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Category Archives: Revisited

June 8, 2017
Revisited

They’re from Here, and They’re Great

By Michael Chabon

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Michael Chabon recalls discovering the Pittsburgh band Carsickness.

Carsickness.

I saw Carsickness play for the first time in the fall of 1980, somewhere on campus at Carnegie-Mellon University, where I was a freshman. I’d listened to their self-released EP, Police Dog, about a hundred and seven times by then, and I found their live show unaccountably stirring, because there was nothing that seemed likely to cause a stir about the five guys who made up the band. They had on jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of them wore a cardigan. A couple of the guys verged, particularly when it came to the way they wore their hair, on the unkempt, but most of them looked, frankly, a lot like CMU engineering students. None looked even remotely, in the fall of 1980, like punks.

This came very much as a relief to me, I remember. I was kind of afraid of punks, or at any rate I was going to be afraid of them, I believed, if I ever actually met any. They did not have punks in the suburban Maryland town where I’d grown up and bought my first Clash, Blondie, and The Jam records. Read More
May 10, 2017
Revisited

The Blue Jay’s Dance

By Sarah Menkedick

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Sarah Menkedick revisits Louise Erdrich’s memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance.

From the first edition of The Blue Jay’s Dance.

Nine weeks into my pregnancy, in the middle of an Ohio woods lit gold with fall, I sat in a small, dark cabin and wept. I had no idea how to proceed and I also understood with a wrenching clarity that I could not turn back. I had no model for pregnancy beyond the asexual lady on the cover of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, clad in neutral sweater and slacks, plain-faced in her rocking chair, an emblem of the dull, docile femininity demanded of American mothers. I was terrified of her blandness and of my own obsequiousness to that book, my careful noting of the iron content in dried fruit and my newfound pedantry about pasteurization. After a decade spent trying to prove my exceptionality, I found myself, in October of 2013, flailing in my newly discovered ordinariness. I felt my life, my identity, my future like shattered glass at my feet.

I took a shower to calm myself and then, hair wet and sick at the smell of shampoo, I ran the five hundred feet from the cabin down to my parents’ house, where I sat on the couch with my stepmother and let loose with frightened sobs. She knew not to attempt rescue, to soothe me with platitudes or plead a strong case for the valor of motherhood. Instead, she sat quietly with my terrible uncertainty on a sunny fall morning and did not turn away. And then she recommended Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance. She had read and loved that book when my brother and I were little. I believe she understood that seeing motherhood through the eyes of a writer would validate and ground it for me in a way that nothing else could. Read More
April 10, 2017
Revisited

Beyond the Alps

By Jacob Bacharach

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Jacob Bacharach revisits Robert Lowell’s poem “Beyond the Alps.”

I think I must have first read Robert Lowell’s poem “Beyond the Alps” the summer before my junior year of high school, when I was at the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia. I know I bought a copy of his Life Studies and For the Union Dead at one of the used bookstores there. I’d read “For the Union Dead” in some anthology or other, and it seemed to me that there was something intensely apropos about rereading this contemplation on a union colonel “and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry,” as depicted in Saint-Gauden’s civil war sculpture, on the Boston Common while living a poetical teenage summer in Charlottesville, surrounded by so much evidence of Jefferson’s cruel, horrible vision of a utopia with slaves.

At the time, I gave “Beyond the Alps” very little thought, because it rhymed, and I’d recently learned from my peers that rhyming poetry was extremely silly. I was actually at the workshop as a songwriter, and I was able to smuggle my interest in rhyme past their censorious gaze by writing song lyrics, which existed in a weird zone of exclusion. Otherwise, I took their exaggerated disdain to heart. Read More
April 4, 2017
Revisited

Ruins in Advance

By Kyle Chayka

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Kyle Chayka revisits Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Chlebnikov.

Anselm Kiefer, Velimir Chlebnikov, 2004 (detail), thirty paintings: oil, emulsion, acrylic, lead, and mixed media on canvas; eighteen paintings: 75″ x 130″ each; twelve paintings: 75″ x 110″ each. Photo: Arthur Evans, courtesy Hall Art Foundation, © Anselm Kiefer

The summer before I went to college, in 2006, I worked as a guard at the Aldrich Museum, a contemporary-art museum an hour from where I grew up in the Connecticut woods. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’m fairly certain it always will be. For ten dollars an hour—a royal sum for a teenager whose only other gig had been making cider donuts at an apple orchard—I and five or six other guards, some retirees and others fellow students, stationed ourselves in the airy galleries to make sure none of the guests touched or collided with the art on display. Mainly, our responsibility was to have conversations with visitors reassuring them of the validity of the curatorial decisions: Yes, this is art. When there was no one around to question contemporary aesthetics, we sat on foldout stools and read, drew, or knitted. (In this way, I made my way through most of Haruki Murakami’s oeuvre.)

That summer, one of the galleries on rotation—we switched locations on the hour, so over the course of a day every guard got a full tour—was a two-story-tall corrugated-steel pavilion built on a cement plinth outside on the museum’s grounds. The pavilion was a work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer, a painter and sculptor known for the gnarled surface of his huge canvases as well as for his gothic sensibility: an atmosphere of fallen historical grandeur pervades his work. Inside the rectangular pavilion’s towering metal doors, the two side walls were hung with thirty paintings arranged in grids, covering every inch. Read More
March 6, 2017
Revisited

Vanishing Point

By Cara Hoffman

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Cara Hoffman revisits Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street.

Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas.

I was fourteen when I first saw the evening sun setting an empty piazza aglow. This was in Vicenza, Italy. My older brother, who was stationed there during the Cold War, was getting married to an Italian woman who worked as a nurse, and my family had gone over to attend the wedding. The image is with me still: in a penumbra of orange, the clock tower cast a long shadow in the street as the high, darkened arches of the Basilica Palladiana breathed the cool power of a stone’s history into the fading light of the square.

The beauty of it was utterly foreign to me. I had lived, up to that point, in a prison town full of strip malls near a narrow highway in a Sears kit house; the blunt suburban ugliness of the place was further darkened by Appalachian poverty. And the only refreshing things my eyes knew were the river by my backyard and the wooded trails that flanked it. Vicenza was the first landscape I recognized as human. Read More
February 23, 2017
Revisited

Language Games

By Caite Dolan-Leach

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Caite Dolan-Leach remembers her first encounters with Oulipo.

Meeting of Oulipo in Boulogne. © Archives Pontigny-Cerisy

By my last year of high school, French was the only class I bothered to attend with any diligence. I was too busy organizing my escape to far-flung climes; a foreign language was the most likely thing to help me secure this imagined, overseas future. I would skip PE to memorize verb conjugations, sitting in the high school’s abandoned auditorium, mumbling to myself in the dark. I think the janitor who occasionally walked in on these foreign monologues was a little frightened of me.

I stumbled across Queneau’s Exercises in Style while browsing the chipped and nibbled pages of the French section at a local used book sale. I was thrilled by the book’s concept, but quickly bored with its execution. Written by one of the founding members of Oulipo, a group that uses constraints of language to spur on creativity, Exercises in Style is a single story told ninety-nine times, each time in a different style. Other members’ works include books composed using mathematical problems derived from chess games, dismembered sonnets, and lipograms. At the time, I liked sprawling, character-driven novels, and this book was stripped of character and even plot. I bought the book—it cost just fifty cents and appealed to my literary vanity—but I’ve still never finished it. Read More