Last week, just days before his first solo album was released, writer, singer, and Odd Future member Frank Ocean posted an arresting statement on his tumblr, describing his first love: a young man who couldn’t love him back. Some called it a coming out…others called it an amazing piece of writing. For his first televised performance, on Jimmy Fallon, he performed the song “Bad Religion,” a meditation on longing in the tradition of An Excellent Song, Which Was Solomon’s, and Mirza Ghalib’s Urdu poetry.
1.
Taxi Driver
be my shrink for the hour
Leave the meter
runnin
It's rush hour
so take the streets if you
wanna
Just outrun the demons
could you.
And he said Allah ho Akbar
I told him don't curse me
Well boy you need prayer
I guess it couldn't hurt me
If it brings me to my knees
It's a bad religion…
—Frank Ocean “Bad Religion,” 2012
2.
1 In my bed by night I sought him that my soule loved: I soght him, but I founde him not. 2 I wil rise, therefore now, and go about in the citie, by the streets & by the open places & wil seke him that my soule loveth: i soght him but I founde him not. 3 The watchemen that went about the citie, founde me: to whom i said, Have you sene him who my soul loveth?
—Geneva Bible, Song of Solomon, 1560.
3.
...What appears as confirmation of the Ocean's actuality
It is merely a sum total of wave, drop, phosphorescence
Reticence is a form of pride, even with oneself
No matter how unveiled you are within your many veils
The embellishment of the ravishing is never to be done
Inside the seclusion of the veil, the mirror lives constantly
The deep decorum of the hidden is misread as revelation
The clairvoyant lost in dream, dreams he is awake…
—Mirza Ghalib, “Why parsimony today in the promise of tomorrow’s imbibing,” 1841, trans. Sara Suleri & Azra Raza
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: Still from Frank Ocean, "Swim Good"
If you're too lasy for even Wikipedia or Spark Notes, here's a big ol' list of spoilers to save you some time.
But before you start spouting off those endings, maybe you should check out the copyright laws behind the books first.
Or maybe you're better off keeping quiet, staying holed up in your luxurious Cobble Hill brownstone.
Maybe keep your thoughts in your Moleskine, and raise its value that way.
Just make sure your grammar is up to par, lest you be mistaken for a poorly worded email spammer.
And who knows? Your work could end up winning you the Kyoto Prize, and you won't know what to do with all that prize money.
Last week, science writer Jonah Lehrer was all over the news after reporters found a number of substantial repetitions between his previously published writings and his new work for the Frontal Cortex blog he brought with him from Wired to the New Yorker. (And now there's this.) A year-old piece from the Observer quoted Lehrer describing some aspects of his high-paid lecture circuit as “existentially sad,” particularly his surplus of electronic hotel keys. Daisy Buchanan and Søren Kierkegaard know what he means.
1.
“You end up getting existentially sad, where you look through your wallet and you realize you’ve got like seven hotel keys…It happened last week in San Francisco, where I was convinced this key wasn’t working. I went down to the front desk, and they pointed out that I was using the wrong key. It was from a month ago.”
—Jonah Lehrer, quoted in the Observer, 2011.
2.
“And yet it could be that the little I have to say contained some particular remark which, if it met with favour and indulgence, might be found to contain some truth even if it concealed itself under a shabby coat.”
—Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1843.
3.
“He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. 'They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.'”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: keanureeves.blogspot.com
In preparation for the weekend, prepare for some drunk texts from your favorite literary rockstars.
Just don't overanalyze them to a Louie CK-esque point of smart-dumb self-hatred.
Besides, why are you texting when you can be using a typewriter instead?
Or better yet, write your next novel on a roll of two-ply Charmin ultra.
If anything, it will add to your legend, should you decide to pull the ultimate literary hoax.
Just make sure you don't end up in a Japanese love hotel with the press following you.
Otherwise, you'll end up back home, living with your parents and sleeping in your childhood bedroom.
And how are you going to explain that to your kids?
