Thanks to Biblioklept reader Jescie for sending in this 2009 piece from Eye Level, which recounts film director John Waters narrating Cy Twombly’s collection Letter of Resignation. From the write-up—-
Baltimore-native Waters, best known for his films Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, spoke, if not performed, at the McEvoy Auditorium, as the inaugural speaker in the second annual American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series. For one hour on Saturday afternoon, Waters shared his interpretation of Cy Twombly’s Letter of Resignation. From the word go, Waters had the SRO audience captivated as he “narrated” the thirty-eight separate drawings that make up this work. At times, Waters had us in stitches, relating slightly off-color stories, and using words not found in museum labels. Often in strong language, he created a persona, or voice for the letter writer: a disgruntled worker who is drafting (and re-drafting) his letter of resignation. By the thirty-eighth draft, he’s just about there. . . .
Waters, who keeps the Letters of Resignation catalogue by his bed, says that Twombly created “such confident work it makes people mad.” To detractors not fond of the work, Waters offered this retort, “This kind of contemporary art hates you too, and you deserve it.”
“Ode to the Only Girl,” a poem by John Edward Williams—
I’ve seen you many times in many places–
Theater, bus, train, or on the street;
Smiling in spring rain, in winter sleet,
Eyes of any hue in myriad faces;
Midnight black, all shades of brown your hair,
Long, short, bronze or honey-fair.
Instantly have I loved, have never spoken;
Slowly a truck passed, a light changed,
A door closed–all seemingly pre-arranged–
Then you were gone forever, the spell was broken.
Ubiquitios only one, we’ve met before
A hundred times, and we’ll meet again
As many more; in hills or forest glen,
On crowded street or lonely, peaceful shore;
Somewhere, someday–but how will we ever know
True love, how wil we ever know?
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As always, the stack overfloweth. Here are a few of the more interesting titles that have landed at Biblioklept International Headquarters recently.
Banana Republican is the first novel by historian Eric Rauchway. The book is a send up of American Imperialism in the 1920s, satirizing the naked greed, corrupt capitalism, and ugly jingoism that infused the rise of the global economy. Fortunately, all of these ills have left American foreign policy forever, right? Satire! Seriously though, Banana Republican looks to the past to reveal that our current foreign debacles are merely an extension of policies that have been around for decades. The protagonist is Tom Buchanan (yes, that Tom Buchanan, the racist football-playing, mistress-slapping lout of The Great Gatsby). Rauchway sends Buchanan into the fiasco of American intervention in Nicaragua in the early 20th century. In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times, Rauchway points out how this scenario allows for an exploration of the American dream from a decidedly different viewpoint than the one we find in Fitzgerald—-
People always see Gatsby as the novel about the American dream. But the character who represents that dream of upward mobility ends up floating facedown in a swimming pool. Tom Buchanan represents the real American dream: having it all and not having to suffer the consequences. I wanted to get away from the somewhat suspect view of the narrator in Gatsby and let Tom speak for himself. . . .
I was interested in writing about the irresponsibility of American foreign policy, so if you take Tom Buchanan in the 1920s, where are we? We’re in Nicaragua. When you look at American foreign policy, in Europe we do pretty well. In South America, not so much. And there’s that tradition in places that are on the edges of empire: Dissolute people get to go there and act badly and no one calls them on it.
Evgenia Citkowitz’s Ether collects seven short stories and a novella, all united by psychological and emotional complexity. Citkowitz’s characters explore moral dilemmas as they quest for identity, and if that sounds like the stock of contemporary fiction (which it is), the prose, terse, often chilly, and darkly funny, is what set these apart. Here’s Ligaya Mishan, reviewing the hardback edition last year in The New York Times—
Citkowitz’s book is peopled by mothers and fathers who are fumblers at best, unrepentant alcoholics at worst. A few are simply absentees, like the father of Beatty, the British schoolgirl in “Leavers’ Events,” who is omitted from family suppers, “disqualified by his status as a heroin addict.” The girl’s mother, a high-level fashion editor, is hardly more present. The only grown-up in Beatty’s life who actually behaves like one is, oddly enough, the rakish novelist she invites to the opera. After initiating a lazy seduction, he wisely thinks better of it. Again, Citkowitz flouts expectations: her heroine may be momentarily crushed, but soon she has moved to New York, ascended the editorial ladder at a chic magazine, landed her own office and effectively supplanted her mother — a modern-day Electra.
Ether and Banana Republican are both new in trade paperback from Picador.
