James Marcus
@jamesamarcus
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"Glad to the Brink of Fear" (about R.W. Emerson) from @PrincetonUPress , "Amazonia," former editor of Harper's, teaching at @nyu_journalism
Joined March 2009
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Vivian Gornick on the workhorse life (and the pitfalls of the so-called fast lane):
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Here's that splendid TLS review, if anybody was frustrated by the paywall.
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Frank MacShane (who was my first translation teacher) spends a rainy afternoon in Manhattan with Borges. The piece is in a fifty-year-old New American Review paperback, whose yellowing pages are about to self-destruct:
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At a certain point Peggy James complained to her uncle Henry James, then entering the deep thickets of his late style, that his work was too impenetrable. His response:
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I find this mid-to-late-1840s daguerreotype of Hawthorne absolutely haunting. The deterioration of the plate is so painterly and seems to capture some of the subject's elusive and anxious mood (he was penniless and would soon be evicted from the Old Manse).
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First spotting in the wild, by a friend. Very excited to be shoulder-to-shoulder with Janet Malcolm and Leslie Jamison--good omen!
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Schoenberg disliked Stravinsky, ridiculing him as "kleine Modernsky"--"Little Mister Modern," more or less. Stravinsky was equally leery of his supposed rival. For that reason I'm even more moved by this strange concatenation at the end (from Allen Shawn's study of AS):
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William James to Henry James, after hacking his way through the recently published Golden Bowl:
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And now, direct from the Golden Age of Sideburns, comes the lovely cover for my book (with a tip of the hat to Karl Spurzem for designing it):
Glad to the Brink of Fear | Princeton University Press
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Aside from Giulia Melucci’s pathetic fibbing throughout, this is reasonably accurate.
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Nothing like a blue-chip reviewer, and certainly the first one to call me "endearing"--I feel like a Sesame Street character.
In our most recent Review, John Banville praises James Marcus’s portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the warmth with which Marcus illustrates Emerson’s love and loss of his first marriage as an enthusiastic portrayal both endearing and persuasive.
#BookBoost
#BookReview
#Read
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One of the fun things in life is making Vivian Gornick laugh. Here I am doing that very thing at McNally Jackson on Monday night, probably telling a Transcendentalist joke of some kind ("So I bit him!"). Good times and a great night.
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For the
@TheTLS
I wrote about Robert Boyers's new memoir of Susan Sontag and George Steiner, a vivid, affectionate, and often ambivalent double portrait:
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Before putting Pnin back on the shelf, I needed to share this beautiful passage:
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Nothing spreads the word like a pre-lecture sandwich board! This is tomorrow night and I can't wait.
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The Washington Post just released its 28 suggested Summer Reads, and I'm delighted to have made the cut! Emerson is of course designed for beach blanket consumption (don't forget the suntan lotion and transparent-eyeball-sized shades):
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A beautiful, simple, early poem--I read it all the time.
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A wonderful conversation earlier this evening with Merve Emre at NYU. Thanks to everybody who showed up!
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Dang, I didn't have this sexy graphic when I posted about that McNally Jackson event. It's too nice to waste, even though I'm violating the primary rule of social media by dividing my viral energies. Alas!
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On some level I really despise the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The lubricating chumminess between journalists and the people they're supposed to be covering is not helpful. Nor is the queasy sensation that politics is just a good joke among friends--no hard feelings.
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I had a lovely time speaking at Boston's First Church last night (despite some unseasonal sleet and wind outside). Since the Second Church merged with the First in 1970, this is both Emerson's congregation and that of his father, William Emerson.
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Me at Amazon, circa 1999 or so, looking grave, wearing my ID badge, probably reading Zsa Zsa Gabor's autobiography.
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Great moments in music history: Bob Dylan discovers the major seventh chord (courtesy of George Harrison):
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Although this appeared online a while back, the paper version from today's NYTBR still has its crinkled, old-school, cellulose-based charm:
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By the way, what household is complete without this Emersonian scented candle, for those special (or ordinary) moments in your human existence? It smells like cedar, like wild fern, like eternity.
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Forgive the carnival-barking tone, but as part of a spring sale, Princeton is currently offering my Emerson book for $14.98. Unbeatable price, ladies and germs!
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Also, on March 22 I will be appearing at the Harvard Book Store with the excellent Rick Moody. Details below, no registration required, should be a blast!
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I was listening to "Into the Mystic" and thinking what a perfect song it was--melody, arrangement, lyrics, singing--and it made me think of the simple and perfect things you find in Yeats. Like here, almost all monosyllables and (aside from "strove") very colloquial and lovely:
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Strolling through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery yesterday, a pleasure as always, although I didn't go up to Authors Ridge--was leaving that for this afternoon.
