feb 4, 2011 @ 6:00:00 pm - bookforum.com / paper trail

"Editor Hugo Lindgren continues to remake the Sunday Times Magazine, with Q and A maestro Deborah Solomon out (she’s planning to devote her time to writing a Norman Rockwell biography), and columnist Ariel Kaminer reportedly replacing Randy Cohen as the house Ethicist."

[From Bookforum]

Ah, I saved this for the announcement of Deborah Solomon's departure. I had a complicated relationship with her snarky charm--at once irritating and delightful--but I was sorry to see her go, and really, the 8 questions format. Her replacement I find to be super boring. I'm sure her Norman Rockwell biography will infuriate more than charm, but I'll have to check it out.

Remembering Joan Sutherland

'The greatest soprano of her time, Joan Sutherland was blessed with formidable technique, a voice that brought her the title La Stupenda, and an unspoiled Australian nature that kept vanity and pretension at bay.' 

In Italy to sing Alcina, Venetians went mad with delight, tore down La Fenice's flower decorations, threw them on to the stage and shouted "La Stupenda". In her autobiography A Prima Donna's Progress, Sutherland acknowledged with typical understatement the name that would accompany her for the rest of her life: "I was quite thrilled with my new title". 

In 1961, Sutherland and Bonynge leased a villa in Switzerland, a place by Lake Maggiore that allowed quick access to Milan and other European opera houses. And as a regular sufferer of sinusitis and throat ailments, the climate was far better than the damp airs of London. Switzerland was eventually to become their home. 

Also in 1961, she made her debut at the Metropolitan in New York where she sang Lucia and was mobbed afterwards on the street. In the opera house, the audience refused to cease their ovations. At the party in a hotel, an extra room had to be hired for the flowers.

[From the Australian]

This is old news, but La Stupenda was the best and this was the best obituary that came out at the time. The audio remembrance is worth listening to, too.

Pregnant women and families are sharing photos and more on Facebook, Web sites

Like many expectant mothers these days, Autumn Yates posted updates about her pregnancy on Facebook. 

“It’s nice for my extended family to see pictures from time to time of me getting bigger and little comments like, ‘34-week check-up went well!’ ” said Yates, 29, a Spanish teacher from Oakton. “I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think there is kind of a line sometimes, though.” 

For Yates, that line is somewhere around “creepy” 4-D ultrasound photos and cringe-inducing comments such as, “My cervix is now dilated [fill in the blank] inches! 

Read full article

[From Washington Post]

The culture of oversharing continues. Thanks, Facebook!

Violist Heckled Onstage - By Violist (There's A Joke in Here Somewhere)

"'About midway through a night of contemporary works, John Eichenseer, who goes by the name JHNO, was performing his Untitled, a new piece for viola and electronics, when he heard hissing, then an outburst of clapping intended to disrupt his playing, then another.' The heckler turned out to be 'Bernard M. Zaslav, a viola player with a pedigree as a champion of contemporary music.'

(Via ArtsJournal)

The Next Movie-to-Broadway Adaptation Is ... Big Fish

Remember Tim Burton's whimsical 2003 film Big Fish, starring Billy Crudup, Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney? According to the film's screenwriter John August, the movie's been optioned as a Broadway musical. "This isn’t one of those announcements where some people had lunch and said, 'Hey, maybe let’s try to do a show.' It’s written. Two acts. Amazing songs. We’ve read it and sung it forty times for lots of different people," wrote August on his blog Wednesday. "Studious readers of the blog and my Twitter feed may have noticed I’ve been in New York City a lot. This is why." Big Fish received Oscar nominations for Best Score and Best Original Music, but garnered mixed reviews from critics. And Big Fish isn't the only recent film adaptation. It's so hot right now! Carrie, The Goonies, and Dave (remember Dave?) are also on their way. [Movieline]

[via Vulture]

LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED the movie--can't wait till the adaptation arrives on Broadway!

Selected Poems and Translations of Ezra Pound edited by Richard Sieburth – review

From Guardian Books:

Nicholas Lezard welcomes a new Ezra Pound selection 

A tricky one, the question of Pound; and yet also easy. The quandary resides entirely in his vile antisemitism and his treasonous Italian wartime broadcasts, and the bearing they have on his poetry, itself studded with lines that make contemporary eyes widen with astonished disgust. And when he made a retraction much later in life – 'that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism' – it was only in conversation, and that 'suburban' hardly lets him off the hook. 

Then again, as Michael Wood once put it: 'it is impossible to take an absolute moral stand against a poet as good as Pound without deciding either not to read him at all or to read him only in terms of a moral judgment previously arrived at – no one who cares about literature, or in the long run about morality, can feel happy about these options.'

