sherwood anderson letter

Letter to Taylor Critchfield Company, a Chicago-based advertising agency

Chicago
June 25, 1918

Dear Barton:

You have a man in your employ that I have thought for a long time should be fired. I refer to Sherwood Anderson. He is a fellow of a good deal of ability, but for a long time I have been convinced that his heart is not in his work.

There is no question but that this man Anderson has in some ways been an ornament to our organization. His hair, for one thing being long and mussy gives an artistic carelessness to his personal appearance that somewhat impresses such men as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mr. Curtenius of Kalamazoo when they come into the office.

But Anderson is not really productive. As I have said his heart is not in his work. I think he should be fired and if you will not do the job I should like permission to fire him myself. I therefore suggest that Anderson be asked to sever his connections with the Company on August 1st. He is a nice fellow. We will let him down easy but let's can him.

Respectfully submitted,

Sherwood Anderson

adam gopnik | the big reveal

The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it—when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.

Yet the project of draining the melodrama from Revelation may scant some significant things even as it draws attention to others. It is possible to draw too sharp a boundary between prophetic and merely symbolic images, between mad vision and coded cartoon. Allegorical pictures of contemporary events have a way of weaving in and out between the symbolic and the semi-psychotic. This is close to an eternal truth of art: one person’s editorial cartoon is another’s weird nightmare. James Gillray, the late-eighteenth-century English cartoonist, meant his gallery of grotesques—armed skeletons and demonic imps and Brobdingnagian heads—as satiric images of contemporary British politics, but they became the image pool for Goya’s “Caprichos.” Even if there is some twist of satire to every wacky turn in Revelation, the writer’s appetite for lurid imagery — the prophetic side we sense in it — is surely part of the book’s intended effect


excerpted from "The Big Reveal"
The New Yorker, March 5, 2012

luci shaw | three wedding poems

Epithalamion
for Greg and Andrea

As God, creating, lifted from Adam
the archetypal rib, now, Greg, because you were alone,
he gives to you Andrea, telling you,
“Here. This is your woman, bone of your bone.”

And Andrea, longing for your loving to come true,
remember how the Lord God spoke,
so that a curving, warm bone woke
into a woman--vital, beautiful, and you !

Lord, let now your word leap down again, restore
Eden, and innocence, and say once more
Good! Will you, who made one like yourself,
and from that one made two,
join them in one again?

*

Prothalamion

How like an arch your marriage!
Framed in living stone,
its gothic arrow aimed at heaven,
with Christ (its Capstone and
its Arrowhead) locking
your coupled weakness into one,
the leaning
of two lives into a strength.
So he defines your joining’s length
and width, its archetypal shape. Its meaning
multiplies: the letting in of light,
the opening of your vision to the sight
of new and varied landscapes, planned
but yet to be explored.
A paradox, for you, who stand
today before us--
you who doubly frame this arch--
may now step through
its entrance into the promised land.

*

Amazed by love

The kinship of woman with man, of water
with stone, is a mystery—the biting of rocks
into the river’s body—the lotion of water like silk
on rough granite—a touch tender and feral,
like the wind combing a green field of oats.

A storm—all the earth trembles, and then is still.
This astonishment, with its sudden thunder,
will shake the breath in your body the way oil
and water shiver together, and when they settle—
a strange new thing, with its pearly light.

To enter the breadth in the joining of two
is to be dazzled—there is so much space in it—
such endless possibility makes you feel smaller than
the ants on a petal, and as wide and rich
as heaven at noon. And the ocean wrapping the world

in its sapphire scarf—at water’s edge, right
at your feet, you will see stones you have
never seen and never will again.
To be amazed by love is not to be blinded but
to let the flare of wonder fill you

like air filling a sail. Isn’t this
the voice of God at work? Even his silence
breathes life into you, a golden sigh as fresh
as Eden. To love someone is not to lose anything,
but to gain it in giving it all away.

illustration by Anton Koberger,

German Bible, 1493

mike mason | the mystery of marriage

It is no secret that there is a heady, breathtaking freedom in love,
but how many realize that the marrying kind is the headiest of all?
In a person about to be married
there is a quality of footloose derailment,
as if an old rusty locomotive had suddenly sprouted wings
and soared away from its tracks.
Being engaged is like
entering a new stage of childhood,
like having a new body,
like being a brand new creature just emerged from a cocoon,
with shining skin not quite dry.
One stumbles around, lumbers, cranes, reels.
And what are those ponderous appendages on one's back,
those preposterous, unwieldy contraptions
that keep lifting one up into the air?

