October 26, 2016 At Work Love, Jimmy: Hilton Als and Jacqueline Goldsby in Conversation By Hilton Als and Jacqueline Goldsby At fourteen, James Baldwin “underwent … a prolonged religious crisis” and discovered “God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell.” At the same age, Hilton Als was given a copy of Nobody Knows My Name and discovered James Baldwin. He then entered into a tempestuous love affair with Baldwin’s work, one that shifted, over the years, from ardent infatuation and reverence to disaffection, settling somewhere in between: “no matter how much I tried to resist my identification with Baldwin,” he writes in his 1998 New Yorker essay “The Enemy Within,” “we were uneasy members of the same tribe.” Last month, Als discussed Baldwin’s legacy at the Windham-Campbell Prize festival, where he was honored for his work in nonfiction. His interlocutor was Jacqueline Goldsby, a professor of English and African American Studies at Yale. What follows is a sliver of that conversation, published with permission by the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
October 26, 2016 First Person My Strange Friend Marcel Proust By Philippe Soupault Marcel Proust in Cabourg, 1896. Next month, City Lights will publish Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, a series of reminiscences and miniportraits of modernist writers and artists—Blaise Cendrars, James Joyce, Pierre Reverdy, and others—by Philippe Soupault, a Dadaist who, with André Breton, wrote Les Champs magnétique in 1919, kicking off the Surrealist movement. Soupault’s sketches in Lost Profiles were originally published in French in 1963; this translation, by Alan Bernheimer, marks their first appearance in English. The personal impressions Soupault provides of these “great” men, who comprise his contemporaries and his heroes, elucidate their individuality, the nature of their friendship, and essential qualities that underpin their artistic reputations. He writes, for instance, that critics’ use of the terms primitive and Sunday painter in describing Henri Rousseau perpetuated a misunderstanding of the man, despite his artistic success. The cause of the misunderstanding is simply that “no one has yet tried to depict the true personality of Henri Rousseau.” In his afterword, Ron Padgett recalls meeting Soupault in the seventies, when he performs the same service for his own literary hero, observing that Soupault’s “personal manner was a reflection of the lightness of touch of his best poems, a delicacy that is so artful that it never calls attention to itself.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
October 26, 2016 On the Shelf “Happy as Hell,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Paul Beatty. With his novel The Sellout, Paul Beatty has become the first American ever to win the Man Booker Prize. “I don’t want to get all dramatic, like writing saved my life … but writing has given me a life,” he said at a press conference, where he described himself as feeling “happy as hell.” Chris Jackson interviewed Beatty for the Daily last year. “I hope that in my audience of weirdos, there’s some of those people of all races,” he said. “As people of color, as black people, we all have to have this ability to speak these different languages and make these different references—we don’t have to have it, but it helps. So for me, it’s still all in one big thing, and these cultures overlap more than they ever have. You know, in the 1970s people wanted this ‘authentic angry’ stuff that was still directed at them but in a weird I-want-to-slit-your-throat way. I’m not saying those people aren’t a part of my audience. I’m just yelling. I know their ears will hear. But I’m hoping there are a ton of ears out there that hear. I’m trying not to yell in one direction, even though I can’t really help but to do that.” The last time I listened to the voices in my head, I wound up causing seven figures of property damage, inventing a new way to violate the Geneva Conventions, and becoming a father. Why? Charles Fernyhough’s new book, The Voices Within, addresses the vagaries of self-conversation, but in Casey Schwartz’s summation, it’s too vast a subject for a single volume: “Inner voices are a facet of ordinary life: They grumble and chastise and offer up opinions, though to what extent differs from one person to the next. Fernyhough starts to ask questions: How and when did these voices first enter our heads? Do young children hear voices the same way adults do? What distinguishes the inner voices that we all hear from the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia? What is the relationship between pathological hallucinations and the exalted experiences described by medieval mystics, who believed they were hearing the voice of God?” Read More
October 25, 2016 Sleep Aid Different Varieties of Glue and Their Preparation By Dan Piepenbring David Rijckaert, Man Sleeping, ca. 1649. It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from Glue, Gelatine, Animal Charcoal, Phosphorous, Cements, Pastes and Mucilages, a 1905 book by F. Davidowsky. Besides the broadly distinguished forms of skin- and bone-glue, the trade recognizes a large number of varieties, distinguished either by their value or their fitness for special purposes. Joiner’s Glue.—This variety is without doubt the oldest in use and most in demand, and its principal requisite is its great adhesive power. It is used for joining wood, leather, paper, etc., and varies very much in quality and price. Read More
October 25, 2016 On History Year Without a Summer By Chris Townsend The climate event that helped create Frankenstein and the bicycle. A depiction of the Mount Tambora eruption. Last year marked the two hundredth anniversary of the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, among the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Next year, 2017, will be the two hundredth anniversary of Baron Karl Drais’s “running machine,” the precursor to the modern bicycle. Strange as it may seem, these three events are all intimately related; they’re all tied together by the great shift in climate that made 1816 the “year without a summer.” Read More
October 25, 2016 Books Kenward Elmslie and The Orchid Stories By Michael Silverblatt From the cover of The Orchid Stories. Upon that golden shore, kidsWe’ll lie on beds of orchids.—John Latouche, “Goona Goona,” from the musical The Golden Apple The first chapters of Kenward Elmslie’s novel The Orchid Stories first appeared in the Summer 1967 issue of The Paris Review. The novel has just been reissued by The Song Cave. Kenward Elmslie’s perverse, scabrous, gorgeous poetry and prose have astonished his fans for over fifty years—decades during which he remained the pride of small presses, the happy secret of cognoscenti—but it is safe to say that the vast audience his work deserves doesn’t know what it’s missing. He’s the most extravagant, and extravagantly overlooked, poet in America. Elmslie is the nearly invisible fifth member of the quintet that includes Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. The generations of poets they inspired sing Elmslie’s praises, but he is most brilliantly described by Ashbery, his comrade-in-arms. Elmslie’s voice, writes Ashbery, is “that of some freaked-out Levi-Strauss, a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.” Read More