Charles Olson was, in Christopher Ricks's words, 'sickened and enraged' by Pound's prejudice, but that didn't stop him from visiting him regularly at the mental asylum he was placed in. 'Olson saved my life,' said Pound later. 

For the fact is that Pound is important, and, when good, very good indeed. He more or less single-handedly invented 20th-century poetry, or modernism, or the kind of literature that is ambitious, intellectually and musically stirring, and often haunting. The opposite, in short, of the rumty-tumty-tum school of Betjemanesque doggerel which people tend to prefer in this country. 

Of course Pound made poetic mistakes (although these are not as grave as his political mistakes); he hoped the Cantos would 'hold the world together', and indeed in my hot youth I used to think that the works contained, in essence, all world history and literature; but they don't, and I suspect that very few people indeed outside academia have read every single one. 

But they contain many, many lines of great beauty, and the 130-page selection in this handsome, splendid volume gives us a perfectly good idea of what they're like (although I looked for some of the more contentious lines and couldn't find them). They're also annotated, so the references and quotations from foreign languages which baffled readers when they came out, and completely flummox the contemporary brain, need be an impediment no longer. (Pound said they didn't matter anyway, and you could skip them until you came back to a bit you could understand.) 

But there is more to Pound than the Cantos. There are the early works, reprinted in full here, which can sound very pre-modern indeed with their thees and thous, although with hints of what was to come both poetically and less palatably. 

Then, as he progresses, the voice, which had always been assured, settles down to both great clarity and beauty. There are lines here which, once read, lodge in the head forever. This, surely, is what poetry should be all about. 'The tree has entered my hands, / The sap has ascended my arms, / The tree has grown in my breast – / Downward, / The branches grow out of me, like arms.' Or 'The gilded phaloi of the crocuses / are thrusting at the spring air'; Or, famously, the poem 'In a Station of a Metro', in its entirety: 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough', which I didn't even have to look up. He could also be funny – see his parody of 'Summer is icumen in', or 'The Lake Isle' (where he longs for a tobacco shop, or 'any profession / save this damn'd profession of writing') . . . 

Then there are the translations, both assured and audacious (not literal, but literality is not their point), and the sustained rage of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: 'All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says, / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days.' 

This is now the definitive selection, which also generously includes the introductions written by TS Eliot in 1928 and John Berryman in 1949. Anyone who cares about poetry, never mind just Pound, should have it. Although the notes could have been easier to use, and there is no index of first lines."

No one benefits from a good selected like Pound--hell, no one requires it as much as Pound does.

Hope for Khodorkovsky, and for Russia?

From NYRblog:

The paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta observed on June 3 that the pleas of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev offer Medvedev “an opportunity to put an end to the absurd saga that has been doing so much harm to the image of Russia…He cannot help knowing that every new verdict and every new denied request thoroughly undermine his own efforts to do away with so-called legal nihilism. He has to sort out this mess and move on.”

But is Medvedev in a position to do so? What happens to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will not only reveal the true depth of Medvedev’s democratic intentions, which have rightly been questioned by Russian liberals. It will above all be a measure of the president’s independence from Putin. Khodorkovsky threatened Putin’s power in 2003 by funding oppositional political parties and Putin is believed to be the main force keeping him behind bars. If Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are granted early release, it would mean that Medvedev is no longer Putin’s puppet, as many assume, but a leader in his own right. Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted that “Medvedev’s successful evolution into a bona fide politician and leader depends on a single decision [in the Yukos case].” This is probably no exaggeration.

Alexey Navalny

From The New Yorker

This profile of a Russian activist--a kind of Julian Assange, but given the level of corruption, a more banal (but no less helpful) one--makes me miss Anna: she was better.

BUT the last paragraph makes up for almost everything:

Neither Navalny’s home nor his office seems especially well protected, and when Navalny files a suit he frequently uses his home address. As I rode the metro back from his apartment, I wondered about the risks he was taking. When we first met, at a sushi restaurant near his office, he spoke about what he sees as the cowardice of liberal Russian businessmen—his natural constituency—who are too scared to stand up to government corruption. “I don’t understand this position,” he said. “First of all, it’s boring. Second of all, forgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees.” He was similarly dismissive of the people who think that he or anyone else is fighting a well-oiled, repressive machine. “I disagree, because the people who work in business at a high enough level can tell you that there’s no machine at all,” he says. “It’s all a fiction. That is, they can destroy a single person, like Magnitsky or me or Khodorkovsky. But, if they try to do anything systemically against a huge number of people, there’s no machine. It’s a ragtag group of crooks unified under the portrait of Putin. There’s no super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.” When things happened to opponents of the system, he said, it was because they showed up individually. “But if tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we’d live in a different country,” he said. “Starting tomorrow.”

On Exile

To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement. 

All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.

