Lossiness
.
I come upon a new term, lossiness,
which is beautiful the way it slips over lips
and sums a feeling up
.
To be lossy, to have kissed-off some part of being
to become apophatic in a small sense
to define oneself by what’s left
in the dust
as we move along disregarding
.
.
by jim Culleny
4/19/13
by Randolyn Zinn
The media is chock full of celebrity gossip, but you still may wonder how actors pursue the tasks of creating characters, accessing emotion and delivering a playwright's intentions.This week master teacher Michael Howard offers 3QD readers a peek into this elusive art.
Randolyn Zinn: I hear you just turned 90. Congratulations!
MH: Thank you, yes, I share a birthday with Shakespeare. And did you know that Shakespeare died on the same calendar day as he was born? April 23rd. So I’m always careful on mine. I don’t jaywalk.
RZ: You have worked as an actor, directed actors, you were the artistic director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, and you’ve been teaching for almost 60 years whether at Juilliard, Yale or your own studio here in New York.
MH: I had no thought that teaching was what I wanted to do. I started teaching at the High School of the Performing Arts here in New York where Sydney Lumet was teaching the senior class. When he took a job as an assistant director in television, he suggested that the school should hire me to replace him. We’d worked together as a group of young actors trying to form a company, that’s how we knew each other.
RZ: Where did you study acting?
MH: Before the war at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sandy (Sanford Meisner) and David Pressman, a wonderful man. And our dance teacher was a woman named Martha Graham.
RZ: What were her classes like?
MH: Hard to describe. Much of what we did was on the floor. She’d get us on the ground and twist us, bend us, give us pain. We understood that the development of our bodies would be useful. You could not be in the same room with Martha Graham and not recognize the enormous energy that came from her. At that time we weren’t aware that she was an icon.
RZ: What did you learn from Meisner?
MH: Oh dear, in one sentence? It’s impossible to say, it’s a challenge. I became aware of what truth meant in acting. I became aware of what the word ‘action’ meant. When I got to the Playhouse, I had done a play in what we now call off-Broadway as well as a tour and I considered myself…AN ACTOR! Sandy wanted to take away all you thought you knew about acting – on purpose! All the old-fashioned thoughts you had about what acting is Sandy worked very hard at breaking down and taking away all the things you held close…but he did it brilliantly…and painfully.
RZ: Did he build you back up again?
MH: Yes and he gave you what you needed. A new and different way to approach acting. Any 18-yr old actor who’s successful thinks Oh, I know what to do and how to do it! And that assumption is based on talent and intuition and pleasing an audience and feeling good. But those things don’t have anything to do with what acting is really about. Sandy worked on you constructively, efficiently…but not always pleasantly. I hated it. I was angry with him, naturally. To take everything away from you and to hear that you knew nothing was hard…but by the end of the two years, I was more sure of myself in some ways and less sure of myself in others. I think I had a sense of what I should aim for, what I should try to become, what it means to be an actor — not a performer, mind you, not a personality — but an actor.
From the New York Times Book Review:
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
Coleman Barks’s translations of Rumi are always wonderful, especially “A Year With Rumi: Daily Readings.” The poem for Jan. 10 for instance, “A Piece of Wood”:
I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.
I do some meanness. It turns out helpful.
I say one must not travel during the holy month.
Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.
Oh, and here’s an even better one. Sept. 20:
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer
and find myself chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
More here.
Roland Chambers in Five Books:
John Adams is actually a colleague of mine, and when I read his book it completely changed my image of risk. For example, Adams discusses at great length whether seat belts actually have reduced the number of accidents, and his point is that when you have a seatbelt on you might drive more dangerously, because you feel more secure. In other words he’s saying risk is not a simple, straightforward thing. He has this brilliant idea which I always quote. If you want to get people to drive more carefully, have a spike set in the steering wheel, pointing towards the driver’s heart. Isn’t that wonderful?
It's certainly a very vivid image
It’s about compensation. How you adjust for risk. I’m a cyclist. Adams thinks, how wise is it to wear a cycling helmet? Perhaps it makes you cycle more dangerously.
I’m a cyclist too, and on the road I divide the traffic into monkeys and rhinoceroses – those who avoid danger through agility and those who do it by putting on armour.
I do wear a helmet, I must admit.
More here.
