5CT for December 2019

Apologies for a very long absence. This is your invitation to take a break from the madness. In this midwinter issue: Magnum photographers, Samuel Beckett, a poem by Charles Simic, an absolutely killer novel, a brilliant young musician and his mom. Plus, a Gif!

“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.” ~ Samuel Beckett


1.
Magnum Photography Agency


I do love poking around the Magnum website. The joys to be found are many and sumptuous. For example, Beckett by Cartier Bresson. Or, Beckett by Bruce Davidson. And so much more.

{USA. NYC. 1964.
Samuel BECKETT. Rehearsal of “Waiting for Godot”. © Bruce Davidson-Magnum-Photos}

{Irish playwright Samuel BECKETT. 1964. ©-Henri Cartier Bresson Magnum-Photos}

BECKETT SPEAKS

… Socks. Nightgown. Window. Lamp. Backs away to edge of light and stands facing blank wall. Covered with pictures once. Pictures of…he all but said loved ones. Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing pins. All shapes and sizes. Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. Strewn all over the floor.

… Could once name them all. There was father. That grey void. There mother. That other. There together. Smiling. Wedding day. There all three. That grey blot. There alone. He alone. So on. Not now. Forgotten. All gone so long. Ripped off and torn to shreds. Scattered all over the floor. Swept out of the way and under the bed and left. Thousand shreds under the bed with the dust and spiders. All the…he all but said the loved ones.

~ Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue

~~~

The Magnum site holds many more delights, such as this amazing page on protest photography.

{USA. Washington DC. 1967. An American young girl, Jan Rose KASMIR, confronts the American National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam march. This march helped to turn public opinion against the US war in Vietnam.}

See more here > 


2.
Charles Simic


All These Mirrors
by Charles Simic

And the one that’s got it in for you,
Mister, that keeps taunting you
In an old man’s morning wheeze
Every time you so much as glance at it,
Or blurt something in your defense,
Loudly, sonorously raising your chin high
While it spits and chokes in reply.

The razor is at your throat.
The lines are inscribing themselves
On your forehead as you listen closely
With a poultice of tissue paper
Already reddening under your left eye.

~~~

A bit more on Charles…


3.
Katya Apekima


The 5CT staff cannot stop talking about this astounding book. The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, by Katya Apekima, is one of the most deeply imagined and beautifully crafted novels this reader has ever encountered. This is the story of a family, told mainly through two young sisters, sixteen and fourteen years old. The less said about it the better. Just go read it. Podcast with the great Michael Silverblatt, here >

Excerpt:

Before that spring, I’d never read any of Dad’s books. It had never even occurred to me to track them down at a library or bookstore because until we came to live with him, he hadn’t existed for me. But in New York, I started reading his books ravenously. I devoured Cassandra’s Calling. I read his novels before bed. I wanted to have the rhythms of the sentences inside of me, so that I could dream about them. In my sleep though, all the characters were Mom. Sometimes Mom would turn into a strong wind and pull me somewhere, or sometimes she would jump on my back and try to wrestle me down to the ground. I barely ever saw her face. Sometimes — and these dreams were always the scariest — I myself would turn into Mom, and then I would be on someone else’s back, or turning into a wind.


4.
Jacob Collier, Susan Collier



5.
Nancy Liang’s Gifs


 

See more of Nancy’s work here >

‘I speak of the things that are there’

I published this piece in Dark Angels On Writing this year. I thought I’d post it here for you very, very few folks who don’t have the book.

 

What does it mean for a writer to pay attention?

“…if you love something enough and pay a passionate enough attention to it, the whole world can become present in it.”

~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

by Richard Pelletier

Here in my writing shed, under a starry night and an almost full moon, on the southern tip of this magical island in Puget Sound where I live, I imagine rummaging through a junk drawer. Amidst the rubber bands and the old paper clips, I am looking for a commemorative 1955 silver dollar that exists only in my dreams—heads on both sides. On one—the profile of the writer James Baldwin. I flip the coin. There is the curly-headed pate of my hero, the photographer Robert Frank. My America.

