TOBI'S DESK

Kathryn Scanlan. Recently, a friend told me about a job she’d had clearing out an apartment in Chelsea. It belonged to a woman who’d recently died, a woman my friend had never met. The woman was a hoarder, and when her apartment became impassible, she’d bought the one next door. In her final days, just enough space was cleared in her first apartment for her bed and hospice nurses. Slowly, my friend pieced together the woman’s life—an antique Chinese tea case shoved full of highlighters, hundreds of self-help books, thousands of photographs. A photo of the woman and her husband, who’d left her in her youth, naked in the bath with their cat; photos from her solo travels to Mongolia, Israel, and China. The woman had died alone, estranged from her family, but in death, through her photographs, my friend fell in love with her. Who wouldn’t? There’s something about encountering only the most intimate remnants of a life that can make us feel it is our own. Something similar happened to the...

For the Guardian, Tayari Jones lists the most influential books of her life , ranging from Jesmyn Ward and Homer to Ann Petry and David Chariandy . She reflects on the life-changing moment she first read Toni Morrison : “I could divide my life into before and after Beloved by Toni Morrison. I was about 19 when I read it. I hate to use such a chilly word to describe an experience that was spiritual, emotional and intellectual, but Beloved made me feel contextualised. That is the only way I can explain it.” Image credit: Nina Subin The post Tayari Jones on Toni Morrison and Homer appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://bit.ly/2QypuUY

The great Walt Whitman sang a song of himself, and that song has continued to resonate over the two centuries that have passed since his birth. As a poet, a queer icon, and a literary celebrity, his influence on the American consciousness was monumental. A new exhibition at The Morgan Library and Museum, “ Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy ” (on view from June 7 to September 15), examines how thoroughly Whitman’s work is threaded into this country’s DNA and mythology. A selection of artifacts from the show—including a plaster cast of the poet’s right hand, a notebook containing early versions of lines from Leaves of Grass , and the cardboard butterfly he posed with in one of his infamous author portraits—appears below. Phillips & Taylor, Photograph of Walt Whitman, 1873. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress.   Walt Whitman’s cardboard butterfly , 1850. Manuscript Division, Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of...

In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of. Max Pechstein, Summer in Nidden . 1919-1920 It was early June, Saturday, mid-morning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half: On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw 6 shooting stars that night. Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing ...

“Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.” – “Section 46” of Song of Myself , Walt Whitman At the start of every semester I ask my creative writings students what food they would choose to eat for their last meal. What they say reveals elements of their pasts, values, hopes, regrets. Students have answered crème brûlée, Papa John’s pizza, Ritz Crackers washed down with grape juice. My go-to is whole fried chicken, served cold, alongside champagne. Beginning in a roundup of notable ailing figures titled “The Sick Among Us,” the Times chronicled the decline of Walt Whitman, whose 200 th birthday would have been today. In the article published December 18, 1891, he was said to have been “taken with a chill” and “quite feeble to-night, though not considered dangerously ill.” The poet was 72 years old, a celebrity the...

May Attaway—the protagonist of Jessica Francis Kane ’s fourth book, Rules for Visiting —is not your usual middle-aged woman: She prefers plants over people, and at 40 years old, is still living with her father in her childhood home in Anneville. As a professional gardener at the local university, May lives out most of her existence toiling over trimmings and maintaining a safe distance from others. The premature death of a stranger, the flurry of heartfelt online tributes to this stranger and her generosity toward others, and an unexpected paid leave of 30 days forces May to look at the lack of friendship in her life. And so, she plans a trip to visit four friends from different parts of her life: Lindy, a childhood friend; Vanessa, a friend she met in the eighth grade; Neera, a college friend; and Rose, who was in May’s graduate landscape-architecture program. In preparation for her trip, May purchases a new rolling suitcase and names it Grendel, after the friendless monster in Beowul...

Somalia’s Jamila Osman and Egypt’s Nadra Mabrouk have been named joint winners of the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, from a shortlist of ten poets. Mabrouk is the first Egyptian to win the prize, and Osman is the third Somali. Their win is the fourth time, in its seven years of existence, that the […] from Brittle Paper http://bit.ly/30YwAak

And like that, he was gone. Moby , the electronic music producer (and descendant of Herman Melville ) currently elbowing his way back into the cultural imaginary, has cancelled the tour for his new book , which revisits his boom years in the 1990s and 2000s. Among the many famous people Moby writes about in the book is Natalie Portman , who, in a recent Vanity Fair interview, refuted Moby’s claim that the two had dated when she was a teenager and he was in his 30s. As Trupti Rami writes in The Cut , “Dudes need to stop instrumentalizing Natalie Portman’s immense talent and charm to sell books.” Looking at you, Foer . Photo credit: CiRo The post On Not Dating Natalie Portman appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://bit.ly/2JOIWMG

In his biweekly column,  Pinakothek ,  Luc   Sante  excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. The press photographer’s task is to obtain a likeness of the person who is at the center of the news. This proves difficult when the subject, who is either accused of crimes or tied, however flimsily, to someone who is, wants to avoid being photographed at all costs. Hounded at every step, unable to escape, even in shackles, the subject resorts to makeshift concealments—hat, sleeve, lapel, handkerchief, newspaper—in order to prevent facial capture. The photographer can only pursue, shadow, perhaps verbally goad the subject, waiting for a slip or a stumble that will cause the mask to drop. When that fails to happen, the photographer’s sole option is to photograph the mask. The public, inflamed by press coverage of the case, wants a face it can charge with blame (and, often enough, spread the blame to faces that bear it a superficial resemblance), but i...

Criag Morgan Teicher [Photo: Spencer Quong] Attentive readers of the magazine may recognize a new name on our masthead: on May 28, Craig Morgan Teicher joined the staff as our digital director. Craig has been a regular contributor to The Paris Review , with that rare trifecta of bylines in poetry , fiction , and essays , spanning from 2004 to last fall. Meanwhile, he’s had a daytime career at Publisher’s Weekly . Over the last dozen years at that magazine, he’s worn many hats, including director of digital operations and, most recently, director of special editorial projects. We were impressed by his pragmatic and broad set of technical skills, his track record of bolstering digital platforms at organizations much like our own, and his literary acumen. He arrives with a sensibility that manifests as a robust understanding of TPR  as a magazine, web presence, and resource, which will be central to any new initiatives we undertake on the site. We wear a lot of hats here, too. We’...

Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson , 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. “We see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used,” wrote Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense (1791) and The Rights of Man (1792). One of the most persuasive spokesmen for American independence, he championed the clearing away of British “cobwebs, poison and dust” from American society. American independence, he argued, could never be complete without that. Many Americans thought the same way: that apart from economic stability and success, what they needed almost more than anything else after political independence was intellectual and cultural independence, free from the stifling influence of British arts, letters, and manners. They resented their cultural subservience, which had not disappeared with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yet for more than a century after the Revolution, the majority of literate and cultured Americans...