February 16, 2016 My First Time Ben Lerner on The Lichtenberg Figures By Sadie Stein “My First Time” is a video series in which we invite authors to discuss the trials of writing and publishing their first books. Consider it a chance to see how successful writers got their start, in their own words—it’s a portrait of the artist as a beginner and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. This installment stars Ben Lerner, poet and novelist. While an undergraduate at Brown—and later as an M.F.A. student—Lerner wrote the cycle of fifty-two sonnets that would become 2004’s The Lichtenberg Figures. At the time, he and roommate Cyrus Console were, says Lerner, “always writing under the sign of crisis … now when I look back, we had a kind of really intense practice.” He discusses the process of imposing form, his thematic inspirations, and the challenges of taking one’s place in the creative universe. “With the first book, you don’t really know if you can do it. You have a kind of constant anxiety about whether or not you have something to contribute to the conversation. And that anxiety—it can ruin your life, but it’s also really generative. Like, it’s a kind of discipline.” This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling; we’re delighted to collaborate with them. Be sure to watch the previous interviews in the series: Katori Hall, on Hoodoo Love, her first play Donald Antrim on Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, his first novel Sheila Heti on The Middle Stories, her first collection Tao Lin on Bed, his first collection Christine Schutt on Nightwork, her first collection Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on his play Neighbors Gabrielle Bell on The Book of … series, her early cartoons J. Robert Lennon on his debut novel, The Light of Falling Stars
February 16, 2016 On the Shelf Spoiler Alert, and Other News By Sadie Stein Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton, 1856, oil paint on canvas. To die in literature is to achieve fictional immortality, argues John Williams. “Just a cursory list of memorable deaths (spoilers ahead) can make all of literature seem like one long Edward Gorey strip: Cathy in Wuthering Heights; Beth in Little Women; Piggy in Lord of the Flies; Cordelia in King Lear; more or less everyone in Hamlet; Leonard Bast in Howards End; Anna Karenina; and perhaps most agonizingly, the small children in Jude the Obscure.” Conversely: “15 Books to Read if You Love a Shocking Plot Twist.” (At some point, Hamlet would have made this list.) Stéphane Heuet’s controversial—but wildly popular—graphic novelization of À la recherche du temps perdu has finally hit the UK. One reviewer—a Proust virgin—finds it “a good and gentle place to start. Sumptuous, elegant and beautifully paced, it is completely absorbing. Will it send me to the real thing? Maybe, one day. But whatever happens, this volume is a work of art in its own right. I’ll be forever glad to have spent so much time bent over it.” The following link is not included at all because it is illustrated by an image of a dollhouse. On the contrary, that is of no interest to us whatsoever. What is: a tribute to the late novelist Margaret Forster (she died February 8th) and her memoir, My Life in Houses. “As Forster moves from room to flat to house so the progress of her life reflects the pattern woven by childhood, academia, love, marriage, a career as a writer and then motherhood while a series of individuals who have marked her life inhabit the shadows within the structure of the bricks and mortar of the book. From her hard-working mother, her altruistic grandfather George, her two Oxford landladies, the imperious lace-capped Mrs. Brown, ‘straight out of Jane Austen’ and her tiny, deceptively smiley sister Fanny, who ran the house in a state of ‘suppressed fury’, to Sixties dinner parties at home with three of the four Beatles, each character takes up position fleetingly.” Let’s just get it out of the way: you are about to read the words Mahler grooves. Besides everything else, this is sort of false advertising; Mahler does not groove so much as write a Sixth Symphony which has been widely interpreted—and reordered—by any number of conductors. The oiid app is pretty groovy, though: it allows you to effectively “step inside a performance,” exploring the recordings of a number of conductors against the score and, in the process, learn a new appreciation for the complex work. As Leonard Bernstein wrote, the Sixth contains “basic elements (including clichés) of German music, driven to their furious ultimate power. Result: Neurotic intensity, irony, extreme sentimentalism, despair … ” In other words, Tuesday.