There was something on the wind in that year of 1955. Those two men, one black, one white, knew. Both were artists, both living in New York City. From the Village, came Baldwin with Notes of a Native Son. “The people who think of themselves as white,” he wrote, “have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. Or, as they are indeed already, in all but actual fact, obsolete.” That same year, Frank, Swiss-born, celebrated here and in Europe, set out on a series of road trips in his 1950 Ford Business Coupe (Detroit, Savannah, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles) to document America in a book. The time was ripe.

The show-stopping cover of Frank’s book, The Americans, might well have flown straight out of James Baldwin’s tightly coiled rage. Five passengers sit perfectly and eternally framed in front-to-back order on a New Orleans streetcar. A white man, a white woman. A little white boy in a little white-boy suit. (Already impressive at white entitlement.) A little white girl, crying. A black man. A black woman. In a single photograph—a supremely complicated one-hundred and seventy-nine-year story. The Americans was a brutally honest chronicle. Look, it said. Open your eyes. Feel. It was the book that changed photography for all time.

 

Miner, shaman, brother, thief


Why is this piece of writing about writing concerning itself with the double helix that is James and Robert? My brief is to talk about writing from the perspective of being a photographer. And, it’s because good writing always concerns itself with seeing. And seeing is what James Baldwin and Robert Frank did better than almost anyone else. Each man came to it in different ways. Baldwin’s gaze was unforgiving; ethical, moral and penetrating. Loving. It was psychological, spiritual, cultural, and personal. He was sort of an apostle of humanism. Frank’s seeing was psychic surveillance. Cunning and skeptical. Exploitative. Also loving. He was a miner and a shaman, a brother and a thief. What writer wouldn’t want to be all that?

There is no evidence that Baldwin and Frank knew or influenced each other. But they were working the same dark alleys—the twisted knot of American identity. “Our dehumanization of the negro then,” wrote Baldwin, “is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves. The loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.” I pause for a quick daydream where I see Banksy, under cover of darkness, spray painting those words on the side of Robert Frank’s New Orleans streetcar.

Frank showed us something we hadn’t seen before. America as a dangerous, nervous, deeply weird, beautiful and lonely place. Everything in conflict with everything else. Not the least of which was the story we were telling ourselves about who and what we were. (This was 1955, remember.) He tunneled down much further than was comfortable. His coda to fellow artists who might be paying attention to his work (and there were legions) was: go deeper. That is the single best piece of advice a writer could ever hope to hear.

I came to Baldwin much later. Born poor, black, and bi-sexual in Harlem, he told Life Magazine:

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.”

~

It’s gray outside this morning—the sun is a half-lit, milky stain as it slides behind a bank of Douglas Fir outside my window. I am back at it, trying to stare down this dastardly task: to say something useful about writing and photography. So it occurs to me to talk about love. To say love is at the heart of all this. First, James Baldwin and Robert Frank both have said they loved America. Their love was complicated, but they were writing and shooting from that place. I loved—and still love—those Robert Frank pictures. They changed me from the inside out. I love them madly. I have never been the same since the moment I saw them. That body of work held me upside down and shook me until finally, I came to understand their code.

It is possible to make something beautiful and lasting and soul-shaking from the place where you—your heart and soul, your voice, your shame, your fear, your oddball ways—meet the world.

That changed everything. When you know something like that, down to the bone, all kinds of wonderful trouble is yours. Because now you believe. You believe in the premise at the root of all art making. Most worrisome of all, you now believe that you—yes, you aspiring writer, painter, musician, sculptor, playwright, might wear the hat, too. To coin a phrase, you are fucked. Which is glorious.

A secret at the bottom of a frozen lake

All this inconveniently dovetailed with my beloved, fiercely believing mother’s favorite Life Lesson: ‘You can be anything you want to be, as long as you want it bad enough.’ I confess that I thought I wanted to be Robert Frank. But underneath it all chained up and locked down like Houdini, buried six feet into the bottom of a frozen lake, was my secret. I only ever wanted to be a writer. Too dangerous, so I spent years taking pictures, and I still do. But it has taken me until this moment, on this gray, overcast November morning, to unlock a mystery. Robert Frank, photographer, was my first writing teacher. His courage gave me mine.

