October 7, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mandolins, Meaning, Mr. Cui By The Paris Review René Magritte, photographed by Duane Michals. The Surrealist painter René Magritte apparently dressed like a banker (dark suit, tie) but under these “innocent allures,” a friend recalled, he “was a very revolutionary personality.” That makes him rather like the subject in his 1964 painting Le fils de l’homme, in which an apple obscures the visage of a man dressed in a suit and bowler: we see him but do not see him. Such is the sense I have of him throughout the newly published Selected Writings, a collection of unpublished bits and bobs written between 1922 and 1967. Of his own paintings, he observes, “What I paint does not imply that the invisible is superior to the visible: the visible is rich enough to create a poetic language, evoking the mystery of the invisible and the visible.” Though he withholds full meaning, his meaning is there. And when he writes, “It is difficult to think while thinking of nothing,” I know exactly what he means. —Nicole Rudick Yesterday, after Rita Dove was named a finalist for this year’s National Book Award for Poetry, I read her 1986 collection Thomas and Beulah, a harrowingly gorgeous book that traverses the earlier half of twentieth-century America by way of Dove’s maternal grandparents. Comprising two parts—Mandolin, for Thomas, and Canary in Bloom, for Beulah—its forty-four elegiac poems reimagine the couple’s past, beginning on a Mississippi riverboat and moving effortlessly through the years from courtship to curtains, kneading in the somber truths of the era: the suicides of the Great Depression, the lynchings of black Americans. We see Thomas sleeping in his work barracks, wooing Beulah with his tater-bug mandolin, walking under the viaduct where men have jumped. Of all the poems, though, I find Beulah’s to be the most beautiful, her sorrow subtle yet profound. From “Daystar”: “Later / that night when Thomas rolled over and / lurched into her, she would open her eyes / and think of the place that was hers / for an hour—where / she was nothing, / pure nothing, in the middle of the day.” (You can listen to Rita Dove read from Thomas and Beulah here.) —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
October 7, 2016 On the Shelf Stephen King Says the Clowns Are Nice, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This clown? Totally fine. Today in clowns: you may have heard about the rash of nefarious clown sightings we’ve faced here in the contiguous United States. It’s hard to keep one’s cool with clowns on the national prowl. But Stephen King, who knows from psychotic clowns, has offered a public-service announcement: do not fear the clowns, America. “King’s clown creation, Pennywise, has terrified readers since he appeared in his novel It in 1986. ‘There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing,’ writes King … But despite his own contribution to coulrophobia—the fear of clowns—King has urged his millions of followers on Twitter not to worry about the rash of sightings across the U.S. ‘Hey, guys, time to cool the clown hysteria—most of em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh,’ he wrote.” Publishers: it’s time to stop pretending that your short-story collections are novels just so you get better sales. The Goon Squad–ization of the story collection is a complete and utter sham, Michael Deagler writes: “When reviewing a linked collection, a reviewer will sometimes (bafflingly) simulate confusion as to whether the book is a collection or a novel or something in between … It is far easier to publish a novel these days than a collection of short stories, so much so that many pragmatic writers have essentially abandoned the form. Fantastic short-story writers end up spending their careers producing middling novels, and our literature is poorer for it. So in those rare cases when a short-story collection does manage to be published (and reviewed and sold and read by a large number of people), to deny that collection its genre—to call it a novel, as though the world really needs another novel—is to rob the medium of short fiction of a hard-earned victory.” Read More
October 6, 2016 Look Circumstantial Pleasures By Dan Piepenbring Since the late seventies, Lewis Klahr has garnered praise for his collage films, whose use of midcentury imagery inspires what the historian Tom Gunning has called “an interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting.” A new exhibition at Zurich’s Grieder Contemporary, in association with London’s Anthony Reynolds Gallery, finds Klahr pursuing collage outside of film for the first time; in addition to a new movie, he’s debuting a set of standalone works. “When I first started doing this, in my late twenties, I was really trying to bring my childhood back,” he told Blouin ArtInfo in 2013. “I wanted the world to look like that again. As I aged, and as I grew as an artist, that became not the concern anymore in the same way. Then it was more about memory. Now it’s just a language; it’s a place I like hanging out. It’s this idea of looking at the world with the openness and wonder of a child, so you’re seeing things fresh.” Lewis Klahr, At Night, 2015, collage on cardboard, 20 1/2″ x 8 7/8″. Read More
