Happy Holidays!

"The essential work of interpretation is best found in a culture’s quieter spaces," Teju Cole says. "We need reports in fiction, nonfiction, and photography that are engagé without being ephemeral and are steeped in a proper thoughtfulness. Small magazines are among the guarantors of these habits of liberty." This work at A Public Space wouldn't have been possible without your support.

Thank you to everyone—writers, readers, supporters, mentors, friends—who has been a part of A Public Space this past year. Please join us for another year of art and argument, fact and fiction, by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign, or giving a subscription to all the writers, readers, travelers, and dreamers on your list this holiday season.

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.

Posted on December 7, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

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.

Posted on November 3, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

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.

Posted on October 18, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Shady Characters

James Wallenstein, Andrew Meier, Clancy Martin, and Siddhartha Deb will convene at the APS headquarters on October 18 for a reading and discussion about the ways that their protagonists—an unscrupulous jeweler, an entrepreneur, a district attorney, and a possibly crooked investor—frame the stories that threaten to compromise them. We asked for their thoughts on other shady characters that interest them.

JAMES WALLENSTEIN
Some figures seem shady from oversight. Others resist us no matter how long we look. General Wallenstein, (Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, it would have said on his driver's license), ruler of the lands of the Duchy of Friedland, commander of the armies of the Habsburg Monarchy during the so-called Danish Period of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), and victim of a possibly conspiratorial assassination, is more famous at this point for the ambiguity of his character than for his exploits. He's typically portrayed as an indecisive military genius, I gather, a cross between Hamlet and Napoléon, if this were possible. There's Schiller's Wallenstein, the dramatic trilogy. There's Alfred Döblin's Wallenstein, a novel. There's Thomas Mann's son Golo Mann's Wallenstein, a celebrated biography. You might think I'd read one of these, but despite the name—a possible indication of descent from one of his many, many serfs, I guess—I'm in no hurry. Maybe it's the thought of having to see the letters spell out Wallenstein so many times. Maybe it's the fact that I don't identify with the name strongly enough to overcome a wariness of the apparently endless plots, subplots, and counterplots that he was involved in. "After [1630]," the Catholic Encyclopedia asserts, "his life was mainly a series of intrigues. His character, which had never been noble, now gave way completely." His character, which had never been noble, now gave way completely. And maybe I'm afraid to discover that I've got more than the name in common with him. So, fear trumping curiosity, idleness trumping suspicion, Wallenstein is likely to remain for me a literally rather than metaphorically shady figure.

Posted on October 12, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Murakami and the Nobel?
by Roland Kelts

Postwar Japan has garnered a reputation for docility, especially after the largely forgotten student uprisings of the late 1960s and early 1970s—when many young Japanese first opposed the ongoing onus of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which amounts to a permanent occupation by US troops, and later the Vietnam War, for which Japan was used as a munitions factory and launching pad. The flames of activism and rebellion were effectively stamped out by the Japanese government, abetted by the US CIA. Haruki Murakami was a student protester back then (“I battled the police,” he once proudly conceded), and has remained a proverbial outsider in Japan long after his generation’s dissidence died. While his fellow protesters donned suits and joined Japan Inc, Murakami opened a jazz bar with his wife. “I felt betrayed,” he says, suggesting roots for his avocation as a novelist.

Since then, Murakami has published fifteen books in English (many more in his native Japanese). A film version of his best-selling fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, will be released later this year. The book is a classic coming-of-age story that is deeply romantic, at least partially biographical, and possibly vengeful. Like Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, it portrays the futility of youthful longing and lust, their inevitable disappointment verging on tragedy. Like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, it finds phoniness in everyone, especially those who claim commitment to abstract idealism.