.... At this point I should say that at least where literature is concerned, I don’t believe in exile. Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience—or wasn’t adversely affected by—the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.... Exile, in most cases, is a voluntary decision. No one forced Thomas Mann to go into exile. No one forced James Joyce to go into exile. Back in Joyce’s day, the Irish probably couldn’t have cared less whether he stayed in Dublin or left, whether he became a priest or killed himself. In the best of cases, exile is a literary option, similar to the option of writing. No one forces you to write. The writer enters the labyrinth voluntarily—for many reasons, of course: because he doesn’t want to die, because he wants to be loved, etc.—but he isn’t forced into it. In the final instance he’s no more forced than a politician is forced into politics or a lawyer is forced into law school. With the great advantage for the writer that the lawyer or politician, outside his country of origin, tends to flounder like a fish out of water, at least for a while. Whereas a writer outside his native country seems to grow wings. The same thing applies to other situations. What does a politician do in prison? What does a lawyer do in the hospital? Anything but work. What, on the other hand, does a writer do in prison or in the hospital? He works. Sometimes he even works a lot. And that’s not even to mention poets. Of course the claim can be made that in prison the libraries are no good and that in hospitals there are often are no libraries. It can be argued that in most cases exile means the loss of the writer’s books, among other material losses, and in some cases even the loss of his papers, unfinished manuscripts, projects, letters. It doesn’t matter. Better to lose manuscripts than to lose your life. In any case, the point is that the writer works wherever he is, even while he sleeps, which isn’t true of those in other professions. Actors, it can be said, are always working, but it isn’t the same: the writer writes and is conscious of writing, whereas the actor, under great duress, only howls. Policemen are always policemen, but that isn’t the same either, because it’s one thing to be and another to work. The writer is and works in any situation. The policeman only is. The same is true of the professional assassin, the soldier, the banker. Whores, perhaps, come closest in the exercise of their profession to the practice of literature.

["Roberto Bolaño in NYRB: "Exiles"]

P.J. O'Rourke on the Scourge of Bike Lanes

"The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey. Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn't appear until the 19th century. The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea. The bicycle is the only method of conveyance worse than feet. You can walk up three flights of stairs carrying one end of a sofa. Try that on a bicycle."

[From WSJ]

On Revolution

"Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt."

[Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair: "What I Don't See at the Revolution"]

Mexican Poet Octavio Paz!

[From Vintage Photographs]

Alexey Navalny's War on Russian Corruption

Neither Navalny’s home nor his office seems especially well protected, and when Navalny files a suit he frequently uses his home address. As I rode the metro back from his apartment, I wondered about the risks he was taking. When we first met, at a sushi restaurant near his office, he spoke about what he sees as the cowardice of liberal Russian businessmen—his natural constituency—who are too scared to stand up to government corruption. “I don’t understand this position,” he said. “First of all, it’s boring. Second of all, forgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees.” He was similarly dismissive of the people who think that he or anyone else is fighting a well-oiled, repressive machine. “I disagree, because the people who work in business at a high enough level can tell you that there’s no machine at all,” he says. “It’s all a fiction. That is, they can destroy a single person, like Magnitsky or me or Khodorkovsky. But, if they try to do anything systemically against a huge number of people, there’s no machine. It’s a ragtag group of crooks unified under the portrait of Putin. There’s no super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.” When things happened to opponents of the system, he said, it was because they showed up individually. “But if tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we’d live in a different country,” he said. “Starting tomorrow.”

[From New Yorker: "Net Impact"]

Rodrigo Rosenberg's Murder in Guatemala

As Castresana looked deeper into Rosenberg’s life, he began to see a tormented soul—“someone like Raskolnikov.” After the death of the woman he loved, Rosenberg wrote to a friend that he felt as if he were “disintegrating, little by little.” He initially tried to do what he had always done: find justice through the law. Based on the intelligence he had gathered—primarily from the legendary spy Mendizábal but also from other sources—he was convinced that the government had killed Marjorie and her father. But, as a lawyer, Rosenberg knew that this intelligence was not strong enough to stand up in court. And Mendizábal warned Rosenberg that it would be futile to fight the President, the First Lady, and Alejos. In a country where crimes were virtually never punished, Castresana says, Rosenberg felt powerless. In a meeting at his law firm, Rosenberg complained, “There is no justice in Guatemala.” And so, Castresana theorized, Rosenberg had set his plot in motion. 

In hindsight, Rosenberg’s actions in his final days made it evident that he was not trying to evade death but, rather, was preparing for it. He had his will drawn up; he bought two adjoining plots in a cemetery, one for himself and one for Marjorie; he gave away family heirlooms. He had then constructed a counterfeit reality, believing, however perversely, that it was the only way that the guilty parties would ever go to jail. And he employed the very methods—hit men, misdirection, stagecraft—that, in the past, had been the province of corrupt states and intelligence outfits. Rodrigo Rosenberg had democratized the art of political murder.

