The New York Times – My Own RE:public

On the lost art of mastering disaster

Again, in one fell swoop, all my petty irritations with The New York Times dissipated into nothingness with this interactive interpretation of Elizabeth Bishop’s much celebrated 1976 poem, “One Art” – a well put together analytical piece from the NYT critics, Parul Sehgal and Dwight Garner, enhanced through referencing Bishop’s drafts and an exposition of the poet’s methodology.

Elizabeth Bishop builds her poem with the consummate skill of one who has honed her craft; working up from a very concrete foundation – the loss of an object, keys perhaps – to that of the more transient – some place, be it near, like one’s home or the greater space that surrounds. And always lurking; pesky, ephemeral time – taken, wasted, forever lost, and so done in the interest of another loss. Loss multiplied, if you will.

Beginning with generalization, her distanced voice evolves into a personal address, and in the last stanza, a much more intimate loss is revealed – that of one loved. Has the lyrical self convinced one own self that such a loss can be conquered by rational means, as those others have been before? She doesn’t say, but as the poem concludes it’s to be supposed she is working on it still – mastering this art of losing.

And maybe she never succeeded in doing so, but Elizabeth Bishop certainly mastered the art of the villanelle; a composition form that she only used on this one occasion. Long live the villanelle!

Should the NYT not deem to let you in: Whilst very much copyrighted of course, “One Art” is available to be read all over the place, including here at the Poetry Foundation, along with a further selection of her works – me, I’ve always especially loved “At the Fishhouses”.

I herewith remind myself of a still outstanding book recommendation, given to me quite some time ago: “On Elizabeth Bishop” (Princeton University Press, 2015), an introduction to the life and work of this great American poet by the wonderful Irish writer, Colm Tóibín.

The Book Review (2) – The Podcast

As The Book Review looks back over a 125 year history, an accompanying podcast does so of its own modest 15 years, and with fifteen favourites. The Review editor and podcast host, Pamela Paul, admits the difficulty in culling down her selection to an acceptable level, and provides some brief and succinct notes of recommendation.

For me; some that are mentioned were caught in a timely way and some missed, some naturally interest more than others; but certainly there is something to be learnt from all. Given that, as I write, I am in the midst of Caste and fairly recently read The Warmth of Other Suns, I especially appreciate Isabel Wilkerson speaking in 2018 on her own work and Michelle Obama’s memoir and the Great Migration – one of those missed, and which is now very relevant to some of my reading projects.

The Book Review (1): Passing review

This year The New York Times Book Review celebrates 125 years of doing just that which its title suggests. During that time, one may imagine it has made and broken enough writers, made many a reader’s heart beat faster, and some to break – over person or product of passion. Enough books lauded, quickly to be relegated to obscurity; some dismissed – or simply missed – now with a place in the realm of classic; but often simply the right words found at the right time – by reviewer and reviewed alike.

There are probably reasons not to have a NYT subscription, but an interactive pieces like this, which in tracing the years of the Book Review also, by the by, passes review on the changing cultural parade of a whole century plus some years more, and Paral Sehgal’s essay “Reviewing the Book Review”, are not amongst them!

There will surely be much more to look forward to during the year as The Review dives into its archives and appraises its history, and considers its role in the complicated literary and cultural present and in the ensuing years.

Klein writ large

To continue the thread. Carol King was born Carol Joan Klein. Such is the train of my thoughts: the squint of an eye to thread through another. To where does this lead, what awaits at eye’s other end? Another Klein has been on my mind.

Off the top of my head, I can’t quite remember when and where I first encountered stuff from the young Ezra Klein; but it was certainly pre-Obama, therefore before he migrated to The American Prospect at the end of 2008, and he was most certainly one of the most interesting (and youngest!) of the first generation of political bloggers. Always on my radar, through his tenure at the Washington Post to the founding (with others) of Vox, and last November brought news of his hiring by The New York Times.