In his promo vid (below) for The Oregon Experiment, author Keith Scribner suggests that, “It’s a novel that explores the ways in which the political, the social, the personal, the domestic are inseparable.” Those are some pretty grand claims, so here are the details: The Oregon Experiment recounts the story of Scanlon and Naomi Pratt, a couple who move from the East Coast to Oregon, where Scanlon begins his first tenure-track job as a professor who studies radical action mass movements. Naomi was once a “genius nose” who worked for perfume companies, but she’s lost her sense of smell; she’s also pregnant with the couple’s first child. Scanlon quickly becomes enamored of Oregon, and becomes particularly intrigued by local separatists and anarchists; Naomi’s nose returns, but she isn’t quite as thrilled as Scanlon about the new scene (particularly Scanlon’s enchantment with Sequoia, leader of the secessionists), although she does connect with Scanlon’s young subject Clay, an anarchist. Scribner propels his novel with ideas rendered in crisp, realistic dialogue. The Oregon Experiment is new from Knopf.
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In Chapter 4 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway recounts the names of the rich, shallow, parasitic guests who attended Gatsby’s parties. Nick tells us the list comes from “an old time-table” of names he originally recorded in July 5th—significantly, the day after Independence Day: the day after the hopes and dreams of a new country. From the chapter—-
Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.
From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut.”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly — they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder.”— I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names — Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing”—
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Mark Twain’s Fourth of July speech, delivered in Keokuk, Iowa, 1886—
Ladies and gentlemen: I little thought that when the boys woke me with their noise this morning that I should be called upon to add to their noise. But I promise not to keep you long. You have heard all there is to hear on the subject, the evidence is all in and all I have to do is to sum up the evidence and deliver the verdict. You have heard the declaration of independence with its majestic ending, which is worthy to live forever, which has been hurled at the bones of a fossilized monarch, old King George the III, who has been dead these many years, and which will continue to be hurled at him annually as long as this republic lives. You have heard the history of the nation from the first to the last–from the beginning of the revolutionary was, past the days of its great general, Grant, told in eloquent language by the orator of the day. All I have to do is to add the verdict, which is all that can be added, and that is, ‘It is a successful day.’ I thank the officers of the day that I am enabled to once more stand face to face with the citizens that I met thirty years ago, when I was a citizen of Iowa, and also those of a later generation. In the address to-day, I have not heard much mention made of the progress of these last few years–of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and other great inventions. A poet has said, ‘Better fifty years of England than all the cycles of Cathay,’ but I say ‘Better this decade than the 900 years of Methuselah.’ There is more done in one year now than Methuselah ever saw in all his life. He was probably asleep all those 900 years. When I was here thirty years ago there were 3,000 people here and they drank 3,000 barrels of whisky a day, and they drank it in public then. I know that the man who makes the last speech on an occasion like this has the best of the other speakers, as he has the last word to say, which falls like a balm on the audience–though this audience has not been bored to-day–and though I can’t say that last word, I will do the next best thing I can, and that is to sit down.
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Garden & Gun ran a short piece on Ernest Hemingway’s guns last year, and linked to a slideshow of the famous author (who killed himself 50 years ago today) with his guns. From the article—
When Ernest Hemingway took his own life on July 2, 1961, it was reported in Life magazine that he had done so with a “double-barreled shotgun.” Further reports specified the gun was a Boss that he had purchased from Abercrombie & Fitch, and for years this has been widely accepted as fact. But a fascinating new book, Hemingway’s Guns, by Silvio Calabi, Steve Helsley, and Roger Sanger (Shooting Sportsman Books), makes the case that Hemingway never owned a Boss, and that the suicide gun was actually made by W. & C. Scott & Son. It was Hemingway’s pigeon gun, a long-barreled side-by-side that traveled with him from shooting competitions in Cuba to duck hunts in Italy to a safari in East Africa. By all accounts it was a favorite.
Not long after that tragic day in Ketchum, Idaho, the gun was given to a local welder to be destroyed. “The stock was smashed and the steel parts cut up with a torch,” the authors write. “The mangled remnants were then buried in a field.” Roger Sanger visited the welding shop, which is still in business and being run by the grandson of the original proprietor. Amazingly, the welder still had a few pieces of the gun in a matchbox, and Sanger’s immediate reaction to the evidence was, “This is no Boss.” After showing pictures to a number of experts and collectors, he confirmed that it was most likely Hemingway’s beloved W. & C. Scott that had been the suicide gun.
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