[From New Yorker: "A Murder Foretold"]

Making Hollywood Films Was Brutal, Even for Fritz Lang - NYTimes.com

“Cloak and Dagger” is one of a handful of anti-Nazi movies he [Lang] directed, which also include “Hangmen Also Die!” Released in 1943, that film turns on the assassination of Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, a Nazi official who was gunned down in Prague in 1942. Its main point of interest, however, is that it was partly written by one Bert Brecht, as he’s charmingly called in the opening credits. According to Brecht’s journals, Lang broached the idea for the film while the two men were sunbathing on a Santa Monica beach.

It was a difficult, at times unintentionally near-comic collaboration, and Brecht grew disenchanted both with Hollywood and his collaborator, as was often the case with Lang’s colleagues, some of whom grew to hate him for his on-set cruelty. “What an infinitely dismal fabrication this hostage film is that I have to occupy myself with these days,” Brecht wrote in July 1942. “What a load of hackneyed situations, intrigues, false notes!” By October the situation was worse. (“I feel the disappointment and terror of the intellectual worker who sees the product of his labors snatched away and mutilated.”) But he kept at it and, while denied screenwriting credit, he did share the story credit with Lang."

[From NYT]

Les Divans

Artemisia Gentileschi

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Henri Gervex

Gustave Caillebotte

Sir Walter Russell

Hubert-Denis Etcheverry

Federiсo Zandomeneghi

Gustav Klimt

Are Sleigh Bells and Diplo Working With Beyoncé?

Diplo said he and Sleigh Bells checked in with Beyoncé last week. On his blog, he wrote: "me and derek and alexis are bros and sis for life. in fact i like sleigh bells so much ... me and switch was in studio in nyc tryin to make tracks with derek and beyonce last week after we played her team their album ... dunno if we gonna manage to finish but was good times." If we understand this correctly, Switch refers to the D.J. and producer, Derek and Alexis refers to Sleigh Bells, and Beyoncé, well, that usually refers to Beyoncé! Sort of confirming the collaboration, Sleigh Bells tweeted today, 'yeah damn beyonce on it was intense track may not get finished (?) but we finished the rum off at least #idroppedsomethingg.' If it comes together, this could bode well for all of them. [Mad Decent, Phrequency]

[From Vulture]

Let's hope so!

CAPOTE UPDATE: Apparently he fell asleep during a reading Frost...

CAPOTE UPDATE: Apparently he fell asleep during a reading Frost was giving, and Frost threw whatever he was reading at Capote, then sent an angry letter to Harold Ross resulting in termination. Capote would later call Frost an “evil, selfish bastard, an egomaniacal, double-crossing sadist.

Anyone else really really miss Old New York?"

[From Lapham's Quarterly]

Patti Smith writing detective novel

Patti Smith may soon follow in the footsteps of Agatha Christie, Ian Rankin and Stieg Larsson. This week, the singer revealed she has completed '68%' of a 'detective story' based in England.

In a Guardian interview last weekend, Smith hinted at several literary projects to follow her acclaimed memoir, Just Kids. Speaking at an Intelligence Squared event at the Royal Geographical Society on Wednesday night, NME reports, Smith confirmed she is currently working on a crime novel. 'For the last two years ... I've been working on a detective story that starts at St Giles-in-the-Fields in London,' she said. Now, whenever the singer is in the city, she visits the church 'where it came to me'.

Over the last 40 years, Smith has published more than a dozen books of poetry, plus collections of artwork and lyrics. Though her written work has been more Allen Ginsberg than Agatha Christie, Smith said she has 'loved detective stories' since she was a child. Her planned novel is inspired by Sherlock Holmes and American crime writer Mickey Spillane.

Smith is also recording a new album, influenced by Saint Francis of Assisi, the home of Dylan Thomas, and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and plans to tour the UK. On Tuesday, singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf revealed on Twitter that he is joining Smith on her forthcoming dates. 'Just tuning up my harp and viola, been asked by patti smith to join her again as part of her backing band,' he wrote. Perhaps he can carry her magnifying glass.

[From Guardian Books]

White Egrets by Derek Walcott

Poems from Derek Walcott's TS Eliot prize-shortlisted collection

The Lost Empire

I

And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden.

Its victories were air, its dominions dirt:

Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan.

The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy's shirt

like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges.

Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags

fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis

went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag,

with tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj

to a sobbing bugle. I see it all come about

again, the tasselled cortège, the clop of the tossing team

with funeral pom-poms, the sergeant major's shout,

the stamp of boots, then the volley; there is no greater theme

than this chasm-deep surrendering of power

the whited eyes and robes of surrendering hordes,

red tunics, and the great names Sind, Turkistan, Cawnpore,

dust-dervishes and the Saharan silence afterwards.

