Joshua Corey's Blog, page 13

100 Words: Maria Bamford at The Den Theatre, Chicago (March 15, 2019)

All too human she comes twitching and bending and switching her voice, her shoulders, her hips, weaving and receiving the adoration of a crowd that’s found the right madness in her impressions of her stoic Minnesota mother and reticent Minnesota dad and of her own unmedicated self. The voices seethe and bubble in her, colliding physical comedy of so many conscience-struck ids, of aging pugs, her husband, her therapist, all coming to a boil on stage in front of this scalded hipster Chicago are-you-not-entertained audience sobbing out laughs. We just met a clown named Maria: grotesquely, we cry: It me.

Significant Form

Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach (1912)

"A good work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope of reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or not a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas."

—Clive Bell, Art (1913)

100 Words: NIGHT COMING TENDERLY, BLACK (2019), by Dawoud Bey, Art Institute of Chicago

The photos shimmer out their own blackness, framing day for night for day for the night of history overlaying these ordinary American scenes made sinister by the glimmering overlay of darkness visible. Lake Erie wears an ominous mask of trees and fronds, framing unknowable waters; white picket fences like gleaming rows of teeth smile out the boundaries of shadowed houses and farms. No faces, no bodies visible, save for the dim reflections of museumgoers, my own outline pricked out by the negative space of Bey’s American selfie, in which the best of us lies concealed, conducting a freedom nobody earns.

100 Words: THE FRIEND (2018), by Sigrid Nunez

More bitter than sweet, more than a hint of the reality hunger characterizing other recent forays (Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy) into the meta-literary: novels about novels, novels about what novels have become in the age of their diminishing clout, a diminishment tuned to diminished whiteness and maleness, a canny examination of what is left to fiction of authenticity in the form of Apollo, the Apollonian Great Dane at the heart of Nunez’s darkly funny negotiation of the razor’s edge between cynicism and sentimentality. Pull down thy vanity, dear dead author, and take your dog for a walk.

100 Words: WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? (2015), directed by Liz Garbus

It begins in Montreux. Sculptural, possessed by a stillness that can’t quite conceal the intensity of the vibration deep within, bowed beside the piano, the swan of her. Later, dressed in white, that uncanny dance, snake or swan, wild with knowing. That dance, that voice, that face. The hands flying not over but into the piano keyboard, piloting time and space. Mad America hurt Eunice into Nina as her husband hurt her, as madness, as she hurt her daughter and herself. We say: we have the music, she had that, martyr-song, young gifted and. My baby just cares for. Still.

100 Words: TODTNAUBERG (2006), by John Banville

https://archive.org/details/Todtnauberg_John_Banville 

An inspector calls: intrepid eyebright Paul Celan stalks Herr Doktor Heidegger to his Hütte on the mountain named for death, where gnomically they rehash their lives. Celan presses the question, Heidegger evades him, falling back into steamy memories of Hannah Arendt and her green dress. All the actors are English and have English accents save Heidegger, played by the great Joss Ackland, man of White Mischief, who rolls his South African growl into the jocular menace of a German master. The play captures little or nothing of the poet’s anguish or his poetry, but consider the possibilities: Paul Celan, P.I.

100 Words: The 47th Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900

From left: unknown poet, Nathaniel Mackey, Alan Golding, Peter O’Leary, Joshua Hoeynck, Ken Taylor, Joseph Donahue, John Yau

Stagger the line between loneliness and sociability—back in Louisville, Ali’s town, prince of the Southern Rust Belt, for my turn in the bourbon barrel, hunched in streets or stretched between the interstate and the partial-brick purgatory of the Humanities building. In cinderblock classrooms casual brilliance on display, nearly spontaneous Festschriften in which the author is present, head bowed, smiling; or else dead, enigmatic, rescued (Jack Sharpless thy lovely lines). Snug with poets on hotel couches or encircling a table at that goddamn Persian place, hovering over the groaning board of dear Alan Golding’s, reading out poems and each other.

100 Words: Ghosted by a friend (2015-present)

How did I fail you, how didn’t I fail you? Life accelerates and pulls away, redshifting friendship, car taillights burning out of sight. Fell into fatherhood then my own father fell. Entangled in webs of illness and loneliness, the call every half-year became too much or not enough. Unanswered texts, emails, my calls unreturned. There used to be more of you—still you move in the world. Others read you, speak of you, as the intimate thread stretches and slims without ever entirely snapping. Unfriended hollowed-out shape in my chest—you, the wound, so lovely a man—I hope, unhealed.

100 Words: “The Dead” (1907-1914), by James Joyce

Is our journey westward back or forth? Swoon, Gabriel, swoon in tragic misapprehension of your wife’s nether regions, planting a pliant face there, while her heart and eyes fill with sentiment for the young man that’s dead. Screwed together upon the scaffold erected for us by the Misses Morkan whose name means in Danish darkness and in Welsh the sea. Chastened foolish Gabriel Conroy dreams his way to dissolution like us all—be it death or regeneration or a bit may be of both. “The Lass of Aughrim” grims its way through Gretta’s dreaming mind, tenor-born. That man could sing.

100 Words: THE BROS. K COFFEEHOUSE (February 2019), Evanston, IL

Ten degrees whirls eddies of shivery air over the black-and-white tile floor, curling around everybody’s ankles, mirroring the steam curling from the tops of lattes. A dozen years gone and the same green painting of the old man smiling down at us, same bearded barista serving up banter, same Brian, same John. Under the old man old men gather at their usual table with biographies and newspapers, talking through the times. The giveaway shelf: thrillers, Twilight, Arthur C. Clarke, Retire Rich! and Pamuk’s Snow. Heat climbs down the ceramic mug of my coffee-for-here. Voices fly to the ceiling. Stay warm.