Foucault in Warsaw

An excerpt from his nonfiction debut, Foucault in Warsaw, Remigiusz Ryziński recounts the secret police's interest in the French philosopher's during his stay in the 1950s.

Probably in the summer of 1959, I learned my friend had made the acquaintance of a Frenchman by the name of Foucault. Because I knew a little French, it was decided I should meet him, which I proceeded to do. At a time when Foucault was to return by plane from Paris, Stefan O., Jurek R., and I went to the airport to welcome the foreigner. (I stress they both already knew Foucault.) Upon greeting him, we all went to his home on Rutkowski Street. In the apartment I also found Henryk R., whom I had known for some time and to whom I was close despite our difference in age. I returned to Foucault’s apartment a number of days in a row. Each day, I found the company I mentioned above, though with small changes, because, as I realized, this foreigner was a homosexual who enjoyed changing his ‘bed boys’ fairly frequently. Despite our acquaintance, nothing intimate transpired between me and Foucault in the course of those days, because of Stefan, who was my friend and in front of whom it was unsuitable to do anything.

Read more at Words without Borders

What was difficult was not being gay but being working-class

Kim Willsher writes on the French writer Didier Eribon's newest memoir Returning to Reims at The Guardian. 

The book opens with Eribon’s return to Reims three decades later following the death of his father, a man he admits he despised: “I didn’t love him. I never had. We were basically strangers. There was nothing between us, nothing that held us together… at least that is what I believed, or struggled to believe; it had been my idea that one could live one’s life separate from one’s family, reinventing oneself and turning one’s back on the past and the people in it.”

However, going back, and slowly rekindling a relationship with his widowed mother as they reminisce over family photos leads him to think again about the world he had left: “I asked myself why I detested my father, why I hadn’t tried to see him before he died. And why I had never tried to understand him and his life, which was not easy.”

Read more at The Guardian

The Man Who Loved Proust

Sudip Bose recounts the little known relationship between Reynaldo Hahn and the famous French writer at The American Scholar.

Throughout his life, many famous people were drawn to Hahn. When he met Proust, however, at the home of the artist Madeleine Lemaire in 1894, the writer was a fledgling artist of little renown. Proust was three years Hahn’s senior, and the two had deep mutual interests in music, painting, and literature. During the two years that their romance bloomed, they saw each other nearly every day, embarking on vacations in Venice and Brittany. Even after the affair ended, they remained good friends. It seems clear that Hahn was conflicted about his sexuality: he remained in the closet, had relationships with women, and was scathing about homosexuality in his correspondence. Still, the letters to and from Proust, those on auction today, reveal a touching, if veiled affection. In a letter dated March 1896, Proust writes: “I want you to be here all the time but as a god in disguise, whom no mortal would recognize.” “Mon petit Reynaldo” is how Proust addresses his friend, upon whom the protagonist of his sprawling, autobiographical, unfinished novel Jean Santeuil is based.

Read more at The American Scholar

Write Something Inappropriate

Amy Wright interviews the writer Dorothy Allison on finding the courage to write at Guernica Magazine

Name the works of genius by American artists and you’ll find that working-class artists created them because they had nothing to lose. The choice is life and death: you will either be murdered outside the Greyhound bus station in your hometown, or you will go to New York to become a dancer or a singer or a poet or writer of fiction. And you find that over and over again. When you find a great artist and you query them you find out that they came from a small town, and they’re estranged from their family. You know why. Even if they weren’t queer they’re queer in that broader context of being unacceptable.

Read More at Guernica

What Makes a Good Essay?

Michele Filgate interviews Leslie Jaminson and Roxanne Gay on their two recent essay collections. Both agree that a good essay needs to look both inward and outward, combining personal experience and larger cultural ideas, all grounded upon a creativity and intellectual rigor.

Well, going along with what both of you said, I wanted to ask what each of you think makes a good essay. You kind of hit on it already a little bit but … I feel like the essay can be so different, much like a novel. There are different kinds of novels, and there are different kinds of essays. But for both of you, when you’re writing them and when you’re reading them, what do you want to see in an essay?

Gay: I definitely want to see writing that looks both inward and outward. I love the exposure, the way in which people reveal themselves, but I also want an essayist to connect to something beyond themselves, something bigger … that kind of inquiry that’s both personal and beyond personal is what makes a really good essay. I also love attention to the sentence. I love a really well-crafted sentence, and a well-crafted essay. Someone who is putting as much time into the writing as they are into the revelation.