II

A dragonfly's biplane settles and there, on the map,

the archipelago looks as if a continent fell

and scattered into fragments; from Pointe du Cap

to Moule à Chique, bois-canot, laurier cannelles,

canoe-wood, spicy laurel, the wind-churned trees

echo the African crests; at night, the stars

are far fishermen's fires, not glittering cities,

Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris,

but crab-hunters' torches. This small place produces

nothing but beauty, the wind-warped trees, the breakers

on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens

a galloping mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us

merely receiving vessels of each day's grace,

light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts.

I'm content as Kavanagh with his few acres;

for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea's lace,

to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts.

A London Afternoon

I

Afternoon. Durrants. Either the lift (elevator),

with shudder and rattle, its parenthesis,

or the brown bar with its glum, punctual waiter

and his whatever accent; biscuits and cheeses

with hot, broadening tea with blessing friends.

Summer London outside, guests, porter, taxis,

the consoling clichés you have come back for,

welcomed, but not absorbed, the little ecstasies

of recognition of home, almost, in the polite roar

of traffic towards dusk; here are all the props,

the elaborate breakfasts, kippers, sporting prints,

the ornate lettering on the smallest shops,

the morning papers and the sense of permanence

under every phrase. This is where it must start:

hereditary in each boy (or chap),

the stain that spreads invisibly from the heart,

like the red of Empire in a schoolroom's map.

II

What have these narrow streets, begrimed with age

and greasy with tradition, their knobbly names,

their pizza joints, their betting shops, that black garage,

the ping and rattle of mesmerizing games

on slot machines, to do with that England on each page

of my fifth-form anthology, now that my mind's

an ageing sea remembering its lines,

the scent and symmetry of Wyatt, Surrey?

Spring grass and roiling clouds dapple a county

with lines like a rutted road stuck in the memory

of a skylark's unheard song, a bounty

pungent as clover, the creak of a country cart

in Constable or John Clare. Words clear the page

like a burst of sparrows over a hedge

'but though from court to cottage he depart,

his saint is sure of his unspotted heart'

and the scent of petrol. Why do these lines

lie like barred sunlight on the lawn to cage

the strutting dove? My passing image in the shops, the signs.

Sixty Years After

In my wheelchair in the Virgin lounge at Vieuxfort,

I saw, sitting in her own wheelchair, her beauty

hunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thought

as the fire of my young life would do her duty

to be golden and beautiful and young forever

even as I aged. She was treble-chinned, old, her devastating

smile was netted in wrinkles, but I felt the fever

briefly returning as we sat there, crippled, hating

time and the lie of general pleasantries.

Small waves still break against the small stone pier

where a boatman left me in the orange peace

of dusk, a half-century ago, maybe happier

being erect, she like a deer in her shyness, I stalking

an impossible consummation; those who knew us

knew we would never be together, at least, not walking.

Now the silent knives from the intercom went through us.

[From Guardian Books]

Unbowed, unbroken

ON TUESDAY Shanghai authorities demolished a million-dollar studio built by Ai Weiwei, an important and controversial Chinese artist. Mr Ai, who has developed a reputation for being critical of China's leaders, was told the building did not meet code. The Shanghai city government had invited him to build the studio in the first place, to attract prominent artists to the city. Two years and many meetings later, the structure is now a pile of rocks. Mr Ai naturally suspects foul play.

'In China being original…immediately people think that you are a danger,' Mr Ai explained in an interview with The Economist (embedded below) some months ago. Individualism and creativity are frowned upon in a culture that prizes the art of imitation and the politics of deference. As an artist who has remained in China despite his outspoken disapproval of the status quo, Mr Ai has become a symbol of tenacity in the face of sinister bureaucratic illogic. But this comes at a high cost, as evidenced by the rubbled remains of years of work.

In a fine profile of Mr Ai for the New Yorker last year, Evan Osnos described him as a rare figure: 'a bankable global art star who runs the distinct risk of going to jail.' Mr Osnos followed up with Mr Ai after his studio was left in ruins; the story he tells gives Kafka a run for his money:

By last July, Ai had finished construction in Shanghai and was poised to open. All of a sudden, he received another round of paperwork. “We get this paper and it says that the studio has to be destroyed. I thought it was some kind of mistake,” Ai told me. The same official came to see him again. “He said, ‘Weiwei, I am sorry but there is nothing that can stop it.’ They came up with a reason but it doesn’t make sense. They told me that the use of the land is not lawful.” Ai went on, “There was never any paper to explain what had changed. But several people who work with him told me that it was because of my political involvement.”... 

