Sam Stephenson & the Jazz Loft Project
The Jazz Loft Project Radio Series debuts this week on WNYC: "In 1957, photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue. It became a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. By the time Smith left the loft more than a decade later he had documented the activity there through 40,000 photos and roughly 4,000 hours of audio tape."
The project—in addition to the radio series, there is a book and an exhibition—started thirteen years ago, when Sam Stephenson's wife bought him a camera for Christmas. The camera shop owner introduced him to Smith's work, and then Sam discovered Smith's archives at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona: "Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of “everything” (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft—two bodies of work that have kept me busy for ten years. His work has become my work."
Read the rest of Sam's piece about Smith's archives, from APS 3.
Merde Alors! Gary Amdahl on Dialogue
A Q&A with Emily Cook
Do you consider yourself to be a dramatic sort of person?
Yes, but not dramatic in a good way—the way, say, someone is who risks his life for a common good, to save the life of a drowning child, or who takes an unpopular but principled stand on a moral issue at a critical moment. Or even a tragic hero who makes a terrible mistake and pays a terrible price. Dramatic rather in a bad way, or at least theatrical in the way a baby is, or a bad actor: the latter hammy and unconvincing, the former helplessly, needily demanding of attention. I am always feigning astonishment or disgust or rapture or some other histrionic emotion, slapping my forehead and crying merde alors, dropping my jaw, and so on. Maybe it’s not a bad actor I resemble so much as a very specific type of methodical actor: an actor from the Delsarte school, where emotions have precise but simple gestures to represent them, or a Meyerhold biomechanic. And yes, I am dramatic in the sense that almost nothing I do or say is done or said casually or conversationally, without imaginary footlights and a sense of rehearsal.
Continue reading Merde Alors! Gary Amdahl on DialogueA Q&A with Emily Cook
Cairo 2010: After Kefaya
The Focus Portfolio in APS 9 introduces the next generation of Egyptian writers.
You are stuck in traffic in downtown Cairo. Zahma—a blockage. The cars are packed in impossibly thick and there is only the slightest of forward movement. Pedestrians squeeze their way through hairline fractures between the metal, which adds to the congestion. A ride that could have taken fifteen minutes takes two hours. Time loses its sense of forward momentum; one becomes philosophical. This is a common occurrence.
Continue reading Cairo 2010: After Kefaya
What to Read Next: Announcing Issue 9
Take a walk along the Nile Corniche in our Cairo Portfolio; enter the Glitter Girl Contest with Danielle Evans; question Reality and Memory with David Shields; visit Strange Lands and People with Richard Powers; and go fishing with T. C. Boyle. Poetry by Derek Walcott, Idra Novey, Eric Pankey, Ron Padgett, and Mary Jo Bang; Gary Amdahl at play in the fields of Cinnabar; Antoine Wilson says good-bye; and much, much more. Renew or subscribe now to ensure you get your copy, and watch for excerpts on the website. Issue 9 is here.
After the Wreck: Naomi J. Williams on Historical Fictions and Fictional Histories
Naomi J. WIlliams's story "Lamanon At Sea" appeared in APS 8.
Everyone likes a shipwreck story. I’m certainly not the first writer to be drawn to the La Pérouse expedition, an ill-fated voyage of exploration that left France in 1785 with two frigates under the command of Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, and disappeared three years later in the South Pacific. Part of the early mystique of the La Pérouse story, of course, was that for almost forty years no one knew what had become of the expedition. It’s always a boon to fictionalizers when people disappear into thin air.
Continue reading After the Wreck: Naomi J. Williams on Historical Fictions and Fictional Histories
T. C. Boyle
John Ashbery
Ernst Weiss
Matthea Harvey
Petina Gappah
Mieko Kanai
Sam Stephenson
Benjamin Anastas
William T. Vollmann
Roberto Bolaño
Rebecca Wolff
James Lasdun
Tomaz Salamun
April Bernard
Laurie Sheck
Eliot Weinberger
Jim Linderman and Luc Sante
Austin Ratner
Dubravka Ugresic
Ben George, ed.
Rob Spillman, ed.
Santiago Roncagliolo
G. C. Waldrep
Arda Collins
John Wray
Yoko Ogawa
Fanny Howe
Anne Carson
Wells Tower
Yiyun Li
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