Atticus Lish is seeking a state of flow—what the “positive psychologist” Mihlay Csikszentmihalyi calls the opposite of psychic entropy: negentropy. It can only be achieved while in pursuit of a task for the sake of the task. The good doctor also claims it is the secret to happiness.
In one of the more bizarre stretches of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, the guards who have been presiding over Slahi’s three-year detainment at Gitmo give him the nickname Pillow and inform him that, in turn, they’d like to be called something from the Star Wars movies. The US government has redacted the Star Wars handle his captors wanted Slahi to use when addressing them, but he says it means “the Good Guys.” Perhaps they wanted to be called “the Jedi,” the Zen warrior protagonists in the George Lucas mega-franchise; it’s even more amusing to imagine that they wanted Slahi
What should we call works in which male artists share a meal while listening to themselves talk? I Think You’re Totally Wrong records pieces of conversation between David Shields and his former student Caleb Powell during a four-day trip on which they discuss how to balance writing and living. “It’s an ancient form: two white guys bullshitting,” Shields says, as the two watch movies, drink beer, and hike the mountains above Seattle. “Why are we even doing this?” he adds. “Why aren’t we home with our wives and children?” Questions like these populate the book, as the leading men try
The truth is out there. You can’t miss it, in fact—it’s everywhere. But even as we embrace the twenty-four-hour confession cycle of social media, the popularity, and subsequent disparagement, of the memoir reveals our (true) mixed feelings about true stories. We might be lured into tales of harrowing childhoods or devastating divorces, but our internal machinery will monitor the narratives based on the same arbitrary rubrics that guard our own personal revelations (or lack thereof): Is the author honest about his motives? Are her experiences exotic enough to teach us something new? Does he learn a great big lesson at
Clancy Martin first proposed to Amie Barrodale, his third wife, outside a New York Barneys, ten days after they’d met and just after buying her a $525 Pamela Love bracelet that she’d requested for her birthday. Martin was less rich than Amie had fancied, but he was willing to spend. Later he proposed again, at a Mexican restaurant, with one eye on the bar (alcohol was a love with a longer history). On a Kansas City sidewalk he proposed a third time. Amie said yes on every occasion. They decamped to India to be married by her guru, and there—either
Perhaps you have wondered (and who hasn’t?) what sort of memoir Bob Ewell, redneck villain of To Kill a Mockingbird, might have written about his life of attempted child-murder and successful child-beating, drunkenness, perjury, and poaching after a long course of education in Juvenalian satire and Ciceronian rhetoric? Or what Jonathan Swift or perhaps Renfield, the “zoophagus maniac” in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, might have become had one of them ripened to manhood in the 1970s on the kudzu and rat-rich red clay of Goochland County, Virginia?
Joan Baez once observed of Bob Dylan’s music that it either left you indifferent or went “way, way deep.” A similar claim, on a far lesser scale of renown, could be made for Nick Drake, the English singer-songwriter who produced three exquisite but largely unnoticed albums between 1969 and 1972, sank into depression, and died of a prescription-drug overdose in 1974. Until his rediscovery a little over a decade ago, his music remained the preserve of the happy few, revered by those who had found their way to it and ignored by everyone else. Even now, a compendium of Drake
Last year’s museum-quality Ad Reinhardt show at the David Zwirner gallery, complete with an atrium devoted to Reinhardt’s career-capping black canvases, prompted the thought that this cantankerous art-world maverick might be the quintessential mid-twentieth-century American painter.
