June 14, 2016 In Memoriam Gregory Rabassa, 1922–2016 By Dan Piepenbring Photo via New Directions We’re sorry to learn that Gregory Rabassa, the translator best known for bringing Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into English, has died at age ninety-four. Rabassa, whose translations include Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral, was renowned for the care with which he introduced a host of Latin American writers to the Anglophone world. García Márquez praised Rabassa at length in the The Paris Review in his 1981 Art of Fiction interview: Read More
June 14, 2016 Basketball Blue in Green By Rowan Ricardo Phillips The finals get interesting. And just like that, Monday evening blossomed into something both the rabid and the casual basketball fan will remember. The Cavaliers, down three games to one and facing elimination on the road—in the fortress that is the Oracle Arena, no less—rode their two superstars, who were both pulsing their brightest, to a dramatic 112–97 victory, dragging the resuscitated corpse of this NBA Finals back to the waiting arms of their fans in Cleveland. Now a win at home—something they already managed in emphatic fashion in the third game of the series—would force a do-or-die game 7; the Cavs would have all of the momentum and every right to believe that the two best players in the building are dressed in Cavs colors. Just like that, this series has gone from the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” to Donald Byrd’s “Emperor.” Read More
June 14, 2016 Our Correspondents I Saw the Figure 5 in Steel By Lucy Sante On the appeal of junk shops. This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today: Luc Sante, who is reviving his blog on pictures, Pinakothek. Luc was interviewed in our Spring issue. (He contributed the portfolio, too.) Junk shops are disappearing, victims of rent increases and online auctions, as well as human aging. Most of my remaining standbys have gone to glory in the past few years, and even if rents should somehow fall, it’s unlikely that replacements will come along anytime soon. For one thing, an important attribute of a great junk shop is longevity. It should accrue layers, like an archeological site. A junk shop is not an antique shop, where the focus is on merchandising and the display favors popular and expensive items. A junk shop, by contrast, will often give the impression that commerce is the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. Some junk shops are a roiling chaos, down to being underlit and perhaps smelly, while others are highly and even compulsively organized—but generally not in a way that makes any sort of mercantile sense. The items in a junk shop may seem like components of a conceptual artwork or a vast personal shrine or an extraterrestrial museum of human culture. Read More
June 14, 2016 On the Shelf A Staggering Array of Folk Art, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An elephant pull toy from 1830–80, on display now at the New-York Historical Society. Image via The New York Review of Books. When I’m on the job, I use periods in my writing all the time. They’re part of the buttoned-up, G-rated approachability that makes me such an asset to office culture. But when I’m off duty, you better believe the periods are the first thing to go, am I right? As Jeff Guo has noticed, “The period is no longer how we finish our sentences. In texts and online chats, it has been replaced by the simple line break … The modern line break is like the medieval punctus—an all-purpose piece of punctuation that inserts pauses wherever we’re feeling it. And the period has gained expressive powers after it was laid off from its job marking the ends of sentences. Now it’s an icy flourish we deploy against frenemies and exes. We should celebrate these developments. Writing is becoming richer. This is an exciting time. Period.” And in German-Turkish relations, grammar is playing a pivotal diplomatic role: “With impressive courage, a hip-hop band called Einshoch6 left their native Munich to keep a longstanding date on June 4 and, as one of them modestly put it, ‘set Ankara on fire’ with a concert and teach-in. Young Turkish German-learners took lessons in how to turn tongue-twisting Teutonic sounds into the verbal pyrotechnics of rap. Their trademark is combining rap vocals with classical instruments (or electronic versions of those instruments) and strong percussion … Along with their own exuberant, random ravings they have experimented with rap versions of the poetry of Goethe, and their whole output is an unlikely by-product of the intense classical-music culture of south Germany. But they send out a message that mastering