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
July 26, 2017 Arts & Culture I Love You So Much I Would Drink Your Blood By Charlie Fox Notes on Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves. Jim Goldberg, Megan, Sherman Oaks, 1991. © Jim Goldberg. All images courtesy of the artist, Pace/MacGill Gallery (NY), and Casemore Kirkeby (SF). Friday? Dad, I’m really sorry about losing control of myself + hurting you (+ the, “ahem”, bathroom mirror). I know + understand that talk doesn’t mean a damn thing to you by now. (Especially from my mouth.) … Some facts before things get messy. This unattributed note—handwritten as neatly as one’s science homework, its margin decorated with a ghostly heart—appears in Jim Goldberg’s mammoth book of photographs Raised by Wolves (1995), juxtaposed with a fuzzy snap of a scarecrow-like boy tilting forward as if hit by a windstorm. I think that boy is Tweeky Dave, a cadaverous teenage drug addict who died from liver disease circa 1993; he was, for a few years before his death, something of a celebrity urchin on the Los Angeles streets he used to haunt in search of opiates. He’s also the hero of Goldberg’s epic book, which chronicles the lives of various homeless kids in LA and its environs (shout-out to Echo, Marcos with the wonky eye, Wolfette, Vampchild—“this cute boy who says he’s a real vampire”—and Blade) and comes stuffed with transcripts of their conversations, faxes from Social Services, Polaroids, and other grungy ephemera testifying to the decade Goldberg spent shadowing his subjects. Tracking them through the book—on drugs, out of school, and running away from ogreish parents—also means confronting some of the gnarliest fallout from the Reagan-Bush years: the rapacious mutilation of education programs and social services, not to mention the, ahem, decline of the “family values” they claimed to protect. Tweeky Dave is just the most wretched embodiment of the trouble all those acts can cause. Read More
July 26, 2017 Our Correspondents “Would You Like to Write Something for My Magazine?” By Anthony Madrid Leaf from a manuscript of Valerius Maximus. I actually have two magazines. They don’t exist. Each one is better and more interesting than the other. I am the sole editor, have been from the beginning. There are no copies of either of these magazines. They are famous all over Europe and South America. Maybe you would like to write something for one of my magazines? The older of the two, there’s no way you’ve ever heard of it, is called The In-House Newsletter. Some people just call it Book Report. One smart-mouth in Laos calls it What I Did Over My Summer Vacation. No one has ever seen or discussed this magazine in any way. Let me tell you how it works. Read More
July 25, 2017 On Translation Straightening out Ulysses By Bernard Hœpffner A translator’s notes. Samuel Frederick Brocas, The Ha’Penny Bridge, Dublin, 1818. The indefatigable Bernard Hœpffner, who translated many English masterpieces into French—among them Huckleberry Finn, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and John Keene’s Counternarratives—drowned off the northern coast of Wales this past May. Many obituaries in the French press highlighted Hœpffner’s involvement in an eight-person retranslation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In homage to an extraordinary figure, The Paris Review Daily presents a translated selection from his Ulysses “logbook.” —Jeffrey Zuckerman, translator Summer 2000 – Phone call from Jacques Aubert, asking if I might be interested in retranslating James Joyce’s Ulysses. Immediate disappointment upon learning this would be a team effort. Each episode having been written in a different style, he asks me which one I like best, and, without any hesitation, I name Ithaca, in the question-and-answer style of the Catholic catechism. October 30, 2000 – First meeting at Éditions Gallimard with several staff members, Stephen Joyce and his wife, Jacques Aubert (the general editor), and nine of the other preliminary translators. I am the sole professional translator. Antoine Gallimard appears briefly. Stephen Joyce promises not to interfere in the translation. Homage is paid to the “complete French translation of M. Auguste Morel, with the help of M. Stuart Gilbert, fully revised by M. Valery Larbaud and the author” (1929), which we decide to stow out of sight, at the expense of using the edition’s critical apparatus. We agree, as our guiding principle, on the credo in Stephen Hero: “He put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter.” We also decide not to Gallicize everything, as Larbaud had done with the preceding translation. Contract terms are discussed. The new translation will be published on June 16, 2004, the one hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, with no notes. Read More