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
November 10, 2016 From the Archive Sound of the Axe By Denise Levertov Albert Pinkham Ryder, Under a Cloud, ca. 1900, oil on canvas, 20″ x 24″. Denise Levertov’s poem “Sound of the Axe” appeared in our Spring 1981 issue. Read More
November 10, 2016 Literary Architecture Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. The skyscraper looming above us is composed of a clean, well-defined volume and a formless, organic, irregular mass that seems to be enveloping the volume while supporting it and, at the same time, oozing from it like a leak from a crack. The shape of the central, glass and steel building is that of an upside-down truncated square pyramid—tall and slender, bright and reflective like a spear stuck into the ground. The accretion is geometrically fluid, opaque, made of wood and with few openings. Read More
November 10, 2016 Poetry Don’t Make a Movie About Me By Johnny Cash This month, Blue Rider Press will publish Forever Words: The Unknown Poems of Johnny Cash. Compiled from a mountain of Cash’s handwritten poetry (all unpublished), the work in Forever Words spans the many stages of Cash’s career. “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” is one of many pieces within that reflect Cash’s “humorous strand,” poet Paul Muldoon writes in his introduction. It reflects “Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering.” From the cover of Out Among the Stars. Christmas 1982 If anybody made a movie out of my life I wouldn’t like it, but I’d watch it twice If they halfway tried to do it right There’d be forty screen writers workin’ day and niteThey’d need a research team from Uncle Sam And go from David Allen Coe to Billy Graham It would run ten days in the final cut And that would mean leaving out the gossip smutAnd I do request for my children’s sake Don’t ever let ’em do a new re-make The thing I’m sayin’ is, don’t you see, Don’t make a movie ’bout me Even for T.V. Don’t make a movie ’bout me Read More
November 10, 2016 On the Shelf Even Sandwiches Are Real Estate, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No joy to be had here. In times of hardship, where can we turn to find even one morsel of pleasure, one solitary crumb of joie de vivre? Well: there are sandwiches. Except, no, today even sandwiches are compromised. The chopped cheese sandwich, for instance—ground beef, onions, melted cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes on a hero roll—is a bodega classic, cheap and delicious. Now it’s gone fancy, with bougie versions popping up in New York and London at much higher prices. “This is a classic story,” said Michael W. Twitty, a culinary historian. “You create something in a state of want, a state of necessity, and then it becomes prime real estate in someone else’s hands.” There is thus no solace to be found in sandwiches, for even they are real estate. At the Lefferts Historic House, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, stands the “Monument to the Unelected,” a lawn full of fifty-eight signs for losing presidential candidates. The artist Nina Khatchadourian, who runs the monument, has just added one more. Amanda Petrusich writes, “Neither the designs nor the signs themselves are archival; Katchadourian fabricated each one anew from corrugated plastic sheets. ‘Of course, it’s a project about politics and history, but it doesn’t take a position on who should win any given election,’ she told me. The monument, rather, is ‘a statement of fact—it’s what we have collectively done, up until now’ … Campaign-sanctioned political signs, Katchadourian pointed out—the ones you can order from a local field office—are often purposefully simple, a blunt visual instrument that, like blunt rhetoric, arouses emotions more than ideas. Read More
November 9, 2016 Arts & Culture “I Will Pass Through This … ” By The Paris Review Shunsuke Matsumoto, Landscape with Bare Trees, 1938. In light of the sad outcome of yesterday’s election, here are some excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that might offer solace, or inspiration, or a cudgel against complacency. People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege. —Marilynne Robinson, 2008 Read More