July 28, 2017 Books How a Silent-Film Vamp Nearly Drove Her Ghostwriter Mad By Luisa Zielinski Dagmar Godowsky. What do Sergei Rachmaninoff, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, and Tallulah Bankhead have in common? Dagmar Godowsky. Once a famous beauty, by the late 1950s Dagmar Godowsky found herself subsisting on caviar, cake, and tales of the past. Typecast as a vamp in the silent-screen era of the early 1920s, she had “hissed her way through a thousand scenes.” She had died by blade, bullet, poison, or strangulation. Yet the demise of silent cinema ended her own film career. Now she performed at the dinner tables of New York’s beau monde. Dagmar Godowsky knew how to busy herself. She always had. Born in 1897 as the daughter of the pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky—known better for his paraphrases of Liszt’s or Schubert’s pieces than his own—Dagmar grew up in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Los Angeles, and New York. Wherever they made their home, her father—a near-maniacal host—collected celebrities. On an ordinary day, Dagmar claimed, she might return home from school to encounter “Jakob Wassermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Sudermann. Thomas Mann. Every Mann.” She inherited not only her father’s seductive charm—her conquests numbered, if not “every man,” plenty of men and women, too—but his wit and skill as a raconteur. It was her storytelling that lured Sandford Dody. A struggling playwright, Dody became witness to Dagmar’s spiel one night at a party. In a remarkable error of judgment that launched an entire, regrettable career, Dody offered to ghostwrite Dagmar’s autobiography—an endeavor that, he was sure, would be both profitable and easy. It was neither. Read More
July 28, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Emily By Sadie Stein Auguste Renoir, In the Meadow, 1888–92, oil on canvas. Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. This was when I was a child, and mistakenly believed this sort of lie gave me a certain obscure cachet. I wasn’t a habitual liar—I was never very good at it. In fact, as an adult I believe I can remember every lie I ever told. At the time, I was very troubled by my own wickedness. At six, I remember telling my reading group that I was going to be a flower girl in a wedding—I think there was a little boy I wanted to impress with my importance—and then, when I did end up at a rather crummy and impromptu wedding party later that summer, I grabbed a bunch of flowers off someone’s lawn, and threw them, just to make my lie true. There was a girl on my block who was an inept and inveterate whopper-teller. Her name was Emily. She wore a lot of pink sweat suits and had a long, reddish braid. I knew she was “disturbed,” as we said in those days—something to do with her parents’ “bad divorce”—and I had been told to be nice to her, but the foolish and incessant nature of her mendacity irritated me. She’d do things like claim to have seen The Blue Lagoon and to have been in near-fatal helicopter accidents, or that her house—which I’d been to—had an improbable number of rooms. Obviously she was one of the first people I knew to say she had a mythical boyfriend. “He gave me a diamond necklace,” she told me once. “I’ll show it to you. My mom’s going to say it was from my grandma, but that’s just because she doesn’t want me dating someone older.” I did not like being taken for a fool; I despised her. We were probably eight. Read More
July 27, 2017 First Person Excerpts from a Grumpy Russian Poet’s Diary By Igor Kholin Igor Kholin. Illustrations by Ripley Whiteside. The Russian poet Igor Kholin died in 1999 an underappreciated talent, but his literary star is on the rise. His Selected Poems were published in 1999 to wide acclaim, followed by his collected prose. This year, a new collection of his diaries and prose will be published in Russia. Ugly Duckling Presse released Kholin 1966: Diaries and Poems this past spring. We’ve published an excerpt of these diary entries—selected from his 1966 diaries and translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich—below. —Ed. August 17 I remember that as a kid I was particularly sensitive to verbal insults. I think that poems should adhere to three rules. They should be: 1) Formally solid. 2) Emotional. 3) Intellectual. I came to these conclusions in part after reading a piece by Krishnamurti. Both my neighbors were utterly drunk. One of them dragged the other one home on a horse. They’re both around 70. Read More
