January 5, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent A Quasquicentennial By Sadie Stein At the start of the new year, Georgia’s oldest bookstore turned 125. Horton’s Books and Gifts is in Carrollton, west of Atlanta. Its founder, N. A. Horton, was an undertaker who, in 1891, decided to sell schoolbooks in his other business—which is to say, inside a funeral parlor. Although the store moved several times in its early days, it’s returned a long while ago to that original location—and, yes, it’s said to be haunted. Read More
January 5, 2016 From the Archive Go Out in a Blaze of Glory By W. D. Snodgrass Robert Frost on a 1974 postage stamp. From “Dabbling in Corruption,” an essay by W. D. Snodgrass, in our Spring 1994 issue. Snodgrass was born on this day in 1926; he died in 2009. Here, he recalls seeing Robert Frost read at a Washington D.C. poetry conference in October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at full tilt. Frost was eighty-eight then, and, as Snodgrass writes, “obviously in his last months”; he died the following January. Our luncheon with Jacqueline Kennedy that day was suddenly canceled—rumor had it she was in a cave somewhere in a western state. Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles were steaming toward Cuba; American war ships were steaming toward them. If they met in mid-Atlantic, World War III would almost certainly begin; Washington would be wiped out in hours … By the time [of Frost’s reading], I was even more drunk and … did not dare register what was happening until a day or so later. Frost began, as he almost never did, by reading someone else’s poem: “Shine, Perishing Republic” by Robinson Jeffers. The title alone might have outraged his audience but they were so preconditioned to reverence that nothing else could reach them. Moving to his own poem, “October,” he drew special attention to its relevance for the current autumnal crisis: Read More
January 5, 2016 Prison Lit In the Madhouse By Max Nelson John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum. Saint Luke’s Home for Lunatics, where Christopher Smart was confined for more than five years Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, here. In an agrarian or preindustrial Britain, a brilliant young man bristles at his assigned vocation. After reading insatiably for years, he starts publishing odd, distinctive poems that cause a local stir. Urged to settle down, he instead experiments with more startling writing and shows more worrying behavior. His wife and family, understandably troubled but also driven by some unsavory motives, arrange for him to be sent to a madhouse, where confinement turns out to be much more to his harm than to his good. As his mental and physical health declines, his poetry starts to develop more radical formal arrangements. It also takes on a new tone: a strange, arresting combination of de-sexed innocence, bitter wisdom, childlike whimsy, and intensity of focus. Well after his death, as literary critics start pillaging the past for works of inadvertent modernism, his surviving poetry becomes a source of inspiration for a new generation of writers by whose books he’d have been equally fascinated and baffled. This account corresponds roughly to the lives of both John Clare (1793–1864) and Christopher Smart (1722–’71), though it ignores much of what set the two poets apart. An archetypical urban poet, the son of a bailiff, Smart spent years on Grub Street writing satires, poems, attacks on his contemporaries, and flurries of hackwork, much of it under pseudonyms. Years earlier, when he started his career as a brilliant (if eccentric) divinity student at Pembroke College, he’d already received a thorough grounding in the classics. Clare, an agricultural laborer who lived and worked in Britain’s East Midlands during a period of rapid industrialization, grew up to a family of poor tenement farmers and went to school only sporadically. No less intelligent and formally imaginative than Smart’s, his poetry was as closely informed by Helpston’s birds, flowers, and folk songs—he might have been one of Europe’s earliest ethnomusicologists—as his predecessor’s was by the gospels, the classics, and the Grub Street press. Read More
