Sacramento artist Gale Hart is commonly referred to as the “Godmother of Contemporary Art.” (Photo by Joan Cusick)
Art Exposed: Gale Hart
By Eva Roethler
April 20, 2018
The Sacramento artist who has embraced her nickname as the “Godmother of Contemporary Art” likes to roll around town on her skateboard.
Many Sacramentans may know Gale Hart for skateboarding around town, and for her “Missing the Mark” public art installation outside the Golden 1 Center, which scatters an aimless oversized game of darts throughout Downtown Commons. In 2016, she was one of four artists, including internationally-known sculptor Jeff Koons, commissioned to create a piece for the new arena. But Hart has been a staple in the local arts community for a lot longer than that, ever since throwing down her roots here in the late 1970s after spending her early years living in a van while traveling West Coast art festival circuits.
Bob Parent/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesOrnette Coleman with Don Cherry at the 5 Spot Cafe, New York City, November 17, 1959
Torrential, Gut-Bucket Jazz
Geoff Dyer
June 20, 2015
It happened that on the day the great saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman died I was watching a preview of a recently salvaged film by Sydney Pollack of the making of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace. The album was recorded live at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, the city where, in the late 1950s, Ornette and his collaborators, Charlie Haden (bass), Don Cherry (trumpet), and Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins (drums) had formed the quartet that would soon declare the shape of jazz to come. The idea for Amazing Grace was that Aretha would record an album of the gospel music she’d grown up hearing and singing in her father’s church in Detroit. This was in 1972. John Coltrane had died in 1967, Albert Ayler—the tenor saxophonist who, along with Ornette, had played at Coltrane’s funeral—in 1970. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been dead for four years. The unifying grace of the civil rights era had given way to the fractured militancy of Black Power and revolutionary struggle.
Guy Le Querrec/Magnum PhotosA television showing John Coltrane, Equatorial Guinea, 1990
Catastrophic Coltrane
Geoff Dyer
October 4, 2014
Offering: Live at Temple University offers further evidence of the catastrophe of the last phase of John Coltrane’s work. “Last” rather than “late” because he became ill and died too suddenly (on July 17, 1967), too early, to have properly entered a late period. He was forty. In any other field of activity that would be a desperately short life. Only in jazz could it be considered broadly in line with actuarial norms. So there’s no late phase in the accepted sense of Beethoven having arrived at a late style, only a sudden ceasing of the unceasing torrent of sound.
Mourning becomes Joe Biden. “I have found over the years,” he writes in his recent best-selling memoir Promise Me, Dad, “that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss…. When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience.” The most moving thing in that book is not even Biden’s restrained and heartbreaking account of the slow death of his beloved son Beau. It is the two brief appearances of Wei Tang Liu, whose son, Wenjian Liu, was one of two police officers murdered in New York City on the Saturday before Christmas 2014. Biden visited the family home in Brooklyn to pay his respects.
The father, an immigrant from China, had little English, but Biden picked up on his need for physical intimacy, for the consolation of touch: “Occasionally he would lean into me so that his shoulder touched my arm…. I did not pull away, but leaned in so that he could feel me there.” When Biden finally made to leave, Liu walked outside with him and embraced him in front of the line of policemen standing watch. “He held on to me tightly, for a long time, as if he could not bear to let me go.” Five months later, when Beau was dead, Biden was leaving the public wake at St. Anthony’s church in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. He saw, in the long line of mourners, Wei Tang Liu. Neither man spoke to the other: “He just walked up and gave me a hug. It meant so much to me to be in the embrace of somebody who understood. He held on to me, silently, and wouldn’t let go.”
Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss. Richard Ben Cramer, in his classic account of the 1988 presidential primaries, What It Takes, wrote how even then it was a journalistic cliché to define Biden by the terrible car crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi (and injured Beau and his brother, Hunter), in 1972, shortly after Biden was elected to the Senate at the age of twenty-nine. Cramer refers to the “type that fell out of the machine every time they used Biden’s name: ‘…whose life was touched by personal tragedy…’ Joe Biden (D-Del., T.B.P.T.).”
Even now, as Hunter Biden’s name is threaded through Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings, there is a ghost behind it: Hunter is Neilia’s maiden name. Trump’s preoccupation with Hunter’s presence on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma hinges on a reality that is certainly worthy of scrutiny: Joe Biden was, as he recounts in some detail in Promise Me, Dad, deeply involved in the Obama administration’s relations with Ukraine, and it seems implausible that Hunter’s position with Burisma was merely coincidental. But the frenzied inflation of this story, like so much that involves the Bidens, is freighted with both dread and grief. The dread is Trump’s (arguably misplaced) fear of Biden as a competitor for the presidency in 2020, an anxiety that became a manic fixation that has led to his impeachment. The grief drives Biden’s fierce need to protect his living son, not just for himself, but for Hunter’s dead mother and brother.