There is an obviousness about true love, a certainty.
To doubt it is to be plunged into darkness and confusion.
But to believe in and accept it is to be filled with light.
There is really nothing else like it.
Few other decisions in life will be anywhere near as crucial
as the decision to love or not to love.
And once made, there can be no reneging.

A marriage is not a joining of two worlds,
but an abandoning of two worlds
so that one new one can be formed.
The call to be married is like Jesus' advice to the rich young man
to sell all his possessions and follow.
It is a vocation to total abandonment.
For most people,
marriage is the single most wholehearted step they will ever take
toward a fulfillment of Jesus' command
to love one's neighbor as oneself.

Make no mistake about it:
the joining of a man and a woman in matrimony
is a supernatural event,
founded upon a mutual exchange of holy pledges –
the only true vows that most people will ever take.
The saying of them requires about thirty seconds.
But keeping them is the work of a lifetime.

illustration by 

William Pène du Bois,

"The Flying Locomotive"

czeslaw milosz | the two of you

Don’t run anymore. Quiet. How softly it rains

On the roofs of the city. How perfect

All things are. Now, for the two of you

Waking up in a royal bed by a garret window.

For a man and a woman. For one plant divided

Into masculine and feminine which longed for each other.

Yes, this is my gift to you. Above ashes

On a bitter, bitter earth. Above the subterranean

Echo of clamorings and vows. So that now at dawn

You must be attentive: the tilt of a head,

A hand with a comb, two faces in a mirror

Are only forever once, even if unremembered,

So that you watch what is, though it fades away,

And are grateful every moment for your being.

Let that little park with greenish marble busts

In the pearl-gray light, under a summer drizzle,

Remain as it was when you opened the gate.

And the street of tall peeling porticoes

Which this love of yours suddenly transformed.

milosz | readings

You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospels in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone,
And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable,
We discover the true dignity of speech.
Compelled to be attentive we shall think of that epoch
No more distant than yesterday, though the heads of caesars
On coins are different today. Yet still it is the same eon.
Fear and desire are the same, oil and wine
And bread mean the same. So does the fickleness of the throng
Avid for miracles as in the past. Even mores,
Wedding festivities, drugs, laments for the dead
Only seem to differ. Then, too, for example,
There were plenty of persons whom the text calls
Daimonizomenoi, that is, the demonized
Or, if you prefer, the bedeviled (as for “the possessed”
It’s no more that the whim of a dictionary).
Convulsions, foam at the mouth, the gnashing of teeth
Were not considered signs of talent.
The demonized had no access to print and screens,
Rarely engaging in arts and literature.
But the Gospel parable remains in force:
That the spirit mastering them may enter swine,
Which, exasperated by such a sudden clash
Between two natures, theirs and the Luciferic,
Jump into water and drown (which occurs repeatedly).
And thus on every page a persistent reader
Sees twenty centuries as twenty days
In a world which one day will come to its end.



Readings
by Czesław Miłosz
From The Collected Poems 1931-1987 (p. 234)

david james duncan | president of the world

Personally I’m not sure just who or what Christ is. I still pray to Him in a pinch, but I talk to myself in a pinch too – and I’m getting less and less sure there’s a difference. I used to wish somebody would just tell me what to think about Him. Then along came Elder Babcock, telling and telling, acting like Christ was running for President of the World, and he was His campaign manager, and whoever didn’t get out and vote for the Lord at the polls we call churches by casting the votes we call tithes and offerings into the ballot boxes we call offering plates was a wreched turd of a sinner voting for Satan by default.

Mama tries to clear up all the confusion by saying that Christ is exactly what the Bible says He is. But what does the Bible say He is? On one page He’s a Word, on the next a bridegroom, then He’s a boy, then a scapegoat, then a thief in the night; read on and He’s the messiah, then oops, He’s a rabbi, and then a fraction – a third of a Trinity – then a fisherman, then a broken loaf of bread. I guess even God, when He’s human, has trouble deciding just what He is.


David James Duncan,
The Brothers K

peter hessler | yakuza love

Stories tended to tumble out of Adelstein, full of crazy yakuza details, and today he told a new one. He said that during his period of obsessive research he had conducted an affair with one of Goto’s mistresses. The gangster reportedly kept more than a dozen women in Tokyo and other cities, and Adelstein slept with one who gave him useful information. Eventually, he helped her escape Goto by introducing her to a gay salaryman who needed a wife and was about to be posted overseas. He said that the couple still shared an address in Europe. I asked what the mistress was like.

