September 23, 2015 On Music The Coltrane Home in Dix Hills By Andy Battaglia The deceptively ordinary house where Coltrane composed A Love Supreme. Coltrane’s unassuming house in Dix Hills. In an empty corner of a modest home in suburban New York, hiding beneath a construction zone’s deposits of dirt and dust on the floor, is a patch of bright, bold, almost electrically colorful vintage purple carpet. It couldn’t be more out of place; the rest of the surroundings are just exposed old wall beams and tattered bits of plaster coming down. But it seems right at home, somehow calm and calming, in the midst of it all. The carpet dates back to the 1960s, when John and Alice Coltrane used to live here and make their way back to the same corner room to go to sleep at night. Close by the master bedroom was the kitchen, the heart of the home in a way, and from there the hallways led out to the kids’ rooms, the den with the fireplace, and the garage out to the side. Over that was the ashram. In the basement was a recording studio. Then, up a now tenuous set of stairs, was the chamber that made this modest suburban home most famous: the room where John Coltrane composed his stirring, searching masterwork A Love Supreme. Read More
September 23, 2015 Big, Bent Ears Big, Bent Ears, Chapter 10: Surrender to the Situation, Part 3 By Nicole Rudick David and Julia on the Carolinian 80. Photo by Ivan Weiss. In his prose poem “Rounding Off to the Nearest Zero,” Albert Mobilio writes that “Driving, or at least driving alone, is, I’ve always found, conducive to thinking. The sense of forward motion, the calf’s calibrated flexing, the purposeful grip of the wheel combine, it seems, to concentrate the mind.” Trains have this effect, too: their linear haste through the landscape makes thoughts unspool. The final three chapters of “Big, Bent Ears”—including the latest, Chapter 10—follow the trajectory of the Carolinian 80 as it wends from Durham to New York, and its motion drew Ivan Weiss into a web of associations between the sounds and processes of Tyondai Braxton and of Oren Ambarchi as well as those with whom they collaborate. This new chapter revels in sensory confusion—rhythms that are seen, memories that are sonic, tables that make music—and in the comfort that can be found in music: I’d walk into a room and be invisible, and music was always the thing that calmed the noise. It was where I found solace. I would go to sleep with the radio next to me and wake up with the radio next to me. Before my eyes would open, my hands would flick the on switch. The chapter opens with David and Julia, pictured above—strangers who meet on the Carolinian 80 and whose conversation is loosed by the lull of travel. Their exchange, like the rest of the installment, recalls Joseph Mitchell’s lines from our first chapter: The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels. Read the latest chapter here, and catch up on the rest of the series: Chapter One, There Are No Words Chapter Two, Borderline Religious Chapter Three, Nazoranai, a Documentary Chapter Four, In Search of Lost Time in Knoxville Chapter Five, Alien Observers Chapter Six, Treatise on the Veil Chapter Seven, Anatomy of a Sequence Chapter Eight, Surrender to the Situation, Part 1 Chapter Nine, Surrender to the Situation, Part 2 Nicole Rudick is managing editor of The Paris Review.
September 23, 2015 On the Shelf Everyone Loves a Good Citation Scandal, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring How an early twentieth-century French artist thought women firefighters would look. Today in the thrill-a-minute world of annotation: well before Genius began its quest to annotate the world (or at least the internet), scholarly annotations of modern books for popular audiences delighted the readers of the 1960s. “The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, for instance, produced annotated versions of Don Juan, Paradise Lost, and Gulliver’s Travels in the 1970s and eighties … The list of books that have been annotated for a popular audience is now in the high dozens … Annotation is a form of literary lingering: It allows us to prolong our experience with a favorite book, to hang around the world of a beloved text a bit longer. But it can also serve as a gateway, for younger readers, to the pleasures of scholarship, by pointing to a larger universe of knowledge beyond.” And there’s news, too, of annotation’s sexy, scandalous cousin, citation. The venerable Journal of Criminal Justice decided to boost its “impact factor”—calculated by the average number of citations a journal receives—by citing itself over and over and over again. It’s thus managed to be both number one in its field and widely suspected of malfeasance. “In the most eyebrow-raising instance, one four-paragraph editorial, published in 2014, didn’t take up even a single page yet managed to have forty-seven citations, all to the Journal of Criminal Justice.” No one knows if Pynchon wrote the novel Cow Country, but people are pretty sure—roughly 100 percent sure—that he wrote this haunting 1966 essay on the aftermath of the Watts riots, which is, given its author’s caginess and flights of fancy, exceptionally well reported: “Except for the use of the words ‘Negro’ and ‘Caucasian,’ Pynchon’s essay reads as if it could have been written this past summer, almost a half-century later. Its downbeat premise, delivered in the voice of a young disciple of Malcolm X, is no less contemporary.” In 1902, the French artist Albert Bergeret designed Women of the Future, a series of trading cards depicting women at work in professions typically reserved for men: your doctor types, your lawyer types, your military-fencing master types. His feminist ambition is laudable; his insistence on skimpy outfits for the female generals and sergeants of the future, less so … “This is all work by local artists and craftspeople … We have yoga classes on Wednesdays and Fridays. It’s just a really great community space … All of our parenthetical duck bidets are ethically sourced in Nicaragua. The lettering on our storefront was painted with sea foam scraped lovingly from the back of a nursing beluga whale combined with a special dye extracted from Welsh nuns. Extracting dye from nuns is, contrary to popular belief, completely painless.” The cynical, no-bullshit New Yorker has been replaced with the humorless, self-serious, astrology-obsessed post-hipster, and now we all must suffer.