‘I worked myself into a state of grace.’ – Robert Frank

The lessons that Robert Frank has brought to my writing life are endless and ongoing. Pay attention. Go to those places—physical and emotional—that aren’t safe or comfortable and look. More important, feel. Bring your whole self. Believe what you see, but stay skeptical. Get ahold of it and report back. There are stories everywhere. An empty highway at twilight. The glowing jukebox in a dive bar. An empty café with Oral Roberts on the television. The cowboy on a Manhattan street. Gas tanks, post offices, backyards. Shift the background to the foreground. Break the rules. Do it your own way. Aim higher. And higher still. Get angry. The shadows are more interesting than the light, except for the times when a crushing daylight is the story. Keep your ear to the ground. Leave some work for the viewer or the reader to do. Find new ways to tell the story. When it comes time to edit, go deeper. Find the most ruthless, merciless, and intuitive version of yourself and go to work. Robert Frank took 27,000 photographs for The Americans. His book is just eighty-three pictures. It was during a year-long, deliberate editing and sequencing process, where the form and the idea and the structure became the thing that we know today. About the entire project, Robert Frank has said, “I worked myself into a state of grace.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion

I was sixteen or seventeen at the time. My grandfather lived across the street from us. I would visit on a fairly regular basis—to bring over meals my mother had cooked, or just to check in. On one particular day, I gave a soft knock on his door, and let myself in. His apartment had that old-world, grandparent charm; a lot of wood and carpeting, built-in glass and wood cabinets. Dark and quiet. He was all alone those days, my grandmother had died some years before. His TV-watching chair was empty, the television was off. But he was there all right, in the room, seated at a card table. The table was crammed—set for six people. Plates, glassware, silverware, everything you’d need if everyone came to dinner. Everyone being himself, his wife, and his four children. But he was alone. Except that he wasn’t, not quite. On each of five plates, he’d placed a framed photograph. I scanned the table. There was my father, my two uncles, my aunt, and my grandmother. Everyone had come to dinner. My grandfather was in conversation with all of them. He turned to me—an actor breaking the fourth wall—and whispered that they’d all come, finally, and wasn’t it wonderful. He turned back to the play. He was wearing two pairs of pants—he’d nap during the day, wake up confused, and get dressed again. I willingly accepted the fiction—and the truth—of all that was in front of me. I may have become a photographer that day. Or, a storyteller. Or, a human being. Joan Didion was right, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

A state of grace

Nothing prepares you for writing quite like being a photographer in the days of film. You’d find yourself out in the world—say, Chinatown in New York, or on the coast of California. Endless possibilities for making pictures. Your camera is loaded with Kodak Tri-X film, thirty-six frames. You’re in a bit of a zone, the light is beautiful, and you’re working. Two weeks later, after you’ve developed your fifteen rolls from that day, you have printed your contact sheets, and you find there is nothing. Five-hundred plus images and not a single image that is more than a humble, pleasing record or a dumb cliché. You will try to convince yourself otherwise. You will lie to yourself, possibly for weeks. Maybe this frame, maybe that one. But it’s all useless, there’s nothing there. There is no better training for the excruciating experience of writing first drafts.

So something happened in the relentless effort. In the absurd amount of failure. In the commitment to trying—and the occasional succeeding—that laid the groundwork for a step into the void. My wife and I spent the first two years of our life together on opposite coasts. We spent hours and hours on the phone. She knew me as a photographer. One night I said, “I’m going to say something to you now, and I ask that you say absolutely nothing after I say it.” “Okay,” she said.
I said, “I want to write.”