Ai was eventually released from house arrest, and he said he was told the demolition in Shanghai would begin sometime after Chinese New Year, which falls on February 3rd this year. Yesterday, however, he received another call, this time from a neighbor in Shanghai; the demolition had begun without warning. He hopped a plane, and by the time he arrived, the artist in him—he is known, after all, for his gleeful destruction of ancient urns—couldn’t help but be impressed by the speed of the destruction. “They had a very professional demolition team. Two sides, each side had four machines, big machines tearing it down and breaking it. I watched until night came.” He sent photos and videos out over the Web.

With the fortitude of the besieged, Mr Ai has already described the demolition as an ultimate work of art. “Everything is in the past. And we have to look forward,” he said to Mr Osnos with impressive calm. A sanguine attitude with hope for a better future is perhaps the best armour when living in a ruthless and unpredictable place. As Mr Ai told The Economist, 'If you prepare to stay, then you have to fight. There’s no other way. There’s no freedom that will be given by the government, especially this government.'

[From Prospero]

I Can See Her Daughter In This....

[Vintage Photographs]

NOTE: The resemblance in question is between Jayne Mansfield, pictured, and her daughter, Mariska Hargitay, television actress from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Loren and Mansfield

[Vintage Photographs]

Marinetti

[Vintage Photographs]

Hermann Hesse

[From Vintage Photographs]

On Limitless

"... the hero of "Limitless," Eddie Morra, is the only cinematic writer I'm aware of who cures his block pharmaceutically -- the booze that so many of the others resort to is more along the lines of drown-your-sorrows self-medication. Essentially, the drug turns Eddie into what a person suffering from a manic episode only thinks he is: a self-confident superman who picks up a new language in an afternoon and finishes a brilliant novel in four days. (See also: cocaine.) It does this by activating the fabled nine-tenths of the brain that the rest of us purportedly don't use.

What's especially bizarre about this premise is the notion that writer's block can be overcome by an increase in intelligence. (More plausibly, Eddie, once he gets really, really smart, decides to bail on writing books entirely.) " [emphasis added]

[From Salon]

On Quixote

... But doesn’t quixotic threaten to swamp Quixote? Aren’t these words, which get coined in tribute to an author or a book, almost always treacherous? Can all the possibilities and implications of a character, or even—more ambitiously—a life’s work, be contained within the semantic boundaries of just one word? We think of Orwellianas adjectival shorthand for a state apparatus of terror and surveillance, but what if we also took it to mean window-pane clarity of expression or even a marked aversion to the poetry of Stephen Spender? 

In the same way, Don Quixote is not only a cautionary tale about the perils of idealism: among other things, it is also the first great book about books, a visionary parable about the responsibilities of reading and writing fiction that arrived early on in the age of printing. The river feeds into an ocean.

[From the Paris Review]

On Merit

"I’m just a misunderstood poet here in the middle of California. The Paris Review has rejected me twice, and I feel lazy about getting the third. Why is it so hard to get poetry and, well, anything else published? Does that mean that many of us are bad writers? Amateur clowns imitating W. B. Yeats, Kafka, Frank O’Hara, et cetera? Who should I be if I am nothing right now? Will I be somebody if I get published? —Jorge

"As a young editor, Robert Giroux once asked T. S. Eliot whether all editors were not failed poets. 'All poets are failed poets,' said Eliot. And he was Eliot."

[From Paris Review]

Letters From Fukushima: Tepco Worker Emails

"I just wanted people to understand that there are many people fighting under harsh circumstances in the nuclear plants. That is all I want.

Crying is useless. If we’re in hell now all we can do is to crawl up towards heaven." 

".... But everyone here pays respect and has lowered their head to pray for those who are facing the brunt of it and fighting on the front lines surrounded by enemies.

Although I am not in a position to say such a thing, I beg you to hang in there.

What I can do for you is limited. But when the time comes, we will take our turn to protect you all. Without fail."

"I myself have had to stay in the disaster measurement headquarters the entire time ever since the earthquake occurred, and have been fighting alongside my colleagues without any sleep or rest. Personally, my entire hometown, Namie-machi, which is located along the coast, was washed away by the tsunami. My parents were washed away by the tsunami and I still don’t know where they are. Normally I would rush to their house as soon as I could. But I can’t even enter the area because it is under an evacuation order. The Self-Defense Forces are not conducting a search there. I’m engaged in extremely tough work under this kind of mental condition…I can’t take this any more!"

[From WSJ]

Veronica Lake.

From Vintage Photographs

Dance, Dance, Dance

(title unknown):

 "

Miles

[Vintage Photographs]

Sonny Clark

Clark seated at piano backstage at Syria Mosque for Night of Stars event, 1946. Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Heinz Family Fund; © 2004 Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive.

