January 19, 2017 Our Correspondents Some “Ozbervatims” on Edward Lear By Anthony Madrid I just finished reading my review copy of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry. The book consists of seventeen scholarly essays, many of which got their starts as papers delivered at an Edward Lear bicentennial conference at Oxford in 2012. I found the book admirable, valuable, and annoying as hell. The present note will not be a review, but only a few stray thoughts. Read More
January 19, 2017 On the Shelf Works of Simple Witnessing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An 1861 lithograph of the Great Fire of London. The “Art Under Trump” essays have been coming fast and loose all week. Today, Margaret Atwood weighs in, sounding a bit leery, a bit tired of wondering what will come of it all. Even as she endorses certain creative forms over others (sorry, satirists), Atwood suggests that artists might be powerless to curb their own suppression. Keep your eyes open, write down what you see, and maybe take out a safe-deposit box: “Some will produce ‘witness art,’ like those artists who have responded to great catastrophes: wars, earthquakes, genocides. Surely the journal-keepers are already at work, inscribing events and their responses to them, like those who kept accounts of the Black Death until they themselves succumbed to it; or like Anne Frank, writing her diary from her attic hiding place; or like Samuel Pepys, who wrote down what happened during the Great Fire of London. Works of simple witnessing can be intensely powerful … American artists and writers have seldom been shy about exploring the fissures and cracks in their own country. Let’s hope that if democracy implodes and free speech is suppressed, someone will record the process as it unfolds.” The fourth and final volume of Beckett’s letters is here, covering 1966 to 1989, which means it contains Beckett’s musings on 1968 (“was ever such rightness joined to such foolishness?”), surviving tragedy (“don’t give up that bottle, whatever you do”) and, naturally, death. David Wheatley writes, “As the light dwindles, however, the real pleasure lies in the ‘black diamonds of pessimism,’ to borrow a phrase from the early work Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in which much that is moving and memorable about these letters crystallizes. ‘Dans vos ruines je me sens à mon aise,’ he tells Cioran in 1969, acknowledging receipt of Le mauvais démiurge. To Lawrence Shainberg in 1979, Beckett confesses the ‘preposterous conviction’ that ‘here in the end is the last & by far best chance for the writer.’ ‘I work on, with failing mind, in other words improved possibilities,’ he tells Herbert Myron in 1980, relishing his receding prospects. ‘I try to think,’ he writes in Watt-like cadences to Franz Wurm, also in 1980, ‘with what mind remains, that now is the time at last, the chance at last, in these remains, with those remains, though think is not the word, at last not the word.’ ” Read More
January 18, 2017 On Film Let’s Get Ready to Crumble By Dan Piepenbring Andy Griffith, looking unhinged and awfully familiar. That slogan comes from a 2005 commercial for Kraft Crumbles, “intense nuggets of real Kraft Cheese” that give your food “that big cheese taste that blows you away.” (You might remember that these crumbles were “crumbelievable,” and that America learned about them to the tune of EMF’s 1990 dance-pop classic, “Unbelievable.”) As the inauguration nears, the phrase has come to mind almost hourly: let’s get ready to crumble. Let us watch as the Thick Man, with his processed-cheese-product glow, assumes the mantle of power and crumbelievable rubble rains down from on high. But you don’t simply wake up all ready to crumble. Crumbling preparedness takes time and effort. It begins by going to the movies. Read More
January 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Good Atticus, Bad Atticus By Nina Martyris Last week, in an uncomfortable but enlightening coincidence, America was confronted with the two faces of its most ambiguous fictional hero, Atticus Finch, the principled racist who bestrides Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). On Tuesday, Finch took to the public square in both his avatars. There was Atticus, the moral exemplar of Mockingbird, who appeared in President Obama’s farewell speech to the nation. And there was Atticus, the courteous Southern chauvinist of Watchman, in the form of Senator Jeff Sessions, who was being vetted by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the post of U.S. Attorney General. Addressing a profoundly divided nation in his final presidential plea, Obama urged black and white America “to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction—Atticus Finch—who said, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ ” Read More
January 18, 2017 Notes from a Biographer The Making of a Comics Biography, Part 1 By Joe Ollmann Read More
January 18, 2017 On the Shelf Crave the Conflict, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring As Inauguration Day beckons with its plump, vulgar middle finger, writers are struggling to articulate their role in the resistance: How do we undo our nation’s descent into mediocrity and bigotry? Surely it won’t hurt to brush up on our occultist spell-writing, which may have gotten rusty since the Bush years. But Aleksandar Hemon—who knows more than a little about the way societies can crumble into cesspools of violence and hate—has a better idea. He urges writers to pursue a “split-mind” literature, one that eschews the assumptions of bourgeois culture: “In America, a comfortable entitlement additionally blunts and deactivates imagination—it is hard to imagine that this American life is not the only life possible, that there could be any reason to undo it, because it just makes sense as it is, everything is going fine. One of the roles literature often serves in a bourgeois culture is to make a case for this life as endless and universal, as making perfect, if pleasingly complicated, sense, as containing all that is required for the ever comforting processes of our understanding ourselves. Literature becomes ontological propaganda, a machinery for making reality appear unalterable. The vast majority of Anglo-American literary production serves that purpose, confirming what is already agreed upon as knowable … What I call for is a literature that craves the conflict and owns the destruction, a split-mind literature that features fear and handles shock, that keeps self-evident ‘reality’ safely within the quotation marks. Never should we assume the sun will rise tomorrow, that America cannot be a fascist state, or that the nice-guy neighbor will not be a murderer because he gives out candy at Halloween.” Marina Warner doesn’t speak Russian, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying a performance of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry at the Gogol Centre: “Unintelligibility has become interesting to me as a far more common state—with its own benefits—than has been recognized. Some of the most involving and passionate moments of a reading life can be baffling. In my first encounters with Rebecca, The Waste Land, Waiting for Godot, Dante’s Paradiso, I could grasp very little of what was being said, either at the level of the words or in the larger picture of narrative and thought. Yet these works absorbed me utterly, and their feel has remained vivid in memory; they felt intense and alive and their power is and was contagious—they made me feel intense and alive too. There’s something about attending to a work beyond lucidity that’s like learning a language when young, or finding your way around a neighborhood.” Read More