September 22, 2015 Look Charles Keeping’s Beowulf By Dan Piepenbring The British illustrator Charles Keeping (1924–88) is remembered largely for his work with children’s books. But his morbid style—his first book commission was Why Die of Heart Disease?—often felt better suited to adult fare, and his long career also saw him illustrate Wuthering Heights, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Idiot, and—most impressive—the complete works of Dickens, from Pickwick clean through to Chuzzlewit. The series took him a decade. In 1982, he contributed these inspired illustrations to an adaptation of Beowulf for ages nine and up. (You can see more of the drawings at Book Graphics.) If your nine-year-old can handle a bleary, ceaselessly gray world in which the sun is a soot-black blot and humans roam the earth in a miasma of hair and stink, have at it. Read More
September 22, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Great Rot By Sadie Stein Little did you know, when you woke up today on this rather ordinary Tuesday, that a treat awaited you. I speak, of course, of the above clip, in which Evelyn Waugh critiques modernism. No one ever made the mistake of confusing the Waugh of the 1950s with a progressive: by this point, he was fully inhabiting the role of an outspoken, old-guard crank, as loudly disillusioned with modernity and its art as he was by the Church of England. And yet! Even so, one is not quite prepared for his strident tone. He refers to Gertrude Stein as an author of “absolute gibberish”; James Joyce, that “poor, dotty Irishman,” is a producer of “great rot.” Between takes, apparently, Waugh sexually harassed his interviewer, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Read More
September 22, 2015 At Work Travel Souvenirs: An Interview with Joanna Walsh By Erik Morse Joanna Walsh Joanna Walsh’s writing enacts what Chris Kraus has called “a literal vertigo—the feeling that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space—by probing the spaces between things.” Walsh, a British writer and illustrator, is fascinated by liminal spaces, especially in the many varieties encountered by tourists. She’s sometimes known by her French nom de guerre, Badaude, loosely translated as “gawk,” and suggesting the perambulatory figure of the flaneuse. Her work trades on the literary genres of the miniature—short stories, essays, even postcards—reminiscent of Marcel Schwob, Clarice Lispector, Roland Barthes, and Lydia Davis. Her 2014 Twitter initiative @read_women is an archival who’s who of modern female writers, extolling in its tweets the distaff works of everyone from Leonora Carrington to Elena Ferrante. Aside from her abundant online presence,Walsh’s prolific output includes three new books: Hotel, Vertigo, and Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairytales About Sex, all of which run from the bantam lengths of fifty-five to 170 pages. Among her seemingly disparate subjects are hotel architecture and etiquette, sexual politics in twentieth-century psychoanalysis, the perils of family vacations, the fantasias of cinema, and fables of transgendered witches. In Walsh’s feminist cosmogony, all are brought to bear as inscrutable souvenirs of the everyday mundane. She elucidates the slippery, gendered in-betweenness of everyday ritual in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s disquisition on the chora—that most mysterious and mundane of spaces, not unlike the anonymous corridor of a hotel. I reached Walsh, appropriately enough, at a hotel in Mexico. She and I shared a lively discussion about hotel culture and theory, travel fantasies, and the contemporary potential of fairy tales. Read More