Forty-eight years ago today, the pianist Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark died of a heroin overdose in a shooting gallery somewhere in New York City. He was thirty-one. The previous two nights—January 11 and 12, 1963—he had played piano at Junior’s Bar on the ground floor of the Alvin Hotel on the northwest corner of Fifty-second and Broadway. On Sunday, January 13, the temperature reached thirty-eight degrees in Central Park. 

The next thing we know with certainty is that Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a noted jazz patron, called Clark’s older sister in Pittsburgh to inform her of her brother’s death. Nica, as the baroness was known, said she would pay to have the body transported to his hometown and that she’d pay for a proper funeral. 

What is not known, however, is if the body in the New York City morgue with Clark’s name on it was his. Witnesses in both New York and Pittsburgh (after the body arrived there) believed it wasn’t; they thought it didn’t look like Sonny. Some suspected a conspiracy with the drug underground with which Clark was entangled, but, as African Americans in a white system, they were reticent to discuss the matter. It was probably a simple case of carelessness at the morgue, something not uncommon with “street” deaths at the time, particularly when the corpses were African American. Today, there’s a gravestone with Clark’s name on it in the rural hills outside Pittsburgh, where a body shipped from New York was buried in mid-January of that year. How painful it must have been to stay silent and let a funeral proceed, not knowing for sure where Sonny’s body was. His may be one of the thousands of unidentified ones buried in potter’s field on New York’s Hart Island, where Sonny himself dug graves years earlier, while incarcerated at Riker’s Island on drug charges. 

Read More »

[From Paris Review]

Lovely piece on a great jazz pianist. I might even have the recordings with Grant Green Stephenson's talking about. Like all the commenters, I hope he does do a biography on Clark. There are so many jazz biographies screaming to be written.

AN ARTIST WITHOUT FRONTIERS

From More Intelligent Life:

Gabriel Orozco, Mexico's foremost living artist, has a secret. Though he is celebrated for his “post-studio practice”, associated with sculptures made from found objects and photos taken in the street, it turns out he has a space that many artists would call a studio. Mr Orozco used to lead a nomadic life, but now that his six-year-old son has started school, he's settled into working on the lower ground floor of his New York home, a red brick Greenwich Village townhouse built in 1845. Mr Orozco prefers to see the space as a modest “operating centre”.With contemporary art, mind invariably wins over matter. “For me, it has always been important not to have a studio, not to have a permanent assistant, not to have secretaries,” he explains as he leans back, relaxing into his chair. “The way the work is produced affects the final result—not just the politics, but also the aesthetics. I don't want the responsibility and inertia of a production machine.”

Another interesting profile. The surname caught my attention and then I remembered why: Gabriel is the son of José Clemente Orozco, the muralist painter.

Erin Kaplan Is Leaving Elle [Updated]

After five and a half years as Elle's publicist, including a starring role on MTV's The City, Erin is leaving the magazine for Teen Vogue, she announced in an e-mail to her contacts today. She starts Tuesday and has not said what her title over there will be. Kaplan's television experience — you know, the real behind-the-scenes work in addition to making Olivia Palermo look dopey on camera — must make her an attractive candidate to the many fashion magazines desperate for a hit TV show. And that is something Teen Vogue is working on. Update: Erin tells us her new title at Teen Vogue is senior director of PR. 

[From the Cut]


God bless dear Whitney, but here was the real reason to watch The City, if indeed any at all. The youngest director of public relations at Elle, she gave Olivia hell--and I loved her for every  minute of it. Whether she could have ever achieved what she wanted (Olivia's failure at the magazine)--or whether she was even really aiming for that, given that the "job" was pure fantasy--her contempt was real. And so was mine.

New York Photographs 1968–1978, Paul McDonough

From Paris Review:

"What turned me away from painting was a realization that the streets and parks of Boston provided me with subject matter that I could not conjure up in my studio. At that point, a blank canvas drew nothing but a blank stare. So, with a newly purchased 35mm Leica loaded with tri-x film, I began my forays into downtown Boston to photograph. The kind of photographs I took then related to my art school days, when I would amble around the city making quick pencil sketches of people on park benches and subways.

After roaming around Vermont in the summer of 1964, I decided to move to Cambridge, MA where I took a full-time job in a commercial art studio. I was by this time married to my first wife and our plan was to save up enough to live for a year in Europe. Instead we wound up in New York, arriving by U-Haul in the summer of 1967. Rents were cheap, and we could now get by on my part-time work in advertising studios. I had abundant free time, and I took full advantage of it."

Fantastic photographs: every last one of them. The exhibition is done, but the book's still out there, and I'll be securing a copy soon to take a long, searching look at New York's Lost Decade.