Jamison: Yeah, I would definitely echo both of those. I think that when I write, and when I read, I like that whole gaze inward and outward, I also love to be surprised, and I love to be surprised on the level of the sentence certainly, the level of cadences and rhythms and how those can kind of lull me into a certain trance, a certain set of expectations and then jolt me out of it again, that sensation is pleasurable to me. But I also love surprise, I love the kind of surprise that testifies to ways that the writer was surprised in the act of writing the essay … I love coming back to the essay as an attempt or as an inquiry, and that certainly resonates in my experience as a writer. Like, almost every essay that I’ve written that I feel is successful is partially successful because it surprised me at some point because it ended up being about something very different than what I thought it was going to be about when I started writing it. And I love as a reader when I’m granted some version of that experience in an essay as well. It thwarts where I thought it was headed, or another kind of floor opens up beneath the floor I thought I was standing on.

Read more at Salon

The Particularities of Their Bodies

Bryan Thomas Rice relates the pleasurable paradox of his obsessions with anonymous sex.

This is what the man from the chat room wanted:

He wanted me to park in the alley and enter his house through the kitchen door, which would be unlocked, and once inside, I would take an immediate right and find a door leading to an unfinished basement, and because there would be no light, I would need to descend the stairs slowly, very slowly, grasping the rail like a child learning to walk, and grope along the cinderblock wall until I found another door, behind which he would be laying on a sleeping bag, waiting for me in the dark.

No names, no faces: only our bodies. Total anonymity. 

He explained that he taught biology at the university and had a wife who was away that weekend. He had the house to himself but he couldn’t take chances. The darkness was unconventional but necessary. For all he knew, I was a student of his. For all I knew, he was lying about the wife. Maybe he was living out a fantasy he'd harbored in secret for many years. I really didn’t care.

As the man spoke, the telephone receiver shook in my hand, and then there was a long silence that gave me the time I needed to consider the possible outcomes. On the one hand, I could break afternoon plans with my friends and meet up with this man, this stranger, and return to my little studio apartment and resume my life. I would tell nobody. 

read more at Sweet: A Literary Confection

image: Christopher Sousa at Advocate.com

Why are Writers Compelled to Write?

In meditating on the writing life, Scott Esposito explores the power of process in any creative effort.

One morning not too long ago I spent a restful hour of more or less genuine solitude with Rothko’s Seagram murals in a small room in the Tate Modern galleries in London. The room is dimly lit, as per Rothko’s instructions, and it is barely large enough to hold the six immense canvasses. One reaches it at the end of a long corridor, giving the sense of having come a ways away from the world and into a chilly cave. The works consist of large pillars of dour reds, oranges, greens, and purples. They are very rough, simple, shapes that reach back toward Nietzsche’s primordial humanity – the heaps of rock and mud and bark and bones that our ancestors made before figuration became the locus of art. Although I find Rothko’s murals beautiful, I do not experience them as a beauty that vanquishes suffering so much as a beauty that makes my suffering articulable. If I were to put such a remarkable experience into the clumsy stuff of language, I would say that it transports me from the realm of the visceral into the realm of the philosophic, in a way similar to how time can take our very immediate emotion – a frenzied sobbing after a break-up – and slowly build around that pit the fruit of reflection and nostalgia. With Rothko one always senses the outbursts that must have inspired the work, yet they are cocooned by the weeks and months of measured brushstrokes that chill passion into reflection.

I stepped up and walked away from Rothko’s murals with the conviction that, of music, art, and literature, I prefer the third the best of all because it is the one most interested in taming the will by giving a sense of duration. Literature finds its highest expression beyond those primal moments that Nietzsche sought out. I imagine it as the dispassionate and quiet third in a lovers’ triangle, the sullen one who will eventually lose interest in the ecstatic sports played by art and music, heading off on his own, ultimately more interested in the introvert’s task of constructing systems and stories. The literary intelligence must ultimately have that distance from our unalloyed passage through life – this is what language forces upon us. And this is the particular barrier that it seeks to overcome, its own version of being cast out from the garden.

read more at The White Review

On Tumbleweed

Brian Blanchfield considers the place where tumbleweeds and visiting poets meet @ Guernica.

Yesterday, a tumbleweed blew right up to my driver’s side door, at a stoplight, here in Tucson. Simpson westbound, turning onto the highway frontage road north. I was alone at the light. Two hours prior, a hard decision, I turned down the offer of a three-year Visiting Poet position at a prominent creative writing MFA program a thousand miles away. I got out of the car, chased it a little ways in a subsequent gust, and then fit it into the backseat of my Mitsubishi, where it crumbled a bit in tight captivity. It was my lunch hour—I work a support position at an arts nonprofit downtown—and I brought it home with me. Later, my boyfriend John and I decided we would string it up as a chandelier in our living room. It’s December 21st and we’d been wondering whether we’d get a tree. What does it mean when the universal symbol of itinerancy knocks into you the day you committed to stay a while?

The flicker of the firelight will throw the tumbleweed’s shadow complexly on the ceiling is my hunch, giving the room a little twirl and flutter. I’ll suspend a tiny mirrored disco ball within it. One ornament spinning within another. I want to show it to John even more than I want to see it.

