April 16, 2018 In Memoriam J. D. McClatchy, Darlingissimo By Henri Cole J. D. McClatchy. Photo: Henri Cole. We must have met in 1980, when I was twenty-four. I was a graduate student in New York City. Sandy was teaching in New Haven. This was before email, Facebook, and Twitter. Poets wrote letters and talked on the telephone (landlines!). Sandy had just published his first collection of poems, Scenes from Another Life, and he and his partner had invited me to dinner in New Haven. They were being kind to a young fan who’d published only one poem. I was not really a poet yet or out of the closet. There was also a young Mexican poet at the table, who would later drown while swimming in the Pacific. After a delicious dinner cooked by Sandy, a joint was passed around. There was not any talk of AIDS yet, as there would soon be, like a hatchet falling through the room. But a profound sense of freedom. Openness. New friendship. “I cannot remember a moment of my life when I didn’t know I was gay,” Sandy said. For him, being gay was simply a fact, like being a poet. This was the era of new formalism, and Sandy was “a painstaking and brilliantly adventurous craftsman,” to quote Stephen Yenser, “the epitome of the writer with savoir faire” and “outrageously candid.” His poems were eloquent yet rueful, a combination I loved. He was not afraid of being difficult. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” Wallace Stevens wrote in “Man Carrying Thing.” In my own poems, it was the “raw power” he praised. Sandy wasn’t prim. I think he was the first real man of letters I knew. A gay man of letters—what a fine thing to be, I thought. Could I be that? He was always up to his ears in teaching and projects, running between this task and another: “I still feel like the baby Achilles, being dipped by my heel into the waters of busywork,” he wrote. Read More
April 16, 2018 On Art David Hockney’s Improbable Inspirations By Lawrence Weschler David Hockney, A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017. David Hockney’s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, “Far from cutting corners, I was adding them.” In Lawrence Weschler’s catalogue essay, Hockney suggests what he means by reverse perspective by way of an allusion to an experience he once had coursing through the arrow-straight eighteen-kilometer St. Gotthard Pass road tunnel, the tiny pinpoint of light ahead epitomizing “the hell of one-point perspective.” “I suddenly realized,” Hockney tells Weschler, “how that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel everything suddenly reversed with the world opening out in every direction … and I realized how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to capture.” In one of Hockney’s first experiments in his recent series, he took Fra Angelico’s San Marco fresco The Annunciation (a masterpiece of one-point perspective)—a poster of which used to grace the upper corridor of his elementary school—and turned it inside out, offering a sense of what it might have looked like in reverse perspective. Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1450. David Hockney, Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico, 2017. Weschler’s catalogue essay, from which we will be publishing two adapted excerpts this week and next, goes into further detail on the taproots and implications of Hockney’s current reverse-perspective passion. The first, below, involves an improbable recent mentor. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
April 16, 2018 On Poetry I Have Wasted My Life By Patricia Hampl Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow, 1872. “I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.” But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity. Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never “be alone.” Read More
April 13, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway By The Paris Review Photo: Carl Fuldner and Shane DuBay. In 2009, Edwin Rist stole hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring, which holds one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Among the collection were a number of specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist whose work is often credited with goading Charles Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species. Why did Rist steal them? To tie the world’s most exotic and expensive fishing flies. So begins Kirk Wallace Johnson’s charming The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, a truly bizarre tale that traces the history of exotic-bird collecting and the feather trade through scientific harvesting, millinery fads, the Victorian era’s fly-fishing boom, up to Rist’s caper and Johnson’s own attempts at retrieving the stolen feathers with the help of some international fly-tying elites. There’s a lot to Johnson’s book, and he ties it together well, reeling you into disparate historical subjects in a thrilling catch-and-release style. The book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set: worth its weight in exotic bird feathers, which you’ll learn are very expensive. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
April 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Book I Kept for the Cover By Anjali Enjeti The first time I saw a picture of an Indian on the cover of a novel was in the fall of 1995. I was a twenty-two-year-old law student browsing the literature section at an independent bookstore in Clayton, Missouri. While scanning the shelves, a small photograph of a dark-skinned woman on the spine of a paperback caught my eye. The book was Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee, and the same photo was magnified on the cover: a woman stands in the opening of a window; her lips are full, slightly parted. What struck me most was her very brown skin. I took the book to the register and purchased it. A Bengali Hindu, Mukherjee was born in 1940 in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was educated in England and Switzerland before emigrating to the U.S. in 1961 to study at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She was a true pioneer. At the time of her arrival, only some twelve thousand Indian Americans were living in the United States. This was four years before the institution of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), which abolished discriminatory quotas, thereby eliminating race, ancestry, and national origin as barriers to entry and enabling the resettlement of thousands of immigrants from the subcontinent. Though I didn’t discover Mukherjee’s work until I was twenty-two, her prolific career began the year before I was born. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), tells the story of a woman named Tara who returns to Calcutta after establishing herself in the United States, only to feel unsettled by how much her hometown has changed in her absence. In 1975, Mukherjee published her second novel, Wife, and a decade later the short-story collection Darkness (1985), followed by The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Jasmine hit the shelves in 1989, at about the middle of Mukherjee’s long literary career. Several novels—including Holder of the World (1993) and the trilogy Desirable Daughters, Tree Bride, and Miss India—followed. Read More
April 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists By Ellen Weinstein On days like today, we need all the tips, tricks, and good omens we can get. This Friday the thirteenth, we’re presenting you with the superstitions of ten artists and writers who (mostly) managed to avoid bad luck. Charles Dickens Slept Facing North Charles Dickens (1812–1870) carried a navigational compass with him at all times and always faced north while he slept—a practice he believed improved his creativity and writing. Audrey Hepburn Lucky Number Fifty-Five The screen legend, humanitarian, and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) had a fascination with the number fifty-five. She is known to have requested the number for her dressing room—as it had also been her dressing-room number for both of the now classic films Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read More