Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.
Perhaps the most romanticized figure in the world is the male war correspondent. Scruffy, haunted, he walks the wreckage alone in battered—but good—European shoes. He smokes (if he’s not American). He has trouble with commitment. Yet his female counterpart cuts a different profile. At his age, she’ll seem leathery and lonely. It’s better that she doesn’t smoke.
Students of publishing lore know that Andrew Wylie used to be a poet, but few have had the chance to peruse Yellow Flowers, a 1972 chapbook that collects some of the vaguely Mephistophelian superagent’s youthful versifications. “There’s a rumor that he has tried to buy up all of the copies,” says literary agent Ira Silverberg. It’s easy to see why: Thumbing through Silverberg’s copy of Yellow Flowers, one can only imagine what a Wylie client like, say, Benazir Bhutto would make of such poems as “Hands up Your Skirt,” “Warm, Wet Pants,” and the determinedly unlyric “I Fuck Your Ass,
Poets find themselves unnerved every April during National Poetry Month when the noise of consumerism fades a decibel and the media spotlight falls on them. “Too bad for you, beautiful singer,” Peter Gizzi laments in his new book, The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press, $23). How do poets write in a culture enamored of both media spectacle (the Super Bowl, American Idol, a televised war) and unmediated individual expression—YouTube, MySpace, and blogs?
Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax. Non-closure is at the end of this excerpt: tten for film and television. What was it like to turn the lens on yourself for the first time?193
A few weeks ago, the New York Times Travel section ran an article about how best to spend a day out in Oxford, England. The author advised readers down which streets they should wander and into which sequestered quads they should peep, from Worcester College, with its sunken lawn in the west, along the cobblestones of Brasenose Lane, past the eighteenth-century shops of Broad Street, as far as Magdalen College’s picturesque deer park in the east.
Ernest Jones had the urge to stand out. A small man, he learned early how to make himself visible through his bearing, his clothes, his mannerisms. And he learned how to distinguish himself—no ordinary Jones, he!—through the quality of his voice and intensity of his gaze. By the time he finished his medical studies and began a specialization in neurology, in 1902, he seemed poised for professional success and could boast of his “flair for rapid captivation of the opposite sex.” But Jones could also be abrasive if not boorish, and he soon discovered that he was not very popular
Most startling in the wealth of John Stubbs’s new life of John Donne is that the subject of the biographer’s attentions spent a very long time trying to escape his poetic fate. Even late in his life, according to Stubbs, Donne was fending off his literary inclinations like so many pesky acquaintances. He complained about having “this itch of writing” and told a friend that he wanted to follow “a graver course than of a Poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seem to relapse.” When he did give in to his urges, his
Bart Giamatti’s first book, an adaptation of his dissertation titled The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966), examined the garden in literature as a symbol of respite and beauty. After his tumultuous and ultimately disappointing reign as president of Yale from 1978 to 1986, Giamatti must have felt that he’d found his own Eden when he ascended to baseball’s commissionership, with an opportunity to lead America’s most pastoral and literary sport. Instead, what he got was a faceful of Pete Rose.
