February 8, 2017 Correspondence Infinite Mischief By Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop was born on this day in 1911. In the early seventies, her friend Robert Lowell sent her the poems that would form his collection The Dolphin—in which, without permission, he’d quoted the distraught letters his partner Elizabeth Hardwick had sent him after he left her. (“your clowning makes us want to vomit,” one poem goes: “you bore / bore, bore the friends who … wished to save your image / from this genteel, disgraceful hospital.”) Bishop, shocked to read the new work, sent him the impassioned rebuke excerpted below. The Dolphin, when it was eventually published, won a Pulitzer Prize. Read more of Bishop and Lowell’s letters in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008), edited Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Read More
February 8, 2017 On the Shelf I Hate My Valentine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Oh look at me I’m so cool with the piano”: a Vinegar Valentine. Irwin Corey, the soi-disant “World’s Foremost Authority” who spent much of the twentieth century declaiming on this and that with an inexhaustible reserve of faux pomp, has died at 102, thus bringing an end to one of the greatest fusions of comedy and performance art. T. Rees Shapiro’s obituary recalls Corey’s brightest literary moment—when he served as a stand-in for Thomas Pynchon. “His career reached its peak of absurdity in 1974 when he was called upon to accept the National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon for the novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Corey gave a wandering acceptance speech on behalf of Pynchon, offering thanks to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—whom Corey called the ‘acting president of the United States’—and author Truman Capote. Since Pynchon had never made a public appearance, many in the audience assumed the prattling Corey to be the mysterious author. (Corey did not, in fact, know Pynchon, but they had mutual friends who arranged the comedian’s book-award talk.)” Some traditions are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them. I think the American people should thrust greatness upon vinegar valentines, a once-prospering Victorian tradition in which people sent anonymous, hateful little poems to their enemies on Valentine’s Day. With the country more divided than ever, it falls to us to resurrect this pungent convention—and to bombard those we hate, especially in seats of power, with more vinegar valentines than our fragile postal service can handle. AbeBooks has a primer on them: “Gluttons, drinkers, hen-pecked husbands, braggarts, windbags, spinsters, sharp-tongued wives, unfaithful lovers, cowards, lazy colleagues, uncaring bosses, ugly people, fat and thin people, vain people, and stupid people—they were all fair game to folks who posted vinegar valentines. They could be delivered to enemies, or people who had treated you badly, or someone you thought needed to be brought down a notch or two. The tone of verse ranged from gentle to downright vicious and abusive.” Read More
February 7, 2017 In Memoriam Thomas Lux, 1946–2017 By Dan Piepenbring The poet Thomas Lux died this weekend at age seventy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Lux, who taught for years at Georgia Tech, aspired to make his poems ring with “the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive.” His earlier, more ironical work recalled the surrealism of Bill Knott, a selection of whose poems Lux had just readied for publication before his death. He had work in The Paris Review in the seventies and eighties. Kevin Young, a friend of Lux’s and a fellow poet whose work has also appeared in the Review, told the Journal-Constitution, “Tom Lux was not only a great poet, but a great poetry friend and friend to poetry. He was a terrific literary citizen, dedicated to trumpeting the power of poetry and championing the music and many moods of language … He will be deeply missed.” My favorite of Lux’s poems in the Review is “The Thirst of Turtles,” which appeared in our Spring 1983 issue and remains, along with Russell Hoban’s novel Turtle Diary, one of the great cornerstones of literary herpetology. Here’s Lux in fine form imagining the turtles’ sixty-day underwater migrations: Read More
February 7, 2017 On Film The Alley Cats of Istanbul By Darrell Hartman Still from Kedi. If you love something, you let it go. Cat people understand this intuitively. You never quite possess a cat, and the sooner you acknowledge that, the better. Cats will chase the tinfoil ball, if they are in the mood, but they will almost certainly not bring it back. We forgive them for this because there is no other option. I have no trouble linking cats to the divine. Chris Marker’s transcendent short film of a sleeping cat is nothing if not an image of Nirvana, pure being, whatever you want to call it. The look in a cat’s eye guides us toward an idea of freedom, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested. Having spent a lifetime studying the structures of ancient societies, the French anthropologist understood well the prison cell into which technological man had locked himself. Only at rare moments, Lévi-Strauss posits near the end of Tristes Tropiques, do we see beyond this cell. One of those is “in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.” Read More