October 6, 2016 On Music Leave Alexa Alone By Paul Grimstad Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho. 1. The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like Bob Dylan, if Bob had just been defrosted out of a block of carbonite. (I was intensely devoted to The Empire Strikes Back, so carbonite was almost always on my mind.) Other Steely Dan records like Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, The Royal Scam, and Aja opened onto a strange and ominous world: double helixes in the sky, Haitian divorcées, the rise and fall of an LSD chef named Charlemagne, someone who drinks Scotch and then “dies behind the wheel.” The photo on the inside gatefold of the Greatest Hits showed two nasty-looking guys standing in what appeared to be a hotel dining room. Read More
October 6, 2016 On the Shelf Embrace Your Inner Airport, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Bjorn Krogstad, Figure in Airfield, 1983. The airport is more than a place—it’s a state of mind. If you’re still wracked with anxiety and frustration whenever you head to JFK, be advised that the whole world is essentially an airport at this point, and it’s up to you to make peace with the essence of airportness. Christopher Schaberg writes, “Airportness transcends airports themselves. It has to do not so much with surface-level features such as sloping hallways and undulating rooflines but a host of more disparate effects that make air travel something humans can internalize and learn to live with. Airportness is how flight becomes natural to us, expected and accepted: contrails in the sky, layovers between flights … Airportness is all around us, exceeding not only airports but also air travel itself, perhaps even becoming a kind of proxy for what it means to be American. Airportness shifts from the derogatory to the sacrosanct, sliding from protected spaces to abject places.” You might’ve held off on reading Kierkegaard because you assume that, like most philosophical writing, his books are stiff, boring clumps of logical premises shouted at you by a dead white man. But you’re wrong. They’re unlike any other philosophical writing before or since. Will Rees explains, “John Updike famously argued that Kierkegaard’s works owe much to the art of novel-writing. After all, they are written by and about fictional characters whose worldviews they attempt to occupy from within. In a way that would please the contemporary teacher of creative writing, Kierkegaard does not tell—he shows. But we mustn’t get carried away; we do Kierkegaard a disservice if we simply appreciate his books. By departing from the normal philosophical form, they arguably tighten rather than slacken the demand on our attention, because arguments are present, but one must search for them, and often they reside in what Kierkegaard’s characters do not or cannot say—in the implicit gaps in their imperfect world views.” Read More
October 5, 2016 The Lives of Others Rise Up By Edward White Alexander Bedward’s mythical powers of flight. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people amassed in August Town, Jamaica, on New Year’s Eve, 1920, to watch Alexander Bedward fly to heaven. Some eyewitnesses claimed thousands: dense clumps of people wading in the shallow waters of the Hope River, crowding the banks or perched in the branches of the surrounding trees. Most of them were unquestioning believers to whom Bedward’s words had the weight of Scripture. For thirty years he had built a vast following by healing, rejuvenating, and baptizing in this very stretch of water, helping ordinary people to know God—and themselves—in ways they’d never imagined possible. Now in his seventies, Bedward sat in a wooden throne, dressed in pristine white robes, awaiting the sweet moment of prophetic fulfillment when he, like Elijah before him, would soar into the unknowable beyond. His ascent, he promised his followers, would hasten the Rapture; before the sun had set, he would be gone and they would be free. Some had their doubts. In fact, a great many Jamaicans dismissed him as either a charlatan or one of the island’s growing number of feebleminded unfortunates. The idea that Jamaica was suffering an epidemic of insanity had first surfaced in the 1890s, when the Gleaner newspaper ran reports about the vast overcrowding of the island’s only asylum: supposed proof that a contagion of madness was spreading out of control, especially among the black population. According to the historian Leonard Smith, in 1863/64 the Jamaican Lunatic Asylum admitted seventy-one black people and two white people; twenty-five years later, the annual white intake had stayed exactly the same, but the number of black patients had increased to 153. Read More