“We had this lovely conversation once in bed,” Adelstein said. “She said, ‘Do you love me?’ I said, ‘No, but I like you.’ She said, ‘I like you, too. You’re a lot of fun.’ Then she said, ‘Are you sleeping with me to get information about Goto?’ I said, ‘Pretty much. What about you?’ She said, ‘Well, I hate the motherfucker and every time I sleep with you it’s like I’m stabbing him in the face.’ She was into astronomy. Once, we went to a planetarium in Sunshine City. I think that was the only time we ever went out in public together. That was our only date.” He continued, “it was nice. Another time, I gave her a gift — I bought an expensive planetarium set that Sega makes. She cried.”

He lit another cigarette. He had told me once that he didn’t expect to have a long life, but in Tokyo he always seemed happy and full of energy. I liked the image from his story: the odd couple at the planetarium, the Japanese gangster’s mistress and the cross-eyed kid from Missouri, both of them staring up at the stars. I thought about that until we reached the airport and he went off to find some shoes.


from “All Due Respect: An American reporter takes on the yakuza”
by Peter Hessler
The New Yorker, January 9, 2012

The Thomas Gantz photo of the Sunshine City planetarium is used by permission

stewart henderson | in the parlour

I only knew her old, and her house with its parlour polished raw
‘because God can see in the dark’.
Dense furniture to weigh weary the spirit and disapproving curtains–
even anything that had colour, hadn’t. So rainbows never called
or circuses,
and parrots were just daft –
it was a room in which to be tethered and bleak.
The best china was never used
because that would be frivolous and wasteful
and something could get chipped.
Outside in the hall, the ramrod grandfather clock
was a ticking sentry, measuring Time’s slow march steps.

I only knew her old
when she darned the days with hate.
She hated Clement Atlee because he was ‘a posh socialist’
she hated Catholics because she observed most of them were short.
She hated all forms of alcohol,
which she described as horse’s piss – but how did she know,
if she’d never tasted either liquid – and if she had,
it may have been just a bad pint or
a stallion with a kidney infection?

She hated tobacco, so a woman with a cigarette was damned
but a man wasn’t – he was just filthy.
She hated gambling, but she did the football pools,
which wasn’t gambling.
She also hated
Haile Selassie, Wilfred Pickles and the first Moon landing.
But she did like dogs – she had several,
all of them madder than Crippen.

All this hate meant that by the age of sixteen,
I was reading impenetrable left-wing books, and
drinking and smoking, and sneaking into Mass, and
getting a mate to place bets on The Grand National.
I also developed a huge affection for Ethiopian emperors,
Yorkshire broadcasters, and the Sea of Tranquillity;
and I became frightened of dogs.
She had the same birthday as Hitler, and there were days
when I used to think: ‘poor Hitler’.

I only knew her old, when life, for her, was about
the dwindling of days, and cataracts, and heavy coats in Summer
and the Pope being ecumenical on television,
and, an even worse abomination for her, a Labour government.

I only knew her old.
I did not see her hurled across the classroom by a teacher,
causing one of her little fingers to snap
(it ever after resembling the shape of a wish bone
pointing back into her palm – a penance of deformity, although
she would never use the word ‘penance’ as that was Papist.)
I did not see her after that incident, when her father
then took his belt to her because
he said she must have deserved it.

I was not there when she lost two babies in childbirth,
and a couple of husbands, and then another child.

I was there, though, when her son suddenly became a ghost,
and her siren grief made next door draw their curtains shut.
Maybe that was the day when love was finally looted from her.

I only knew her old,
and, at the end,
in her room, in her breathless bed,
when she left for somewhere
where I hoped she wouldn’t be old
or beaten
or stooped with hate.



Copyright Stewart Henderson. Must not be copied or reproduced without the author's permission. To do so is to infringe UK copyright law.

evans + frank + herzog | santa

walker evans | west virginia living room | 1935

robert frank | ranch market - hollywood | 1956

fred herzog | paris cafe | 1959

frank + herzog | witness

Jehovah's Witness

Robert Frank

Los Angeles, 1955-56

Witness

Fred Herzog

Vancouver, 1966

adam gopnik | boring, boring, boring

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. "Incoherent and inaudible" was Kingsley Amis's verdict on his teacher.

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written....

Adam Gopnik, "The Dragon's Egg"
The New Yorker, December 5, 2011

richard bram | street photography

Photos by Richard Bram

iN-PUBLiC

jim lepage | word

jim lepage is a graphic artist who set himself a two-year project to create at least one image for each book of the bible. these are my favourites. here's the link.