Wilson Brissett and Patton Dodd in The Atlantic:
Calling what happened in Boston “Islamic violence” is comforting, because it renders it immediately recognizable to post-9/11 minds, and locates the source of the violence outside of American society. A more unsettling but more accurate account of the Tsarnaev brothers would see them as merely the latest incarnation of a figure as old as the United States itself: the isolated individual lost in the social and cultural whirlwind that is secular American modernity, who sees salvation in the absolute moral clarity of an idiosyncratic collection of beliefs, and decides that he would rather resort to violence than countenance any concession to a complicated, ambiguous social reality.
The Tsarnaevs are part of a continuum that includes not just other Muslims, but Christians like anti-abortion killers Paul Hill and Scott Roeder along with arguably more secular perpetrators like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. The faith of the Tsarnaev brothers, in this sense, is more American than Islamic.
More here.
Omar Waraich in The Caravan:
This month, with Pakistan’s general elections scheduled for May 11, he looks set to make a breakthrough. Khan’s message, defined by his contempt for a venal political class, hasn’t changed, but it has finally found a constituency. The vast crowds he attracts are principally drawn from an increasingly assertive urban middle class. He has a notable following among sections of the elite, and some of the opportunist politicians he has lured from rival parties have brought their rural supporters with them, but this is the first time that a party with national ambitions has put the middle classes’ concerns at the centre of its platform.
Many are coming out on to the streets to demonstrate their support for the first time; many will be making a rare appearance in queues outside polling booths this month. Until now, Pakistan’s middle classes have remained on the political margins. Their numbers were too few, and their influence too little, to have an electoral impact. When members of the middle class joined politics, it was often in service of parties whose major sources of support came from other sections of society.
More here.
Bilal Tanweer in Chapati Mystery:
There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken up by snazzy advertisements announcing the featured artists of the season. It’s the biggest annual ad campaign for any TV program and this is Season 5. It’s being touted by many to be the mother of all seasons, mainly on the basis of a wildly circulating promotional video of Episode 1 of the new season. The first artist on the promo video is a rapper: Bohemia. The video shows him in a hoodie and dark glasses, slamming out a rap number in Punjabi. ‘This is an opportunity for me to tell you what rap is—it’s poetry, it’s a message,’ he says in a close-up shot of his 3-second interview. The video cuts back to the song. By his side are the Viccaji sisters – Zoe and Rachel – who do backing vocals and harmonies but they appear to be in a more prominent role for this number.[sepoy notes: Bohemia was featured on CM a long time before “Coke Studio”]
The clip is followed by Hadiqa Kiyani, among Pakistan’s leading female vocalists, singing what sounds like the hard rock version of an AR Rahman’s composition. She is singing the Sufi poetry of Bulleh Shah. She’s followed by Atif Aslam, arguably Pakistan’s biggest rock star, also a sensation in India for the last four years. He has teamed up with ‘Qayaas’, an underground band, to do a version of a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawwali. The last singer on the promo is of Humayun Khan’s who is singing Larsha Pekhawar Ta, a popular Pushto folk song. The absence of billboards is unexpected. For the last three years or so, Coke Studio is the soft drink brand’s main marketing strategy in the country. In fact, the entire marketing campaign of Coca Cola Pakistan is designed around Coke Studio: artists featured in the program are on Coke bottles, cans, television adverts, newspapers, television, radio and billboards. But there is no visual clue of it this year. Maybe it is a scaling back by the soft drink company. But the other interesting thing I notice is that on Coke Studio’s Season 5 website there is no ‘About’ tab either – meaning nothing to introduce a newcomer to Coke Studio. Taken together, these could mean a number of things, but they unmistakably do mean that no one needs to be told What Coke Studio Is and What It Does; and second, nobody needs reminding that Coke Studio will start airing on May 13. It’s common knowledge.
In other words, if there is a confirmation of Coke Studio’s status as a cultural behemoth in Pakistan, this is it.
More here.
Jemima Khan in New Statesman:
As a divorcee, bringing up children on her own for three years before remarrying, she built up an independent life for herself: “It’s hard to let your goals go for a man all over again.” Although she concedes they have had a “few teething problems” and that it took his first wife “some time to come to terms with it”, now, she says, they “have come to an understanding . . . We are finding our feet.” Both sets of children are aware of the new situation and have accepted it. In fact, she says that her husband’s daughter from his first marriage “can’t wait to meet second Mummy” and her own son, who now has a father figure and “role model” that he was previously lacking, is “really happy with it”. They have yet to experience “a big family get-together”, but Aisha says she is “hopeful that will happen soon . . . I’ve spoken to her [the first wife] a couple of times. She seems really lovely. I would really like for us to become good friends . . . for there to be that kind of bond of sisterhood between us.”