Posted on October 5, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Chaos Manor: A Multimedia Theater Installation

821 Sixth Avenue was a hub for jazz musicians from 1954-1965, and many big names in New York found themselves there. The photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into the building in 1957 and eventually wired the place, intent on recording as much of the rehearsals, jam sessions, conversations, and daily life in the loft as possible. The result, though vast (40,000 photographs and 4,500 hours of audio recordings), accounted for a sliver of what was going on culturally, artistically, and politically in the city during the time. Explore a selection of significant spots on the map below.*

Chaos Manor, a multimedia theater installation based on Sam Stephenson's book The Jazz Loft Project, premieres this weekend, September 16 and 17, at The Invisible Dog.

*zoom out to see more locations (like the site of the 1964 World's Fair in far east Queens)

View Larger Map

Posted on September 13, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Excavating a Life, Part II
Following Eugene Smith to Japan

Earlier this year, Sam Stephenson spent four weeks in Japan, walking in the footsteps of photographer W. Eugene Smith, whose life and work he's been studying for fifteen years. Sam is working on a biography of Smith, and collaborating with Chris McElroen on Chaos Manor, a multimedia adaptation of The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965. Sam and Roland Kelts, whose Focus: Japan portfolio appeared in APS 1, talked about his trip to Japan, eccentricity, assumptions about progress, and a culture that cultivates paradox.

RK: Eugene Smith, your subject, was known to be an eccentric man. After so many years of researching Smith, what new insights did you learn about him during your time in Japan?

SS: There are a couple of things that come to mind. One is the fondness expressed for Smith, the really moving expressions that people made about him. Several of our interview subjects cried when talking about him. I’ve made 120-some trips to New York in the last fourteen years, researching Smith and the Jazz Loft Project. I’ve interviewed almost five hundred people now. In New York, people thought he was a pain in the ass. In twenty-some interviews in Japan, that never even came up. People loved him. So was there a different Eugene Smith in Japan, or were they just more accepting of his, as you said, eccentricities?

Posted on September 13, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Stet?

Stuart Dybek’s story from APS 13 , “Four Deuces,” is set in Chicago, a city I have only visited once (for AWP, incidentally). When one shady character, Frank, tries to track down another, Lester, he finally finds him in the Lawless Housing Projects. “They named that right,” Frank comments to his wife. Below is the exchange I had with Stuart about the importance of local knowledge.

AMcP: Is Frank making a joke, or is that the actual name of the project?

SD: There at one time was in Chicago a public housing project that was named after some public figure named Lawless. I forget the exact details but the project was referred to locally as the Lawless Project. However, if that is too distracting, maybe it isn't worth saving and should be cut, as I certainly don't want to stop to explain to the reader that there is/was such a place.

AMcP: I did find the name distracting without your explanation. I'm just one reader, of course, but I worry others would miss the point too.

SD: The actual name for them is Lawless Garden Apartments. (Named after Frank or somebody Lawless.) They're low income housing and everyone in Chicago regards them as a housing project. I don't have to move him there. The there, by the way, is one of the classic African American 'hoods in the city, called Bronzeville, which is Gwendolyn Brooks’s famous neighborhood.

Posted on June 30, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

Stet?

In which we take you behind the copy editor's curtain.

In an interview in the first issue of A Public Space, Motoyuki Shibata talks about the difficulty of translating Philip Roth's sentences ("He simply puts too much into his sentences. You know, in a typical Roth passage there are all those self-inflections. In English it makes sense, but in Japanese, you have to break a Roth sentence down into two or three sentences.") With the Haruki Murakami interview in the first issue of Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan, it was the word I that presented the problem.

Posted on May 9, 2011 | Comment | Permalink

The Music of Charles Newman

"One of the most interesting, intelligent, and, I suspect, secretly optimistic prophets of doom now writing fiction." —John Gardner on Charles Newman, Washington Post Book World, October 31, 1976.

A Public Space and the Brooklyn Philharmonic present a concert inspired by Charles Newman's novella "The Five-Thousandth Baritone: A Masque in Five Parts" at Music Off the Shelves: Where Music and Literature Meet. Featuring the work of Purcell, Handel, Schubert, and Fauré. This Sunday, January 30, at the Brooklyn Public Library's Dweck Center. More details here.

Posted on January 25, 2011 | Comment | Permalink