I do not remember the first Cy Twombly painting I saw, but I think it might have been this: I was in graduate school. It was the ’90s. I was more than casually obsessed with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. I had even tried translating one of the Orpheus sonnets. It was a terrible translation, but I was hooked on Rilke. Around that same time, I was reading a great deal of critical theory and found Roland Barthes utterly beguiling. Somehow, I came across Barthes’ great essay from 1979, “The Wisdom of Art,” in which he mentions one of Cy Twombly’s Orpheus pieces. I was immediately intrigued, and when I stumbled […]
Category: Essays
Essays that only appear online, but not in the print journal
No Heroes: On Cormac McCarthy, 1933-2023
by Don Waters
I liked him early on, this author. I read him, and I kept reading, hungry for more. At nineteen, a student of college literature, bored of portraits of artists and odes, I discovered the author at a used bookshop. In little time, I took to him more than any writer on my syllabus. I admired the brute stories the author put to the page. So clear-eyed, but defiant. And terrifying. An uncontained heat drew me to them. The author’s radical diction and syntax were at war with the rules I had always been taught. Punctuation be damned, the books […]
For Oppenheimer, Bay Area was the spark
by John McMurtrie
It all started with a haircut. Taking advantage of a slow Sunday, Luis W. Alvarez, a budding physicist, was at a barbershop on the campus of UC Berkeley, not far from where he worked at the university’s Radiation Laboratory. Sitting in the barber’s chair, he held that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle, dated January 29, 1939. In it was a wire report that said German chemists had bombarded uranium with neutrons—they had discovered nuclear fission. Alarmed by what he read, Alvarez “stopped the barber in mid-snip, and ran all the way to the Radiation Laboratory to spread the word.” In what […]
House to House: Voices from a Refugee Center in Odesa
by Oleg Suslov
“Until February 24, 2022, I had never written about the war. A journalist needs to have the specific vocabulary, terminology. Until this full-scale invasion, I did not have the terminology of war.” But these days, Oleg Suslov, the 58-year-old editor of the Odesa Evening News, is writing mostly about the war. “This September,” he says, “in the middle of the war, my daughter will give birth…Explosions woke me at 5 a.m. My daughter calls. Dad, what is this? My daughter has three children and at this moment she is pregnant with her fourth.” “That is how I remember it,” Oleg […]
On the Art of Interviewing
by Michael Krasny
I learned an important lesson interviewing David Byrne. He was (and is) an artist I respect and admire, but he was a terrible interview. Monosyllabic grunts were what I got from him as well as a clear indication that he simply did not want to be there, in the studio, being interviewed. Sometimes you can
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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 6—Yukio Mishima
by Sean Gill
“I wrote ‘Patriotism’ from the point of view of the young officer who could not help choosing suicide because he could not take part in the Ni Ni Roku Incident. This is neither a comedy nor a tragedy but simply a story of happiness…To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life.” —Yukio Mishima, in a 1966 postscript to his short story, “Patriotism” Army Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama sits on a Noh stage with his wife, Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka). The only real ornamentation in the spare white room is an enormous kakemono banner, bearing the Chinese […]
Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 5—Jacqueline Susann
by Sean Gill
Q: “Which is the product, you or the book?” JS: “Way back… the author, the successful author, sold himself, only we didn’t have the media. If you recall, Ernest Hemingway… there was always great publicity, how he was a great white hunter, how he went to the bullring… and so you sort of almost mixed the man with his character, they said, ‘That’s really Hemingway.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, he and his wife, Zelda, lived the same kind of flamboyant life in the south of France as the kind of Americans they wrote about. And then along came television, and the […]
Everyone Has a Dead Father
by Matthew Zapruder
The road from Chicago to Iowa City is straight, about three and a half hours due west. In 2004, I was on my way from a reading at a bookstore in Chicago to one in Iowa City, the famed Prairie Lights. About halfway there, I pulled into a rest stop and saw I had missed
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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 4—Mickey Spillane
by Sean Gill
1963 Mickey Spillane is “Mike Hammer” “When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought about what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book, reading about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences… But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics… All you have to […]
Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 3—Irvine Welsh
by Sean Gill
1996 Irvine Welsh is “Mikey Forrester” “I’m playing this drug dealer who’s probably one of the most unsympathetic characters in the book, cause, probably kinda manipulative and nasty and sort of horrible guy so, a lot of people will be saying sort of type-casting again, you know?” —Irvine Welsh, in a video interview from the set of Trainspotting in June 1995 To the strains of Bizet’s Carmen, Renton (Ewan McGregor), a young Edinburger junkie, makes fastidious personal preparations for kicking heroin, the final step of which is obtaining one last hit from his dealer, Mikey Forrester. Mikey appears, smirking like […]
Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 2—Richard Wright
by Sean Gill
1951 Richard Wright is “Bigger Thomas” “I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, if I did not try to make him a living personality and at the same time a symbol of all the larger things I felt and saw in him, I’d be reacting as Bigger himself reacted: that is, I’d be acting out of fear if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me…The writing of it turned into a way of living for me…I kept out of the story as much as possible, […]
Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 1—Stephen King
by Sean Gill
Why? Simple self-promotion? For fun? Sheer ego? “Because no one else can?” To wrest back the measure of control which a solitary typist enjoys? Is it fear of living merely a life of the mind? The need to act out a fantasy? Or is it a public therapy, an exorcism of demons? Typically an author’s on-screen role in an adaptation is that of a background artist: blink and you’ll miss Kurt Vonnegut (a pedestrian in Mother Night), Amy Tan (a house partier in The Joy Luck Club), Chuck Palahniuk (an airline passenger in Choke), or John le Carré (a […]