Yet even if those horrible losses had not befallen his family, Biden would have a very public relationship to the dead. He is haunted by the murdered Kennedys. In his campaign speeches he has evoked the image of himself and his sister, Valerie, weeping openly as Robert Kennedy’s funeral train passed by. For the first decades of his political career, his pitch was essentially that these dead men could rise again through him. The speech that first made people talk of Biden as a potential presidential candidate was at the New Jersey Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1983, when he brought the house down with his evocation of the slain: “Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.” Biden recalled in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, “I remember the feeling in the room when I delivered that line; its effect on the crowd washed back at me as a physical sensation. I could see people in the audience crying.” He also realized that in channeling the dead, he allowed each listener to “fill in my words with his or her own meanings…. After all, each person has a little something different buried in a broken heart.”
“From birth to death,” writes Vivian Gornick, in her memoir The Odd Woman and the City,
we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions—anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate—yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.
From there the divisions multiply. We long for experience, we shrink from experience; we want to understand, we don’t want to understand. We confuse our neuroses for our innermost truths and in the end it all boils down to: nothing. Pointless disharmony. “Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities,” she writes in another memoir, Fierce Attachments.
Escaping Pandora’s Box — Another Novel Coronavirus
List of authors.
David M. Morens, M.D., Peter Daszak, Ph.D., and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D. FEBRUARY 26, 2020
The 1918 influenza pandemic was the deadliest event in human history (50 million or more deaths, equivalent in proportion to 200 million in today’s global population). For more than a century, it has stood as a benchmark against which all other pandemics and disease emergences have been measured. We should remember the 1918 pandemic as we deal with yet another infectious-disease emergency: the growing epidemic of novel coronavirus infectious disease (Covid-19), which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This virus has been spreading throughout China for at least 2 months, has been exported to at least 36 other countries, and has been seeding more than two secondary cases for every primary case. The World Health Organization has declared the epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. If public health efforts cannot control viral spread, we will soon be witnessing the birth of a fatal global pandemic.
In 1988 the French novelist and photographer Hervé Guibert was diagnosed with HIV. Two years later, Éditions Gallimard published To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a stark autobiographical book about his desperate effort to gain access to an experimental “AIDS vaccine.” To the Friend made Guibert both wealthy and famous, especially after an appearance on the French TV show Apostrophes. Posters of his handsome face went up around Paris, transforming him into a symbol of the intense suffering of seropositive men and women at the time. Though he promises in the opening section of his book to become “one of the first people on earth to survive this deadly malady,” he would die the following year, on December 27, 1991, only a few days after his thirty-sixth birthday, author of an additional five extraordinary books, all of which would be published posthumously.
To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life- Hervé Guibert
MAY 5, 2014 LESREVERIESDEROWENA
“My blood, unmasked, everywhere and forever, naked around the clock, when I’m walking in the street, taking public transport, the constant target of an arrow aimed at me wherever I go. Does it show in my eyes?”– Hervé Guibert, To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
This was a tough review for me to write especially having lost a relative to AIDS as a teenager, a relative who lived at my parent’s house until a few days before he died. Having witnessed the painful death of a loved one to this disease , it surprised me that I’d even consider picking this book up. Well, morbid curiosity got a hold of me really after I watched a documentary on Foucault in which there was mention of a friend of his documented his final months before succumbing to AIDS. This friend is Hervé Guibert and this story is both a fictionalized account of Foucault’s death and Guibert’s own experiences with the disease.
From Karl Ove Knausgård to Marguerite Duras, the French author Nina Bouraoui celebrates the writers whose stories are told without invention
Nina Bouraoui Wed 16 September 2020
A
n autofiction is a work of truth; the author is not hiding behind an invented character, she is that character. The character’s spiritual and philosophical quest is the author’s own; the “I” of the narrative is the author, recreating the world according to his or her own experience.
She delivers the truth, without altering or falsifying the facts, as if putting together a police report. The power of autofiction comes from its universality. When she tells her own story, the writer describes an expanded world, one that unites us all.
The writer’s own story is the human story, with the same structure and complexity. Autofiction doesn’t arise from the urge to invent, to create a fictional other and tell a tale according to the rules of a particular form. It’s more a way of experiencing the Other as a being similar to oneself: “when I speak of myself, I’m speaking of you.” It may not be the absolute truth the author is telling, but it is her truth as she lived and experienced it.
