October 6, 2015 Inside the Issue Eileen Myles on Reading Out Loud By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of I Must Be Living Twice. Photo: Catherine Opie “The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time,” Eileen Myles tells Ben Lerner in our new Fall issue: There’s a whole kind of inside thing bursting out, and I’m always dying to hear it. I do hear it in my head, but I never read it out loud to myself until I’m in front of people … What is so great—I’ll even say holy—about reading a poem for the first time in front of people is that you’re sharing what you felt in the moment of composition, when you were allowing something. When I’m writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don’t mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness and that’s the birth of the poem. Writing is all performance. Something’s passing through … The performance is us writing what’s using us, remarking upon it. (Subscribe now to read the whole Art of Poetry interview.) Read More
October 6, 2015 Look More Sweetly Play the Dance By Anna Heyward William Kentridge’s elaborate danse macabre. William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015, eight-channel video installation with four megaphones, 15 minutes. All photos © William Kentridge, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Dance has always been aware of death: it lingers just off to the side of the stage, waiting for the performance to end. William Dunbar’s 1508 poem “Lament for the Makers” describes two “state[s] of man”: “Now dansand mirry, now like to die.” In other words, you’re either dancing or dead. Death in the poem is personified as a sort of efficient businessman, doing his best to knock people out of the dance. The more familiar character of Death—the cloaked, scythe-bearing skeleton who fulfills his duties like an overworked godly employee—was around even before Dunbar, an invention of the medieval period, which remains the most productive time in human history for imagining deathly personifications. People then seemed less resistant to death than they are now, perhaps because the threat was omnipresent: one could die from the plague, childbirth, decapitation, infection, or even of indigestion, as Martin of Aragon did at a feast in 1410. The danse macabre, or death dance, another medieval invention, was an allegorical way of resisting as well as respecting the force of death. It comprises a chain of dancers, some living and others skeletons, moving together toward a grave—death being the equalizing force that brings all of us together, finally. Some more modern dances, like the tarantella, present themselves as assertions of survival, proving that one is still alive despite mortal injury. When we dance, the thinking goes, we are at the most alive we can be. Likewise, when we stop dancing, we die. Read More
October 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Mother Approved By Sadie Stein Only the best for my boy: the actress Helen Twelvetrees and her son, Jack Woody, in Sydney circa 1936. I used to have a superpower. I never told anyone, of course—that’s the rule with powers—and in the grand tradition, it was a mixed blessing. It was this: mothers loved me. It’s true. Mothers of all kinds wanted me to date their sons. Hell, they wanted me to marry them. Not shockingly, the actual sons in question were less jazzed about the prospect. It seemed like the very qualities that rendered me totally unsuitable to boys my own age—my good manners, my bookishness, my lack of any adult sexiness, even my runty size—were the same things that drew their mothers like catnip. Read More
October 6, 2015 On the Shelf Jeanne Dielman Forever, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Jeanne Dielman. The filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose 1975 movie, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is arguably “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema,” has died at sixty-five. “Jeanne Dielman is a real-time study of a middle-aged widow who lives with her teenage son in a small Brussels flat. The film follows her as she completes drab domestic tasks and tries to make ends meet through occasional prostitution … The long, frank takes featured in Jeanne Dielman were a feature of Akerman’s work.” As a theater director, Bryan Doerries aims to revitalize the power of the medium: his company performs Greek tragedies at full-tilt for audiences at schools, hospitals, prisons, and army bases, and his goal is catharsis in the fullest sense of the word. “Theater is able to do something that no other medium can achieve,” he says. “It leads disparate audiences into a profound communion … We have lost touch, as a culture, with the importance of coming together and confronting what it means to be human as a community. Theater, and tragedy in particular, has the power to do this … Theater still has the power to create a sacred space, in which we are transported out of our quotidian reality and brought into contact with the transcendent, the heroic, the mythic, and with one another. We still hunger, I think, for this experience, as people, as a culture. And in some ways, because it’s so rare, it’s all the more overpowering and effective when we encounter it.” Today in unlikely longevity: New Hampshire’s Yankee magazine has been around since 1935, and it’s navigated, somehow, many epochal changes in media. What’s its secret? Listen carefully: cover fall foliage as if it’s Mardi Gras, never change, and appeal to a boring, affluent, aging readership. Yankee stands tall because of, not in spite of, its stupefying predictability: “There are tips on travel to destinations like Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, and recipes for Boston cream pie and needhams (an old-fashioned Maine candy made with mashed potatoes). Ads for regional businesses and New England wares still fill the magazine, which now comes out six times a year. The much loved Swopper’s Column—a classifieds page for unusual objects, which first appeared in the magazine’s fourth issue—was not discontinued until 2013.” On Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, which has at its center a stunt that cinema has been waiting for a long time: “Two twenty-first-century phenomena have changed the way moving pictures are made and perceived. The first is the accelerating use of digital technology and the inexorable rise of a cyborg cinema that, by combining animated and photographic images, compromises the direct relationship to reality that had long been the medium’s claim to truth. The second is the trauma of September 11, 2001, which for many provided the ultimate movie experience that was more than a movie—spectacular destruction, broadcast live, and watched by an audience, more or less simultaneously, of billions.”
October 5, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Nonsense Verse By Sadie Stein West Frisian Alice. “A language is not complete if there are no translations of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Alice in Wonderland,” the translator Tiny Mulder wrote in 1962. Would that it were so easy! The Grolier Club’s current exhibition is called “Alice in a World of Wonderlands,” and its subject is Alice in Wonderland in translation, on the occasion of the book’s 150th anniversary. Like all the Grolier’s shows, it is free to the public. And at 140 translations—and a bevy of very different Alices—it’s well worth a visit. There are Braille editions and Frisian editions and Pakistani editions. We see Alice’s adventures rendered in Farsi, in Uyghur, in Hebrew, and in Jèrriais, a Norman language spoken in some of the Channel Islands. Naturally, Carroll’s own Nyctographic language (invented for Alice) is represented, too. Read More
October 5, 2015 Bulletin Preorder The Unprofessionals, Get a Free Paris Review T-Shirt By Dan Piepenbring This morning we made an exciting discovery: beneath a plaster bust of George Plimpton and a dog-eared copy of our short-lived magazine for children, we found a box of limited-edition dead-stock Paris Review T-shirts. Being nothing if not business-minded, we knew we had to get these on the market ASAP.—that’s why we’re giving them away. Starting today, if you preorder a copy of our upcoming anthology The Unprofessionals for $15.99, we’ll throw in a Paris Review T-shirt free of charge. The shirts are available in men’s sizes small and medium and women’s sizes medium and large. But don’t dally: supplies are limited. (We really do have just one box.) Read More