August 15, 2016 My First Time Akhil Sharma on An Obedient Father By Caitlin Love Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Today, Akhil Sharma discusses his first novel, An Obedient Father, which he started when he was a student at Stanford: “I got [to school] about a month before classes started, and I didn’t know how to write or how to begin writing a book. And I thought, I’ll begin writing five pages a day and in two months I’ll be done with a novel. I didn’t know how to come up with plot, I didn’t know how to do anything … Still I don’t know how you get through all those years of being lost.” Read More
August 15, 2016 On the Shelf Hemingway’s Antlers Returned, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A photo posted by aspentimes (@aspentimes) on Aug 10, 2016 at 11:51am PDT Try to stay calm, everyone, but I have some very exciting news: it’s about Hemingway’s antlers. Back in 1964, Hunter S. Thompson stole a set of elk antlers right off the guy’s wall, only three years after he’d shot himself … Thompson felt bad about it and meant to return the antlers promptly, but you know how it is, the decades go by, stuff piles up in your garage, and you just sort of forget that you have these priceless antlers sitting around, and then it’s 2005 and you’re dead, too. So it fell to Thompson’s widow, Anita, to return the property to the Hemingways last week: “They were warm and kind of tickled … They were so open and grateful, there was no weirdness … Still, it’s something that was stolen from the home. They were grateful to have them back. They had heard rumors. Sean Hemingway, the grandson, was the first family member that I’d heard from. He spoke with other Hemingway family members and he said that everyone agreed that he should have them. He lives in New York, where he curates a museum. So now that I’m back from Ketchum we’re actually shipping them to Sean.” Finally, New York’s newspaper of record has taken it upon itself that humblest of tasks: defining punk. Since 1976, the punk-rock spirit has been noxious, amorphous, and utterly unreconstructed. That was okay, but isn’t it better to have the Gray Lady trotting out a bunch of musician types to tell you what it’s really all about? One twenty-five-year-old says that punk as “like a massive piece of denim, and with that denim you can make something really cool. You can make a jacket, you can make some cool jeans, or you can make a cushion or a cover. There’s nothing that’s wrong or right about it, it’s just a thing that gives anything you want to do some backing.” Walter Benjamin wrote of the age of the mechanical reproduction—how quaint! In 2016, a good 3-D scanner-printer combo can do what mere mechanics never could; we have arrived, as Noah Charney writes, in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction. “When we speak of scanned and printed works of art, copies made by computers and a fabrication mechanism rather than a human hand, it is a different story altogether. It might look good, but what about Benjamin’s ‘aura’? … A danger arises when amateurs and bogus experts aren’t able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s reproduced. Worse, they might see the digital copy and decide that it is not worth the effort to see the original. They might not think that the work is better, but it is unarguably more convenient to access.” Two new books, American Girls and Girls and Sex, see a kind of crisis in young women today, and of course social media is to blame—these girls’ parents didn’t grow up with Instagram, so Instagram can only be the enemy. Zoe Heller raises an eyebrow: “To be sure, certain kinds of sexism have been amplified—or perhaps transmitted more efficiently—in the Internet era, and girls are now under pressure to present themselves as pliable sexual creatures at a much earlier age than they have been in the past. But even in the far-off 1970s and 1980s, young women experienced their share of exploitation, abuse, and unsatisfactory sex … If the good old days were never as good as both writers are wont to imply, the dark days of our present era are not quite as unremittingly desperate either.” Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book of atypically intimate interviews between the two filmmakers, turns fifty this year, and it’s still “one of the sharpest, most enthralling studies of creative thought” in print, Nathan Heller says: “As Truffaut presses Hitchcock on decision after decision, in film after film, an elaborate, reasoned logic rises to the fore—a point that both directors, similarly inclined toward meticulous visual formalism, were keen to drive home. Hitchcock is occasionally self-dismissive in a way that seems self-blind. My first destination, on paging through, was the discussion of Rear Window, from 1954, which to me seems Hitchcock’s greatest … Yet the director’s account extends from indifference to dissatisfaction. He dismisses the Franz Waxman score—whose weaving through a wash of overlapping urban sounds is striking even today—as disappointing. Not even the most deterministic director in the movies, it would seem, could see a clear path to his full achievement.”
