“I was going to say that my experiment shows the dangers of creation, the difficulty of balancing more than one consciousness simultaneously. But what good would that do? What solace could I derive from that? Everything is lost now: the woman, my past solitude. Since I cannot escape, I continue with this monologue, which now is unjustifiable.” – Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (p. 34)
Book in the Pipeline: Testing the Current by William McPherson
American author, journalist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic William McPherson penned only two novels over the course of his career, the first of which, Testing the Current, published in 1984, many critics now regard as a modern classic. Set in the 1930s in a small town in the Midwest, this coming-of-age novel follows Tommy MacAllister, an eight-year-old boy whose privileged upbringing and wealthy parents provide him a refuge from the ravages of the Great Depression. Affluence and complacency define the tenor of Tommy’s early life, but as he grows up, the innocent sheen of his childhood slowly begins to fade. Soon he comes to glimpse the darkness of the reality his familial status has kept him above, and what unfolds is a tale that author Russell Banks called a “permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood, and memory,” further writing that, “From the first sentence of Testing the Current to the last, there is not one false note, one forced image. It is a novel written with great skill, and with love...what most good first novels aspire to be.” With praise like that, Testing the Current is a must-read for me.
Book Still on the Mind: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
The truth about Nightwood is that it is a novel never not still on my mind; this is a work that remains indelibly etched into my mental foreground, a book as strange as it is magnificent, as wondrous as it is memorable. Nightwood is American writer Djuna Barnes’s magnum opus, published in 1936 and now considered a cult classic of lesbian literature and a seminal work of modernism. T.S. Eliot famously championed the novel, citing how it would appeal to readers with a poetic sensibility, how the reader should be prepared to find “the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” I read it in March of 2022 for a class back in college, and I still remember vividly how affecting each page, each character, each mysterious thread and subtle line of dialogue flew from the text and in through me. The novel follows an interconnected web of eccentric characters living in Paris at the top of the twentieth century: Felix Volkbein, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, Robin Vote, and Nora Flood stand center stage, and their multiplied interactions and peregrinations fill the pages of the novel. But besides these characters, the true magnificence of this work stems from Barnes’s unique baroque prose style which combines aspects of the gothic and avant-garde experimentation. One of the salient aspects that I’m still drawn to is Barnes’s ability to imbue and invoke an undercurrent of anxiety that lasts the length of the novel, seeming to supplant the timeless plot-driven versus character-driven structures in favor of a “melancholy-driven” composition, a feat that stands in its own category. I named it one of my favorites of 2022, a work that “lingers long after the final words have been read.” And now that more of Barnes’s work is poised to be published later this year, I think it’s a good time to revisit this elegantly bizarre modernist masterpiece.
Solita Solano (left) and Djuna Barnes (right) at Café Le Dome in Paris, 1925, taken by Maurice Branger
Art(ist) of the Week: “Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17” by Hilma af Klint (1915)
“Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17,” Hilma af Klint, 1915, oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum, New York
I recently rediscovered the mesmerizing work of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, a painter and mystic who came of age at the fin de siècle. Klint’s career began with a focus on landscapes, portraits, and botanical renditions rooted in the realm of realism. But it wasn’t until after the death of her sister that Klint’s artistic proclivities began to pull away from the real and move more towards the abstract. Inspired by the growing spiritism movement and bolstered by the esoteric teachings of the mythical Madame Blavatsky, Klint entered an era of experimentation that would extend well into the twentieth century. One of her majors works from this era was the series of paintings titled Painting for the Future, comprised of 193 paintings and drawings created between 1906 and 1915 characterized by Klint’s bold use of color, geometric shapes, and symbolism. A groundbreaking achievement that would go on to inspire future abstract artists, the series contains this selected painting, the seventeenth in a sub-series referred to simply as “The Swan.” Centered amid a pool of rusty-red paint sits an ocular orb whose vertical bisection divides the circle into two halves. The left half contains a well of black arched in white, while the right contains three equally wide layers of sky blue, pale yellow, and a parched rose in descending order. Although an abstract piece, many viewers, considering the title of the series, claim that buried in the painting’s colorful unreality, under the union of opposition and contrast, resides a swan or multiple swans. I leave it up to the viewer to interpret what they might. Atomizing reality and imbuing the parts with symbolic meaning were recurring motifs in Hilma af Klint’s later works, which to me makes her an endlessly fascinating figure in Western art history, whose innumerable works I look forward to discovering and rediscovering in the years to come.
Hilma af Klint
Music(ian) of the Week: “Jah No Partial” by Major Lazer ft. Flux Pavilion
Summer’s outset sparks many musical memories for me, but perhaps the fondest I have is going to the 2013 Mad Decent Block Party at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, an event for which the word “party” seems too slight a descriptor. American record producer Diplo and Jamaican DJ/producers Walshy Fire and Jillionaire are the musical minds behind Major Lazer, an electronic dance music trio that burst onto the scene back in the early 2010s, whose genre-bending hits fusing dancehall, trap, and electro quickly attracted a worldwide audience of dancing fans. I count myself among them, having discovered Major Lazer’s music early in college and had the opportunity to see them twice, the first time on their now famous Mad Decent Block Party tour, the second time in NYC with my sister. Mad Decent, Diplo’s record label, has its origins in Philly: its headquarters (now the famed PhilaMoca) housed the first Mad Decent Block Party on 12th and Spring Garden back in 2010. In only a few short years, what started as a simple block party would become a global tour. Seeing Major Lazer perform, especially in the early ‘10s, truly eludes description: their shows were electric, explosive, and more energetic than any concert I’d ever been to before. One can easily glean it from this music video for one of my favorite songs off their second album Free the Universe, an album I still consider one of the greatest of all time. English dubstep beatmaster Flux Pavilion lends his hard-hitting synths to Diplo’s dancehall directionality in “Jah No Partial,” turning a reggae tune into a club banger. And the music video, a montage of moving clips from the Mad Decent Block Party tour that I attended, matches the musical verve of the track. It takes me back to that glorious, hot day eleven years ago where I, alongside a thousand jumping fans, danced and sang until I was saturated in sweat. Memories attached to music are always the most powerful, and as summer descends over the city of Philadelphia, the wind that soars through the streets carries with it that unmistakable Major Lazer sound.
Major Lazer
Wild Card: NOSFERATU | Official Teaser Trailer (2024)
There are few other filmmakers working today whose careers I follow with as much anticipation and eagerness as that of Robert Eggers. The American filmmaker is the mind behind the historical horror flicks The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), two of my favorites of the past decade, as well as the historical epic The Northman (2022). Well, this past week, the trailer for Eggers’s forthcoming fourth film was released: a remake of the 1922 gothic horror film Nosferatu, inspired by Bram Stoker’s famed 1897 novel Dracula. Coming this Christmas, Eggers’s adaptation stars such heavy hitters as Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hault, Lily-Rose Depp, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe. When I returned home from work this past Tuesday, it was a beautiful, windy day, and I had the window in my bedroom open, allowing the breeze to rush through my apartment. Seeing the trailer had just dropped, I immediately pulled it up and watched with ardent concentration. Midway the preview, a gust of wind entered my room and slammed the door shut with a loud bang that, in tandem with the horror of the scenes I was watching, scared the living daylights out of me. Now, I carry an emotional attribution that only bolsters my excitement to see this one. December could not come soon enough.