The Arts Fuse Newsletter, September 11
A Chat with Adam Kuber about "The Museum of Other People," Praise for the Letters of Seamus Heaney, HBO's "Industry," and the Jam-Band Goose, and an Appreciation of the late Sérgio Mendes
From The Editor's Desk:
This year marks the 100th birthday of a pair of my favorite postwar authors. Their fiction is challenging, eccentric, and non-commercial: just the way I like it. Back in July, I applauded the bedazzling American prose of William Gass. The centenary of New Zealand writer Janet Frame came in late August. She is best known here for her magnificent three-volume autobiography, the basis for Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel on my Table. The movie’s success continues — at least in part — to taint a proper appreciation of Frame’s novels, short stories, and poetry. Frame was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic in her late teens; a scheduled leucotomy (the New Zealand version of a lobotomy) was scratched after doctors learned that her debut collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories, had just won a prestigious literary award. “Is it little wonder,” Frame writes in her autobiography, “that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life?”
Campion’s movie turns Frame into a likeable eccentric, but the writer’s picture of the mentally ill is harder-edged than she has been given credit for: she rejects comforting pieties about victimhood. Frame’s best novels — Owls Do Cry (1957), Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963), Intensive Care (1970), Daughter Buffalo (1972), and The Carpathians (1988) — are fierce struggles to conjure up a language that expresses the mysteries of inwardness. Existence is about naming rather than possessing. Scented Gardens for the Blind eschews the warm gush of “mere animal cries, demands for warmth, food, and love, nor human pleas for forgiveness, salvation, peace of mind, but the speech which arranges the dance and pattern of the most complicated ideas and feelings of man in relation to truth; truth; it, the center; the circus; the crack of the whip, the feeding time of the spirit …” Her radical quest for a transcendent language — powered by crick-crackling alphabets — poses readerly difficulties. But her imaginative vision nourishes the spirit, at least it has mine. (For those curious about Frame’s fiction, Fitzcarraldo Editions has just released an edition of her 1962 novel The Edge of the Alphabet.)
Some wrongly dismiss Frame’s word-crazed introspection as narcissistic verbosity. But, if conscience is our capacity to reflect on our actions in the light of our sense of justice, than linguistic sorcerers, such as Gass and Frame, take us just where we need, perhaps kicking and screaming, to go: the rough hewn edges of human consciousness. Their revelatory narratives of self-examination play a vital role in civilization making good on its commitment to moral and ethical inquiry. These are writers who excavate the soul. Wallace Stevens articulates why their mission is so valuable in his poem “Chocorua To Its Neighbor”: “To speak humanly from the height or from the depth/ Of human things, that is acutest speech.” And that was Janet Frame’s lingua franca.
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Note: From the Editor's Desk -- By Popular Demand.
Readers have asked that I post these weekly opinion pieces in the magazine — request granted.
Book Review: “The Letters of Seamus Heaney” – The Burden of Good Fortune
By Leigh Rastivo
In his letters, Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s tone, and the expanse of his openness, varies according to the addressee — but his approach to all is inevitably marked by seriousness and elegance.
Short Fuse Podcast #69: Talking About “The Museum of Other People”
By Elizabeth Howard
The host of Short Fuse talks to Adam Kuper about his book The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.
WATCH CLOSELY: “Industry”‘s Third Season — The Dramatic Stakes are Rising
By Peg Aloi
HBO’s Industry is an intense and highly intelligent series that just seems to keep getting better and better.
Arts Remembrance: To Sérgio with Love -- Sérgio Mendes, 1941–2024
By Evelyn Rosenthal
Sérgio Mendes, the man who ignited my own love affair with Brazilian music, has passed, at the age of 83, from complications of long Covid.
Goose -- More Immersive Than Ever
By Paul Robicheau
Goose’s three nights at the MGM Music Hall at the Fenway seemed a bit hit-and-miss, which is not unusual for jam-bands, although that only made highpoints more exhilarating.
Book Review: A Good Russian
By Peter Keough
Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War is a Russian journalist’s poignant view of life during wartime as seen by both sides.
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Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