Image credit:
The Adidas Originals Facebook page (and the internet at large) blew up after a photograph of a shoe with ankle chains, the JS Roundhouse Mid, designed by Jeremy Scott, was posted this past Monday. Scott said the shoe was inspired by the 1980s toy My Pet Monster. The Reverend Jesse Jackson got involved. Meanwhile, the National Parks Service has plans for an event called “Walk a Mile, a Minute in the Footsteps of the Enslaved” on July 8. Adidas, for their part, have decided to pull the shoe. As Olaudah Equiano reminds us, "apparel" manufacturers were always slow to join the cause of abolition.
1.
“The design of the JS Roundhouse Mid is nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery…Jeremy Scott is renowned as a designer whose style is quirky and lighthearted and his previous shoe designs for Adidas Originals have, for example, included panda heads and Mickey Mouse. Any suggestion that this is linked to slavery is untruthful.”
—Adidas statement regarding the JS Roundhouse Mid shoe, 18 June, 2012.
2.
“I hope that the slave trade will be abolished. I pray it may be an event at hand. The great body of manufacturers, uniting in the cause, will considerably facilitate and expedite it; and, as I have already stated, it is most substantially their interest and advantage, and as such the nation’s at large, (except those persons concerned in the manufacturing neck-yokes, collars, chains, hand-cuffs, leg-bolts, drags, thumb-screws, iron muzzles, and coffins; cats, scourges, and other instruments of torture used in the slave trade).
—Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, 1789.
3.
“Park Ranger Angela Roberts-Burton will be in period clothing telling tales of the enslaved who labored here. Experience agricultural labor that enslaved people may have performed at Hampton. Work in the fields with actual hoes and scythes. Carry buckets of water with a yoke on your shoulders.”
—Publicity materials for the National Park Service’s Hampton Farm Site in Maryland, which is planning an event called “Walk a Mile, a Minute in the Footsteps of the Enslaved on the Hampton Plantation” on 8 July, 2012.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: Black Media Scoop
Did you hear the news? Books have the power to change laws.
And some people would like to make a law to keep the Gatsby movie from ever happening.
Though, if they can make a Ulysses movie, I suppose anything is possible.
Just ask Hannah from Girls, whose literary ambition is the stuff of awkward legend.
If only newspapers had more ambition when it came to diversifying their reviews.
Or they could reach out to unorthodox book reviewers, like LeBron James's take on the Hunger Games.
He could even take on a few poems by our country's latest poet laureate.
Let's just hope the zombie invasion doesn't take place before any of that can happen.
Photo Credit: Michael R. Perry
It is believed that Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger may have had something to do with the infamous Gardner Heist, in which Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," among other works, was stolen. Yesterday, Catherine Greig, the long-time companion of Bulger, was sentenced to eight years in prison for harboring her boyfriend while he remained atop the FBI’s most wanted list. In a sentencing memo Grieg’s lawyer invites us, by way of Shakespeare, to consider why people love criminals.
1. “Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare’s sonnets…The truth of the matter is that she was and remained in love with Mr. Bulger…It is not justice to use the law as a cudgel to exact the proverbial ‘pound of flesh’ from a kind, gentle 60-year-old woman who is at the mercy of this court for a fair sentencing commensurate with her conduct which arose out of the love she had for Mr. James Bulger.’’
—Kevin Reddington, sentencing memorandum, filed 11 June, 2012
2. If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather'd,
As subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-number'd hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 124, 1609
3. “It helped…that his brother, William Bulger, was the president of the Massachusetts state senate. The base of Bulger’s personal kingdom was Southie, where he served as the judge and jury, the hometown hero who never left, and teenagers would sometimes scrawl on their notebooks:WHITEY RULES.”
—Ulrich Boser, The Gardner Heist, 2009.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee via Wikimedia Commons
Did you survive the tote bag frenzy that was BEA 2012?
Maybe take a breather and eat a mango if your nerves are still on edge.
And leave it to Oprah to make all your book selections from now on.
Though, if you ask Zadie Smith, she still holds complete faith in libraries.
Just try to avoid Amazon if you're not trustful of corporate behemoths.
But if you're not, just make sure you don't Nook a flame you can't put out.
You may end up with something worthy of the scariest post-apocalypse novel.
Which may come about from a war between the grammar gods.
Though the end already seems near for the Israeli publishing world.
Let's hope someone takes advantage of all of this drama and makes a good graphic novel out of it.
