The Unrest
This strange essay is about my insomnia, raccoons, and wanting to be friends with Andy Warhol.
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We Are All Modern: Revolutions in Biography
HONORABLE MENTION IN THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2021
In 1913, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas traveled to London. Stein was seeking a publisher for Three Lives, three short experimental pieces she wrote from the points of view of a female servant, a housekeeper, and a “Negro” woman. From London Stein wrote a chatty letter to an American friend reporting that she and Toklas went to the Richard Strauss opera Elektra. Though not generally a fan of music, Stein found Strauss’s work quite compelling. “He has made real conversation and he does it by intervals and relations directly without machinery. After all,” Stein wrote Dodge, “we are all modern” (in Mellow 172-3).
Critical Intimacy: On Susan Sontag’s Obituaries
The obituary is an existence writ small, the preface to the literary afterlife. Suddenly the story, once endlessly expansive, is over, and can be condensed to a few paragraphs, or summarized in a column or two of newspaper ink, depending on how luminous the luminary under consideration. Like most of what appears in the morning paper, convention and form govern the obituary: the childhood, the schooling, the highlights of the career, comments from notables in the field, the publications, the memorable conflicts, the cause and manner of death, the list of grieving survivors.
An Original Adventure
Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink.
Cogito Ergo Boom: Susan Sontag’s Journals
In his introduction to the awkwardly titled As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, David Rieff tells us that his mother Susan Sontag “toyed desultorily with the idea of writing” an autobiography in the early 1990s, which surprised him, given her characteristic skepticism about self-exposure. “To write mainly about myself,” Sontag said in a 1972 interview, “seems to me a rather indirect route to what I have to write about.”
How To Think More (But Not Better): Alain de Botton’s School of Life
Is the very idea of an intelligent self-help book a paradox? It is certainly trying to serve two demanding masters: philosophical speculation and practical action. After all, readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions.
Is This Any Fun? On Writer and Scholar Richard Poirier
When I signed up for Richard Poirier’s seminar at Rutgers in 1996, it was out of obligation. As an American-literature grad student (“Americanist,” in grad-school lingua franca), I was expected to take Poetry and Pragmatism—a course decisively bound to the modernist project, with a syllabus that included William James, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—even though I had come to graduate school to study the works of the early settlers, fiery jeremiads and captivity narratives, sentimental novels and transcripts of witch trials. But the ethos of the Rutgers Americanist demanded I expand beyond my specific interest zone; since there was so little American literature, we were expected to be fluent in all of it, from Winthrop to Updike.Clip Title and Intro/Details
On Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth
Time was we liked our poets young. From the classical age to the Romantics the ideas of poetry and youth were hopelessly intertwined. Whether it is because we associate youth with our headiest feelings or because there have been times — and the first half of the twentieth century was one of those times — when bad boy poets reigned like rock stars over a popular culture that actually thought about, and cared about, poetry.
On TS Eliot’s Day Job: A Peaceful, But Very Interesting Pursuit
Even after he published Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank. The new volume of his letters reveals his financial anxieties and his unexpected attitude towards work and writing. From 1917 until 1925, T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. A simple, declarative sentence, a biographical fact.
On Books as Fetish Objects
Unpacking My Library introduces a new sub-genre to coffee table books: library porn.
In his essay “Unpacking My Library” Walter Benjamin, a critic who knew no school or home in his lifetime, lovingly describes his book collection. An aphoristic writer, Benjamin peppers his “talk about book collecting” (the essay’s subtitle) with all sorts of gems about books, writing, collecting, reading, and memory.
The Pleasures and Perils of Rereading
In his often anthologized essay “On Reading Old Books,” William Hazlitt wrote, “I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire to ever read at all.” This is a rather extreme position on rereading, but he is not alone. Larry McMurtry made a similar point: “If I once read for adventure, I now read for security.
On The Great Gatsby as Noir
For a long time, whenever someone asked me what my favorite book was (an occupational hazard of being a book critic is that people ask this question a lot) I had an immediate and simple answer: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My love affair with Gatsby started early; I probably read it for the first time when I was 11 or 12 and read it again every year until I was in my 20s. Yes, I was a precocious reader, but I also had a good reason for diving into Gatsby.
On the books of Susan Sontag, Ranked
There is no way for this not to be a throwdown. You are going to disagree with what I say about her fiction, especially the early stuff. We are going to clash about which essays are best. From that, we will inevitably diverge on which of her essay collections (to me, her most important work) is most vital. As for the monographs, several of them dazzle, but how to find their proper spots among her works is rough going.
Short review of Jeannie Vanasco’s Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
Jeannie Vanasco’s new book Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl should be considered closer to true crime than memoir. The crux of it is Vanasco’s confronting a friend who assaulted her in high school. First, they talk tentatively on the phone, but eventually they move to face-to-face meetings and Vanasco starts using straight transcription, as if to leave her own experience unmediated. This splits points of view so that you get a sense of what is in each of their heads, perpetrator’s and victim’s. For the remainder of the book she alternates between her own narration of present events, and the transcripts of her meetings and calls with Mark, her rapist.
Why Does Everyone Love It But Me? An Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn’s Manhattan apartment is quiet, classy, tasteful. It is a symphony of stillness and neutrals in stark contrast to the constant motion, precise convictions, and easy chatter of the man who inhabits it. He apologizes for having nothing to offer but ice water, but is generous and forthright in his conversation.
Dirty Mind: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum
There is nothing drab about Wayne Koestenbaum. The critic, poet, novelist, and, most recently, painter was dressed in turquoise and yellow the afternoon I chatted with him in his studio; the paintings that covered the walls were small riots of color as well. Koestenbaum’s conversation, like his writing, is both precise and elliptical, frank and expansive.
