21 January 2012
An exhibit at Tibor deNagy of Elizabeth Bishop‘s art — both her original art and art she collected — reminds me that the creative process is constant. Writing, painting, collecting too – these are all acts of seeing.
I love the inscription of “Happy Birthday” here – no one knows to whom Bishop wrote this, some speculate that she wrote/painted it for herself.
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43 King Street in NYC, where EB lived not too happily (for a year or so, I believe). She was never able to feel at home in New York. ”I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s about right for a poet’s sense of home.”
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EB did not have an easy life — she was adrift, suffered heartbreaks and isolation — but she made her own way, always finding ways to live where she wanted, and how she wanted (Maine, Key West, Brazil) — as an artist. A rare and beautiful thing.
16 January 2012
I worked through most of MLK day, but I did enjoy wandering the Studio Museum of Harlem for an hour or so. It’s a privilege to live in this neighborhood, to partake in its culture, present and past; and I forget it too easily.
I found this photograph utterly arresting and beautiful. I failed to photograph the plaque with the artist’s name, but I’m working on tracking it down.
Kira Lynn Harris‘s homage to Romare Bearden‘s “The Block,” part of the Romare Bearden Project, celebrating the centennial of his birth.
If you’re a New Yorker, be sure to make the trip uptown; if you’re an uptowner, be sure to get over to the Studio Museum sometime if you haven’t. It will be worth your while.
11 January 2012
Two things: an essay and a blog post.
My essay on James Salter, “In the Light Where Art and Longing Meet: My Day With James Salter,” is in the current print issue of Tin House Magazine. I couldn’t be more tickled. The project began almost exactly two years ago(!) — with my piece at The Millions (on sex writing by “great” male writers), a stunning email from JS himself, and an ensuing correspondence over the following year. Other amazing authors in this issue, themed “Beauty” — Marilynne Robinson, Michel Houellebecq, Eric Puchner, Paul Willems, Michelle Widgen, Aimee Bender on artist Amy Cutler, and more.
I also have a blog post, “Living and Learning in Bookstores,” as part of Tin House‘s “Book Clubbing” blog series — wherein I describe the independent bookstores in NYC that I love, and the unassuming bookstore in Seattle where I embarked on my literary education, many lifetimes (although really not that many years) ago. Enjoy!
26 December 2011
Phew — made it.
Every year, during the month that starts at Thanksgiving and ends after Christmas, I feel like an undersized running back at the two yard line (deep in my own team’s territory), working my way down the field. I keep hoping that the quarterback will hail-mary us to the end zone in one gorgeous, painless swoop; but it ends up being more like piecemeal progress, fending off tackles, a little achey and bruisey.
There’s just too much expectation around these holidays. Some of which I feel unable to meet, some of which I am unwilling.
In a few days my homage to Giuseppe di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard will go up at The Millions; and in it I write about how much I sympathize, and even empathize, with Don Fabrizio, the novel’s middle-aged Sicilian protagonist, a Prince circa 1860 no less. What could I possibly have in common with the Prince of Salina during Italy’s Risorgimento? Well, principally this:
I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.
My family life is not conventional enough to conform to holiday expectations; and I suppose I am not (yet) unconventional enough at heart to truly feel free from all those expectations.
Anyhoo — officially, we (if you happen to relate to this) can now come out of hiding. It is okay to be doing non-holiday things — like work, correspondence, etc — without seeming too much like a sad weirdo. Here is a bit of what we did on Dec 25, here in Buenos Aires, Argentina:
Parque de la Memoria (for The Disappeared) — “To Think/Contemplate is a Revolutionary Act”
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Kitschy Nativity Scene, outside Congreso
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Quiet subway platforms — a gathering of tourists mostly!
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Families fishing along the Rio de la Plata
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Football (soccer) stadium, River Plate Team, the rich team (think Yankees)
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In Once (OHNsay) – an immigrant neighborhood centered around a place called Plaza Miserere (yikes) that reminded me of Queens (and not really miserable at all)
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And what did we eat? Leftover Chinese takeout, sauteed gai-laan, leftover peach pie (homemade, by a lovely young expat who hosted us for Christmas eve dinner), and flan from the corner bakery. Whiskey and soda, cheap Malbec. Good stuff.
15 December 2011
Can I just say how much I love the siesta concept, here in Latin America (and many places around the world)?
I’m using mine to catch up on… well, to catch up on everything at this point, but at the moment, catch up on blogs and literary periodicals. From Claire Messud‘s review of Michael Ondaatje‘s new novel, The Cat’s Table:
In a rare, distinctly essayistic moment in his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje articulates his position thus:
Recently I sat in on a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne. He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they: we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves…. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.