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@OsitaNwanevu
@jasoncherkis
Interesting argument, although here is the late Terry Teachout, more of a conservative himself, giving her a semi-flogging in the NYTBR:
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Another hilarious moment in the William-and-Henry saga: William James violates decorum by attempting to spy on Chesterton (from Robert D. Richardson's great bio). "This sort of thing was just not done in England."
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Georgia O'Keefe said that this charcoal drawing depicted a headache. And why not:
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Please do read this excellent conversation between Scott Sherman and Edwin Frank on publishing, classics, economics, taste, and the intricacies of translation:
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About to go listen to Ligeti on the elliptical. If I'm not back in two hours, somebody send out a search party.
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Just FYI, I keep listening to this on my fancy headphones and the textures are like a beautiful drug. I get to the end and start over. Unworldly (and lots of people, but not me, consider this one of Mahler's lightweight productions):
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Harold Bloom on the enigmatic payload of great poetry (from an interview in the course of which he addressed me as "darling" several times):
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It's not every day that I'm cheek-by-jowl with RuPaul (from the Washington Post Book World's preview of coming titles)!
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Some thoughts about my father's death and filial grief, in the latest issue of The New Yorker.
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Nothing quite like the Old Manse. I worked on my RWE project in the upstairs study in 2017, with Emerson and Hawthorne peering over my shoulder (or so I imagined):
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Very nice how-the-book-came-to-be feature in the Boston Globe, with many thanks to Kate Tuttle:
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Cynthia Ozick turns 96 today--an amazing thought! Presenting her with the NBCC award in 2001 was one of the highlights of my professional life. You can see it all here (at 11:13, and wow, my hair was darker then):
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James Merrill on writing prose, so terribly blunt and utilitarian an instrument, and yet:
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@kurteichenwald
This is election tampering, plain and simple. Just a reminder: federal judges can be impeached and removed by the U.S. Congress.
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The Vito Model 35 alto played by Johnny Hodges, which should probably be in the Smithsonian:
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So apparently the first published computer algorithm was created by... Lord Byron's daughter? Ada Lovelace sounds like one fascinating (if frequently unhappy) person and I'm curious to learn more about her.
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Swinburne to Emerson, 1873: "You, sir, are a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle."
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I've always loved this. Of course he didn't take his own advice. Who ever takes his own advice?
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Mozartian in its command of shoelaces, staplers, escalators, fast-food bags and containers, industrial design, and the flume ride of the free-associating brain. I mean, he's amazing, always was.
Today's
#WaferThinBook
: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1988, 135p.)
Baker shows us an entire world in the space of a CVS bag and an escalator ride. If you've read it, you probably love it. And if you haven't read it, you've missed one of the best books of the last 40 years.
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First event for my book, on March 4, and I'm really looking forward to it!
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@emyxter
@NickKristof
The usual student population on campus is about 8,000, but only 1,500 returned for the remainder of the spring semester. And yes, it wasn't business as usual--there were plenty of restrictions imposed by the administration, which seem to have worked.
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In other news, I spent a few marvelous days at an off-the-grid dwelling in the San Luis Valley. What more can a city slicker ask than feral horses, wild asparagus, awesome sunsets, and a porch to loll on? https://
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SCOTUS is now essentially an anti-democratic council of mullahs, making decisions in complete defiance of popular will and, often, common sense. This lines up nicely with the fetishing of semicolons in the Constitution--scriptural madness. We are in such trouble.
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We won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary! A giant tip of the hat to Rebecca Solnit!
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My former student Carrigan Miller has single-handedly resurrected the KGB Lit quarterly for another lap around the track. He's also a big fan of ink, paper, and movable type ("No one’s improved on it!").
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Me in my role as arrogant French furniture designer. "Steel must be lacquered or not at all, you ignorant canaille!"
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"Isobel, who with her leaping breasts / Pursued me through a Summer." Auden later said these were the worst lines he ever wrote--impressive.
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Eight months from publication and already
#1
with a bullet in the coveted Nonexistent Books Pertaining to the Nineteenth Century category (although David Walker's "Appeal" definitely exists)! I think this means my Mom put in a preorder.
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I'll drink to that, and to all my fellow Princeton authors!
1.17.24 publications from Princeton University Press. Congratulations to all.
Photo credit: Mary Lynn McCarthy.
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The Emersonian avalanche continues with this interview over at the Library of America, conducted by the excellent Ben Lasman!
