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]