More here.
Their Lonely Betters
.
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds
A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.
Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
.
by W.H. Auden
publisher, Curtis Brown
Stephen Sparks in 3AM Magazine:
Historian and biographer Pierre Champion once characterized French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) as “a man of the future.” It seems an odd assessment of a man who insistently looked to the past. Born into a family of rabbis and doctors, Schwob’s life was strongly marked by an obsessive fascination with bygone historical epochs: he studied Sanskrit; translated Catullus, Defoe, and Shakespeare; he spent his brief adult years studying, with the intention of publishing the definitive study of, fifteenth century outlaw poet Francois Villon. His stories, when not set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, are ripe with allusions to legends, lost customs, nearly forgotten mythologies and characters from the fringes of empire and art. Under the aegis of his uncle, Leon Cahun (great-uncle of the artistClaude Cahun), the curator and librarian of the famous Bibliothèque Mazarine, Marcel spent his formative years surrounded by a rich collection of books and manuscripts, including the Mazarine Bible, printed by Gutenberg himself. When he was sixteen, he wrote and abandoned a novel set in ancient Rome. It could be said that Schwob grew up at the end of the 19th century, but came of age in antiquity.
Champion’s insight may have been less a characterization of Schwob’s gaze than his destiny. In the century following his premature death, Schwob appears to have been all but forgotten. This despite numbering among his admirers Jules Renard, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry (who both dedicated books to Schwob), Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. Despite periodic dustings off—Solar Books published a translation, by “Lady Jane Orgasmo,” of his secretly influential Imaginary Lives a few years ago that is already out-of-print and difficult to find—there seems to be little reason to revise Roger Shattuck’s claim, made in 1955, that Schwob is a “singularly neglected figure.”
The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity?
Fuchsia Dunlop in Lucky Peach (via The Browser):
The first time I visited London’s Chinatown was in the late 1980s, when a Singaporean family friend, Li-Er, took my cousin and me there for dim sum. To a Chinese-food virgin, as I was at the time, it was daring and exotic. We passed pillars wreathed in dragons on our way into the cavernous Chuen Cheng Ku, where we sat among the roaming trolleys, eating strange tidbits made with unfathomable ingredients. The textures of the food were unlike anything I’d encountered before: flabby, glutinous, taut, and slippery.
I was still in my teens, already a keen cook and adventurous eater, and I’d acquired from my mother a habit of analyzing new dishes, trying to guess how and with what they’d been made. But until that Sunday lunchtime, the nearest I’d got to tasting real Chinese food was the occasional takeaway of deep-fried pork balls with a slick of bright red sweet-and-sour sauce, chicken with tinned bamboo shoots, and egg-fried rice (which, incidentally, I adored). In Chuen Cheng Ku, I was thrilled and baffled in equal measure. I was game for eating anything, so I tried my first chicken’s foot, steamed in black bean sauce, and scoffed down mysterious, slithery rolls stuffed with prawns and slabs of something white and pasty. I couldn’t have guessed what went into most of the snacks and had no yardstick with which to judge them. Without Li-Er, I doubt that I’d have ventured into that kind of restaurant at all. Our dim sum lunch was just an isolated adventure. I had no idea then Chinese food was going to become an obsession that would take over my life.
It wasn’t until a few years later, in 1992, that I made the first of many trips to China. I backpacked my way around the country, from Guangzhou to Yangshuo, Chongqing, and Beijing. Like many foreign travelers, I was stymied by my lack of knowledge and my inability to speak or read the language. Aside from a few famous delicacies like Peking duck, I didn’t know what I should eat or where to find it. Once inside a restaurant, I didn’t have a clue how to order. My gastronomic experiences on the trip were random and haphazard.
Jeffrey Frank in the NYT's The Stone:
For years, visitors to the Copenhagen City Museum wandered into a modest room that contains a few artifacts from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s life: portraits, meerschaum pipes, first editions and, best of all, the desk where he stood and produced with preternatural speed a series of original and difficult works, many of them written pseudonymously and published in editions that numbered in the hundreds — among them “Either-Or,” “Fear and Trembling,” “The Concept of Dread” and “Repetition.” The exhibit has been refreshed to mark Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday on May 5th. His belongings — a large library, furniture, paintings, and knickknacks —were pretty well dispersed after his death in 1855, but the expanded version will add an “outer circle” of relevant material. Manuscripts and papers from the Kierkegaard archives will be on display at the Royal Library.