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My wonderfully talented sister-in-law on the New Yorker poetry podcast, reading Eavan Boland and one of her own poems:
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How can you not love William James? Here he is in a 1905 letter, comparing Santayana's newly published "Life of Reason" to Emerson (unfavorably, even though he loves, and also dislikes, the book). Irresistible!
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Am delighted to be making my debut in the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement, discussing (yet again) that Mutt-and-Jeff duo of Emerson and Thoreau!
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Of course Merrill can be too clever but often there's a payoff, like this two-liner, which pops into my head all the time:
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I just had to retweet this--the amazing and zany Les Paul playing up a multi-overdubbed storm with his equally overdubbed wife Mary Ford. Plus she's attending to the plants at the same time! And the cat is lolling on a chaise longue in the background!
Remembering Les Paul, gone eleven years. Here he is performing “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” with his wife and musical partner Mary Ford.
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Am thrilled to be on the cover of the TLS with this piece about Norman Mailer, who remains a pigeonhole-proof figure a century after his birth.
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Lidian Emerson (RWE's second wife, activist on behalf of abolition, female suffrage, and other great reform causes of the day): "Save me from magnificent souls. I like a small common sized one."
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Vivian Gornick, as she prepares to drop the hammer on Geoff Dyer in The Atlantic. My question: are there artists, contra Gornick, who keep harvesting fresh and animating fixations, or are we all essentially one-trick ponies?
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My favorite line of dialogue from 1997, uttered by my five-year-old child to a contentious friend: "My Dad KNOWS. He's an editor on the Internet."
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@ae_stallings
While we're at it, here are some fragments of Shelley's skull, on display at the New York Public Library (gathered while his remains were being cremated on the beach in 1822):
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Opening page of Mahler's autograph score of the Fourth Symphony, with its magical flute and sleigh bells--otherworldly.
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While it LOOKS like Robert Sullivan and myself will be engaged in a cage match, what will transpire is actually a cordial conversation about Transcendental stuff, science, politics, and that goofy eyeball on two legs.
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"Give All To Love," Michael Maglaras's marvelous new documentary on Emerson, can now be streamed for free on the 217 Films website. Yes, I'm in it, a one-man peanut gallery and Greek chorus. But the film is crammed with visual delights and Emerson love:
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@AdamKinzinger
Pence is just so dreadful--a clumsy, inept, craven, sanctimonious liar, droning on in that cough-syrup voice of his.
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This event, with the awesome Robert Sulllivan, is coming up on Thursday in Philadelphia!
On 3/14 author and journalist James Marcus brings his latest work to the Wagner. Join him as he explores the history and evolution of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the subject of his new book Glad to the Brink of Fear. Register here:
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At the Baths of Diocletian this afternoon (see tiny yet imposing figure at lower right). As you will notice, very high ceilings--I suspect this is a prewar building.
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Allowing Bill Barr to whitewash his role in Trump's political crime spree is a disgusting move by CNN. Barr: "Joe Biden is not morally superior to Donald Trump." A chimp, a rock, a rotting stump--they are all morally superior to Trump.
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@damianrucci
I had an essay rejected with a slip thanking me for my "proposal." Later, the essay was selected for Best American Essays and I became editor-in-chief of the magazine.
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So I got Covid. Seems like a mild case (knock wood). Am swanning around the apartment in my pinstriped bathrobe with a mask on, energetically avoiding Nina--it's like we're in a French farce. Will pull myself together (no bathrobe) to teach via Zoom in two hours. Wish me luck!
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At his sublimest.
Robert Lowell
⸻ from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"
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Currently up for sale (at auction). But what would I do with it?
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May I just reiterate how much I despise "originalism" as a judicial philosophy? It's largely a fig leaf for pedantic cruelty and a crazy attempt to turn the clock back to 1783.
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After about a million years of studying RWE, I realized only yesterday that his brother Charles is buried in the New York Marble Cemetery in NYC. I walked by the gate today--the place is open only one or two days per month, so I'll have to pay my respects some other time.
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Having a gotten a new and snazzy graphic, I'm posting another notice for this event in Tulsa, where I'll be trading epigrams with the excellent Chris Hallman. Should be fun!
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Herbert Spencer and Andrew Carnegie learn anger management skills from Emerson. I should probably try that "What, so hot?" riff myself:
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Corot just screwing around on an etching plate and producing something pretty great, also strangely contemporary:
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I'm delighted to share these thoughts on the sexually confused being that was Henry David Thoreau! Three cheers, too, for the animated illustration, with its sly allusion to HDT's vision of floral eroticism (
#thoreau
):
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