November 14, 2016 On the Shelf Terror That Makes Knees Tremble, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From an early edition of Absalom, Absalom! When Toni Morrison looks at Trump’s victory, she sees echoes of Faulkner: “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble … William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In Absalom, Absalom, incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its ‘whiteness’ (once again), the family chooses murder.” Publishers: someone should print an affordably priced pocket-sized edition of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1998). Then every philosophy major could carry it at all times, and whenever anyone mocked you for having pursued this seemingly worthless degree, you could pull out Achieving and flip to the part where Rorty predicted—with such prescience that it’s almost painful now—the rise of Trump: “The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…” Read More
November 11, 2016 Arts & Culture Dostoyevsky’s Empathy By Laurie Sheck Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871 I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press. For the seven months following his arrest, he’d been kept in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva, his cell window smeared with an oily paste to prevent any daylight from seeping through. Read More
November 11, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Léger, Loving, LSD By The Paris Review From Barbara, Wanda (c) The Estate of Barbara Loden. Courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive. The last couple of days, with work as my excuse, I’ve been losing myself in our back issues. This morning I was moved by a poem I haven’t read in years, “The Mutes,” by Denise Levertov, first published in 1965: “Those groans men use/passing a woman on the street/or on the steps of the subway…” Then, in our summer 1966 issue, I found a letter from Allen Ginsberg describing his first acid trip, at Big Sur, on the same day that LBJ underwent gallbladder surgery: “President Johnson went that day into the Valley of Shadow operating room because of his gall bladder & Berkeley’s Vietnam Day Committee was preparing anxious manifestoes for our march toward Oakland police and Hell’s Angels. Realizing that more vile words from me would send out physical vibrations into the atmosphere that might curse poor Johnson’s flesh and further unbalance his soul, I knelt on the sand surrounded by masses of green bulb-headed Kelp vegetable-snake undersea beings washed up by last night’s tempest, and prayed for the President’s tranquil health.” —Lorin Stein An excerpt of Nathalie Léger’s new book Suite for Barbara Loden appears in our Fall issue. It’s one of my favorite pieces, a multigenre portrait of Léger, Loden, and Wanda (the titular subject of Loden’s 1970 film, which Loden wrote and directed and in which she stars). Léger sets out to write a short notice of Loden for an encyclopedia but quickly becomes mired in the task. How do you describe a person you don’t know? What constitutes their essentialness? And how do you tell their story simply? Since closing our Winter issue last week, I’ve taken up the rest of the book, and I’ve found it to be one of the most affecting stories I’ve read in a long time. A mix of observation, recitation, and imagination, Suite persists in the idea that no single perspective is sufficient in gaining an understanding of a person, and also, perhaps, that no accumulation of perspectives is sufficient either. “There I am,” Léger writes, “still unable to grasp the truth of this life in its official version, the version that is both overloaded and sparse. Born. Died. In the distance the barking of a dog and the sound of trucks maneuvering: the only illusion of reality, the only depth.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
November 11, 2016 In Memoriam Leonard Cohen, 1934–2016 By Adam Shatz Leonard Cohen died on November 7, a day before the election, at eighty-two. Readers of David Remnick’s extraordinarily moving profile in The New Yorker know that he had been preparing for death. Still, it felt like an act of cruel and unusual punishment after Trump’s victory, and like many Cohen fans I couldn’t help connecting his death to the election. Was it a sign of some sort? Had Cohen been so dejected that he decided to call it quits? Did Trump kill him? You may laugh, but it’s no less plausible a theory than pretty much anything from the president-elect’s mouth. When I heard the news of Cohen’s death, my first thought was: Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye. Then I remembered that Neruda, one of Cohen’s favorite poets, died as Pinochet established his grip on power. Neruda was spared the sight of Chile’s grim descent into torture and extrajudicial killing, and the imposition of a regime of murderous silence. But he did not vanish: his poems of revolutionary love were like fireflies in Chile’s dark night, providing sparks of hope that the day of liberation would come. Read More
November 11, 2016 Our Correspondents Our House By Amy Gentry Violence and gentrification in John Schlesinger’s Pacific Heights. Still from Pacific Heights. “This is our home. This is all happening to us in our home.” That is the sound of a white woman’s despair. It’s the second act break of the domestic thriller Pacific Heights, and Patty (Melanie Griffith) has just realized that her stupid, pseudo-liberal boyfriend and her smart, pseudo-liberal self are no match for their leering, destructive tenant (Michael Keaton), a failed trust-fund sociopath with a who-me? grin and a twofold goal: first destroy her home from the inside out, and then grab it for himself. Not to live in it, but to profit from its collapse. When Pacific Heights was released in 1990, critics were puzzled and more than a little contemptuous of the workaday “real-estate thriller” directed by John Schlesinger in his post–Marathon Man slump. Patty and her boyfriend, Drake (Matthew Modine), are unmarried yuppies who’ve pooled their resources to buy an albatross of a Victorian fixer-upper in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying Pacific Heights neighborhood. They fudge the numbers on their mortgage application—“Everybody does it,” bleats Drake—and stay afloat by renting out two units to tenants. Read More
November 11, 2016 On the Shelf Poetry Is the Evidence of Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Leonard Cohen in 1988. Leonard Cohen has died at eighty-two. Less than a month ago, David Remnick profiled him for The New Yorker, and Cohen knew his time was near: “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.” There’s so much to be said for this: he was ready. “Poetry is just the evidence of life,” Cohen said once. “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” Meanwhile, Shirley Collins, one of the stars of traditional British folk music, has started singing again in her eighties, after decades away from music. “It was only as Ms. Collins was approaching her eightieth birthday in 2014 that she started to seriously test the waters of performing again. ‘I was a singer,’ she said in a phone interview from her cottage in the English countryside. ‘I couldn’t bear to leave this world without giving it one more go.’ The results can be heard in the new album Lodestar, her first recording since 1979. The road to its creation snakes back twenty years, to when a younger friend of hers, the cult musician David Tibet, beseeched her to try and sing again. She demurred, repeatedly. But every few years, he’d nudge her again. Finally, two years ago, Ms. Collins said yes to a guest appearance at one of Mr. Tibet’s shows in Islington, a north London neighborhood. ‘That surprised me as much as anyone,’ she said.” Read More