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
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.
"Minor Aspirations and Mock Debate"
Triquarterly, the literary magazine at Northwestern University, is shutting down. It isn’t news that publishing is in upheaval, and Triquarterly isn’t the first literary magazine to lose the support of its university, but for forty-five years, under several different editors, Triquarterly championed the idea of the literary magazine. Charles Newman, who became the editor in 1964 ”‘more or less invented the look’ of the modern literary magazine.” They published a special issue on The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History in 1978. They sponsored a famous symposium on the Writer and the World in 1984, three days after Ronald Reagan’s re-election. The university’s disregard for that history is disheartening. The way the decision was made is also disheartening—the editors were only informed of it a few hours before the press release was sent out. The university had an opportunity (and a responsibility I think) to initiate an important discussion about the future of literary magazines—in public, with the magazine’s editors, readers, and writers, and the entire literary community.
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Charles Newman, who transformed Triquarterly from a student paper to a national publication, died in 2006. The executor of his estate, his nephew Ben Howe, is a contributing editor at this magazine, and I asked him if we could include his foreword to his first issue here.
As for the future, it cannot possibly shock us, since we have already done everything possible to scandalize ourselves. We have so completely debunked the old idea of the Self that we can hardly continue in the same way. Perhaps some power within us will tell us what we are, now that the old misconceptions have been laid low. Undeniably the human being is not what we commonly thought a century ago. The question nevertheless remains. He is something. What is he?” —Saul Bellow
There are two kinds of magazines—those which fascinate with nouns, and those which delight in verbs. The former are more proper: dealing modestly with time and life, they assert rather than explain; to sell things, they name things. The latter, more common, more active, tend to make a statement, ask a question, give a command. Their tenses are generally more progressive and less tangible. This is a perfect situation for dialectic, but there isn’t one. It is not at all as simple as that. This accounts for the ambiguity of the title—Tri-Quarterly. We read it as an adverb—a modified occurrence, in which action and naming are indivisible. It may tell place, sense, manner, frequency, degree, direction. Yes and no are also adverbs.
Mary Mattingly Sets Sail
The artist Mary Mattingly's Waterpod launches this weekend at the South Street Seaport. We published an early version of the project—a self-sufficient floating home—in A Public Space 2. It's interesting to see how the project has changed in the transition from theory to reality, this especially: "At first, I designed it as a personal space, but as the idea evolved, it became clear that it needed community to be sustainable and to benefit from multiple inputs and interpretations."
The Waterpod will be open to the public when it docks at various locations throughout the city, and there are a number of events planned on board—including a lecture by Peter Eisenstadt on Four Centuries of Immigration and Migration this Sunday, and an event later this summer with the biographer Jean Strouse.
Announcing Issue 8
Head west for indulgence at the casino in Primm, Nevada; to Zimbabwe to dance at the Why Leave Guesthouse and Disco Bar; to China to live among the enemy; to England to ride the Atmospheric Railway; or stay right here for an impossible sightseeing tour of New York. We’re talking Jesse Chehak, Petina Gappah, Atsushi Nakajima, Shena Mackay, John Wray, and Matt Dojny; Samantha Hunt getting noticed by her neighbors and Yiyun Li eavesdropping on hers; poetry by Adrienne Rich, Matthew Zapruder, Rebecca Wolff, and Mahmoud Darwish; fiction by Sara Majka and Naomi J. Williams; and much more. Renew or subscribe now to ensure you get your copy; watch for excerpts on the website; and, if you’re in New York, come to BookCourt on June 15 for a launch party featuring readings by Samantha Hunt and Sara Majka.
Continue reading Announcing Issue 8
Sail On, My Little Honey Bee
Congratulations to Amy Leach, whose essay from Issue 7, "Sail On, My Little Honey Bee," has been chosen for Best American Essays 2009!
Saadat Hasan Manto
The new issue of A Public Space includes a portfolio on Saadat Hasan Manto, an Urdu writer who lived in Bombay in the 1940s and 1950s. He is a revered name in the world of Urdu letters, perhaps best known for his Partition stories. But Matt Reeck has put together a portfolio that looks at his other great subject: Bombay. Manto’s Bombay was an immigrant city - according to the 1921 census, an amazing 84 percent of the population were immigrants, most of them extremely poor - and a large cross-section was comprised of a motley crew of exiled dreamers and the woebegone. Manto’s stories are populated with film stars and prostitutes, pimps and writers (as well as the occasional rich man), and full of the life of the street. His interest in depicting the lives of Bombay’s disenfranchised often put him at odds with the leading literary movement of his day, the Progressive Writers Movement, which saw literature as a vehicle for social uplift. The state put him on trial for obscenity five times. Manto left Bombay in 1948, a year after Partition, and moved to Lahore. But the city had a strong hold on him, and he wrote some of his best Bombay stories as an exile from the city he loved.
This is from the postscript to Yazid, a collection of his stories that was published in 1951:
It was a blow to have to leave Bombay, where I had lived such a busy life.
Bombay had taken me in, a wandering outcast thrown out by even his family. She had told me, “You can live happily here on two paise a day or on ten thousand rupees. Or if you want, you can be the saddest person in the world at either price. Here you can do whatever you want, and no one will think you’re strange. Here no one will tell you what to do. You will have to do
every difficult thing on your own, and you will have to make every important
decision by yourself. I don’t care if you live on the sidewalk or in a
magnificent mansion, I don’t care if you stay or go. I’ll always be here.” I
was disconsolate after leaving Bombay. My good friends were there. I had
gotten married there. My first child was born there, as was my second. There
I had gone from earning a couple rupees a day to thousands - hundreds of
thousands - and there I had spent it all. I loved it, and I still do!
Manto died in Lahore in 1955. The Daily Times of Pakistan remembered Manto on the fifty-third anniversary of his death last month. You can read one of the stories from the portfolio, in full, here.
Continue reading Saadat Hasan Manto
Issue 7 Is...
Peter Orner on Governor Blagojevich; Saadat Hasan Manto on Bombay's lowlifes; Amy Leach in outer space; and Tom Drury in LA. With new fiction by Mary-Beth Hughes, Clare Wigfall, and John Haskell; Anne Carson's Variations on the Right to Remain Silent; new poems by Mary Jo Bang, Arda Collins, Brandon Shimoda, Tom Yuill, and others; and translations by Walter Murch, Mira Rosenthal, and David Ferry.
Dirty Politics, Designer Kisses, and More
Issue 6 is: Peyton Marshall on celebrity family reunions; Dubravka Ugresic on setting off alarms; Keith Lee Morris on getting lost on purpose; Colleen Kinder on defining Iceland; and Martha Cooley on the sounds of silence. With new stories by Peter Orner (with illustrations by Eric Orner), Gary Amdahl, Sana Krasikov, and Preeta Samarasan; and new poems by Cathy Park Hong, Tom Yuill, Major Jackson, Billy Collins, and others, and translations by John Ashbery and Luc Sante. In the Focus portfolio, the state of Italian literature. And Jono Rotman at White Sands Missile Range Museum on the cover.
Continue reading Dirty Politics, Designer Kisses, and More
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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