In 1960, Christa Wolf received a phone call from the Russian newspaper Izvestia, inviting her to participate in an imaginative project devised by Maksim Gorky in 1935, which asked writers worldwide to describe their actions during the course of a random day—September 27—as exactly as possible. Wolf, then thirty-one and living in East Germany, not only documented the day but permanently adopted the project as a preventative measure against forgetting. “Transitoriness and futility as twin sisters of forgetfulness: again and again I was (and am) confronted with that eerie phenomenon,” she explains in the introduction to One Day a Year,
In 1999, after an impressive career as an investigative journalist, author, and critic, Nicols Fox took up bookselling on idyllic Mount Desert Island in Maine, home of Acadia National Park. I recently discussed the transformations her little bookshop has undergone there, first operating out of her small Bass Harbor home, then from a picture-perfect shop front in affluent Southwest Harbor three miles away, and most recently as a “virtual bookshop” on the Web. As author of Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives (Island Press, 2002), Fox has described the historical importance of resisting
Chance May Crown Thee APRIL 1–7 Is there anything SHAKESPEARE didn’t say? Settle your bets with the new Modern Library edition of the complete works. It comes out just two days after Abrams Books releases Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, an illustrated guide to muscled melancholy, and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, a tale of star-crossed lovers […]
While ferociously pious, Jonathan Edwards was also way into metaphysics. Thanks to Jeremiah Dummer’s gift of five hundred volumes, which began making their way into the Yale library in 1714, the undergraduate Edwards enthusiastically discovered Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, and—most crucially for Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism—an edition of Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704), which Edwards read time and time again. From the repetition of Samuel Clarke’s Latin translation of Newton’s English version of Opticks, Richardson finds etched into Edward’s later sermonic rhetoric a prismatic network of “light” (lumen), and from this link, she distills her fascinating premise: Attention to
According to the sixteenth-century Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci, a memory palace is a complex mnemonic system, a mental structure kept in one’s head and not a physical (literal) structure to be constructed from real (concrete) materials. The purpose of such mental constructs, he explains, is “to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge.” Each thing we want to remember is assigned an image, which is then committed to a location in the memory palace, where it rests until we choose to “reclaim it by an act of memory.”
About halfway into his memoir, André Schiffrin notes that after his father died in 1950, André and his mother lived on New York ‘s Upper East Side on only a few hundred dollars per year, well below the city’s poverty line. Yet as the distinguished French-born editor of the New Press explains, he never felt lower-class: Back when his family lived in Paris, his mother had detailed the different layers of the French bourgeoisie, concluding that “[o]n top of them all were the intellectuals. That was us, and therefore there was never any question of our feeling underprivileged.” Though Schiffrin
Aline Kominsky Crumb was born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in Long Beach, New York, in 1948 and grew up in a chaotic household behind a tidy suburban facade. Her mother came from a well-to-do family and found success as an ad agent; her father was a small-time businessman and possible small-time crook, who died of cancer when his daughter was nineteen. Her escape into the counterculture of the 1960s led her to New York City, Tucson (with her first husband, Carl Kominsky), and, finally, San Francisco, where she became prominent in the underground comix scene of the late part of the
“You know, all my life, my favorite kind of story is one that starts early in the 20th century, and then works its way on down toward modern times.” Kim Deitch, both the author of and a protagonist in Alias the Cat, explains exactly where he intends to take us in his latest book—and more than delivers. A revered underground cartoonist whose work is steeped in the lore and traditions of early animation, Deitch draws loopy, crowded, psychedelic stories that start where the Fleischer brothers’ Betty Boop and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat left off and add in sex, money,
In the small Pennsylvania town where I grew up, the windows of the Gap, the national purveyor of affordable and non-threatening attire, are papered over and a to lease sign has been posted. But across from this empty storefront, Hot Topic is booming. Discordant music pours from an arched entrance meant to resemble a dungeon, and the red-and-purple-striped tights and silver-studded jewelry here sell for double the price of khakis and blue button-downs. That goth attire flourishes while more mainstream options languish is a cultural phenomenon on which academics have finally set their sights—with sometimes illuminating and sometimes predictable results.
Perhaps it would have been more of a surprise, in retrospect, had Tommie Smith not done what he did at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, considering the times. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, an event that triggered rioting and rebellion in major cities across the United States and for many, black and white, signaled the end of the best hope of the civil rights movement. In June, Senator Robert Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. He was running because President Lyndon Johnson had stunningly chosen not
Photographer Danny Lyon has spent much of his career documenting the overlooked and underreported, be it an outlaw motorcycle gang (The Bikeriders [1968]) or the nineteenth-century buildings demolished to make way for the World Trade Center (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan [2005]). In 1967, his quest to photograph society’s outsiders took him to the Texas Department of Corrections. There, Lyon knew he would find a subject most people had never seen. (It would be four more years before the tragic Attica uprising brought prison life into public consciousness.) In a facility nicknamed “the Walls,” he met career criminal James Ray