Carl Van Vechten was, by the late 1920s, “the nation’s unrivaled expert on the Negro, the man who had unveiled to the world the remarkable truth about the United States’ hidden artistic genius.” He was also one of New York City’s great narcissists. And he managed to distinguish himself even within this self-enamored group by carefully crafting his image for posterity—hoarding great stockpiles of material related to himself and feeding them to Yale and to the New York Public Library. So he is recognized as the connective tissue between Lincoln Kirstein and Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes and the Fitzgeralds
Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A RETROSPECTIVE OF COMICS, GRAPHICS, AND SCRAPS (Drawn & Quarterly, $40) reveals the busy creative mind behind Maus, Spiegelman’s masterstroke, completed in 1991, in which he used the despised, adolescent, “Jewish” entertainment of the comic strip to explore his relationship with his parents and their experience of the Holocaust. Co-Mix echoes that strategy, performing the jujitsu flip of mimicking a high-art exhibition catalogue in the quintessential low-art medium of comics. Compulsively self-reflexive, the book convincingly makes the case for comics as the ultimate postmodern art form. With a smart introduction by J. Hoberman, the book spans Spiegelman’s
Lutz Bacher, Horse/Shadow, 2010–12, plywood, paint, ribbon, horsehair, pedestal with motor, lights, 78 x 36 x 1/4″. HOW DOES a contemporary artist take on the cosmic? Last year, Lutz Bacher dumped hundreds of pounds of smashed coal slag onto the floor of a darkened exhibition hall. She then planted black television sets and shattered mirrors […]
In his first purely autobiographical work, My Lives (2006), amid chapters titled “My Mother” and “My Friends” and “My Master,” Edmund White nestled “My Europe,” a bit overpromising in its scope since for practical purposes it was the story of the time he spent in France. White moved to Paris at age forty-three in the summer of 1983, a newly minted literary celebrity on the strength of his novel A Boy’s Own Story. By the time he returned permanently to the States fifteen years later, the sun had more or less set on Paris as the desired destination of young
Two rather astute voices were in my ear as I read Megan Hustad’s beautiful but ultimately unsatisfying new memoir: that of the “worker in song” who’s giving Leonard Cohen head in the Chelsea Hotel; and that of Joan Didion, circa Slouching Towards Bethlehem, who delivers a characteristically morbid appraisal of herself, and the rest of us, in “On Self-Respect.”
German by the grace of Goethe: A century ago, this formulation served, for many German Jews, as a kind of motto. Never mind that, like so many progressive reforms in Germany, full emancipation of the Jews had been a top-down affair, pushed through by Otto von Bismarck without much pressure from below. The idea was that the Jews had the liberal tradition in German culture—which Goethe best embodied—to thank for their enfranchisement. And this faith was bolstered by the allied sense that Jews had acquired their Germanness through their mastery of canonical German culture—again best represented by Goethe.
Forrest Bess, Dedication to Van Gogh, 1946, oil on canvas, 15 5/8 x 17 5/8 x 1 3/8″. In a 1948 letter to art critic Meyer Schapiro, Forrest Bess introduced himself as a “painter-fisherman.” Over the course of their correspondence (as well as in an exchange with art dealer Betty Parsons), Bess detailed the elaborate […]
Beatles enthusiasts, like Dylan fans, seem especially susceptible to what could be called Mystical Completism—the belief that each newly discovered document, each unpublished photo, each additional outtake, represents another step along the path to ultimate enlightenment. As a pursuit, it acknowledges the forest—the variety of approaches from which the band’s chroniclers have come at their boundless subject—but much prefers the trees, those excavated documents and outtakes, over the critical or purely metaphysical.
Early in Noah Isenberg’s biography of the legendary filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer—ultimate auteur of the desperate, no-budget, seventy-minute feature, the proverbial Eisenstein of Poverty Row—the author plucks the phrase “fever swamp” from one of the director’s later efforts, a purple western called The Naked Dawn (1955). The farther Isenberg dives into the blissfully cursed recesses of that swamp, the more Ulmer’s career seems like a perverse figment of a cigar-chomping imp’s imagination. It might have sprung fully deformed from an unproduced Coen brothers script (The Amazing Transparent Director) or lost chapters from Kafka’s Amerika.
IN THE WORK of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the shortest distances are often also the greatest: The space between self and other can be maddeningly difficult to traverse. Full of magical transformations, ritual sacrifices, and turbulent prophetic dreams, Cortázar’s writing abounds with troubled pairings, unlikely and uneasy doppelgängers who come apart even as—especially as—they converge. In one of his stories, “The Distances,” a wealthy Argentine woman dreams repeatedly of a Hungarian peasant. When she finally encounters the object of her visions on a bridge in Budapest, she embraces the woman and watches, helpless, as her double walks off in
Back in the mid-1990s a marine public-information officer took me into a secret watering hole at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, that served as a private clubhouse for snipers. There was, however, one key condition: Nothing I saw and heard there could be used in a piece I was then writing for the Washington Post Magazine. […]
Reviewing is easy, but history can be hard. I mean that Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid. But Vidal himself, two years after his death, poses more of a challenge. Was his accomplishment literary, finally? Or does he owe his status more to his public persona, and his gifts as a well-spoken cultural gadfly? Such celebrity carries its own weight, to be sure; most writers would gladly give up a masterpiece for a fraction of Vidal’s fame. Nonetheless, the nature of that fame ought to be examined,
