Unknown couple holding a daguerreotype, c. 1850
Speculating Daguerre: Art & Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre, which includes the first-ever catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print—welcome to the world.
Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler at their Provincetown studio, c. 1960.
“For Motherwell, getting to the point where everything in a given work was “just right” involved ridding it of an array of unacceptable elements. While collage—which is usually thought of in terms of vastly expanding the range of what is possible to includein a work—may seem a strange choice of strategies, it offered him an eminently practical way to proceed. The series of mistakes and crimes that Motherwell claimed went into any given painting required an almost continuous process of decisions about what to leave and what to delete, and how to coordinate and relate all that remained. It required him to be, in other words, an editor, “revising and revising and revising.”—Catherine Craft, from An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism
“To recur to my ghostly frame of reference, we can say that Janeism in its past as well as its current forms allows us to foreclose the gap between Austen’s time and our own, between the dead and the living, the fictional and the real, and to occupy Austen’s novels as they are—not were—lived, in an eternal present, where they commune with her familiarly.”—from Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of the Avant-Garde Photomontage coming soon.
— Barry Wightman, editor of Hunger Mountain, in the Washington Independent Review of Books
It’s impossible to pick a representative interview from the hundreds conducted by Studs Terkel in his lifetime, but this clip from 1961 with James Baldwin, and its opening—Bessie Smith’s Back Water Blues, which Baldwin remarks inspired his “forthcoming novel” (Another Country)—is good enough to take your breath away.
***
“I love thee, infamous city!”
Baudelaire’s perverse ode to Paris is reflected in Nelson Algren’s bardic salute to Chicago. No matter how you read it, aloud or to yourself, it is indubitably a love song. It sings, Chicago style: a haunting, split-hearted ballad.
Perhaps Ross Macdonald said it best: “Algren’s hell burns with a passion for heaven.” In this slender classic, first published in 1951 and, ever since, bounced around like a ping-pong ball, Algren tells us all we need to know about passion, heaven, hell. And a city.
He recognized Chicago as Hustler Town from its first prairie morning as the city’s fathers hustled the Pottawattomies down to their last moccasin. He recognized it, too, as another place: North Star to Jane Addams as to Al Capone, to John Peter Altgeld as to Richard J. Daley, to Clarence Darrow as to Julius Hoffman. He saw it not so much as Janus-faced but as the carny freak show’s two-headed boy, one noggin Neanderthal, the other noble-browed. You see, Nelson Algren was a street-corner comic as well as a poet.
He may have been the funniest man around. Which is another way of saying he may have been the most serious. At a time when pimpery, licksplittery and picking the poor man’s pocket have become the order of the day—indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue—the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.
Unlike Father William, Algren did not stand on his head. Nor did he balance an eel on his nose. He just shuffled along, tap dancing now and then. His appearance was that of a horse player who had just heard the news: he had bet her across the board and she’d come in a strong fourth. Yet, strangely, his was not a mournful mien. He was forever chuckling to himself and you wondered. You’d think he was the blue-eyed winner rather than the brown-eyed loser. That’s what was so funny about him. He did win.
A hunch: his writings may be read, aloud and to yourself, long after acclaimed works of Academe’s darlings, yellowed on coffee tables, have been replaced by acclaimed works of other Academe’s darlings. To call on a Lillian Hellman phrase, he was not a “a kid of the moment.” For in the spirit of a Zola or a Villon, he has captured a piece of that life behind the billboards. Some comic, that man.
At a time when our values are unprecedentedly upside-down—when Bob Hope, a humorless millionaire, is regarded as a funny man while a genuinely funny man, a tent show Toby, is regarded as our president—Algren may be remembered as something of a Gavroche, the gamin who saw through it all, with an admixture of innocence and wisdom. And indignation.
—excerpted from Terkel’s Introduction (originally penned in 1982) to the Sixtieth-Anniversary Edition of Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make
STUDS TERKEL (1912–2008)
“As early as the 15th century paradigm meant a pattern, a model, an example or a typical instance of something. Before Kuhn, however, it was just a term in dictionaries, languishing in obscurity. Kuhn made it a star among words. He surrounded it with glamour and an unprecedented density of importance.”
—
Probably the only time a quotation involving the phrase “testicle fortitude,” referred even tangentially to one of our books. In this case, though, it’s worthy.
Let us now praise the “fortitude” of Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity; no, John Jeremiah Sullivan did not make up this episode.
In which we continue to promote The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine by considering what exists outside its daunting canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century giants. Part I here.
Oh, Mari’bn: You’re kiddins
Our remix of Anne Carson’s “A Detail from the Tomb of the Diver (Paestum 500–453 BC) Second Detail” (after a reading of Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, in which we channel Caroline Bergvall and Tan Lin)
A Dtret rnou rrn Tolas or rHE dr,ER
(PAiliruM
Joo-451
BC) SEcoND DrTdr
Art..tr Ccx-soN
Swinhine at noon alwaF ftninds me
-Fn,@
s,tug
The Eruscos: true you blue, MaritFrl
lou rc btuc?