Towards the end of the 1990s I was asked by the French writer Christine Angot to write an autobiographical novel for her series of autofictions with the general title of Sujet(Subject). I had just started therapy and the analysis spilled over quite naturally into my writing.
I was driven by a genuine craving to write about my origins, my identity, my dual nationality, my sexuality. I felt that in getting to the heart of my own truth, I was also touching on what seemed to be a universal truth. After that I wrote three auto-fictional novels, bringing together my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.
In 2008, I came back to the more traditional novel, inventing characters and stories that weren’t part of my own experience. I wrote All Men Want to Know 10 years later, perhaps as a response to the times. On the one hand gay rights had become more widely recognised and defended, at least here in the west, but at the same time, we were witnessing a rise in verbal aggressions towards minorities in France, as well as a surge in violent homophobic assaults.
I can lay claim to having a triple status: I’m a woman, I’m of mixed race and I’m gay. With the rise of the extreme right, I felt it was important to tell my parents’ story: a French woman marrying an Algerian man, my mother’s arrival in Algiers after 1962, a time when the French were all leaving Algeria; our life there, full of beauty, poetry and sometimes, danger; the discovery of my sexuality. It takes courage to step outside of the norm and become the person you are. I wanted to affirm once and for all that one’s sexuality, one’s identity has a story of its own, that it doesn’t arise from nowhere, that it is not something one chooses.
I feel affection and admiration for all writers of autofiction and for the books they write. It takes a certain kind of courage to deliver up the truth about oneself. I see it as a kind of political act, too: in declaring who you are, you’re also saying something about other people and about the world we inhabit.
Guibert is the father of autofiction, the master of finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty. In this book, he tells the story of his illness, Aids, in the late 1980s. He tells of how life with the virus became an existential adventure, how it affected a generation, how it stole his friends and lovers, and how writing was for him a bulwark against death and destruction. It’s the story of an era, a turning point – when Aids transformed our relationship with desire and sexuality forever.
Zorn could be Guibert’s brother. A somewhat mysterious figure, who only wrote this one novel, Zorn writes of his strict, repressive upbringing and denounces the hypocrisy of bourgeois Zurich. He writes in clinical, icy terms of his cancer, in which, to his great surprise, he found a kind of salvation. This is a book about the prison of the family and the veiled violence within it. A masterpiece.
Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this great writer. In Practicalities, Duras tells of her childhood in Indochina, her relationship with alcohol, her experience of the second world war, of religion, love and the solitude in which books are born. She writes about the places that mattered to her – her house outside Paris, her apartment on the Rue Saint-Benoît. This is Duras as seen by Marguerite, an intimate and major work.
Norwegian writer Knausgård has constructed an autofictional edifice. The master of detail, he writes not only about life as it is being lived, but also about the roots of that life: childhood, adolescence, the death of his tyrannical father. Knausgård’s work, considered by some to be sensationalistic, is the ultimate in provocative, brutally honest autobiographical writing.
This short work tells the story of a woman’s great love. Ernaux’s unadorned prose lays bare the madness of love and the workings of the flesh: expectation, physical tension, surrender – written, as always, with consummate skill. Ernaux never tired of writing of passion and lost love, of the female body and its vertiginous relationship to the male.
With great courage, Angot writes of how an incestuous father ruptured a soul’s equilibrium to the core, fracturing its relationship to love, to the world (in this instance, a conflicted relationship with a woman) and to other people. A work unequalled in its power to give strength and comfort to all abused children.
In 1957, Sagan was involved in a car accident and spent several months in hospital recovering from her injuries. During that time, she kept a journal in which she reflected on pain, writing and morphine. This previously unpublished journal throws light on the work of Sagan, who almost died at the height of her fame and who found herself caught in the infernal cycle of drug dependence.
The story of a generation (the 1980s again) and the key to all of Ellis’s work. This is Ellis from the inside: the origins of Less Than Zero, the success of American Psycho, an overview of our time, Ellis predicting the end of the novel, perhaps, and revealing his desire to tell it all the way he sees it.
A love story about a young reader (Yann Andréa Steiner) and his passionate admiration for a woman who writes: Marguerite Duras. This is their story, set in Paris and Trouville, told in words and silence. A window on the world of Duras: a world of books, films, plays – and alcohol. Yann Andréa was Duras’s young gaycompanion, her first reader and her great love.
10. Consent by Vanessa Springora translated by Natasha Lehrer The autobiographical account of a woman, who at the age of 14 was allegedly groomed by a man in his 50s, the writer Gabriel Matzneff. It tells the story of an adult’s hold over a young girl barely out of childhood. This extraordinary book could not have appeared without the #MeToo movement and the power it gave to women to speak out.
