January 11, 2016 In Memoriam Queen Bitch By Alex Abramovich A still from the “Blackstar” video. Two days ago, Ben Greenman got a post up on The New Yorker’s Web site: THE BEAUTIFUL MEANINGLESSNESS OF DAVID BOWIE, the headline read. “His new album, Blackstar, embraces nonsense, and that makes it prime Bowie.” That was on Saturday. This morning, the meaning snapped into place like a bear trap: released on Friday—Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday—Blackstar is a threnody, composed by the artist himself. Read More
January 11, 2016 First Person Pimped for a Part By Laren Stover My mother makes a match. Image via New York Public Library. My mother was open-minded about the boys I brought home. She was, in fact, oblivious to any of their flaws. In high school, in Philadelphia, my platinum-haired boyfriend, Billy, who walked with a strut and stole cars, OD’d in our basement under my black-light poster of Jimi Hendrix; Mom was fine about my visits to him in the locked ward in the Quaker mental hospital across the street from us on Roosevelt Boulevard. My next boyfriend, Randy, a whimsical outpatient with a genius IQ at the same hospital—we met on the bus; he was coming from prep school—got permission to have dinner with us one evening and afterward played with my gerbil. Randy blurted that he hallucinated perpetually because of all the LSD he’d taken and that now he was on Thorazine, Elavil, and a third prescription I can’t recall. My mother’s only comment: he should trim his nails. She did seem to cotton on to my Mormon suitor in college (my only vice was tea) but criticized his piano playing as “stiff.” She did not seem disturbed when four years later I had a “dancer/artist” boyfriend in sex therapy (“You’re sexually repulsive to me,” he’d confided, “but don’t take it personally, all women are”), and she said nothing disparaging about his successor, an alcoholic Columbia University student/construction worker who accidentally burned, hoping to keep warm during a cold snap, all the savings he’d hidden in his never-used oven. He once showed up drunk at four A.M. with a lipstick-swished cheek and confessed he’d kissed another woman who’d bought him a cabbage, but it was me he really loved, he said, and then punched a hole in my door. Mom remained mute when I confided I’d met, in Egypt, a much younger French Algerian paratrooper named Karim, even when I revealed that he would call me long distance from Marseilles and never talk—simply whisper my name and breathe for twenty minutes, or play a tape of music he’d written. My bass-player roommate at that time, Sara, once quipped, “Karim’s mother’s not going to be very happy when she sees that phone bill.” Read More
January 11, 2016 On the Shelf Bowie’s Books, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Oh, but he could. The 1997 single for I Can’t Read. First things first: David Bowie is dead, and the world is a worse place for it. Here, from 2013, is a list of his hundred favorite books, including DeLillo’s White Noise, Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, yes, The Paris Review’s collected Writers at Work interviews, among many others. While we’re talking music, Alex Abramovich has put in a good word for that most maligned of instruments, the saxophone, which has for too long been discounted as an agent of sleaze. (Bowie used it to impeccable effect on “Modern Love.”) “A shitty thing about standard histories of rock and roll—ones that tell us that the music is half country and western, half rhythm and blues—is that they always slight jazz. (To do otherwise would be to suggest that rock and roll was was being played, by black musicians, well before Elvis Presley followed Ike Turner into Sam Phillips’s studio.) But the truth is that electric guitar solos are directly descended from saxophone solos via Charlie Christian, who defined his instrument (which was once seen as a joke among jazz musicians, much as the saxophone’s a joke in rock) by being the first guitarist good enough to cop saxophone riffs in cutting contests.” What’s the point of a literary magazine today? Our editor, Lorin Stein, essays an answer: “Writing fiction is pretty much the opposite of writing a good tweet, or curating an Instagram feed. It’s the opposite of the personal-slash-professional writing that is now part of our everyday lives. More than ever, we need writers who are unprofessional, whose private worlds come first … By writing offline, literally and metaphorically, this new generation of writers gives us the intimacy, the assurance of their solitude. They let us read the word I and feel that it’s not attached to a product. They let us read an essay, or a stanza, and feel the silence around it—the actual, physical stillness of a body when it’s deep in thought. It can’t be faked, in life or on the page.” Not dissimilarly, Christian Lorentzen wonders about the role of the short story, which was once the highest-paying, most robust form in fiction: “the revolutions of the past century have been absorbed by four generations of writers at work today, and that modes once heralded as avant-garde now linger among the array of strategies available to any writer … Literary fiction is at its worst when it’s easy to imagine it recast as quality television or low-pressure art-house cinema. The battle between words on a page and images on a screen has long been lost.” Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen is not, in fact, an easy-to-carry smattering of the seminal economist’s musings on conspicuous consumption. It’s a novel. About a woman with a fondness for squirrels. That woman’s name is Veblen, and she and her husband are at odds over a furry visitor in their attic. “It doesn’t take long for the reader to understand that the couple’s opposed feelings about the squirrel—he wants to trap or kill it, she wants to make friends—bespeak a deeper opposition in personality and values that might very well ruin their relationship … When Veblen cages the attic squirrel and takes him on a meandering driving trip, all the while holding conversations with him about the meaning of love and happiness, you begin to realize that McKenzie means to blur the boundary between adorable eccentricity and actual madness.”
January 8, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: BMX, BBQ, Brutes By The Paris Review From an early edition of Black Wings Has My Angel Dying is an experience that biographers tend to pass over in silence. That’s why Katie Roiphe’s forthcoming book The Violet Hour is a revelation, at least to me. Her case studies—of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, Dylan Thomas, John Updike, and Maurice Sendak—focus on the last months of life, using each writer’s final struggle as a key to his or her character. This is the best book Roiphe has written. She shows that our interest in dying is not just an interest in endings, or in final things, or in posterity. Instead, it has to do with how we get along, how families and friendship work, in short, how we live. —Lorin Stein I spent Christmas on the beach in ninety-degree heat, so I wanted something pulpy to read. I took along Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel, a 1954 noir, just reissued. Its plot doesn’t break the mold: a lowlife dude busts out of the clink, picks up a gorgeous hooker, and embarks with her on a life of crime in big-sky country. But Chaze has a strange eye for details, ones that set him against the grain of most crime writers. (Seldom do you hear a hard-boiled guy extol the potato salad at a roadside BBQ joint or tell you about his hernia exam.) Black Wings gathers a bizarre, often comical head of steam that reminded me of Denis Johnson or Wild at Heart. What kept me turning the pages was the easy, blunt wit and endless disdain: “Both had the terrible conceit of little men,” he writes of his employers, “who through fortune or persistence had landed in positions where there were even littler men for them to boss around. I’m sure it never occurred to either of them that they were stupid.” And Chaze gave his hero an excellent nom de guerre: Timothy Sunblade. “I picked that name,” Sunblade tells us, “because it is a name that smells of the out of doors.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
January 8, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited By Sadie Stein From Pocket Atlas. There’s a book I’ve returned to again and again, ever since its clementine-orange cover first caught my eye at a museum bookstore: A Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Christine Lo. Read More
January 8, 2016 Books The Countries We Think We See By Tara Isabella Burton For Lesley Blanch, travel writing offered a chance to explore her preconceptions about a place as much as the place itself. Every travel writer is a character in her own narrative, no less a part of the story than the “foreigners” that story depicts. In my own travels, I’ve found that women in countries that discourage mixed-gender interactions often speak to me more openly about culturally illuminating subjects—sex, love, motherhood—than they might to a male writer. My femaleness, it seemed, wasn’t simply a question of perspective; it was a question of action. When I raised this subject in a lecture last year, someone in the audience broke in with a question. Why did I feel the need to “insert” myself into my narratives at all? She brought up the travel writer Colin Thubron, whom she cited as the paradigmatic example of the quiet, objective observer. “He doesn’t insert himself into his writing at all!” she exclaimed. Read More