MarnJyn: Co undervr aLer.
The Etruscans: Wlry?
Maribn: Slowwortd, I like thar
The Etruscms: Slow bodies?
Mrlp: Bodes pulled amond by faces.
The Etruscans: Momentary faces.
Marilyn: Acutally, alldle same face.
The Etruscans: Irigfi renhs? Seduftive?
Marilyn: No. Sr.-nge. Beautitul.
The Eduscans: Odd son ofbeauty.
Mrill,n: Uke r new brasie.e
The E*uscans: Or a ery u$al erb.
Ma.itp: Wharl.
The Etruscals: For insraace the verb !s,.
Madbn: I didn’t know
is,was a ve$.
The Etruscans: What did you ftrink it was?
Marilp: A light for dre otho verbs.
The Eo-uscds: tn wrinen Cuuscd ( s rhe only vcrb
we hare.
Mdilyr: You’re kiddins.
Th{ Emiscansi:
ts,Ms. hasbeen. had beerl wilt be. mish t be.
shou.ld be, ro bc. to tuve been-
ro oe aDour ro have been. being. beins abour ro
be. And of (-oure de nesarives
of rhese.
Mmjn: no$ do you gf| maried orgo ro Lhc beach?
I ne Luuscans: we do such rhng5,
iusr done, rwrite abour rem.
Marnllrr: No novelsJ no scre.npla}s?
The Druscms: No lircracure.
Deciphernent ol Lineat x
Marilyn: Why bother wirh witing ar all theD?
The Etruscms: Itn needed on tonbsrones.
Marib’n: Oh I see.
The Ernscds: Now therek a slow world-
Marilyn: You gor that right.
The Etnscms: Now you’re sad asair
Mdlyn: No
just
thinling. My pain self etc.
The Etruscms: If,s choses derriere les choses.
Maril1rr: l
sres.
The Etmscas: Getting colder now.
Mdilln: Time to go in.
The Etrusans: And tomorow?
Mril)n: Tomorrow wil cdtainly be.
The Etruscans: You are very tunnv.
Mdi\r: So I’mtold.
ETissure 32: Anothcr rin{r x sire.
The Open Door doesn’t anthologize this. But it does anthologize all of this. Coming September 2012.
So much Hemingway, so little time. So little Hemingway, so much time? Something about little—not literal size; something about Hemingway—Hemingway and… . Hemingway and… . Hemingway and … Gellhorn?
James Gandolfini—indomitable analysand and crime boss Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, Patricia Arquette-beating goon Virgil in True Romance, and producer of more than one documentary on war veterans for HBO—signed on in June 2010 to serve as executive producer of a then-untitled biopic centered around Ernest Hemingway’s sojourn during the Spanish Civil War with Collier’s Weekly correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Fast forward to 2012: the film Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, and directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, Henry & June), will premiere on HBO on May 28th. Another tough-guy with a (tortured) pen of gold tale? Not quite.
Martha Gellhorn married Hemingway in December 1940, after the pair lived together off-and-on for four years, which the movie charts from an initial holiday encounter in 1936 Key West. Beginning with those early contributions to Collier’s, Gellhorn followed reportage during Franco’s protracted war with the Spanish government with a trip to Germany that chronicled Hitler’s rise, before she moved on to Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and the UK, among other locales, alongside the unfolding of World War II. She witnessed D-Day on Normandy Beach without a set of press credentials, posing as an impromptu medic, though Hemingway had earlier tried to block her flights to the Italian Front and later France, delivering the oft-cited line:
“Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?”
Gellhorn was perhaps a badass at both pursuits (She demurs, “I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”), but definitely the former. A lifelong leftist, after she divorced Hemingway in 1945, she went on to cover wars in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Central America, penning nearly twenty books, and making her home in more than nineteen international locations before her death by self-inflicted overdose at the age of 89 in 1998.
One of those books is A Stricken Field, which fictionalizes a journalist’s return to Prague after its annexation (1938), in a narrative voice both frustrating and futile, as the main character struggles to assist its refugees and make sense of the once-proud democracy’s difficult plight under the Gestapo. Here, Gellhorn’s voice is both clear and forceful, more reliant on journalistic observation and political reflection than Hemingway’s staccato figures of speech, but still shaped by the years they overlapped as lovers and correspondents to war and second-wave modernism. In many ways A Stricken Field is a fine follow-up to Hemingway & Gellhorn, showcasing Gellhorn at the height of her powers, self-helming a fictionalization of her life as a correspondent under critical regime changes and conditions of duress.
No comment on Nicole Kidman (the vehement atheist Gellhorn, who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, wrote a NOVEL about McCarthyism, and slept with a Major General on Hemingway’s watch might have reason to turn over about that particular casting choice).
