EASYREEDER

The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, OUT, Publishing Perspectives, TinHouse, Harper’s, SuperRare, Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone: Shirley Chisholm’s Newly Unearthed ‘Do Women Dare?’ Speech Is Just as Relevant Today

(02/03/2022)

In July 1971, Shirley Chisholm began to talk about it. Chisholm, who in 1968 had become the first African American woman elected to Congress, would run for president. The congresswoman from New York announced her intentions to secure the Democratic nomination in September, and formally announced on Jan. 25, 1972. The Democratic candidates who sought to oppose President Nixon’s bid for a second term counted “Fighting Shirley” and nine white men, all of whom had higher degrees, like Chisholm. Of the 10, all but Chisholm, Wilbur Mills, and Hubert Humphrey had served in the military. Chisholm was the first African American to contend for the presidential nomination of a major party…

SuperRare: We got the funk! Do you? Bill Bernstein and Pixel 54 on the legacy of Studio 54

(09/22/2021)

Studio 54 is no more: not in the way we remember. No man on the moon with a coke spoon sign above the door—no crazies and geniuses and going-up-in-flames beauties. Bill Bernstein documented life at Studio 54 and NYC discos for three years, and through the film rolls, we keep going back. Night Fever: New York Disco 1977–1979, The Bill Bernstein Photographs was on display at New York Museum of Sex for three years—and you can buy a book (Disco, from Reel Art Press), or print editions, direct from Bernstein himself. And if Studio 54 the place is gone, Studio 54 the sprawling enterprise endures, as a record label (an album was produced in tandem with Studio 54: Night Magic, which was on view at The Brooklyn Museum in 2020), as a website/shop, as a radio channel on SiriusXM, and now, as an NFT…

Harper’s: Revisionist History

(12/29/2015)

… At its face, the possible source seemed like more than a big coincidence, but the Internet discussion around the subject, and a few academic consults with colleagues, were discouraging: Orwell didn’t read or speak Russian; Orwell wouldn’t have heard of Kostomarov; Kostomarov’s story was more minor than Kostomarov himself; Orwell was clear about the inspiration for Animal Farm. “I saw a little boy,” he wrote, “perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them.”

That quote comes from the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, which was released in 1947 as part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s soft war on communism. (As a result of the British Secret Services’ Foreign Office, which worked hand in hand with Orwell, the CIA, and CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, Animal Farm was arguably the most massively translated and distributed small-press book in the history of literature.) If anyone was to have made the connection to “Animal Riot,” it was the audience for the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm. Kostomarov, according to the Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, was one of “the three founders of the Ukrainian national renaissance.” Kostomarov was also a major influence of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, an author and political leader who was at the forefront of revolutionary Ukraine, a subject Orwell wrote about. Kostomarov, in Hrushevsky’s evaluation, was “the precursor of modern Ukraine.” So, it’s ironic that the Ukrainian edition is the evidence that Orwell came up with Animal Farm independently of Kostomarov. Ironic, as well, is the similarity of Orwell’s boyhood memory to a boyhood memory of Dostoevsky. In Crime & Punishment, Dostoevsky describes the cruel beating of a horse. In his notebooks of the period, Dostoevsky explains: “The dreadful fist soared again and again, and struck blows on the back of the head . . . This disgusting scene has remained in my memory all my life. . . . This little scene appeared to me, so to speak, as an emblem, as something which very graphically demonstrated the link between cause and effect. Here every blow dealt at the animal leaped out of the blow dealt at the man.” …

TinHouse: On André Gide’s Paludes

(06/09/2015)

The literary figures of the mid-twentieth century are simultaneously, paradoxically, cultural heroes and yokel blunderers, stalwart independents and villainous conformists; they are loudmouths about Communism, the greatest political experiment since democracy; they are sometimes proponents and sometimes detractors, and in their arguments they are sometimes perspicacious and wicked.  They are the Russian Revolution, and they are the CIA and the British Secret Service’s Congress for Cultural Freedom—which lent massive support to Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell—with a stated mission of winning a “soft war.”  They are Ezra Pound and his radio pontifications for the Nazis.  They are anti-semitism and knee-jerk atavism, they are racism and sexism, and they are every other nasty, troll-ish habituation of people-kind.  They are also courageous resistance, enormous personal loss, and a Western outlook that expanded, became more inclusive and humane—socially, sexually, racially, and culturally. 

But in the beginning, they were children—literary children.

Andre Gide’s early satirical work, Paludes (1895, in English, Morasses) is an allegory for nineteenth-century Paris’s cultural world, a quaintly a quaintly seductive, if frequently silly and petty, vision of the arts.  Paul Claudel, in a 1900 letter to Gide, called Paludes “the most complete document we have on that curious atmosphere of suffocation and stagnation we breathed from 1885 to 1890.”…

Publishing Perspectives: Publishing in 2002 vs 2012: Better, Worse or a Stalemate?