January 5, 2016 On the Shelf Let’s Fly Some Art to the Moon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This platinum-engraved sapphire disk is going to the moon. Courtesy of the Moon Arts Project The following are things we’re sending to the moon: text messages between a husband and wife, thirty-three artists’ blood, microscopic sculptures, river water, DNA from a genetically modified goat. They’re all part of Lowry Burgess’s MoonArk, a four-chambered mass of conceptual art he designed with dozens of other contributors. Soon it will go hurtling into the dark abyss on a privately funded space flight. “A poem is like a bell,” he said: “every word in a poem rings and makes all the rest of the other words ring. So in this, everything that’s there is making something else ring. So the totality is meant to hum together … We think it should be different than sticking a flag in the soil and claiming territory … maybe we’re leaving breadcrumbs for someone else to find their way back here. It’s an attempt to communicate forward in time—it’s an attempt to communicate outward.” Plenty of books exist. But just as many, if not more, have never existed. And it’s these that Samantha Hunt has on her mind: “I have spent many pleasant nights imagining ghost books, those phantom texts of possibility and wonder. Their unprintable Dewey Decimal classifications divide them into (at the very least) three basic categories: books that can only be read once, books that cannot be read in one lifetime, and the largest, aforementioned group, books that don’t exist … Among the books that cannot be read in one lifetime there is Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliard de poèmes … It is the poetic response to the mathematical function 1014 … It would take more than a million centuries to finish reading this thin, thin book of poems.” Remember all the dumb shit you wrote about T. S. Eliot in college? Imagine if it were published decades later, when you were President of the United States of America. A letter from the twenty-two-year-old Barack Obama to his then-girlfriend sheds light not just on his exegesis of “The Waste Land” but on his worrisome tendency toward fatalism: “Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats,” Obama wrote. “However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time … Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.” Today in toothpicks: they’re still out there in abundance, sometimes soaked in tea-tree oil, and you chew on them at your own peril, as Ryan Bradley learned: “There is but a small window in which it is okay to have a pick in your mouth, and that is for approximately ten minutes post-meal, when it’s necessary to needle stuff out of your teeth. Unless you are Steve McQueen—not the director, but the actor, who is dead—if you walk around with a toothpick in your mouth trying to look cool, you look, instead, like a prick … I put a pick in my mouth, allowing it to soften, then bit down enough to release a burst of tea-tree oil, and thought of the bacterial apocalypse I had unleashed. It was satisfying. I lingered at a stoplight, chewing slowly, murdering millions of mouth bacteria while the light went green and the driver behind me began leaning on the wheel and only then, with the drone of the long honk behind me, did I begin to speed up.” In 1942, Shostakovich completed his seventh symphony, which made its debut in Leningrad even though the city was under siege by the Germans and many of its citizens were starving. The moment is the subject of a new documentary, Leningrad and the Orchestra That Defied Hitler: “One of the interviewees recalls her eighteenth birthday in January 1942, when she put her grandfather’s body on a sledge and took it away. She remembers seeing a Christmas tree with what looked like parcels under it and then realizing they were dead children. Her voice sounds incredibly young when she talks about the performance in the Philharmonic Hall, which looked just the same as ever, and the sense of elation everyone felt as they listened to Shostakovich’s music.”
January 4, 2016 Bulletin Speaking Unprofessionally By The Paris Review Attention, procrastinators! This is your last chance to get a free copy of our new anthology of emerging writers, The Unprofessionals. Want to learn more? See below for a talk with our editor, Lorin Stein, and contributors Emma Cline, Kristin Dombek, Cathy Park Hong, Ben Nugent, and Jana Prikryl. Thanks to BookCourt for letting us tape their conversation. Read More
January 4, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent New Year By Sadie Stein A still from The Thief of Bagdad, 1940. One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats. —Iris Murdoch The New Year comes as a relief: it’s like the morning after a good cry. You feel exhausted, yes, and hollowed out, but unburdened, too. What do you do? Well, you go back to work. You listen to music, return e-mails. Your calendar slowly fills, even though not so long ago January seemed like it would never come. “Happy New Year” is the one thing everyone can say to everyone else with confidence, and clearly we enjoy this, it’s a good way to begin a year, all together. Large things give way to small. There are friends, and there is kneading bread, and then there are the little shaded candleholders you picked up, supposedly discarded from a defunct restaurant in Central Park—and they do look pretty, even given the state of the world outside their little flames. Maybe you watch the movie about the narcissistic puppet or the ten-hour series about the miscarriage of justice in Wisconsin. Perhaps you KonMari your closets or take a month off drinking. Whatever you do, don’t panic. Read More