French publishing boss claims she was groomed at age 14 by acclaimed author
Vanessa Springora describes relationship with Gabriel Matzneff, then 50, in new book
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Fri 27 Dec 2019 15.57 GMT
The French literary world is in shock after a leading publishing director, Vanessa Springora, alleged in a new book that she was groomed into a damaging relationship from the age of 14 with an acclaimed author who was 50.
White by Bret Easton Ellis review – sound, fury and insignificance
Bitter rants and petty score settling drive this attack on political correctness in the Twitter age
Anna Leszkiewicz Wed 24 Apr 2019 07.30 BST
F
or reasons clear only to himself, Bret Easton Ellis opens his new book with an image of himself hunched over a screen, pulsating with uncontrollable fury. Minor incidents with strangers on social media had meant an “overwhelming and irrational annoyance started tearing through me up to a dozen times a day”. Alongside this anger came “an oppression I felt whenever I ventured online”. Worst of all, these feelings “could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress”. But, he adds darkly, “silence and submission were what the machine wanted”.
It’s impossible to read the rest of the book without this image of Ellis – sweaty with rage, contorted over a keypad, humming with paranoia about the demands of “the machine” – coming to mind. BecauseWhite, a collection of eight essays that respond to contemporary culture, has all the sound, fury and insignificance of a misguided rant posted at 3am. Except, inexplicably, it has been given the dignity of print publication.
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard – review
A national obsession in Norway, this autobiographical epic is somewhat indigestible
Michel Faber
Wed 25 April 2012
T
he corpse in A Death in the Family belongs to the author's father, and this book – marketed as fiction, but obviously memoir – is the first instalment of a six-volume fictionalised autobiography that has been phenomenally successful in Norway. The series has been bought by almost half a million of the country's five million inhabitants, necessitating some workplaces to declare "Knausgaard-free days" on which employees were cajoled to talk about something else.
Old favourites: ‘Practicalities’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray (1987)
Rob Doyle
Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 06:00
Rob DoyleWhen she was in her early 70s, the French novelist Marguerite Duras spoke to the writer Jérôme Beaujour about a range of subjects and memories that preoccupied her. Her musings were transcribed, Duras edited them and the result is this consistently interesting book of miniature essays, autobiographical fragments and aphoristic reflections. Although Duras insists on the work’s limitations - “At most the book represents what I think sometimes, some days, about some things . . . The book has no beginning or end and it hasn’t got a middle either” – for my money it’s at least as valuable as the fictions that ensured her renown. In a sense, it’s a pity that authors must first prove themselves with the kinds of work – novels and short stories – that we consider the imprimatur of talent, before the publication of books like Practicalitiesbecomes feasible. Relieved of the obligations of narrative and setting, such secondary works offer a more direct intimacy with an author’s consciousness.
Practicalities might have been titled “Marguerite Duras Talks About Whatever Comes Into Her Head”. The sections bear titles by turns prosaic and suggestive: “The telly and death”, “Alcohol”, “Men”, “The pleasures of the 6th arrondissement”, “Hanoi”, “The smell of chemicals”. Duras reflects on her past work – such novels and films as The Lover, Moderato Cantabile and Hiroshima Mon Amour. She writes bluntly about her alcoholism – “What stops you killing yourself when you’re intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you’re dead you won’t be able to drink any more” – and voices a provocative vision of the relations between men and women and the murky nature of sexual desire. She recounts a sexual encounter she had with an older boy when she was four years old and another with a much older man on a train to Paris when she was a teenager, while her family were sleeping next to them. While the musings are personal rather than abstract, Practicalities hints at a broader truth: after the youthful romance of creative expression fades, writing is a vocation that makes no easy accommodation with happiness.
MARS By Fritz Zorn. Afterword by Adolf Muschg. Translated by Robert and Rita Kimber. 241 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
FOR a person to have to face death from malignant lymphoma is a tragedy under any circumstances. For a 32-year-old ''adolescent'' whohas never lived, made love, experienced friendship, achieved success, found comfort or known pleasure, it is a particularly grievous tragedy. ''Mars,'' which was published in Germany in 1977 to some intellectual acclaim, is the autobiographical account of a young Swiss raised on the Gold Coast of Lake Zurich who attempted to find some meaning in his existence by writing candidly about it in the months that preceded his death. In that better world of the cinema, he would have left us an illumination that not only served his purposes but transformed his death into a final bequest for all who are suffering and dying. But life is not the movies, and cancer does not confer acuity or wisdom - only pain, suffering and despair. And Fritz Zorn was singularly untalented. With Fritz Zorn being a pseudonym (meaning ''Angry Fritz'') and the author now dead, a reviewer is released from the normal compassion toward the dying and solicitude toward the innocent.
