June 28, 2017 Our Correspondents Carrying Away His Last Sheep By Anthony Madrid An illustration of Leopardi by Tullio Pericoli. It’s Leopardi’s birthday tomorrow. Happy 219, Giacomo. In remembrance of the occasion, I think we’d all better have a look at the following short poem by James Wright. I’ve never seen it in any anthology. It’s from Shall We Gather at the River (1968). Read More
June 28, 2017 Notes from a Biographer A Friendship Hiding in the Archives By Scott Schomburg Joseph Mitchell and Ralph Ellison at a New York Public Library Literary Lions event in 1990. Photo: Star Black Workers wheel Ralph Ellison’s coffin to a vault at the Trinity Church Cemetery on 153rd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan: “There’s no room in the ground to be buried.” His mourners follow the pallbearers out of a small, unadorned chapel. Classical music plays faintly from a cassette player. The vaults, about fifteen feet high, look like “oversized pink marble post office boxes in the sunlight.” The George Washington Bridge is visible in the distance, darkly present in the afternoon haze, like a bridge to a world beyond our own. I’m reading an account of Ralph Ellison’s funeral, nine pages typed, hiding in a folder among the 127 boxes of Joseph Mitchell’s extant papers, at the New York Public Library. There is no byline, and it isn’t Mitchell’s prose. I stumble on it during my third day in the archives, sitting under lamplight at a corner desk in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. Mitchell and Ellison’s friendship has never been documented, as far as I know, but here in the preserved debris of Mitchell’s life, Ellison fills an entire folder. Four, in fact. I keep reading: “The ceremony is perfunctory, and except for watching Joe Mitchell comfort Mrs. Ellison, his arms encircling her small body, his sorrowful face bent toward hers, you almost forget someone has died.” Read More
June 28, 2017 On the Shelf Return of the Zombie McMansion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It lives. We thought we’d solved this problem. This time, we hoped, it was gone for good. But it’s back. Drive into the suburbs and you’ll see it, something out of the nightmares you have when you eat a big meal just before bed. Risen from the dead to stoke our deepest fears, it is: the Zombie McMansion. Okay, maybe its foam-filled, non-load-bearing Doric columns are showing their age a bit; maybe a few of the quoins are starting to peel off, and some of the two-dozen dormer windows no longer open. But it still stands, and worse still, young people are still willing to buy it. As Ana Swanson reports, the improved housing market means a return of architectural crimes against humanity: “Today, McMansions are not exactly cool, especially compared with the exposed-brick urban lofts young people today will pay exorbitant prices for. But with the recent recovery of the housing market, they are coming back anyway. As Americans have started building and flipping houses again, they are once again buying McMansions. Since 2009, construction of these homes has steadily trended upward, data from Zillow, a real-estate website, shows. The median home value of McMansions is also rising, at a pace that eclipses the value of the median American home … Many casual onlookers have forecast the death of the suburbs in recent years, especially as younger renters and buyers turn an eye to city centers … Yet younger people who are starting families are still moving to the suburbs for more room, she says. About half of all millennials that purchased a home last year did so in the suburbs, according to Zillow data.” While we’re looking at things that refuse to die, here’s Kyle Chayka on Monocle, that shiny symbol of the global elite—a magazine for the late aughts that persists, somehow, into the late teens: “Over the years, Monocle has become as much a status symbol as reading material. Its editor is one of the world’s foremost lifestyle auteurs, a tastemaker of late capitalism … While Monocle projects confidence in the march of globalization, it barely hints at the growing threats to the world of open borders and free-flowing capital it depicts. The magazine’s globalist chic contrasts sharply with the nationalist movements in the United States and Europe … Monocle views the world as a single, utopian marketplace, linked by digital technology and first-class air travel, bestridden by compelling brands and their executives. Diversity is part of the vision—the magazine’s subjects are from all over the world, and its fashion models come in every skin color—but this diversity is presented, in a vaguely colonialist way, more as a cool look to buy into than a tangible social ideal. Cities and countries are written up as commodities and investment opportunities rather than real places with intractable problems that require more than a subsidy to resolve.” Read More
June 27, 2017 First Person Starting Out in the Evening By Brian Cullman Photo: Dan McCoy, NARA, 1973. Years ago, a psychic of some sort told me that the top of my head was open, that I had a WELCOME mat where a locked door ought to be, and I should be careful: any passing or wandering spirits could just drift in and make themselves at home. It felt like that last night. Partly in terms of psychic disturbance, getting too many signals from too many stations—but also because everyone on the street wants to tell me something. Read More
June 27, 2017 First Person From the Foreword to Debths By Susan Howe From the cover of Debths. The below is excerpted from the foreword to Debths, Susan Howe’s latest collection, out today from New Directions. Going back! Going back! “Little Sir Echo, how do you do? / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Little Sir Echo, we’ll answer you / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!)/ Won’t you come over and play? (and play)/ You’re a nice little fellow / I know by your voice/ But you’re always so far away (away).” —Bing Crosby and the Music Maids (1939) When I was eight my parents packed me off to Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls on Lake Armington in the foothills of New Hampshire cofounded and owned by Mary Hoisington and Margaret Conoboy ten years earlier. Apparently the women chose the name because of an echo that bounces off the surrounding White Mountains. An actual child may or may not fit parental fantasies. I hated the place. Most of all I dreaded riding classes and spent many nights praying I would be assigned the tired elderly horse with a creaking stomach for the next day’s obligatory ride around the ring. On the one visiting day allowed per summer we rowed across the lake and picnicked on a secluded beach at the edge of a pine forest. I begged them to ransom me. But no. Around four P.M. they left for Boston, leaving me alone with my dread of being lost in the past; absent. Read More
June 27, 2017 On the Shelf Pour One Out for Branwell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Give the guy a little love. Poor Branwell Brontë. He had three brilliant, literary sisters. He had a way of courting misfortune. And, worst of all, he had a first name that sounds like an off-brand cereal from the health-food store. But now that Branwell’s siblings have ascended into the highest reaches of the canon, Emma Butcher argues that we’ve failed to give him his due: “We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of thirty-one from the long-term effects of substance abuse … Life threw repeated punches at Branwell, but within this series of unfortunate events there was happiness and worth. We must not forget that the Brontë brother grew up in the same literature-charged environment as his three siblings … Although his influence was not always positive, Branwell remained a primary muse for his sisters, and we should remember him as a major cog in the Brontë writing machine—even if his own work was always ‘minor.’ And the story of a young, talented fantasist failing to make his way in the world resonates with our experiences of hardship and lost dreams.” Are you an unconventional male artist who intends to go to the grave with many illegitimate children just waiting to come out of the woodwork? Boy, do I have an idea for you: on your deathbed, make a big show out of preserving some of your DNA as your final artwork. Send it to a museum or something, I don’t know. Not only will this earn you plaudits for your striking comment on the artist’s body as the ultimate artwork—it will save your descendants a little trouble down the road. As Raphael Minder reports, a Spanish court has ordered the exhumation of Salvador Dalí’s corpse for DNA testing; a young woman claims to be his daughter. If he’d just taken the time to put a little of his DNA aside for safekeeping, they wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble, but … “Pilar Abel, a Tarot card reader, wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a ‘clandestine love affair’ that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house … Dalí died in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship, which included Gala’s moving to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and only granting Dalí the right to visit her there by written invitation. In his will, Dalí left paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Spanish state.” Read More