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1878: Eadweard Muybridge photographs the racehorse Sallie Gardener at a gallop. John Haskell’s essay “The Persistence of Muybridge” appears in APS 12: “I believed I could find, somewhere in his armor of control, a crack, and in that crack I could find his desire, and by giving him that desire, I could make him happy.”

1886: Arthur Rimbaud writes Illuminations. John Ashbery’s translation appears in APS 13.

1887: Walt Whitman’s poems are the subject of a Contemporary Humor column in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Omaha Girl: “Why, they are not even rhymed.” Eastern Man: “Nevertheless they are marvels, considering that they were written in a place where the poet had to stop between every word to fight mosquitoes.” Therese Stanton imagines the poet’s swarming tormentors in APS 14.

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Posted on December 7, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

News

Prize News

Congratulations to Jesmyn Ward, who received the National Book Award last night for her extraordinary novel Salvage the Bones. Her debut story, "Cattle Haul," appeared in APS 5, a new story, "Barefoot," in APS 14. We wrote about Salvage here, Ron Charles reviewed it here, and you can hear her read from the novel here.

It’s easier driving through the country, especially when you doing a cattle haul. Two lanes on one side and two lanes on the other. Switch lanes and pass. At night, like now, the signs sharp and clear. The trees like waves at the side of the road, all black and blue, coming in and going back out like a tide. Ain’t no lights to distract me, to crowd up around me. Just taillights, red lights, like ants, leading me in a line westward. —Read on.

Posted on November 17, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Etc.

KERSTIN EKMAN — GO, READ! by Dorthe Nors

KERSTIN EKMAN — GO, READ!
by Dorthe Nors

Recently, I was asked by literary friends in the United States whom we Danes were hoping might win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I had no real idea of any consensus, but as happens every year a large number of male culture scribes over the age of sixty seemed to think it should be given to Bob Dylan. Which always makes me wonder why, if the prize really should go to a troubadour, no one ever talks about Leonard Cohen, but that’s just my own personal aside.

And yet, if we were to really choose a Nobel candidate on the basis of who made the deepest impression on our lives when we were young, I for my own part would point to the Swedish novelist Kerstin Ekman (born 1933). The chances of her ever being awarded the prize, however, are small: she walked out on the Swedish Academy in 1989 in protest against its spineless stance on Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, and leaving the Swedish Academy is something you only do in a coffin. Nevertheless, Ekman stood up and walked out, and I’ve always found that such a very admirable thing to do.

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Posted on November 3, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Issue 14

Eva Zeisel's Prison Memoir

Eva Zeisel's Prison Memoir

In 1932, the designer Eva Zeisel was living in Berlin and, according to her grandmother, becoming “inebriated on amusements.” She worked for the Carstens factory and at home often gave large parties for all sorts of artists and intellectuals—her guests included the young physicists Leó Szilárd and Victor Weisskopf, the writers Anna Seghers and Arthur Koestler (a childhood friend), and two future husbands, Alex Weissberg and Hans Zeisel. Then rather suddenly one day she decided to “see what was behind the mountain.” A visit to Russia turned into five years there, the last sixteen months in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. She was caught in the early Stalinist purges and accused of plotting to kill Stalin.

According to her daughter Jean Richards, “For many years Eva did not want to make her prison experiences public (in part because she was afraid that the KGB would come after her in the U.S.—this fear was not far-fetched). When a friend read these memoirs, he found them disingenuous. He did not believe that one could write about such a serious situation with so much humor and charm. But that is Eva. She often saw herself from the outside. She felt like a tourist in life. This allowed her to see herself in a different, sometimes bemused way. All the details of Eva’s memories that we could check have been accurate.” Eva Zeisel's Prison Memoir appears in APS 14.

PRISON MEMOIR
Memories of long ago are not true. They have been gilded by time, the way I remember them now, with love for my youth, sentimentally, of myself—slim and energetic, resistant, sad, alert. I speak of myself as much as of the things that happened to me. None of it is true, but I shall be precise reporting my memories.

My Arrest
It all started with mother bending over me to wake me up. It all ended with this. This, for a long time, was the end of my good life. Even today, my heart repudiates this memory bitterly. Even now, I think of this moment when my mother bent over me as one of the happiest of my life. I had slept particularly well, probably dreamed very happily, and when I saw her, I put my arms around her neck and we smiled at each other. It was only four o’clock in the morning, hardly light, and no time to get up.

The day before, I had been particularly cheerful. I do not remember why it was such a happy day. I had gone to the beauty parlor and had my nails manicured, my hair done, and a facial massage. I felt pretty when I got back to the office to have a meeting with my boss’s boss; there was a flirting atmosphere between him and me. It was May 27, 1936. I walked home through the park. There were people lying in reclining chairs, children playing. Everything seemed clean and friendly.

I do not remember the evening. Mother and I shared a room in the little apartment in Moscow we rented with my brother, his wife, and small child. After dinner together, we must have had a good evening before I went to bed. And now Mother was bending over me to wake me up. Mother was very pretty, but it was not customary between us that she was openly tender or loving. So her smile and maybe her kiss (this I forget) must have come as an unexpected present.

“Well,” Mother said, “there are some people here to see you.”

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Posted on October 24, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Etc.

On Unsettling the Predictable:
Reading Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

A recent review of Salvage the Bones considers the novel in the context of a Salon essay about Modern Steinbecks. These novels, the reviewer suggests, “play into the exoticization of lives unlike those of readers who are inclined to pick up literary fiction.”

Salvage the Bones, like her stories “Cattle Haul” (APS 5) and “Barefoot” (APS 14), is set in rural Mississippi (the state with the greatest percentage of poor people in the nation, and one of the top ten in terms of income inequality). It takes place in the days before Hurricane Katrina. The narrator, Esch, fifteen and pregnant, lives with her three brothers and father in a clearing in the woods they call the Pit.

The way the reviewer reads the novel reminds me of when one drives through an unfamiliar neighborhood and, catching oneself staring, averts one’s gaze: We shouldn’t look too closely. That wouldn’t be polite. But at the end of the day, isn’t what makes fiction matter the compact a reader makes: to shift from looking at to seeing with.

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Posted on October 18, 2011 | Comment | Permalink