DISCIPLINE WITHOUT PUNISHMENT

From More Intelligent Life:

"Monica Bonvicini, an Italian artist based in Berlin, is best known for her three-dimensional works, particularly those that take on the male-dominated domain of large-scale sculpture. Her acclaimed “Stairway to Hell” (pictured below, 2003) sawed through a ceiling to occupy two floors of the Istanbul Modern, while “She Lies” (pictured at bottom, 2010), a new sculpture made of steel, glass and styrofoam that floats in a fjord in Oslo, rises to a height of three-storeys. When Ms Bonvicini first started making sizeable works, she says that their “hugeness was almost existential”. Now the scale is less about self-assertion than affinity and aptitude—skills which no doubt contributed to her winning one of the art competitions for the Olympic Park in London. The exact form of the public sculpture is still under wraps, but it might very well assume a grand luminosity and involve the word “run”."

Great title for a fascinating profile--I especially like her quotes. I even like the sculptures, seen below:

Law & Order Los Angeles Is Finally Interesting

From Macleans.ca:

"Not for anything that’s happening on the show, mind you. The interesting part is that several cast members have been let go, including the lead, Skeet Ulrich. This is the fun side of Dick Wolf and his status as one of the oldest successful showrunners in U.S. television (well, he’s only 65 this year, but that’s old in the TV world, where 50 is considered over the hill for writers as well as viewers). You might, once in a while, get a very old-school way of shaking up a struggling show: no subtle changes, no fancy arcs to create a re-tool without making it look like one. Instead, three major characters just get kicked out in mid-season and the show keeps going, not even bothering to shut down production while it looks for new people."

What? I totally didn't see this coming. I do think the cast is kind of mess, as well as the show more generally, but there have been a couple of compelling episodes--or at least moments. And my gosh, it's Law & Order, practically an institution in my life.

Dorwan Stoddard, RIP

From National Review:

An overlooked story of heroism

Dorwan Stoddard and his wife, Mavanell, grew up together as friends in Tucson, and were high-school sweethearts in the 1950s. The two parted, moved away, and married others. But 15 years ago, having survived the death of their spouses, the two were reunited -- and then married -- in their hometown.

When Jared Loughner began firing on the crowd gathered around Rep. Gabrielle Gifford at the Safeway supermarket in Tucson on Saturday, Mavanell thought the sounds came from firecrackers. Dorwan knew otherwise and quickly pulled his wife to the ground and threw himself over her. Mavy -- as she is known to her friends -- was hit three times in the legs, and is now in stable condition and expected to survive. Dorwan was shot, fatally, through the head, at the age of 76. Dorwan was memorialized at the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ -- a small Tucson-area church where he and Mavy had worshipped and served -- on Sunday.

Trading his life for his wife’s was Dorwan’s final act, after which he could manage no final words. Rev. Mike Nowak, the pastor of Mountain Avenue Church of Christ, visited Mavy at the University Medical Center, to which she and Dorwan were both rushed, and she spoke about the aftermath of the attack: “She talked to him for ten minutes as he breathed heavily. He never talked back to her.”

In pictures, Dorwan typically wears a bolo tie, a white cowboy hat, and a graying beard, and keeps his arm firmly around his wife. He had retired from a career as a construction worker, and had since freely employed his skills repairing and rebuilding their church. A sign for “Dory’s Room” -- styled after his affectionate nickname -- marks one of his own creations, during the construction of which he fell off a high ladder. Against church members’ expectations, Dorwan survived the fall, but he needed 17 stents.

Dorwan and Mavy led the church’s “benevolence committee,” a group devoted to helping the poor. The Stoddards helped care for sick church members and provided transportation for those who needed it. Several friends and church members praised their work on the committee as Christian charity. The couple didn’t just write checks; they sought out those in need, listened to their problems, and offered their friendship as well as their financial support. Several people stood up at the funeral services to speak of how Dorwan had helped them. Kat Joplin said she had been homeless until the Stoddards helped her and her husband get off the streets, into a motel room, and eventually, onto a payroll. The Joplins even stayed at the Stoddard’s own home for a time.

Friends described Dorwan as an enthusiastic Arizona Wildcats fan, and pictures show Dorwan at the piano at a church picnic.

Nowak said that Mavy credits Dorwan with saving her life, and had joked from her hospital bed that “Dory will never have to worry about another stent again.” Nowak described their relationship for KGU9: “They were inseparable. You saw one and you knew the other one wasn’t far behind. That will be a whole other life for her, so I’m afraid it will hit her harder down the road.”

Dory and Mavy “didn’t write any books. There are no streets named after them. There is no monument to them, but their impact in the community of Tucson will last a lifetime,” Nowak said.

Dorwan Stoddard is survived by two sons, four stepdaughters, and his wife.

--- Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley fellow at the National Review Institute

Like so much from this atrocity, there are no words.