When the young Samuel Coleridge discovered The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment in 1798, the book so impressed him that he became, he wrote, “haunted by spectres.” His father, aghast at the effect the Nights was having, torched the child’s copy of the tales. But they’d already worked their spell. Coleridge credits the book with turning him into a dreamer, indisposed to all bodily activity, “fretful, and inordinately passionate.”
Robert Adams, Eden, Colorado, 1968, gelatin silver print, 5 15/16 x 5 9/16″. Near the beginning of the third volume of photographer Robert Adams’s The Place We Live, a compilation containing nearly four hundred tritone plates (about half reproduced at full size), published to accompany a major traveling exhibition of Adams’s work (currently in Los […]
Frankfurt School favorite Charlie Chaplin. Any student of silent cinema, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School, or film aesthetics and the avant-garde, will surely at one point or another have come into contact with the work of Miriam Hansen. Her groundbreaking study Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) inspired a generation of […]
There are two man-made objects visible from space. One is the Great Wall of China. The other is a newer addition: a massive garbage dump at Fresh Kills, New York, home to fifty years’ worth of New York City’s trash.
Author of The Soviet Novel, a classic analysis of socialist-realist fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and a professor of Slavic literature at Yale, Katerina Clark here reads the text of High Stalinism. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome—a series of linked essays following an adroitly plotted historical narrative—she recounts a scandalous episode in art history, while making a significant contribution to the understanding of 1930s European political culture and providing a lucid guide to the late-’30s period of mainly Soviet collective mania.
I know how to sharpen pencils. I shove them into the electric pencil sharpener suction-cupped onto a corner of my desk. It growls so satisfyingly and provides a kind of smoke break for a nonsmoker—a perfect bit of procrastination. Some days I am committed to sharpening every pencil I can find before starting work—even though I do most of my work with a fountain pen.
Gil Scott-Heron, 2010. Years before he died last May at age 62, the legendary poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron had been working on a memoir. Canongate Books, his publisher in Britain, announced plans to publish the book nearly a decade ago, and on the Canongate website there is a spectral recording from the early […]
When Daniel Levin Becker was sixteen, he made a mixtape that included only songs and artists whose names did not contain the letter e. Soon after, he read Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the offending vowel. Levin Becker spent a good part of his formative years “making the numbers and letters on license plates into mathematically true statements,” so he was heartened to discover that he was “not alone in appreciating naturally occurring palindromes, or knowing a shorter sentence with all the letters in the alphabet than The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,
WHAT DOES NOT INITIALLY MEET THE EYE in Richard Mosse’s vivid photographs of cotton-candy hillsides, vamping child soldiers, and rose-hued rebels is the violence of their setting: the war-torn Kivu region of eastern Congo. Located near the border of Rwanda, Kivu has been ground zero for many of the worst atrocities of a civil war […]
LAST SEPTEMBER, shortly before the Whitechapel Gallery mounted an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work, Phaidon’s website posted a list of songs the Polish artist listens to while painting. Many of the tracks are ominously monotone, uniform in mood, sound, or structure—there’s no resolution, no cure for what ails. Even Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” second on Sasnal’s […]
Herb Ritts, Richard Gere—Poolside (detail), 1982. Courtesy and © the Herb Ritts Foundation, Los Angeles SWIMMING POOLS. MOVIE STARS. The Clampetts found them when they moved to Beverly. Hills, that is. And they are what you find in this portable summer-between-covers collection of SoCal pool photos that feature the likes of Rock Hudson, Marilyn Monroe, […]
Christa Parravani, Charlie, 2004. I felt super proud of myself when I made it all the way to page 3, technically page 1, of Christa Parravani’s memoir her before I Googled “christa parravani.” Parravani, as she immediately reveals in the book, is a photographer whose identical twin sister is dead. But I wanted to know: […]
Yasmine Chatila, Bathroom Girl II (detail), 2007–2008. Rushdie had the Ayatollah, Job had God, and James Lasdun has Nasreen—at least that’s what he calls her in Give Me Everything You Have (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)—the former creative-writing student who harassed him for five years and is apparently still at it. As Lasdun remarks mordantly, […]
Laura Kurgan, New York, September 11, 2001, Four Days Later, 2001, digital print from Ikonos satellite data. On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 emerged from its fourth lunar cycle on the first manned mission to another celestial body. “Oh, my God,” cried astronaut Frank Borman as the spacecraft emerged from the moon’s dark side. “Look […]
Diagram mapping eye movements while observing a painting. From “Ways of Seeing,” Cabinet magazine (summer 2008). On January 30, approximately 180 people overfilled an auditorium in the New York Public Library to witness an event titled (after Musil, in part) “Cabinet on Trial: A Magazine of No Qualities?” Forty-five issues into Cabinet’s run, which began […]
T he first inkling of William Styron’s interest in the rebel slave leader Nat Turner, which evolved into the prolix, vision-packed novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), surfaces in a letter to his literary agent in 1952. Styron asked Elizabeth McKee to look out for a copy of The Southampton Insurrection by William S. Drewry (1900). “It’s the only full account I know of the Nat Turner rebellion, and I’d like to read it.”
I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind.
The Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan recently took memoirists to task with his piece “Journalism is not Narcissism,” which bluntly argued that “journalism is not about you” in the very first paragraph. While Nolan’s piece focused on writers “who decide to base their careers on stories about themselves” by writing essays that are “confessional as attention-grabber,” there is a whole other sort of nonfiction that was ignored in the piece, a kind of personal and reflective reporting that elevates the work above the sort of confessional that Nolan critiques. A perfect example of that style is found reading a memoir like
Craig Morgan Teicher’s third book, To Keep Love Blurry, name-checks only one of mid-century American poetry’s big-name Roberts: the now-unfashionable Lowell. Like Lowell, Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating, as was Lowell, in his depiction of himself as a father and husband. But Teicher’s poems also obsessively chart a kind of epistemological and existential anxiety, often in the manner of another mid-century Robert: Creeley, who once enjoined, “So keep on tracking—life.” When Teicher is at his best, he “tracks life” in a compelling and singular way. His long poems “Layoff,” “On
“I was a beatnik, and then I was a hippie, and before that I was a bohemian,” a sky-high Dennis Hopper confided to Merv Griffin on television one night in 1971, in a clip you can see on YouTube. On the opposite couch, Willie Mays uncomfortably refilled his glass of water and James Brolin sneered—Hopper certainly didn’t belong to their worlds.
