Mar 17, 2016 07:07 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 17, 2016 07:20 PM by C C.)
A Loaded Gun: The Real Emily Dickinson
http://blog.longreads.com/2016/03/15/a-l...dickinson/
EXCERPT: She was less like a recluse, more like a bomb going off. [...] Below is an excerpt from "A Loaded Gun," by Jerome Charyn, who writes that Emily Dickinson was not just “one more madwoman in the attic,” but rather a messianic modernist, a performance artist, a seductress, and “a woman maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky...
Charyn: [...] With a bit more vernacular, Huck Finn could be talking here. And at fourteen, she writes to her friend Abiah Root: “I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year.” [Letter 6, May 7, 1845]
But something happens to that chatty exuberance by the time she’s in her twenties. The letters grow shorter and shorter, have much more violent shifts. And when she first writes Higginson in 1862, seducing him with her poems, compelling him with her leaps, she’s like a huntress with poison arrows.
“I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—” [Letter 261, April 25, 1862]
Higginson didn’t have a chance. And neither do we. But it’s hard to grasp how and where that sudden mastery arose. It had to come from more than craft. It’s as if she had a storm inside her head, an illumination, like a wizard or a mathematical genius. Dickinson was reinventing the language of poetry, not by examining poets of the past, but by cannibalizing the words in her Lexicon. Jay Leyda was the only one who understood this. [...] She told riddles: “the deliberate skirting of the obvious— this was the means she used to increase the privacy of her communication; it has also increased our problems in piercing that privacy.”
[...] That sentimental legend of a lovelorn Emily “isolates her—and thus much of her poetry—from the real world. [...] Leyda believed that Dickinson was no more isolated from the world than most other artists, that “she wrote more in time, that she was much more involved in the conflicts and tensions of her nation and community, than we have thought.” Yet she remained a riddler....
David Litvinoff: Opportunistic hustler, king of the rock 'n' roll underworld, or stupendous intellect?
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1678671.ece
EXCERPT: This fascinating biography opens with its horrible subject, David Litvinoff, coming round after a severe beating. He is naked, bleeding, has had his head shaved and is bound to a chair which is in turn secured to a fifth-floor balcony railing above Kensington High Street, along which a CND march happens to be passing. He struggles free, staggers through his vandalized flat and, one suspects, immediately starts to work up the story to amuse his friends. Keiron Pim reveals that the man behind this brutal punishment was the artist Lucian Freud, with whom Litvinoff had fallen out.
Freud first became aware of Litvinoff in the Knightsbridge nightclub Esmerelda’s Barn, overhearing the barman ask an adjacent punter: “Is that on your bill, Mr Freud?” “It turned out he’d been me for quite a while”, Freud later commented. An understandable urge to kill Litvinoff on the spot turned into a perversely stronger urge to paint him, and the resulting portrait, later retitled by Freud “The Procurer”, features on the cover of this book. The gangster Ronnie Kray had a stake in the nightclub so connections were made and for a time in the early 1960s – that high, dishonest decade – Litvinoff was a ubiquitous figure in Chelsea, Soho and Notting Hill, linking the toffs and toughs, acting as a social conduit between swish Mayfair, the burgeoning rock counter-culture embodied by the Rolling Stones, and the East End underworld.
Was Litvinoff a protean social phenomenon or an opportunistic hustler? His biographer opts for the former. Born David Levy to working-class parents, Litvinoff adopted his half-brother’s family name (Emanuel Litvinoff was the poet who famously locked horns with T. S. Eliot) and embarked on a programme of elaborate self-invention. He inhabited, in Pim’s shrewd estimation, “a repertoire of preordained roles”, all derived from Yiddish culture: the pitiable schlemiel, the mendicant schnorrer, the intimidating shtarker, the performing badchen. He was certainly not a mensch, and had little consistent purchase on his own intense personality, being essentially an erratic fabulist....
http://blog.longreads.com/2016/03/15/a-l...dickinson/
EXCERPT: She was less like a recluse, more like a bomb going off. [...] Below is an excerpt from "A Loaded Gun," by Jerome Charyn, who writes that Emily Dickinson was not just “one more madwoman in the attic,” but rather a messianic modernist, a performance artist, a seductress, and “a woman maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky...
Charyn: [...] With a bit more vernacular, Huck Finn could be talking here. And at fourteen, she writes to her friend Abiah Root: “I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year.” [Letter 6, May 7, 1845]
But something happens to that chatty exuberance by the time she’s in her twenties. The letters grow shorter and shorter, have much more violent shifts. And when she first writes Higginson in 1862, seducing him with her poems, compelling him with her leaps, she’s like a huntress with poison arrows.
“I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—” [Letter 261, April 25, 1862]
Higginson didn’t have a chance. And neither do we. But it’s hard to grasp how and where that sudden mastery arose. It had to come from more than craft. It’s as if she had a storm inside her head, an illumination, like a wizard or a mathematical genius. Dickinson was reinventing the language of poetry, not by examining poets of the past, but by cannibalizing the words in her Lexicon. Jay Leyda was the only one who understood this. [...] She told riddles: “the deliberate skirting of the obvious— this was the means she used to increase the privacy of her communication; it has also increased our problems in piercing that privacy.”
[...] That sentimental legend of a lovelorn Emily “isolates her—and thus much of her poetry—from the real world. [...] Leyda believed that Dickinson was no more isolated from the world than most other artists, that “she wrote more in time, that she was much more involved in the conflicts and tensions of her nation and community, than we have thought.” Yet she remained a riddler....
David Litvinoff: Opportunistic hustler, king of the rock 'n' roll underworld, or stupendous intellect?
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1678671.ece
EXCERPT: This fascinating biography opens with its horrible subject, David Litvinoff, coming round after a severe beating. He is naked, bleeding, has had his head shaved and is bound to a chair which is in turn secured to a fifth-floor balcony railing above Kensington High Street, along which a CND march happens to be passing. He struggles free, staggers through his vandalized flat and, one suspects, immediately starts to work up the story to amuse his friends. Keiron Pim reveals that the man behind this brutal punishment was the artist Lucian Freud, with whom Litvinoff had fallen out.
Freud first became aware of Litvinoff in the Knightsbridge nightclub Esmerelda’s Barn, overhearing the barman ask an adjacent punter: “Is that on your bill, Mr Freud?” “It turned out he’d been me for quite a while”, Freud later commented. An understandable urge to kill Litvinoff on the spot turned into a perversely stronger urge to paint him, and the resulting portrait, later retitled by Freud “The Procurer”, features on the cover of this book. The gangster Ronnie Kray had a stake in the nightclub so connections were made and for a time in the early 1960s – that high, dishonest decade – Litvinoff was a ubiquitous figure in Chelsea, Soho and Notting Hill, linking the toffs and toughs, acting as a social conduit between swish Mayfair, the burgeoning rock counter-culture embodied by the Rolling Stones, and the East End underworld.
Was Litvinoff a protean social phenomenon or an opportunistic hustler? His biographer opts for the former. Born David Levy to working-class parents, Litvinoff adopted his half-brother’s family name (Emanuel Litvinoff was the poet who famously locked horns with T. S. Eliot) and embarked on a programme of elaborate self-invention. He inhabited, in Pim’s shrewd estimation, “a repertoire of preordained roles”, all derived from Yiddish culture: the pitiable schlemiel, the mendicant schnorrer, the intimidating shtarker, the performing badchen. He was certainly not a mensch, and had little consistent purchase on his own intense personality, being essentially an erratic fabulist....