compound verbs and case-endings needn’t be done with a long, studious face.” Hey, kid. Wanna get into the picture business? Don’t go to Tinseltown. It’s for chumps and floozies. Get yourself a one-way ticket to Marrakesh: “Morocco shares many of the advantages that first drew filmmakers to California: year-round sunshine, diverse landscapes, great old architecture and abundant available extras. Just recently Morocco and Britain signed a treaty giving each other reciprocal tax subsidies for film and television production. And since the UK and Morocco are in the same time zone, they keep the same business hours. My fascination with film was kindled in the New York editorial offices of a literary magazine, The Paris Review. My then boss, George Plimpton, recounted over lunch one day an adventure he had had long before—one of his stunts in participatory journalism—when he shipped off to Morocco to play a Bedouin extra on the set of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.” Because your year in the arts isn’t truly complete until you’ve seen an old elephant pull toy in the same building as a roach motel, visit the New-York Historical Society, where a new exhibition features folk art from the collection of Elie Nadelman: “The more than two hundred objects on display range from clipper ship figureheads (‘It was not just a sailor who carved this but an artist,’ Nadelman remarked of a ravishing gilded eagle with detachable wings) to miniature carved animals, amid a trove of carefully selected pottery, exquisitely detailed needle-cases, and an early, ingenious earthenware roach motel—the glazed, funnel-shaped opening of which traps roaches lured inside by molasses. This staggering array of material is complemented by a dozen or so of Nadelman’s wondrous figurative sculptures, fashioned in weathered cherry or mahogany and often given an overlay of seemingly aging paint.” In writing a book about indentured servitude in British Guiana, Gaiutra Bahadur faced a major research dilemma: no firsthand accounts existed by women. “Since indentured women were, for the most part, illiterate, they didn’t leave behind written traces of themselves. Just as there isn’t a single existing narrative from a woman or girl who survived the Middle Passage, the rare first-person accounts of indenture—there are three—are all by men. The stealing of the voices of indentured women, born into the wrong class, race and gender to write themselves into history, was structural. How could I write about women whose very existence the official sources barely acknowledged? To enter their unknown and to some extent unknowable history, I had to turn to alternative, unofficial sources. I looked for clues in visual traces and the oral tradition: folk songs, oral histories, photographs and colonial-era postcards, even a traditional tattoo on the forearms of elderly Indo-Caribbean women.”
June 13, 2016 Correspondence You Waspy Wasp By Fernando Pessoa Fernando Pessoa, right, at the Café Martinho in Lisbon, 1914. In 1929, after a nine-year silence, Fernando Pessoa renewed his correspondence with Ophelia Queiroz, with whom he had enjoyed the only romance of his life. Where his earlier letters, from 1920, found him effusive (perhaps excessively) in his affections, this later chapter sees him in a far more disturbed frame of mind; by the end of the year he had broken off their correspondence again, this time for good. Read more of his letters in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. September 24, 1929 So tell me, my little Wasp (who’s not really mine, though you are a wasp), what words you want to hear from a creature whose mind took a spill somewhere on the Rua do Ouro, whose wits—along with the rest of him—got run over by a truck as it turned the corner onto the Rua de Sao Nicolau. Read More
June 13, 2016 Revisited Dying on the Toilet By Max Porter Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Max Porter revisits Francis Bacon’s painting Triptych May–June 1973. Francis Bacon, Triptych May–June 1973, 1973, oil on canvas, 6’6″ x 4’10”. What happens to Ben Lerner, or Ben Lerner’s character in Leaving the Atocha Station, when he has a profound experience of art cannot happen to a person too many times, or it stops being profound. I do not fall in love all the time, and I distrust the cultural vocabulary that insists I should. I’ve looked at a lot of art, and thought deeply about what I’m looking at, how I’m looking at it, and I think only two or three times has it been profound. This might be a failing on my part, and I could strive, like the ecstatic saints, to prolong the jouissance, the sweet heightened encounter. But for now, here is one of those times: Read More