The philosopher’s grave is fairly close by, in Assistens Kirkegaard—his forbidding name is a variation of the Danish word for cemetery — in the Norrebro district, which is also the burial ground of many other notable figures, including Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr and the American tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.
Though in death he rests in this distinguished company, Kierkegaard was markedly less revered in life. His contemporaries saw him as a troublesome, quarrelsome figure. He was a familiar sight, strolling about the Old City, where he created the illusion that he was merely an underemployed gentleman. The satirical weekly Corsair published nasty caricatures of him and mocked his writing and pseudonymous disguises. He was gossiped about when he broke his engagement to the 18-year-old Regine Olsen, and was feared by his targets, among them, Hans Christian Andersen, whose early novels Kierkegaard eviscerated in his 1838 debut, “From the Papers of One Still Living.” Shortly before he died at age 42, he began a bitter ground war with the state Lutheran church. For his biographers and interpreters, his private life remains a nest of secrets.
Marina Petrova on Jim Holt's book, in the LA Review of Books:
JIM HOLT IS AN EXPERT AT NOTHING. He has gone on a world tour of modern philosophers, physicists, theologians, and writers, and asked them a question that is, he writes, “so profound it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Holt visited esteemed thinkers — Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, Adolf Grünbaum, and John Updike — in their natural habitats, places like Oxford or Café de Flore in Paris. Holt presents their theories in Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story in a manner a layperson could grasp, and with wit and dry humor a cynic can appreciate. A philosopher, author, and essayist, Holt gives these great minds physical bodies, allowing his readers a glimpse into the lives of our own endangered species — humans that think for a living.
Holt grew up in a religious family, but he “had begun to develop an interest in existentialism” in high school, he writes, because it was “a philosophy that seemed to hold out hope for resolving my adolescent insecurities, or at least elevating them to a grander plain.” His parents and the nuns in his elementary school initially taught him that the world existed because God created it out of nothing. That answer didn’t quite jive with him, but that the world might exist for no reason at all seemed a bit unnerving. So Holt decided to play detective and attempt to make the universe answer for its existence.
Thinking for a living is a luxury few have, and asking the big questions is rare once we leave college. How many of us regularly ponder the reasons for the world’s existence after a full day’s work, doing homework with the kids, paying bills, and arguing with the spouse over whose turn it is to buy groceries? At times, after a long day, nothingness doesn’t look so bad. While nothing is more human than to contemplate our own existence, we just often forget about it when we grow up, leaving it to the metaphysicians, philosophers, and children. To read Jim Holt’s book after our daily minutiae is to remember what it was like, when we were younger, to mull over the question of existence and nothingness.
In the Boston Review:
WA: Religion in South Asia has been characterized by extremism and intolerance: the Taliban in Pakistan, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the continued prominence of Narendra Modi in India. What should the role of religion be in a purportedly democratic modern South Asia, and can religious extremism be removed from the political theater?
The question is whether those opposed to extremists can creatively deploy South Asia’s religious and spiritual traditions in their quest for social and economic justice. The question arises because the old Western language of politics, too identified with the hypocrisy and venality of local elites, doesn’t seem persuasive anymore, even in the West itself. And the old binaries of secularism versus religion or democracy versus theocracy don’t clarify much. We need a fresh vocabulary to both describe our political dilemmas and to seek solutions to them.
More here.
Bruce Stone in Numéro Cinq:
Viewed as domestic terrorism (even Cossacks have dreams), these acts seem comparatively tame, even quaint. As a more benign kind of vandalism (tell that to the producer), they make their point clearly enough, I suppose. But as literary criticism, they are an utter travesty, an intellectual obscenity that should make the Cossacks and their kin themselves the object of public and lasting derision (pillories and tomatoes or, at minimum, raspberries). A half century has passed since Lolita’s publication, yet here we are again—it seems inevitable—with the literal-minded and the simpletons, the well-meaning zealots and zombie mooncalves breaking out torches and pitchforks, vodka bottles and spray paint, to decry Lolita as the work of the devil.
More here.
Joseph S. Nye in Foreign Policy:
Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, and that can be accomplished in three main ways — by coercion, payment, or attraction. If you can add the soft power of attraction to your toolkit, you can economize on carrots and sticks. For a rising power like China whose growing economic and military might frightens its neighbors into counter-balancing coalitions, a smart strategy includes soft power to make China look less frightening and the balancing coalitions less effective. For a declining power like Russia (or Britain before it), a residual soft power helps to cushion the fall.
The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority). But combining these resources is not always easy.
More here.
