May 17, 2017 Our Correspondents Five Limericks By Anthony Madrid Just a few words about the rhymes and pictures below. The limericks date from 2013. I wrote more than three hundred that year, and might have continued indefinitely except I was made to stop. At first, they were a form of self-medication. In the aftermath of turning in my Ph.D. thesis and finally graduating (June 2012), I was completely numb. Only Edward Lear’s limericks did me any good, so I wound up studying them. And then I just wanted there to be more of him … Naturally, all good things have to be taken too far and made monstrous. Some days I made four or five limericks, or four or five versions of the same limerick, texting every one of ’em to the people in my life who, in my judgment, did not then and do not now deserve God’s mercy. Everyone was fed up. So I promised to knock it off come Christmas 2013. Which promise was faithfully observed. The pictures, meanwhile, are newborns, less than six weeks old. These five specimens together, and buckets more just like them, are slated to appear in book form in 2018. Prelude Books has graciously agreed to, et cetera. Of these items, “Minsk” is the most authentic (where authentic is defined as “closely approximating the verbal manner of Edward Lear”). Elsewhere, the rhyme {Bensonhurst | mention first} will be judged satisfactory by persons who think all rhymes should be like that. “Bozeman,” Montana is where my life partner, Nadya, is from. The image depicts the two of us very accurately. In closing, it’s vital that everyone understand that the pictures were not done by me, but by my friend Mark Fletcher, who also designed the covers of both my books. I said for years that I had never heard this man’s voice. It’s still true to this day. All we ever do is email. We were put in touch, seven or eight years ago, by our mutual friend Michael Robbins, who, incidentally, headed the movement to annihilate the limericks juggernaut. Anyhow, I want to underscore that Mark Fletcher alone is responsible for the gorillas, the blankets, the verisimilitude of the Louvre exterior, and for ninety-six percent of any actual value attaching to this whole enterprise. Read More
May 17, 2017 At Work The House of Song: An Interview with Michael Robbins By Daniel Johnson The Overlook Mountain House—near Woodstock, New York—features prominently in “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday.” After his first two collections, Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex, Michael Robbins drew comparisons to poets like Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon. In those poems—with titles like “My New Asshole” and “Pissing in One Hand”—Robbins is concerned for the fate of the whales, and he’s unafraid to spit vitriol about banks, oil pipelines, Xbox, Jesus, Jay Z. He writes about the modern world with such referential range, and such sharpness, that you can almost miss his superhuman command of verse and rhyme, which Dwight Garner has called “dizzying.” Those poems are anchored by constant allusions and tributes to the music Robbins loves. Most memorably, in Alien vs. Predator’s “I Did This to My Vocabulary,” he exclaims the names of heavy-metal bands as Santa Claus roll calls his reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas”: “On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom! / On Motorhead, and Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem!” Two poems published in The Paris Review over the past year, “Walkman” and “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday,” are more autobiographical and ruminative; they seem to follow in the tradition of the New York School. “Schuyler was too tender / for me then,” Robbins writes in “Walkman,” “but now / he is just tender / enough.” It’s this pivot toward tenderness—rich with memories, “beautiful experiences,” secrets, breakups, apologies, Schuyler-esque wishes—that might best characterize the departure from his earlier work. You can hear a little Taylor Swift (Robbins is a fan) in the last lines of “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday”: “Wherever / you are, I hope you stand / still now and then / and let the prayers / wash over you like the breakers / at Fort Tilden that day / the huge gray gothic / clouds massed and threatened to drop / a storm on our heads / but didn’t.” I met Robbins at a café in Brooklyn, where we talked about Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, his book of essays forthcoming in July, and the stylistic shift between his collections and his poems in the Review. INTERVIEWER The two poems in the Review recently—“Walkman” and “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday”—are a radical departure from those in your books. ROBBINS After The Second Sex, I didn’t want to write any more poems in the vein of my two collections. I just didn’t want to be one of those poets who write the same book over and over again. I knew that I wanted to write a different kind of poem. So the first thing I decided, before I knew what I was going to write, was that I wasn’t going to rhyme, and I wasn’t going to worry about meter. Read More
May 17, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Your New Moving House, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just relax and take a nap while your house moves. So you’re moving. That’s nice. I bet you’re packing up all your stuff and stowing it in some U-Haul. I bet you’re tissue wrapping your glassware and purging your bookshelves. I bet you’re actually moving to an entirely different home in another place. Which makes you just another sucker. Did it ever occur to you to just move your entire home—just put the whole thing on wheels and have some guy drag it along the road while you remain inside, comfortable, with all of your belongings where you want them? This was all the rage in the nineteenth century. Jeannie Vanasco writes, “Early movers, such as Chester Tupper, Chicago’s first professional house mover, shied from shanties, log cabins, and brick or stone buildings, but balloon frame structures could be lifted and rolled down streets relatively easily. Born in Missouri in the eighteenth century yet called ‘Chicago construction’ in the nineteenth, balloon framing required lumber, nails, and basic carpentry skills. Lightweight, sturdy, and flexible, a balloon frame structure could be built within a week. Tupper moved thousands of them on rollers. In his memoir, A Pioneer in Northwest America, 1841–1858, the pioneer and priest Gustaf Unonius wrote about seeing Chicago houses moved: ‘I have seen houses on the move while the families living in them continued with their daily tasks, keeping fire in the stove, eating their meals as usual, and at night quietly going to bed to wake up the next morning on some other street. Once a house passed my window while a tavern business housed in it went on as usual. Even churches have been transported in this fashion, but as far as I know, never with services going on.’ ” The “desktop” has become the reigning metaphor of personal computing—why? Oliver Wainwright explains that most of our ideas about the aesthetics of computers come from LSD: “Organizing your files might not seem like a psychedelic experience now, but in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated a futuristic world of windows, hypertext links, and video conferencing to a rapt audience in San Francisco, they must have thought they were tripping. Especially because he was summoning this dark magic onto a big screen using a strange rounded controller on the end of a wire, which he called his ‘mouse.’ Like many California tech visionaries of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD … His own technological epiphanies while tripping seem to have been limited: in one session, after staring at a blank wall in fascination for hours, he came up with the ‘tinkle toy,’ a potty-training aid in the form of a miniature water wheel that would spin and tinkle when peed on. But he remained convinced that the drug opened doors to alternative realities, including one where people could control computers through screens.” Read More
May 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Canine Cremains By Jane Stern Photo: Kippelboy Because I have owned many dogs, I have many containers of what remains of them. Without meaning to, I’ve become a hoarder of canine cremains. When one of my dogs dies, the vet will ask me how I wish to dispose of the deceased. I am at that moment of two minds. One is abject and hysterical grief. The other is: I want to get home as fast as I can, cry, and drink a lot of bourbon. So I pretty much say yes to any options the vet offers, and then I run out the door. If I lived on a farm in a rural area, I could dig a hole in the ground and bury the dog, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less. Living in suburbia, the options are more limited. I can have the dog cremated with a bunch of other dead dogs or have the dog cremated separately, after which the facility sweeps its ashes into a pretty urn or wooden box. It arrives a few weeks later with a heartfelt note and a sentimental poem. Read More
May 16, 2017 Look Thirty-One from Oaxaca By Dan Piepenbring “31,” an exhibition of works on paper by Domenico Zindato, is at Andrew Edlin Gallery through June 4. Zindato, who was born in Italy, began the project after stopping by a small shop in Mexico City, where he stumbled on an album with thirty-one sheets of handcrafted paper from Oaxaca, made with regional plants. He decided to make a “visual poem” with its contents, cutting out the sheets and painting them in vibrant colors with fine-haired brushes and nib pens. Domenico Zindato, Into the Water’s Music, 2015, ink and pastel on paper, 10″ x 16″. Read More
May 16, 2017 On the Shelf The More Ink, the Better, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A 2010 illustration by Karl Lagerfeld celebrating Gerhard Steidl. If I had me a printing press, here’s what I’d do: I’d stand by the machines all day as they spat out inky paper, and I’d close my eyes and huff the paper, fanning the wet air toward me with a flowery gesture. And from the scent alone I would render a verdict on the quality of the print job. “No, no, this smells all wrong. Do it over.” Or: “This … is my masterpiece.” There lives among us one man, Gerhard Steidl, who does something like this for a living—his printing is an art form, his fastidiousness is renowned, and he takes enormous pride in mastering every minute detail of the bookmaking process. Profiling the legendary Steidl for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes, “Among photographers and photography aficionados, Steidl’s name recognition equals that of Johannes Gutenberg: he is widely regarded as the best printer in the world. His name appears on the spine of more than two hundred photography books a year, and he oversees the production of all of them personally. Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer … Steidl seeks out the best inks, and pioneers new techniques for achieving exquisite reproductions. ‘He is so much better than anyone,’ William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of The Democratic Forest, the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. ‘Feel the pages of the books,’ he said. ‘The ink is in relief. It is that thick.’ ” Yesterday in this space, I linked to an essay by Samuel R. Delany about his experiences at a gay sex party for older men. In an interview with Junot Díaz, Delany explains that he later saw a documentary about that same sex party (it happens once a month) and that it furthered his concept of sexual radicalism: “I went to the party first … The documentary was made three months before I went to the party. But that just made it seem I was involved in the same process. And I had had sex with maybe half a dozen of the guys I subsequently saw on the screen. That was certainly a first for me … Sitting in a movie theater and looking at the screen and thinking, Yes, I’ve actually had sex with him, as you are watching him have sex with someone else (or pretend to), has got to be an experience pretty limited to the community of movie actors—perhaps the community of porn film actors. But when those communities shift radically, it means something—and not just approaching mortality. Not all explicit sex is pornographic. It can be educational, and I expect that a room full of forty- to eighty-year-olds having sex and discussing their lives would be just that: educational.” Read More