Image source: The Trustees of the British Museum
Tin House has an excellent post up with many fantastic writers confessing their pre-writing rituals. From Jim Sherpard’s even numbered emails to Janice Erlbaum’s horse porn, I can’t help but grin at the perfect bedlam of obsessive compulsions and pure superstition in the attempt to drill productivity and inspiration into one’s head. Of course, such habits and rituals can’t help but extend into the day beyond when the writing’s done, so I thought it might be useful to compile a small exposition on how writers behave beyond the desk.
How writers navigate the grocery store. The writer doesn’t know which piece of paper has the grocery list on it. Or there’s more than one list on several different pieces of paper and the stress of finding these pieces of paper is just too much, so the writer proceeds to the store without such a list. The writer chants what he/she believes to be the list in his/her head while wandering the aisles. In the produce section, the writer becomes distracted. Slightly euphoric but nervous. There are items here the writer lusts after that are not on the list. But they are shiny. It is here the writer thinks, "Fuck. Look at this piece of fruit. Nothing I will ever create compares to the perfect beauty of this pomegranate. I can’t even afford pomegranates. Fuck." The list is forgotten and the writer leaves with one can of tuna and tomato paste, loose almonds rattling in the writer’s pocket that he/she has no intention of paying for.
How writers decide which clothes to wear. If the writer is only sitting at a desk and writing, then the writer wears whatever the writer went to bed wearing the night before. If the writer has to go out—to the grocery store, for example—the writer will simply put a coat on over these work-slash-bedclothes. If it is too warm to wear a coat, the writer might go so far as to put on a bra. If the writer has a special occasion, like a night on the town, the writer will apply deodorant and sniff around for a clean shirt with a minimal amount of holes and stains. If the writer has to attend a job interview or a wedding, clothes will be borrowed from a friend.
How writers behave at restaurants. The writer will order a beverage in a prompt manner, knowing beforehand what he/she likes to drink. The writer does not deviate in the selection of beverages, though will order different beverages depending on the time of day. The writer is probably alcoholic. Ordering food is a far more complicated and drawn-out affair. The writer will smile and fall slightly in love with his/her server, as the server quickly becomes the writer’s navigational savior in all matters. It is only when the writer has had too many beverages to see clearly and yet senses the server’s impatience that the writer will beg the server to decide what the writer should eat. The writer will tip extravagantly. If the writer happens to sit at the bar, the writer will not accomplish the task of eating but will stay until the bar closes and then go home with the bartender, whom the writer is now deeply in love with.
image: dria.org
An article in yesterday's New York Times explored the Obama administration’s “top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture.” The president remarked that the youth of the nominated has moved us into a “whole different phase.” In 2007, Judge Peter Beaumont called 17 year-old Samina Malik, also known as the “Lyrical Terrorist,” a “complete enigma.” And in a 1987 review of Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival, Salman Rushdie suggests that the answer to the riddle is the one thing that must never appear in the riddle itself.
1.
“The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years… ‘How old are these people?’ [President Obama] asked, according to two officials present. ‘If they are starting to use children,’ he said of Al Qaeda, ‘we are moving into a whole different phase.’”
—Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, 29 May, 2012.
2.
“We are told of a dream of an exploding head, of ill health, of family tragedy. There may be more to it. I think it was Borges who said that in a riddle to which the answer is knife, the only word that cannot be employed is knife. There is one word I can find nowhere in the text of The Enigma of Arrival. That word is 'love,' and a life without love, or one in which love has been buried so deep that it can't come out, is very much what this book is about and what makes it so very, very sad.”
—Salman Rushdie, “A Sad Pastoral,” in The Guardian, reviewing V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, 1987.
3.
Following the verdict, Judge Peter Beaumont QC, the Recorder of London, told Malik: ‘You have been in many respects a complete enigma to me.’ She had posted her poems on websites under the screen name the Lyrical Terrorist, prosecutors said…The court also heard she had written on the back of a WH Smith till receipt: ‘The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom.’ Malik said she had only called herself the Lyrical Terrorist ‘because it sounded cool.’”
—BBC News, “Lyrical Terrorist Found Guilty,” 8 November, 2007.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
image: Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon, 1912, via wiki-paintings.org
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