February 15, 2016 On the Shelf Mourning Lincoln, and Other News By Sadie Stein Happy Presidents’ Day! Martha Hodes’s Mourning Lincoln has won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The prize committee described the NYU Professor’s book as “a stunning and enlightening work that underscores the rage that Lincoln’s assassination fueled, the outpouring of grief that resulted, and how the anger and confusion that boiled across the country that summer influenced the failures of Reconstruction.” Related: there are comic books devoted to the lives of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, and, obviously, Donald Trump. Irin Carmon, author of the recent Notorious RBG, discusses Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous cross-aisle friendship with her judicial adversary, the late Antonin Scalia. “Ironically, Scalia’s death has laid bare just how endangered such comity now is in Washington.” So don’t expect to see an ironic political takeoff of Unlikely Friendships at your local Urban Outfitters any time soon, which I’d been privately cherishing as a million-dollar idea. It’ll surprise no one that reading is good for the brain: a recent Emory University study found that “reading can heighten connectivity in the left cortex of the brain after the fact. The activity is potential evidence that while we imagine the events in a book, the brain activity allows us to feel immersion.” The buried heartbreaker? Apparently Pew finds that only 72 percent of Americans read a book in the last year. Which is, yes, a passing grade, but also a C-. Speaking of! What do “millionaire entrepreneurs” read? According to this article, exactly what you’d expect: The Art of War, The Tipping Point, and, obviously, The Elements of Style. Quoth Leon Rbibo, president of The Pearl Source, “If you can’t write—if you can’t clearly and concisely express yourself, your goals, your objectives, and your strategy you’re not going to make it very far as an entrepreneur. Rewrite your elevator pitch after reading this book. I guarantee you’ll impress yourself.” Well, that too.
February 12, 2016 On Film Kriemhild’s Revenge By Henry Giardina Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s strangest collaboration. Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou weren’t collaborators so much as co-conspirators: they had one of the strangest, most fruitful partnerships in the history of film, an erotic and artistic alliance that helped the new medium establish an emotional and political grammar. In the course of their eleven-year marriage, the pair, who met in 1920, made roughly a dozen films, often with Von Harbou writing the screenplays—adapted largely from her own work—and Lang in the director’s chair. They shared an expressive aesthetic vision, an exacting work ethic, and an almost tyrannical unwillingness to compromise with others. They changed people’s minds about their movies and, in radical ways, they changed each other. Their dedication manifested in odd ways—even though, a year into their affair, the bloom had already gone off the rose, they continued to live together, work together, and keep up the pretense of monogamy for another decade. She looked past his philandering; he looked past her increasingly fascist politics; they kept a full calendar. “We were married for eleven years,” von Harbou said later, “because for ten years we didn’t have time to divorce.” When they did separate, in 1933, the break was clean: not even a year later, Lang, having only recently claimed German citizenship, had fled the country. He said he’d met with Joseph Goebbels, who asked him to head the Nazified film unit of UFA—an experience that so spooked him he left that very evening. If his story is factually dubious, it makes emotional sense: Lang saw himself as having chosen art over nationalism. Von Harbou, who stayed behind, thought she had chosen art, too. And this is in many ways the problem at the heart of their romance: Who, if anyone, had betrayed whom? When love is so tied up in art, and art so tied up in politics, what does betrayal end up looking like? Read More
February 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent I Know Where I’m Going! By Sadie Stein A still from I Know Where I’m Going! I’ve been trying for some days now to think of something really romantic to recommend to people for Valentine’s Day. But it seems that many of the things I thought were romantic are, in fact, creepy. I’ve learned this since getting married and showing my husband some of my favorite films. Read More
February 12, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Critical Features and Substitute Teachers By The Paris Review From the cover of Albert Angelo. One pleasure of living where I do is the giveaway table, where tenants leave unwanted CDs, cassettes, salt-and-pepper shakers, et cetera, and especially books. These tend to be romance novels or thrillers, but the other week someone left the second edition of August Kleinzahler’s Cutty, One Rock—a book I’d given away many times and had eventually forgotten to replace. My wife let me read the title essay aloud, even though I kept slipping into my version of a New Jersey accent (bad, bad). Then, maybe three days later, on the same table, I found a copy of B. S. Johnson’s 1964 novel Albert Angelo. It was crazy—I’d been meaning to read B. S. Johnson for years. If I had come across any of his novels in a bookstore, I’d have bought them. This one’s about a beleaguered substitute teacher in a London slum, a subgenre (the bitter teacher novel) I especially enjoy. Obviously these books—the old favorite and the object of curiosity—have been two clicks away, but serendipity beats intention every time. —Lorin Stein Read More