And so it is that I have a new must read to add to my fluctuating (some have been known to fall out of favour!) list, and to date it has absolutely not disappointed. Already, some really excellent pieces focusing on the dangers ahead; from Covid-19 variants, for the Democrats should they rest on their laurels, should the failing political system and specifically the Senate not be reformed. Klein’s critical reflection on the problems (and liberal failings) crippling his home state of California is a highlight. Beyond the weekly opinion pieces, there is a twice weekly podcast (with full transcripts) that appear to be related and, after only a few weeks a wonderful mix of guests; including his Opinion desk colleague, Paul Krugman. Unafraid to go beyond his comfort zone, his talk with Yuval Levin about the future of the GOP is a master-class in intelligent, respectful conversation with those not of one’s own political persuasion. You may say they are peddling their wares (both have newly released, and big-time talked about books), but I could have listened all day to what Elizabeth Kolbert and Heather McGhee had to say. Only because it is the most recent, below is the conversation with the latter on Spotify, from whence the earlier episodes can be navigated to.

Ezra Klein talks with Heather McGhee on his NYT podcast

Returning to where I began, Ezra’s Typepad blog from the mid-noughties is still to be found out there on everyone’s favourite “forget nothing” machine (not to mention this foodie blog that he participated in – I even remember that!), and now I am fairly sure it was there that I began reading his earnest, geeky, political junkie commentary (and that of others – the Blogroll is like a blast from the past!), and which comes to an end in the year 2008 and Klein’s move to The American Prospect. What followed from then on seems to have been a career mostly in the ascendant. Half his luck, I say. The “good life” well earned. I’ve always found Ezra (everyone calls him Ezra!) to be an extraordinarily intelligent and thoughtful young man, and will enjoy accompanying him into his middle-age at NYT, just as I slink into the much older version. (Though I do note he doesn’t seem to stay in one place for too long!)

More than nostalgia

In these frenetic days, in which so much stuff, and so much more unsavoury stuff, is endlessly being thrown around, The New York Times has resorted to viral videos and the nostalgia of the urban snowball fight of yore. Not exactly today’s weapon of choice on the streets of Lyon or anywhere else I would suggest. So were my first thoughts…

Auguste & Louis Lumière: Snowball Fight (1897)

But, the author of the article, Sam Anderson, manages to retrieve his piece from my harsh verdict; both with some very nice observations and imagined narrative of the content, but more importantly with his reflections on our complicated relationship with the past and our exaggerated sense of the importance and uniqueness of our present.

…On an intellectual level, we all understand that historical people were basically just like us. […]They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.

[…] to watch this snowball fight, to see these people so alive, is a precious gift of perspective. We are them. They are us. We, too, will disappear. […] We are not unique. We move in the historical flow. The current moment will melt away like snow crust on a moustache…
Sam Anderson, in “The New York Times Magazine“, Nov. 5 2020

The original black and white version included in the Lumière catalogue can be found here. On a technical level, the colorisation and a smoothing process makes the participants, indeed, look more like us – which of course they really did. This was something I actually thought about quite a lot a couple of years ago on seeing some excerpts from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary film he made in remembrance of the end of the First World War, and in which he took archive footage from the time and, with all the technical wizardry available to him, transformed the subjects from blurred images of long ago to (mostly) young men who one may very well come across today – on the bus, at the pub or football, or most anywhere. I remember thinking, irrespective of the objections raised by purists, the familiar visages that were exposed with such technical finesse do create a powerful bridge between all the years of the century passed. Again – they were just like us! Beyond that of community and comradeship, there is little comparison between the respective fights on the winter streets of Lyon and on the fields and in the trenches of the Somme, but what they do share, are the threads of time that bind each inextricably with our present and all the presents to come.

NYT Book Review: Sylvia again!

Not Sylvia again? What more is to be said? Daphne Merkin rhetorically asks of herself. And in her review of Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is more than pleasantly surprised; in fact, inspired to think again, delve even more into this light that burned so brightly on the literary horizon, only to be extinguished too early and to pass into the dubious category of legend.