February 7, 2017 Our Correspondents Flamingo Love Story By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: two flamingos escape to the Gulf. Design by Kristen Radtke. It is a black eye, to be honest. It was basically an error. We are not fond of this story. —Scott Newland, Sedgwick County Zoo Jay points the boat in the direction of a couple of large pink dots. And as we approach closer, the dots start developing long necks and legs. —The birder Neil Hayward Every once in a while they’d walk 10–15 feet apart, but then they’d just come back together and move as one. —The birder Nate McGowan Names: 492 and HDNT Species: Phoenicopterus roseus and Phoenicopterus ruber, respectively Years Active: 2005–present Distinguishing Features: yellow ID tags, monogamous tendencies Skills: escape artistry, international travel, standing on one leg Habitat: The Gulf Coast (by way of Tanzania, Kansas, Wisconsin, and the Yucatán) Additional Notes: On June 27, 2005, a ten-year-old flamingo escaped the confines of its Wichita zoo with another pale-pink inmate. Zookeepers hadn’t properly clipped either flamingo’s wings—a regrettable error, they later confessed—and the birds simply took flight when no one was watching. The fugitives, members of an “old world” species called the greater flamingo, had recently arrived in Kansas from a colony in Tanzania. They hadn’t even been named yet and were only identified by the numbered tags on their right legs; their sex was also undetermined. Despite this lack of human knowledge, the flamingo known only as 492 would soon join a long list of headline-making runaway animal celebrities, thanks to its bold escape. Famous animal fugitives are legion; this past year alone has featured the viral jailbreaks of Inky the Octopus (who squished across an aquarium floor to slip out a drainpipe); Ollie Bobcat, reported missing from her enclosure in the National Zoo last Monday (but found near the bird exhibit Wednesday); and Sunny, a red panda that ghosted from the Virginia Zoo (and is still at large). We humans thrill over the creatures that outsmart us—those that go on the lam and rewild themselves into the free world. Perhaps we see in them a covetable wiliness, or maybe the escapees just make our planet—so much of it now cultivated, mapped, and conquered—feel vast again. And as long as these runaways have no taste for humans, we tend to support their newfound freedom. Read More
February 7, 2017 On the Shelf The Man Who Gave Brontë Eyes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A caricature of John Ruskin from Vanity Fair, 1872. Let’s say you had to choose one genre, just one, in which you’d prefer your politicians to write with rigor and fluency. Political theory, you might say. Or biography. Probably not even those of us with a bona-fide death wish for the republic (anarchists, accelerationists, the Joker) would say “Civil War alternate history.” But that’s exactly what we have in Bannon and Gingrich—connoisseurs of the uniquely depraved world of ahistorical warmongering. Paul Mason writes, “Bannon, the White House chief of staff and Donald Trump’s closest aide, believes the next phase of American history should be as catastrophic and traumatic as the conflict of 1861–65 … [Gingrich] took time out from impeaching Bill Clinton to co-author three excruciatingly dire alt-history novels about the Civil War. In Never Call Retreat, the final in the trilogy, written by Gingrich with William Forstchen and Albert Hanser, the Union side wins the war but, by implication, the South wins the peace. With Sherman’s Union army poised to destroy Atlanta, the Confederate commander, Robert E Lee, persuades the South to surrender. ‘The patience of our opponents is at an end,’ this fictional Lee tells the Confederate government. ‘We shall reap a terrible whirlwind that will scar our nation for generations to come.’ ” Anna Aslanyan writes on the exasperating indifference with which the court system treats its interpreters, who are only responsible for, you know, 100 percent of the communication between the state and the accused: “Translation is like rubbish collection: no one notices it until something goes wrong … Much of court interpreting is simultaneous: you sit next to a defendant and whisper in their ear as you listen to the proceedings. You have to be familiar with legal procedures and fluent in legalese as there is no time to decode ‘ABH’ or invent a term for ‘corporate manslaughter’. You also need to be able to temper your language depending on who you are interpreting for: a drug addict going through withdrawal, a graduate with some knowledge of legal arguments, or an emotionally unstable person with a patchy understanding of the situation. These skills require constant practice … As qualified interpreters stop working for the courts, standards keep slipping—yet more evidence, if it were needed, that outsourcing doesn’t improve services.” Read More