It could be a long time before we enjoy the arts as a form of social bonding once again. For now, there are no intermissions because there are no concerts, no eavesdropping in the galleries because the museums are all closed, no flirtations across the table because the clubs and cabarets are shuttered. The substitutes for the collective experience of art — the streaming concerts, virtual gallery tours and Zoom improv sessions — are a stopgap, but does anyone want them to become an actual replacement for experiencing art in the company of others?
Yet if we are cut off from experiencing art with others, we are perfectly placed to consider an old and out of fashion idea: the power of private contemplation and solitary engagement. The silence in the room as you read a poem or look at a print, or prepare to listen to a piece of music, isn’t absence. It is the presence of your undivided attention.
Most of humanity lives in the forests and cities of prose, but a poet spends her days amid frigid gray rocks with only the occasional company of other poets. The journey from this remote territory is long, and the change in customs is extreme, which is perhaps why so many books of “selected prose” by poets are loaded with mystical bombast — the kind of posturing you’d expect from people not really comfortable in a new terrain. It’s also the reason that when we pick up a poet’s prose, we expect it to tell us about that mysterious idiom, poetry. “How marvelous that you speak this extraordinary language,” we say. “Could you sum it up for us in plain English?”
If anyone could manage this task, it should be Kay Ryan, whose “Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose” has just been published. Ryan is one of America’s most decorated poets — she’s received the Pulitzer, among other glittery knickknacks — but she came to prominence late; her first book to be widely reviewed, “Elephant Rocks,” was published in 1996, when she was over 50. She doesn’t have an M.F.A. or Ph.D. (the driver’s licenses of the poetry world), and she’s never taught creative writing. All poets consider themselves outsiders, but even the island of misfit toys has its fringier characters, and for much of her career Ryan was one of them. “I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers’ conferences,” she writes. This is a sentiment most human beings can surely endorse, but it’s not the norm in the land of sestinas.
Most of us have a swimming story, even if only a short one about why we don’t do it. These tales tend to feature a cavalier coach whose go-to technique was a heartless shove, or a slightly older or bigger child with a yen for dunking the new kid in the pool. The former is the kind of person one hopes is vanishing from our culture; the latter will be there at the end of time, chortling. The nonswimmer holds on to the names of these villains forever — along with the secret belief that the real culprit was his or her own fear. Swimming, perhaps the most commonplace and relaxing way of putting yourself in total peril, is a real mind game.
Bonnie Tsui’s “Why We Swim,” an enthusiastic and thoughtful work mixing history, journalism and elements of memoir, is ostensibly focused on those who do swim, rather than those who don’t. Tsui sets out to answer her title’s question with a compassionate understanding of how that mind game stops some and a curiosity about how and why it seduces others. She herself is a lifelong swimmer who has competed (first as a child on Long Island, with the Freeport Sea Devils, and more recently with a masters group in the Bay Area) and who also surfs, a sport where the base requirement is being fine with receiving full body punches from waves.
Mark O'Connell's new book about the end of the world is not called Notes from the Apocalypse, but rather Notes From an Apocalypse — a gesture of articular modesty that points to a larger truth: Despite the climate crisis, despite a global pandemic, it has always been "the end of the world for someone, somewhere."
Fifty years since their dissolution in April 1970 the Beatles live on. The band’s music, their significance and their individual personalities exert a hold on the cultural consciousness that seems to tighten as their heyday recedes. But is there anything new to say? Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, the latest to enter the crowded library of Beatles books, is not a biography so much as a group portrait in vignettes, a rearrangement of stories and legends whose trick is to make them gleam anew.
As a geographer who studies the civil rights movement and public memory told Mask, “We have attached the name of one of the most famous civil rights leaders of our time to the streets that speak to the very need to continue the civil rights movement.” White’s mission expands the idea of what civil rights work might entail nowadays — more fund-raisers than fire hoses. And in telling the stories of boulevards named for world-famous overachievers, Mask is best down on the street, chatting up local heroes like him.
The fall so splendid, the end sweet,
The struggle forgotten, what bliss
To stretch the glistening body out
Against the moss, after the dance!