(09/23/2012)

Snowball’s Chance by John Reed.  When the book came out, I related.  I had the spirit to make a few insurrections—went to a Christopher Hitchens right-wing diatribe and corrected him from the audience when he talked about me.  At my readings I drank more than usual and encouraged my audience to drink more, and to contribute animal sounds.  I gave out rubber animal noses.  (Oh, I wrote Snowball’s Chance just after 9/11: Snowball returns to Animal Farm, brings capitalism.)  Then nine years went by, and, uh, I looked at the book again; a tenth anniversary reprint was in the works.  I called James Sherry, the original publisher.  The prose melted when I tried to read it.  The thing was nonsensical.  

“James,” I asked, “I don’t understand anything in here, what does that mean?”

“It means,” said James, “you wrote it.”

Ten years.  Just long enough to think, times weren’t so different, and just long enough to remember, yes they were…

OUT: Where Are All the Angry Young Men?

(07/16/2012)

David Wojnarowicz.  Two reasons you may not know that name:

—our culture can’t remember, can’t deal with, can’t fathom the angry young man;

—it’s too hard to spell (and pronounce).

Let’s deal with the second reason first.  Everyone spells it wrong.  Forget it.

And the first reason, of course, is why you should know who David Wojnarowicz is. Where are all the angry young men?  Contemporary life is not only culturally constrained, it is a compromise of privacy, of identity, of rage.  We have to log on. We have to survive.  Network, or perish.  What happens to the fuming young artist who sledgehammers his dealer’s wall?  Who ditches his friends by the road in Nevada?  Who marches in and takes paintings out of the exhibit? It’s a romantic picture, the outsider, the rebel, but in reality, we are all too replaceable, too jaded, too doomed to wield our mallets. Or perhaps, we are too doomed to do it all the time. The anger that David Wojnarowicz channeled, his lashing, spitting invective against a life prescribed from birth, has become familiar, a mundane emotional disorder, easily treated by another prescription. Rage, at the governmental handoffs to hemorrhaging corporate behemoths, at the senseless cues of teleprompters, has become the dial tone of everyday life. ..

The Rumpus: The Politics of Narrative

(12/06/2011)

… With the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sprawling literary novel has regained pre-eminence. The realist recoil is cyclical—Bellows springs to mind as indicative of a generation that tended toward socially engaged novels of nebulous structure. In the larger political context, the “realist” novel indicates conservative values. The novel that puts content second to structure parallels a nation (a globe) that espouses an ideology of the systemic over the sovereign. To maintain that content comes before structure is a precept for revolution: a particular idea, person or solution comes before the nation, the corporation, the praxis.

Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), a prolific pulp western writer of the 1920s and 30s, maintained that there were two types of stories: coming home, or leaving home. The assertion neatly correlates to the classical definition of comedy and tragedy, as well as a content-first v. structure-first division of the arts. The coming home story (usually comedic or “feel good”): the cowboy accepts and/or is accepted by society. The leaving home story (usually tragic or “dark”): the cowboy rejects and/or is rejected by society. Structure-first stories, i.e. coming home, tend to be about assimilation, while content-first stories, i.e. leaving home, tend toward dissent…

The Brooklyn Rail: PRAISE THE BARD

(05/28/2010)

No artist is solely responsible for a work of art. Every creative work relies on cultural history, collaboration, and the creative contribution of its audience. Harold Bloom, in declining health, is the subject of discussion these days. Not always a fond subject. I went back to the daunting Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, Bloom on Shakespeare. Daunting, but as I’ve repeatedly discovered, a short essay followed by encyclopedic and subjective discussions of the individual plays: an act of amassment. Bloom’s interests in religion, the divine spark of Gnosticism, cross over here; Shakespeare, says Bloom, did more than just represent consciousness, he created it, in the literary sense and perhaps beyond.

Johann Heinrich Füssli, “The Sleepwalking Lady Macbeth” (1781-1784). Oil on Canvas, 221 × 160 cm.

Bloom’s thesis is founded partly in out-of-fashion adherence to universality, and partly in the Shakespeare authorship discussion, which to Bloom is too silly to address directly. But Bloom goes to great lengths to attribute every last work to one man, even in contradiction of accepted scholarship. On first exposure, I—like just about everyone else—shrank from Bloom’s contention of a monotheistic Shakespeare; on closer examination, I’ve revised my appraisal. I didn’t grant adequate credit: the attribution of literary consciousness to Shakespeare is far lamer than estimated….