“I guess to do something fully, you have to believe it will change everything,” Egan said. “And I, for some reason, have a delusionary ability to think that about what I’m working on.” I asked how she deals with the disappointment of returning to a world unchanged by her work. “It’s just the feeling of getting it right.”
For Egan, getting it right has to do with fulfilling a reader’s craving — the word “craving” appears in the first line of “Candy House” and the last chapter of “Goon Squad” — for mystery and imagination, as opposed to the barrage of information, the much emptier imagistic titillations, that we find much easier to access.
I used to think I was just being nostalgic for a sweet, geeky connection between father and daughter. Dad was trusting me to find out a statistic, like a football score, perhaps. But Dad and I weren’t rooting for players to score goals. We were rooting for players who had come together in the studio in the service of a piece of music – something stitched together from wisps of melodies, harmonies and rhythms, something that also, enchantingly, stitched us together. We were rooting for the two of us to be people for whom songs were extensions of their ordinary lives.
When I think of him, Dad always looks like he did in the porch, leaning over on his walking sticks, his eyes full of love, me looking into them for acceptance. When I think of him there, I also think about how he trusted me to tell him a story about a song. It still breaks my heart that I couldn’t stick to that promise.
It may seem improbable today, but some 75 years ago, classical music was a lingua franca for the average American, regularly heard and pervasive in mainstream popular culture. Film soundtracks of the Hollywood studio era either directly quoted or deliberately evoked the vocabulary of 19th-century symphonic and operatic literature, with many of the film composers themselves (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman, among them) émigrés from the European concert world. Classical musicians were frequently portrayed as romantic or tragic characters in the movies, on radio, and in legitimate theater, regarded not as elite types but as Everymen. Clifford Odets’s popular 1937 play Golden Boy (later a movie and a Broadway musical) was about a young man torn between being a prizefighter and a violinist, a dilemma unlikely to have befuddled Muhammad Ali or Tyson Fury.
Comedians Jack Benny and Henny Youngman came on stage with violins as props; both played the instrument competently though abused it humorously during their standup routines. The trope of the struggling musician or composer finally making it to Carnegie Hall was portrayed in countless movies, including a 1947 film actually titled Carnegie Hall. In the 1946 Warner Brothers film Deception, Bette Davis two-times her cellist lover Paul Henreid with classical pianist-composer Claude Rains; the same year, the same studio put out Humoresque, in which arts patroness Joan Crawford commits suicide Virginia Woolf-style when her love affair with the young concert violinist she has sponsored (John Garfield) goes sour (Isaac Stern dubbed Garfield’s violin-playing scenes). Could any film credibly essay a similar plotline in today’s culture?
"The name is Inuktitut for the skin blemishes or pimples caused by the very cold weather," explained Isabelle Dubois, project coordinator for Nunavik Tourism, who had previously only visited the crater in winter when the landscape was covered with snow.
I looked out of the window to distract myself from our second landing attempt and thought how apt a moniker it was. The tundra here is pockmarked by clefts, fissures and depressions filled with tiny pockets of water. Yet amid the myriad indentations, the eponymous crater stood out significantly.
Sublunary editions’s 2022 publication of Magdalena Edwards’s debut translation of a lone story by Julio Cortázar is an event. “Letters from Mom” (“Cartas de mamá”) is the opening story in Secret Weapons (Las armas secretas), Cortázar’s seminal 1959 postmodern pentad, and until now the only one untranslated into English. Four of the five stories appeared in a collection of 15, first published in hardcover as End of the Game and Other Stories (1967; trans. by Paul Blackburn) and later republished in paperback as Blow-Up and Other Stories. But Edwards’s translation means that, for the first time, English-language readers can appreciate the context and range of the five stories comprising Secret Weapons, written before his 1963 novel Hopscotch made Cortázar famous. Through these stories, as Cortázar himself affirmed, the author discovered his métier and began to mature as a writer of fiction.
Scholastique Mukasonga’s tender paean to motherhood and community (originally published in French in 2008 and seamlessly translated by Jordan Stump) explores how exile robs people of their traditions and identity.
Kofman’s multi-layered memoir / manual is a fascinating read; ripe with truth, experience, and actionable advice. This is no generic guide to word-spurtage, but a carefully constructed collection of writerly guidance and literary wisdom. The Writer Laid Bare draws figurative maps around writerly obstacles, highlighting routes for overcoming creative, emotional, and practical roadblocks, with an admirable emphasis on honesty, bravery and contemplation.
Phillips’ knack for making the past feel immediate is on point in the well-plotted “One-Shot Harry,” his first novel about Harry Ingram, a freelance photographer whose work appears in newspapers and magazines serving Los Angeles’ Black community during the 1960s. Although this Harry is fictional, Phillips’ inspiration for this character came from two real Black photographers from this time period, including Harry Adams, who was nicknamed One-Shot Harry for his quick work.
Long though it is, Richardson’s Life was never intended to be definitive since many important archives are still closed. Nevertheless, it is an anthology of memorable gossip from the margins of Picasso’s life.
Last night
I saw that the moon
Was empty in the sky.
The stars around did
What they do.
They are