This view, almost an authorial ethics of representation, explains some aspects of Ondaatje’s literary style: his prose, while gorgeous, is on occasion quite oblique, and his narratives—as is true of The Cat’s Table—can be strikingly fragmented. (It is wonderful and, in these fundamentally homogenizing times, increasingly rare to encounter a writer who does not shape his art to a known and satisfying form, but instead fashions the form around his content.) His goal is to reach toward that elusive complex we might call experienced human reality, and in so doing, precisely to grant each of his characters his own wisdom and autonomy. In an Ondaatje novel, there is much that we do not directly know, much that we cannot know for certain.
I think often about what it means, in this current cultural moment, to be a “literary” writer; and if that terminology even matters anymore. There is a sense that it doesn’t; that it is an anachronistic, old fuddy-duddy kind of categorization; that you will die in dinosaur-like fashion if you hold too tightly to such high-art ideas. But something about Messud’s description of Ondaatje’s literary vision speaks to what I consider to be literary — to be art — in a way that matters. Uncertainty; unknowability; “experienced human reality” as elusive and complex; ultimately a reading experience that effects some discomfort and reminds us that life is a mysterious, unstreamlined business.
4 November 2011
The Poetry Society of America and NY Botanical Garden present: Poem Forest by Jon Cotner, this weekend and next. Doesn’t this sound great?
Poem Forest
A self-guided walk designed by Jon CotnerNew York Botanical Garden
Thain Forest | Sweetgum Trail 12-4:30 Nov 4-5, 11-12
Poem Forest gives festival visitors a new kind of poetry experience, as well as a new kind of walking experience. Poet-walker Jon Cotner has fused lines selected from 2500 years of nature poetry with Thain Forest’s autumnal landscape. At 15 spots along Sweetgum Trail, visitors will speak, sing, or variously engage with 15 lines that encourage them to see and sense more clearly, to inhabit the present more deeply, and to fill with enchantment over the course of this walking meditation. The original poets who composed the lines are explorers – observers, lovers – of nature. They address us from America and from around the globe: Chile, China, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden.
21 July 2011
This spring I had the great privilege of being interviewed for “James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime,” a new documentary from Checkerboard Films – directed and produced by Sandy Gotham Meehan and Edgar B. Howard, also directed and edited by Tom Piper. It was a pleasure to speak on film about my admiration for Salter’s work.
Others featured in the film include the late Reynolds Price (whose on-camera readings from A Sport and a Pastime are unforgettable), Robert Redford, Nick Antosca, Salter’s daughter Nina Salter (a publisher in Paris), several other editors, writers, and friends, and, of course, Jim Salter himself.
You can purchase the DVD of the film directly from Checkerboard here.
I also had the privilege of attending the film’s premiere back in May. Thanks to Checkerboard’s Executive Director Muffie Dunn for sending along these photos from the event. A most memorable evening…
Greeting Jim Salter
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Listening to Ed Hirsch tell a great story about another Salter admirer, Susan Sontag
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After the screening, with director Ed Howard
9 July 2011
The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) on Cape Cod will be exhibiting the work of my very talented friend and portrait photographer Robin Holland this summer. If you’re in those parts, stop by the opening reception on Friday, July 15, 6-7:30.
Robin’s subjects include American and international independent filmmakers, Oscar- and other award-winning actors, musicians and composers, artists, architects, writers, political activists, journalists, politicians. Check out images on Robin’s amazing web site. The list is too long, but we’re talking everyone from Louise Bourgeois to Edward Albee to Jessica Simpson to Sapphire to Isabelle Huppert to Wong Kar-wai.
Congrats, Robin!
22 May 2011
I’ve been thinking about art that makes you “feel” and art that makes you “think” and the intersection/layering thereof. Your comments please (specific examples especially welcome) on the following, from Susan Sontag‘s 1964 essay on French filmmaker Robert Bresson (a master, in Sontag’s opinion, of “reflective art”):
Some art aims directly arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection.
Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed. […]
In reflective art, the form of the work of art is present in an emphatic way.
The effect of the spectator’s being aware of the form is to elongate or to retard the emotions. For, to the extent that we are conscious of form in a work of art, we become somewhat detached; our emotions do not respond in the same way as they do in real life. Awareness of form does two things simultaneously: it gives a sensuous pleasure independent of the “content,” and it invites the use of intelligence.