~

The sun has returned to its milky, half-hidden ways. It’s cold outside. The wind is up. The stand of fir out past my window is telling its proud, steadfast, multi-generational tale. Later this afternoon, Linda and I will travel to the north end of the island to visit a sawmill. On that hour-long ride—through stands of fir and cedar and small towns, I’ll be thinking about a photograph I saw the other day. It’s Robert Frank, 93 years old, sitting out in front of his home in New York City. The backdrop is gritty. A green metal door, a brick section of wall, a green metal screen. The paint on the door frame is chipped and worn. And there he sits, a little hunched over. Still has his hair. He’s an old man looking straight into the camera, a father who has outlived his two children, who both died tragically. His cane is at hand. I imagine James Baldwin sitting right next to him, the other side of the coin. If he were still here, he’d be 93 too. I imagine the two of them, finally having met, after all these years of crossing paths, comparing notes. If I were there, I’d be at a loss for words. What to say to the two storytellers who saw America, who told us everything. Who spoke of the things that were there, who told us of the doom and the glory of who we are. Who left us their songs to sing.

 

* From Robert Frank’s Guggenheim Grant application. “I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere—easily found, not easily selected and interpreted.”

 

Robert Frank died on September 9, 2019. Rest in peace, Robert Frank.

5CT for June 2019

This is what magic in the day-to-day looks like, wrote Clare Dwyer Hogg, as spoken by actor Stephen Rea, on the Irish border seen through the cluster that is Brexit. Saul Leiter knew something about magic in the day-to-day, just look at these pictures. The legendary UK based lit-band, Dark Angels, has a new album out — Dark Angels on Writing. Early reviews indicate their latest is a scorcher. Since we’re talking about Europe, and magic, and whether to stay or whether to go, here’s Timothy Snyder with some historical context. “Imagination,” said Einstein, “is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” To the 5CT subscriber who wrote to say, ‘I miss 5CT,’ thank you. Me too.


1.

Saul Leiter, photographer


{ snow, 1960 (c) Saul Leiter }

{ subway car 4435 1950 (c) Saul Leiter }

{ jean 1948 (c) Saul Leiter }

{ boy, 1950 (c) Saul Leiter }

 

Saul Leiter started shooting color and black-and-white street photography in New York in the 1940s. He had no formal training in photography, but the genius of his early work was quickly acknowledged by Edward Steichen, who included Leiter in two important MoMA shows in the 1950s. MoMA’s 1957 conference “Experimental Photography in Color” featured 20 color photographs by Leiter. Read on here >

{ New York 1950 (c) Saul Leiter }


2.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe


Patrick Radden Keefe is a New Yorker writer of uncommon instinct, talent, grace and empathy. A couple of years back, he did what many writers do; he read a whopper of an obituary (Dolours Price, Defiant IRA Bomber, Dies at 61)  and followed his nose. That led him down an extraordinary path, to a murder mystery, a thicket of stories, and to the Troubles. Hard to imagine a more challenging, complicated story to tell. It’s a masterpiece. Read it, you won’t believe it. That’s Dolours on the cover of his book. At the end of her life, she fingered Gerry Adams as the man who gave the orders. She took on Margaret Thatcher and won. And, she became the wife of the actor Stephen Rea, seen below in a Brexit video. For a good podcast on this, go to Longform>

Excerpt from Say Nothing:

Just after lunchtime, at around 2 p.m., a phone rang at the headquarters of The Times of London. A young woman named Elizabeth Curtis, who had just started working on the news desk at the paper, picked up the call. She heard a man’s voice, speaking very quickly, with a thick Irish accent. At first she couldn’t make out what he was saying, then she realized that he was reeling off the descriptions and locations of a series of cars. He spoke for just over a minute, and, though she was still confused, she transcribed as much as she could. Before hanging up, the man said, “The bombs will go off in one hour.

3.

Hard Border: Clare Dwyer Hogg & Stephen Rea


To Clare Dwyer Hogg, playwright, poet and journalist, who wrote this absolutely jaw-dropping piece on Brexit, we give thanks. “We’re holding our breath again, because we know that chance and hope, come in forms like steam and smoke.”


4.

Dark Angels on Writing


The UK writing collective known as Dark Angels (where does that bloody name come from?) has published a new book, Dark Angels on Writing: Changing Lives With Words, aimed squarely at the legions of companies, businesses and writers who want to write beautifully and better. This is a very special book with appearances by such writers as Michelle Nicol, Nick Asbury, Tim Rich, Rowenna Roberts, Larry Vincent, Therese Kieran, Rob Williams, Becca Magnus, Faye Sharpe, Jonathan Holt, Nick Parker, Henrietta McKervey, and many others. Get your copy here >


5.