August 12, 2016 Correspondence All the Misfits of This World Are Lonely By Radclyffe Hall Radclyffe Hall, right, with her lover, Una Troubridge, 1927. The below comes from a love letter dated October 24, 1934, sent by the English writer Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline, a Russian émigré. Hall, best known for her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, wrote with unprecedented openness about her lesbian identity; she often went by the name John. Though she lived with Una Troubridge, pictured above, she carried on a long love affair with Souline. Her letters to Souline are collected in Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, edited by Joanne Glasgow. Why is it that the people I write of are so very often lonely people? Are they? I think that perhaps you may be right. I greatly feel the loneliness of the soul—nearly every soul is more or less lonely. Then again: I have been called the writer of “misfits.” And it may be that being myself a “misfit,” for as you know, beloved, I am a born invert, it may be that I am a writer of “misfits” in one form or another—I think I understand them—their joys & their sorrows, indeed I know I do, and all the misfits of this world are lonely, being conscious that they differ from the rank and file. When we meet you & I will talk of my work and you shall be my critic, my darling. If you wish to you shall be very rude—but I do hope you like your John’s work just a little. I want you to like my work, Soulina. Read More
August 12, 2016 Look Doing Hard Time By Caitlin Youngquist Tom of Finland, 1984, graphite on paper. All images courtesy of Taschen. © 2016 Tom of Finland Foundation. “He only knew a drawing was good if it got him hard,” writes Dian Hanson of Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland (1920–1991). I’ve been spending my evenings drooling over “Tom’s men,” as they’ve come to be called—famously erotic, fabulously gay, and achingly virile. Tom’s is a métier that worships the male form. Sculpted, brawny bods dress up in archetypically masculine uniforms—men in uniform were a fetish of Tom’s—and frolic across the page to bone. Since the late fifties, when a (comparatively tame) drawing of his was featured on the cover of the muscle mag Physique Pictorial, Tom and his drawings have risen to an iconic status—and there’s a whole cottage industry of ToF merch, from fire blankets to anal beads, to prove it. But I, bashfully, have only just found him. I owe much of that to Taschen, who has, to mark the quarter century since the artist’s death, published a handful of books comprising much of his delicious oeuvre—a retrospective culminating in the reissue of the Holy Writ of all ToF books, Tom of Finland XXL. Among the collection is The Little Book of Tom of Finland: Cops and Robbers, one of three in the Little Book series, and my favorite of the bunch. Read More
August 12, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Surveillance, Silence, Pseudocide By The Paris Review From Will You Dance with Me? Our colleague Bobby sent me back to Edith Wharton’s novel of 1870s New York, The Age of Innocence. What struck Bobby (I’m paraphrasing) was the air of heavy surveillance: the action begins in an opera box, under the scrutiny of hundreds of eyes, and basically stays there. It feels oddly contemporary. At the same time The Age of Innocence is, very self-consciously, an historical novel. That’s what struck me: it appeared in 1920, almost fifty years after the events it describes, and belongs to that fun subgenre of novels—e.g., A Journal of the Plague Year, Middlemarch, Swann’s Way—that imagine what the grown-ups were actually up to when the author was a kid. —Lorin Stein When City Lights was preparing to publish the first edition of Julio Cortázar’s poetry in English in 1997 (it’s number fifty-three in the Pocket Poets series), Ferlinghetti wanted to produce a lean volume. In doing so, he cut the essay “For Listening Through Headphones,” which Cortázar begins by mourning the “pre-echo” on some records that mars “the brief night of the ears as they get ready for the fresh irruption of sound.” It’s funny that an essay that more than once uses the play of light and darkness to illuminate sound would be omitted from a book titled Save Twilight. But this month, City Lights is reissuing the volume, now heftier, thanks in part to the restoration of “For Listening” (and other poems that were left out from the original). In addition to being mesmerizing and utterly gorgeous (“now the needle / runs through the former silence and focuses it / in a black plush … a phosphene silence”), the essay links the experience of hearing music through headphones to poetry’s innate intimacy: “How not to think, then, that somehow poetry is a word heard through invisible headphones as soon as the poem begins to work its spell.” —Nicole Rudick Read More