RED COMET The Short Life and Blazing Art of SYLVIA PLATH by HEATHER CLARK, Pub. Knopf

As one, from the generation after, who fell captive to that legend others built around Sylvia Plath’s life and death, and equally so fell for the legend that she, herself, created in her only novel The Bell Jar; a work of autofiction (and written before that term existed) some would contend, and that Plath would not live to either affirm or deny. It was because of The Bell Jar and Plath’s life (and her death) that I first read her poetry – at the time I was of the age at which she was when she was writing, and remember wondering at the intellectual and emotional depth, and to this day I gladly read her again. Perhaps some would consider her work too removed from contemporary concerns, too beholden stylistically to the old, now dead, white men who dominated twentieth century poetry, but in her last works she was shedding that influence, and I ask: was the beating heart and yearning soul of a young woman in the 1950s really so different to now?

Merkin’s review convinces me that there is more to know – of Plath’s life; of Aurelia and Otto, and always there the complications of Ted (after more recent revelations and denials, I didn’t think I wanted to go there again either!), and her art and her legacy.

Yes, Sylvia again! Or, still. Another, for my must read.

How political can Black be?

Identity, very real yet permanently theorised upon; the reflection in the mirror or thoughts in the head, the heated arguments, the terminology, and beyond – who is what and who says, variance in usage and acceptability over time and from nation to nation; all this and more is almost impossible to escape these days, and just when one is convinced to be almost on top of it, or given up in despair, there it is again demanding to be considered again. For me, at least, that state arises again this time in reading an opinion article in The New York Times by Kwame Anthony Appiah; throwing a spanner in the works again.

Springing from an ongoing debate, some of it fair, and some provocative purely for the sake of provocation (this ranging from the mischievous to the malevolent) about the correct nomenclature when in comes to US Vice-Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, born in California to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Appiah’s thoughtful piece returns half-way home (for him) to the United Kingdom, where ethnicity has been historically approached differently and the matter much more black and white (my pun is intended), to construe his argument.

Appiah describes the “political Blackness” ideology, rooted in the early nineteen seventies and finding legitimacy at the latest in the eighties, and in the wake of recommendations from the Commission for Racial Equality; whereby Asians were officially categorised as Black. (In terms of Britain, important is that here we are talking predominately about South Asians – i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc. dispersed in the wake of Partition and the aftermath – whereas in America one would understand “Asian” to refer to those of East Asian, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Southeast Asian, for instance, Vietnamese, descent.) While historically and unofficially, Black people were always seen to be anyone who was not absolutely white, that categorisation was then embraced by many in minority communities that were not sub-Saharan or from the African diaspora.

Under the “umbrella” of their Blackness, it is easy enough to understand that its proponents envisaged power, not only in numbers, but shared experiences and just grievances, mostly extending from the remnants of Empire and colonisation. It is also clear: there are disadvantages inherent in claiming too “big a church” for too “diverse a congregation” (my unoriginal metaphors). Appiah also agues on the point of the immense range of internal diversity; cultural and religious (e.g. consider alone India: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, etc., languages and dialects ad infinitum, socio-economic status and caste) that further complicate sympathies and allegiances.

Today the project still remains highly contentious – for every example of mutuality sought there is at least another of repudiation and offence. But, as an “idea” of inclusivity, it is not dead and that is something.

Sympathy for … “Jack”

Did I not say I wasn’t going to read any more reviews on Jack? But, when it is from Hermione Lee in the New York Review of Books and is titled: “Sympathy for the Devil”, what can I say? Must be read. Lee, wonderfully I think, fixes this new novel in the midst of the greater oeuvre of Marilynne Robinson’s work, foremostly the other “Gilead” books (which she revisits) but not only, and encapsulates, what for me is the essence of Robinson’s writing: her singular way of grasping the ephemeral in the every day, loading them with grace and kindness, then giving them permanence in the greater human narrative.

Elaine Showalter’s review in The New York Times (as pleaded for, I did get another, a better, review from NYT!) is not as extensive nor does it assiduously reference Robinson’s past works or comments, but obviously she read the same book as Hermione Lee; right down to Prince of Darkness metaphors.

Finally, a couple of general points: Lee and Showalter do seem to agree that this new novel would be difficult to appreciate outside of the context of the previous three in the series, and both remain unconvinced as to why Della is prepared to forsake so much for Jack’s sake. In respect to the latter, Showalter makes a plea for the another instalment – and for it to be called “Della”!