Timothy Snyder Speaks


Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian and one of the people I look to for help in understanding what’s going on in the world. He wrote On Tyranny in 2017 after the car crash of 2016. This video — The European Union —  is part of a series of 16 or so videos he’s posted on YouTube. These are mini-lectures that he uses to air out ideas he’s thinking through. Episode 1: Russia Defeats America.

5CT recommends his latest book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

 

***

That’s it. Thank you.

Sonnet, with dark wings

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Sonnet, with Dark Wings

1. A thin, slender neck road. The ocean stretched forever left. Wooded marshlands, right. A crow dropped in and attacked from the top of a wind bent telephone pole. Scared the shit out of me. 2. “I’m from the UK,” he squawked to the back of my young, foolish head, “that’s a million miles from here. As the crow fl— forget that, cliché.” Black wings flapped around my face as the beast hightailed it back whence he’d come. 3. Chills pinged the length of my spine, as I pushed on, biking into the wind down the cracked asphalt, looking back, watchful and afraid. Finally, something had actually happened to me. Something weird, possibly mysterious. Maybe a portent. A harbinger. An omen. A forewarning. Who could know these things? 4. Night. Inside my unheated knotty pine cottage of overdue rent and flickering courage, I tapped out my stories on my mother’s old typewriter, a Remington. Of black winged memories and of my grandfather, who near his end, stood in a midnight rain, ancient, spotted, bony hands pulling and pulling at the door of a cruel, empty car. As if that old car was the all of it, the whole wide world, leaving him. Through a curtain I spied him begging for more time, more something. “Room for one??!! Room for one??!!” he shouted. I went outside and took him home. In fits and starts I wrote what I didn’t know — the beating heart under my paper thin skin. 5. The stories were always the same — only the chords changed. A man who was young and old. On a road of some sort. A coming from, a going to. Arrival always in doubt. 6. Creatures real and not dashed onto the stage. Beagles and nuns and coaches, wine-glugging, boy-loving priests. A rain stick house. A neighbor kid with the All American story: soldier, husband, civilian, divorcee, murderer, convict, ex-con, ordained Deacon, Harley rider, excessively tanned resident of Florida, and finally dead on a desert highway. Tattooed ex cons. Hundred year old rowhouses, beautiful, hundred-year old crack-smoking Muslims. The lonely dried-flower lady who loved gossip. And Chester, who cold-nosed his way into the center of my being and made me love him. 7. So apropos of nothing – this was just the other day — I looked up crows. They are carriers. Of life magic and the mystery of creation. Of destiny and personal transformation. 8. It seems I’m slow on the uptake, it took me decades, but black crow, I take your meaning. I accept. 10. And so this is a song of gratitude. This is a song of a million miles of thank you’s. A song of trying, of beginnings, of asphalt roads, of black winged words, of unheated shelter, of flickering courage, of sad rememberings of a dying man lost in the rain who gave me so much more than story. 11. This is a song of being. And of being together. 12. That old black crow is gone now, his ghost haunts the causeways and the spits searching for the next kid biking past a briny sea, a wooded marsh, dreaming how maybe one day he could be a writer. 13. How he might find his long and thin slender neck road…meet his dark winged crow, his life magic, his night rooms of sorrows and ardour 14. and shed his tears such as Angels, Dark Angels, weep…

5CT for June 2018

Delighted to be back after a long absence. Dog lover and New Yorker, Maira Kalman clearly has it all going on. Totally. Unfair. Alexander Chee is a beautiful writer from Maine and San Francisco, and is someone worth reading and thinking about. The great Emmet Gowin, who studied with the great Harry Callahan at RISD in Providence, RI, began by photographing his family in Danville, Virginia, and now he’s onto…. moths. A Bukowski poem inspires a brilliant young English animator. Carolyn Drake’s collaborative photographs in China are cryptic and amazing.


1.
Maira Kalman|Word & Image

Maira Kalman, My Favorite Things


How do I combine this writing and this art to say as much as I can with as few words as I can.” Maira Kalman


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