Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The New Yorker electronically rejected my electronic submission thus: We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material, in spite of its evident merit. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it. Best, The Editors Should I take consolation from the phrase "evident merit"? Or is this what they write on all their rejections? * Watched another play-turned-into-film yesterday. Unlike Doubt , however, Proof shows fewer signs of its theatrical origin. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn, who also wrote the screenplay. The film, directed by John Madden, is about genius and its anxieties. But it is so much more. It is about the responsibility and heartache of taking care of a crazy parent. It is about detaching one's identity and work from a famous and loved parent, and how that detachment feels like killing him. Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis and Jake Gyllenhaal gave strong performances. In thinking about D...

TNY May 18, 2009 from "Slang-Whanger" by Arthur Krystal on William Hazlitt: When discussing Shakespeare's Coriolanus , Hazlitt examined the nature of poetry itself: The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. . . . The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. . . . Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right. A lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild assess is a more poetical object than they; and we even take part with the lordly beast, because our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to place ourselves in the situation of the strongest party. Hazlitt's words ring true to my ears. The lure of power is what draws me to poetry. Recognizing this is a ne...

TNY May 8, 2009 from "Back to Basics" by Adam Kirsch on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Kirsch criticizes Paul Mariani's new Hopkins biography for not acknowledging that what made Hopkins unhappy (as well as happy) was "his religion--or, more precisely, the self-tormenting spirit in which he approached his religion." "Self-tormenting" is both more precise and more obfuscating. Yes, in damning his own poetic ambitions and achievements, Hopkins was extreme. But he did not torment himself by having homosexual desire. His religion, the homophobic form of Catholicism he believed in, tormented him.  And Kirsch refuses to make the smallest reference to the poet's homosexuality, though he alludes to it, perhaps, by comparing Hopkins and Whitman. Quoted by Kirsch, Hopkins' letter to Robert Bridges is sad for its internalized homophobia. Bridges had commented that Hopkins' poem "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" reminded him of Whitman. Hopkins r...

TNY March 30, 2009 from Paul Goldberger's article on Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) "All He Surveyed": Palladio was born in Padua and grew up in Vicenza. He was trained as a stonemason, but his potential must have been clear, because he had a knack for finding mentors. * . . . he essentially invented the modern architectural career. The "Four Books [of Architecture]," which Palladio published in 1570, when he was in his sixties, is not just a book of rules and standards but also the first architectural monograph. Palladio included a portfolio of his own work, which disseminated his ideas and made his buildings more famous than anyone else's.  * Yet the tradition of reverence that has sprung up around Palladio's work is in danger of obscuring its humbler but more interesting features. Since many villas were not only aristocratic retreats but also working farms, he made specific recommendations about where to place granaries, haylofts, quarters for animals, a...

TNY, March 2, 2009 from Ariel Levy's "Lesbian Nation": The lesbian separatists of a generation ago created a shadow society devoted to living in an alternate, penisless reality. There were many factions: the Gutter Dykes, in Berkeley; the Gorgons, in Seattle; several hundred Radicalesbians, in New York City, along with the smaller CLIT Collective; the Furies, in Washington, D. C.; and the Separatists Enraged Proud and Strong (SEPS), in San Francisco. There were outposts of Women's Land all over the United States and Canada--places owned by women where all women, and only women, were welcome. "Only women on the land" was the catchphrase used by separatists to indicate that men, even male children, were banned from Women's Land (and they often spelled it "wimmin" or "womyn," in an attempt to keep men out of their words as well as their worlds. More .  * from Gary Giddins' article "A Passage to India" about jazz musican Rud...

TNY Feb 9 & 16, 2009 from Claudia Roth Pierpont's article "Another Country" on James Baldwin: Feeling more than usually restless, James Baldwin flew from New York to Paris in the late late summer of 1961, and from there to Israel. Then, rather than proceed as he had planned to Africa--a part of the world he was not ready to confront--he decided to visit a friend in Istanbul. * It is an incongruous image, the black American writer in Istanbul, but Baldwin returned to the city many time during the next ten years, making it a second or third not-quite-home. . . . Istanbul was unlike any place Baldwin had been before and, more to the point, unlike the places that had defined both the color of his skin and his sexuality as shameful problems. Whatever Turkey's history of prejudice, divisions there did not have an automatic black/white racial cast. . . . In fact, during his first days in the city, he was nearly giddy at the sight of men in the street openly holding hands...

The New Yorker, January 12, 2009 from Adam Kirsch's article on Hannah Arendt, "Beware of Pity": When she came to write about Rahel's [Rahel Varnhagen's] life, then, Arendt brought to it a passion and a personal commitment born of her own experience. No one could have believed more seriously than Rahel in the cultivation of the spirit. Yet to Arendt she appears as merely the victim of a terrible illusion--"the hapless human being, the shlemihl , who has anticipated nothing." The lesson that Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community. * As she wrote in 1941, "One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the...

The New Yorker , December 22 & 29, 2008 Peter Schjeldahl writes on the Dumas exhibition at the MoMA: There is a heaviness to the paintings of the South African-born, Dutch-based artist Marlene Dumas, as if they might fall off the wall and break the floor. And yet they are thinly brushed, for the most part, on ordinary canvases. There's a flypaper stickiness about them, too, though their usual surface is matte and dry. The impressions are emotional. * Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work's authority. She doesn't give; she takes. * [Of "Stern" (2004), based on Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977" (1988), itself in turn based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof militants] she drags the drama of a particularly haunting tragedy back to the secondhandedness of the photograph from the thirdhandedness of Richter's painting. By this and analogous uses of imagination, Dumas suggests, a li...

The New Yorker , December 15, 2008 Of Bernstein conducting Mahler's Second Symphony, the "Resurrection," Ross writes: At the climax of the first movement, the brass unleash militant chords that turn fearsomely dissonant, while a scale grinds downward in the remainder of the orchestra. The sequence ends with a violently plunging octave figure. I remember Bernstein flinging down his arms to produce it. On the recording, you can hear the echo sail down the nave of the cathedral, like a hammer thrown with enormous force. The moment exemplifies Bernstein's ability to render almost any abstract sequence of notes or chords as a physical act, a sweatily human gesture. . . .  The American gesture. American Expressionism. Abstraction as a physical act, a "sweatily human gesture." * Of Bernstein's democratic taste and global syntax: In childhood, Bernstein was an omnivorous consumer of music, blissfully unaware of the distinctions between high and low, elite and po...