July 27, 2017 First Person My Brief (Doomed) Surfing Days By Dave Hickey LeRoy Grannis, Makaha, Hawaii (detail), 1966. © LeRoy Grannis Collection. Courtesy TASCHEN. From Surfing by Jim Heimann, published by TASCHEN. I went to first grade in Fort Worth with Lee Harvey Oswald. I went to second grade in Shreveport, where my dad had a gig in some Dixie greaser lounge, but we were moving up. In third grade, we lived in nifty North Dallas. Every Thursday, in social studies class, we drew the name of a country out of a hat and wrote a report about it. We made our own folders for each report. Then we would vote for the best cover. First shot, I drew Italy—and how can you fuck up Italy? I had grapes, columns, and a version of Trajan’s Market that foreshadowed the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. My grapes foreshadowed late Sam Francis. They were especially praised, and I won. I got the Hershey bar that was the prize. Next time, I reached in and drew Bolivia. Right, Bolivia. I cut out a brown mountain and stuck it on a blue sky. My friend Cecily drew Egypt and she killed it. Perspectival pyramids with scaled triangles of ocher in different shades. These were major pyramids, but I won again. I thought this was outrageous. Either North Dallas third graders had developed a prescient taste for minimalism or I won because I had won last time and now I was the guy who won. The insult festered and I gave my Hershey bar to Cecily because I am a critic and not an artist. I don’t care about winning. I care about being right. Meanwhile, at home, my mom and dad screamed at one another. They threw clocks and vases. My mother was late for an appointment one morning. She backed out of the garage in a hurry, spinning her wheels, and ran over my Jack Russell terrier, Milton. She reminded me that it was my damn dog—that she was in a hurry—and rushed off, gone before she was gone, leaving me to bury Milton in the backyard. I took the little brass plate off Milton’s collar, nailed it to the side of the garage, and buried Milton under it. No one ever spoke of Milton again. On Saturdays, my parents were in the house together all day, so I would set off on my bike at 10 A.M. and ride down to the Inwood theater on Lovers Lane, and then over to the Village Center on Preston Road, to watch movies a day long. Unlike other movie fugitives I have known, I came to hate movies. Also, eventually, somebody stole my bike. Read More
July 27, 2017 Correspondence Cosmic Mindlessness By Jeffery Gleaves James Tate, ca. 1965. James Tate, who moved often during the sixties and seventies, frequently updated his mentor and friend Gene DeGruson on his writing and on personal matters. Though routine in topic, Tate’s correspondence was often as humorous and purposeful as his poems; “I love my funny poems,” he said in his Writers at Work interview, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.” From a 1969 letter to DeGruson: Read More
July 26, 2017 Arts & Culture The Old, Weird Days of National Public Radio By Heather Radke William Eggleston, untitled, from the “Los Alamos Series,” 1965–74. © William Eggleston. From Autophoto (Éditions Xavier Barral, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2017). It’s January 1, 1985, and in kitchens and cars across the United States, National Public Radio is reporting the news: the man who hijacked American Airlines flight 626 is in custody in Havana, Cuba; in Pensacola, Florida, a twenty-one-year-old construction worker has confessed to bombing four abortion clinics; last night, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as India’s sixth prime minister. Sometime during All Things Considered, the evening news broadcast, there is another sound, unrelated to Reagan or hijackings or abortion clinics. A horse whinnies. And then the sound of a barn—jangling tack and boots walking on concrete—fades in. “Okay, what’s your horse’s name?” a woman asks in a chipper, expectant tone. Off mic, a different woman answers, muffled. And then a man’s voice comes in, strong and certain, with a Western, tough-guy accent: “They call me Christopher.” For the next four and a half minutes, the woman, an animal communicator, reads the mind of the horse, Christopher, speaking aloud into the microphone. “Tell me about times when you’re happy,” she says. “Well, I like to run in open country and jump,” the horse says. Christopher sounds melancholy; he misses wherever he came from. “It rained last week. The rain always does this to me.” The communicator misunderstands: she thinks the horse loves the beach. “No, no, no the ocean’s fine, I like it,” Christopher explains. But it’s the mountains he really loves. “This guy is really something else,” the communicator laughs. “He wants to wear bells!” She hasn’t heard quite right, again. “I’m thinking of canyons and lightning,” the horse says. “I’m wet. Running against the dark sky. And there is nothing more free than this. The earth is ringing. And I believe I can fly.” “He’s happy,” the communicator says. A long moment, the sounds of the barn, a stretch of quiet makes the listener wonder if the horse really is happy. “Okay?” she asks, a bit less chipper, finished with her job. The recorder turns off. The news fades in. Read More