When I met John’s father, Edmund, when he and his wife Diane, John’s mom, visited their son in Montana about this time two years ago, his first words to me, over the handshake, were: “So. Visiting. Poet?” I felt it as a challenge, just as twenty minutes later, when dinner was over, he’d outwit me to pay the check. He knew I had been John’s teacher, and I was uneasy in any misapprehension that our romance began when he was my student. I made sure to narrate the timeline as naturally as I could over our plates of river trout, and it was in that discernible anxiety I felt myself fall farther in Ed’s early estimation. It seems to me that of all his children, John is most like him: unpredictable conversationally, apt equally to quip obliquely or to wander off on his own in thought—a peppery kind of depressive, stubborn, quick enough to be disappointed in the world, good enough to prompt others to show him any flair for transcending the ordinary. John is made that way, too, except in his demeanor he is more graceful, more liquid, lovelier. It is clear that Edmund loves John supremely. A visiting poet, might by definition leave new relations by moving on, this visiting poet who presumably had upswept his son in poetry or something, his son whom he had known all twenty-nine years theretofore and had been unable to save from every hurt or letdown.

Read More at Guernica

Warhol's Last Starlet

Sandie Friedman wonders about all the lives she could have lived @ The Nervous Breakdown.

Edie Sedgwick was my idol.

As a junior in high school, I read the biography Edie: An American Life by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, so I knew she grew up on a ranch, the troubled scion of a privileged family, had been institutionalized at Silver Hill and sculpted a horse at Radcliffe. In 1965, she became the most glamorous of Warhol’s “superstars,” the one who best set off his own spectral image when they appeared in photographs together. I’d seen footage of her in Ciao! Manhattan balancing on a stone wall, a celestial tightrope walker; and later, a tragic burnout, camping at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. She died only months after the filming was complete, of an overdose of barbiturates, at the age of 28. To me, 28 seemed plenty old, and besides, I had a premonition that I would die in a car crash at that same age. Before then, I was destined to become Warhol’s last starlet: Edie Sedgwick reincarnated as a middle-class Jewish girl from Connecticut. I knew what I had to do to become Edie. First, I had to become as exquisitely, breathtakingly thin as she was. (I knew beauty was a prerequisite, too, but thinness you could take action on immediately.) Second, I had to get to New York. When I got there, Warhol would hire me to work in his studio, but would soon realize my destiny and make me a superstar. College was just a means of getting to New York; my real life would be in the Art World. I would make art twenty-four hours a day, and I wouldn’t need to sleep. Or eat.

It wasn’t 1967; the Factory was defunct; the Warhol of the Factory era was no more. But somehow I thought that if I could just be strange and beautiful enough, it would still be possible, in 1984, to find that world—or for it to find me. In choosing Barnard for school, I understood that I was choosing Uptown, not Downtown. But it wasn’t until I got there that it became clear just how different college was from the New York of my imagination. Instead of raising the silk screen from one of those dazzling society portraits while Andy looked on, I was charting the velocity of balls for my physics lab; instead of shooting up in the bathroom with Billy Name, I was locked in a stand-off with my uptight pre-med roommate.

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Memory is Never Anybody's Friend

Gary Indiana on our idea of Cuba @ the London Review of Books.

Events of a distant nature have an abstract, even occult quality in Cuba, as of things glimpsed through a scrim of fog. Last June, Granma, the country’s only newspaper, reported the death of Whitney Houston four months after the fact, like a suddenly declassified state secret, in an edition otherwise devoid of anything resembling news. (Granma features plenty of statistics, state and municipal documents, decrees, ‘human interest’ stories and recipes for pork. News, not so much.) The paper was keeping its readers current with the latest tweaks in Holguín poultry farming, and running Fidel Castro’s memoirs.

I have only spotted Castro once, 12 years ago, at a patriotic rally on the Malecón: a new statue of José Martí was being installed. Martí’s new replica pointed an accusing finger towards Florida and held the repatriated boat child Elián González in his other arm. (‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked a Cuban friend in the crowd. ‘If we come to this we get the morning off work,’ he said. ‘Also, a free sandwich and a T-shirt.’) Castro didn’t address the rally. The keynote speech was given by what appeared to be a Cuban Girl Guide, in a green uniform. The statue of Martí has migrated to a traffic island in front of the Cupet-Cimex petrol station at Calle 15; it was originally planted below the cliff where the Hotel Nacional sits. At least I think it was. I’m not really sure. I spent much of 2012 in Havana writing my own memoirs, and the fact that I’m not sure only adds to the dismal impression I had as I was writing them that memory is never anybody’s friend.

Photo: Michael Eastman at Le Journal de la Photographie

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