especially with your foulest parts. Foul matter, it turns out, as I learned by reading the rest of the note, is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book—the notes, page proofs, drafts, and rejected covers and art. Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as the art of removing stone until a beautiful form emerges from a block of granite. If writing is at all like this, foul matter is the stuff strewn across the studio floor. The question remained: Did I want it? Read More
October 3, 2017 In Memoriam Petty in the Morning By Brian Cullman Back when my son Harry was little, I’d take him out early in the morning, usually with Miss Otis in tow, and walk over to Les Deux Gamins. One of those mornings, I got there around eight. They were still setting up inside, but the morning was mild, must have been early October, and I sat at one of the four or five outside tables. Noel, the Moroccan waitress, brought me coffee in a bowl and brought Miss Otis a similar bowl half filled with water. She looked at it with a mix of droit du seigneur and disdain. As if she were thinking both, Mine! and What the fuck do I care? Pugs have that look down solid. Tom Petty walked by and stopped to take in the café. He was with a pretty blonde woman, not a girl, a woman who looked like she’d done some heavy lifting. She was in a T-shirt and loose cardigan, but he was wrapped up in a navy peacoat, hands in his pockets. Anything below seventy degrees was probably winter to him. Read More
October 3, 2017 Arts & Culture The Art of Memory By Presca Ahn Bernadette Mayer’s Memory at the Canada Gallery Last week, I went to Canada Gallery on the Lower East Side to see the current show, a rare exhibition of the 1971 work Memory by Bernadette Mayer. Mayer is known and respected primarily as a poet, but Memory is an installation of eleven hundred photographic prints and approximately six hours of audio that she created over the course of a month. Those are numbers I learned later, from the gallery’s press release, not ones I processed during my own rather disoriented encounter with the work. I did not count the photographs, which seemed simply numerous to my eye and were arranged in a long rectangular grid spanning the gallery’s back wall. Nor can I recall many details about the half hour of audio I heard, a recording of Mayer reading hypnotically from journal entries corresponding to the dates of the photos. (Later I would read an edited transcript, published as a book by Mayer a few years after the work was first exhibited.) Indeed, as I wandered back and forth in front of the piece, I had to make some effort to focus in on single photographs. The mind, I guess, wants some kind of narrative, and I resisted each image as an isolated moment. Those details of Memory that I do recall vividly are more suited to an archival interest than a critical one: gaps in the wall where certain photos seemed to be missing; the beige mounting corners holding each photo in place, looking almost brown against the white border of the photos; the fact that large plexiglass panels protected most, but not all, sections of the work; a few photos which had slipped free of the mounting and drooped gently away from the wall. Up close, the work looked like it could be some long-untouched photo wall in anybody’s home, depicting friends and places of strictly personal interest. (In fact, after the work was first exhibited at Holly Solomon’s Greene Street space in 1972, Mayer showed the work by appointment in her own apartment.) There is a handmade, unpolished feel to the work that is accentuated by its slightly sunstruck, fading archival state, over forty years after most of the prints on view were made (a few were reprinted for this show). Read More
October 3, 2017 Baseball The Called Shot By Rich Cohen A detail from Robert Thom’s painting depicting Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot.” Courtesy the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Wrigley Field is beloved not just because it’s a beautiful place to see a baseball game, which it is, not because of its harmonious dimensions, which it has, not because of its context, its perfect neighborhood of stoops and taverns where men quote Bartman and Banks, nor because of its ivy, bare in spring, green in summer, but because of all the things that’ve happened there—all of the images and afternoons. Wrigley Field’s pitching ace Grover Cleveland Alexander, ruined by World War I, stashing whiskey bottles in the clubhouse. It’s the catcher Gabby Hartnett, hitting the dinger in near darkness, that basically put the Cubs in the 1938 World Series—“the Homer in the Gloaming.” It’s the slugger Dave Kingman, known as King Kong and as Ding Dong, proposing that Chicago trade the reporter Mike Royko to New York for the reporter Red Smith. It’s the famous rant of manager Lee Elia, in which he described the stadium as a “playground for the cocksuckers.” It’s the play-by-play genius Harry Caray leaning out the broadcast booth to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It’s me standing with Bill Buckner in the Summer of 1977. It’s the bleacher bums genuflecting before great the right fielder Andre Dawson, the Hawk. It’s Omar Moreno climbing the ivy to get at the hecklers, who drive him off with a delicious shower of frosty malt. But the most iconic event in Wrigley Field did not star the Cubs—it starred the New York Yankees, with the home team serving merely as foil. Backstory: In July 1932, as the Cubs were cruising, their shortstop was shot in a hotel room by a jilted lover. It’s enough to say that the ballplayer was Billy Jurges and the perp was a showgirl who’d later perform under the stage name Violet “What I Did For Love” Valli. Jurges was shot in room 509 of Hotel Carlos, a few blocks from the ballpark. He’d be back on the field before the end of the season. In the meantime, the Cubs needed a solid substitute infielder if they were going to make a pennant run. Read More
October 3, 2017 At Work Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado By Lauren Kane Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s first collection of short stories, but Machado is no novice: her writing is prolific and varied, from essays on higher education and retail consumerism, fiction on clairvoyance and the afterlife, and criticism on Leonora Carrington and Game of Thrones. In Her Body, Machado flexes that versatility as her characters navigate the emotional landscapes of love, sex, and grief within the contexts of pandemic narratives and ghost stories. Throughout each of the book’s eight stories, Machado uses elements of the fantastic as a vehicle for better understanding the complications and challenges of reality. Machado and I spoke over the phone at the end of August, as she was preparing to start the semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the artist in residence, and just before her collection was named to the longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Our lively conversation took us from Victorian England to Law and Order and a lot in between. INTERVIEWER Let’s start at the beginning. What prompted you to start writing? MACHADO I have been writing basically my whole life. My family read to me a lot, and my grandfather’s Cuban, so there was a lot of storytelling in our household. I learned about stories through that oral tradition and through reading, and as soon as I was able to pick up a pen I was writing “books” and “stories” and sending them to publishers. I found Scholastic’s address in The Baby-Sitters Club and sent a letter saying, Here’s a chapter of my novel. Please let me know if you would like more of it. I wrote constantly, poetry and prose. For a while I wanted to be a doctor, but only because I was reading a lot of books about doctors. When I got older, I thought I wanted to be a journalist for a while. But I always returned to writing fiction. It was a stable thing in my life, and it was just luck that it was natural for me. But I feel like it was pretty late that I decided I wanted to be a writer, with writing as a part of my identity, as opposed to somebody who writes. Read More
October 2, 2017 On Poetry Lost and Pound By Daniel Swift A few weeks ago, I wrote here about a poem I found written on the back of an envelope among Ezra Pound’s papers in Italy. It is a small poem and it runs in full: Hast thou 2 loaves of bread Sell one + with the dole Buy straightaway some hyacinths To feed thy soul. It does not look much like a Pound poem. It is perhaps too tender, too straightforward. Yet, I suggested, it is filled with Pound’s perpetual concerns: with economics, in a minor key; with the possibility of the spiritual in the world of capitalist trade; and with the eternal problems of exchange. However, some sharp-eyed and well-versed readers soon wrote in to say that this sounded awfully like another poem, or other poems. (One subject line: “The Paris Review has been hoodwinked!”) This was, they reported, hardly a Pound poem at all, and in this they were right. Read More