Neither the restlessness of the surf,
nor the deserted shifting sands,
nor the obscene bodies of women
sated our yearning.
We forgot the pose of untroubled calm,
sang death, sang dearth, sang lies, sang harm,
equated remembrance with pretense,
that’s why we’re burning.
–Alexander Vvedensky, Elegy
The final poem of the only volume of Russian poet Alexander Vvedensky’s work in English, Elegy conceals its dagger behind a cloak of ambiguity. An elegy for the avant-garde before, during, and after the Five-Year Plan that ruined lives and “centralized” art under the aegis of realism, the poem walks a tightrope pitched between the abandon of radical writing and its deadly repercussions. Not only did Vvedensky’s friends and fellow artists forget “the pose of untroubled calm,” they pushed their art further by equating “remembrance with pretense.” Could remembrance here be the 19th century-style realism practicing writers were literally forced to emulate? The final line of the stanza is crushing. “That’s why we’re burning.” Burning to create, burning alive.
Clearly we owe a debt of gratitude to the NYRB/Poets series for bringing An Invitation for Me to Think into the world.
—Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon
David Byrne is interviewing himself, and it would be wise to watch the hairdos. For a few months now I’ve been coasting in the Talking Heads frontman’s frenetic groove, and this clip, set up like the ‘argument’ to their concert-film Stop Making Sense, effectively doubles over and explodes the tropes of every daytime talking head. Such is the brilliance of Byrne: he toys with careening personalities, while he himself (at least posing as himself) sits up straight, as strong as a billboard. And so we look up and wonder how much can be said by forsaking a suit that fits for a more suitable fit, and wait for the reassuring wink only to be met with his uncannily deadpan gaze: there’s no easy way to get in on this joke, we might better conjure up our own.
This is what draws me to Byrne: he is the rollicking materialist, preoccupied with all of these countless things around us, with our poses and gestures and our ever-strange costumes, and rather than dispelling the ridiculous spectacle, he takes it up and makes it his own, giving the audience simply a more suitable simulacrum. His materiality is never dry, but always brimming with contingency, with potential recomposition, and his irony-drive is acerbic: after this, how could you possibly watch any basic interview without some wry smile crouching in the back of your mind?
—Thomas Sliwowski
“…there was nothing I could say. I had already done what, in Bacon County, was unthinkable. I had cursed the sun. And in Bacon County you don’t curse the sun or the rain or the land or God. They are all the same thing. To curse any of them is an ultimate blasphemy. I had known that three years ago, but in three years I had somehow managed to forget it. I stood there feeling how much I had left this place and these people, and at the same time knowing that it would be forever impossible to leave them completely. Wherever I might go in the world, they would go with me.”
New York has been my home now for the better part of six years, but it will never really be my “home.” When the seasons are in shift like they are right now, I feel the call of the Great Lakes and desire to watch the changes around them. When the ice finally melts on the deepest surfaces of the lake, and the trees seem to bloom over night, and the days become increasingly warmer to the point where it doesn’t matter that the water is still cold from winter, there is this primordial pull telling its onlookers it’s time to dive in.
Lately, this seasonal nostalgia has reminded me of Harry Crews, a writer who is able to hold himself at that perfect distance (emotionally and physical) in order to write about “home.” It’s been one year now since the death of Harry Crews. It’s been about two years since I first read A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. I still find myself going back to his memoir, rereading it or searching for those passages that seem to hit me at random moments, like a rock on a windshield. His ability to honestly and eloquently write about himself and his childhood home feels so real, so beautiful that it leaves me restlessly excited about the idea of eventually returning to Michigan and the Midwest to physically revel in my own childhood nostalgia.
—Lisa John Rogers
A man stands alone on an empty stage. The set has been dismantled, the overhead lights turned on. He looks upwards, slowly, with a foreboding gaze. A brief moment of silence and then heavy chains crash down from the rafters above. Black out.
This haunting image serves as the ending of Jack O’Brien’s production of Douglas Carter Beane’s The Nance—an expertly crafted play marking Tony award-winner Nathan Lane’s return to the Broadway stage for the first time in two years.
Like Cabaret, The Nance uses the charming artifice of burlesque performance within the play to heighten the eerie disconnect between the safe dreamworld of theater and the reality beyond the stage—in this case, the discrimination against homosexuals in New York City in the 1930s. The play dances flawlessly between the worlds on and off the burlesque stage, and achieves one of theater’s lofty and gratifying feats—toeing the delicate line between the comic and the tragic such that Nathan Lane’s line, uttered in the midst of a lively party, that “it’d all be so tragic if it weren’t so comical” resounds with absolute precision and heartbreaking truth.
—Elianna Kan
In “Pathetic Fallacy,” a collection of graphite drawings, Anthony Goicolea investigates our tendency to anthropomorphize animals and nature. In his artist statement (itself worth a good ponder), he observes that “Nature is economical in the structures it uses: vascular forms repeat in bundles of nerves, blood vessels and rivers when seen from above.” Is it simply this similarity between structures that makes it so easy to endow Nature with our qualities? We readily imagine trees uprooting themselves and roving as bipeds, but Goicolea shows us what this would really mean—in “Sticks and Bones,” Goicolea illustrates an anatomical diagram of a tree with a spinal cord, alongside broken branches shaped like bones. How rare is it that a Gothic image also feels fresh?
—Alyssa Loh