Lost Angeles, CA

November 2, 2012

LIBERAL FATHER, RADICAL SON: Adam Kirsch on the relationship and conflicts between Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg

LIBERAL FATHER, RADICAL SON: Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg

Author: Kirsch, Adam.

Publication info: The Virginia Quarterly Review 85. 3 (Summer 2009): 199-VIII.

In the spring of 1944, as the Second World War neared its turning point, the first skirmishes of the generational battle that would define postwar America were taking place in a lecture hall at Columbia University. When Allen Ginsberg, then a seventeen-year-old freshman, signed up to study the Great Books with Lionel Trilling, neither one of them could have suspected that they were about to begin a lifelong friendship that was also a mortal combat - over literature and politics, morality and maturity, liberalism and radicalism. The Sixties, historians have variously said, started with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. But a good case can be made that the Sixties really began when Ginsberg walked into Trilling’s classroom.

June 14, 2012

THE GULF: A Meditation on the Mississippi Coast after Katrina by Natasha Trethewey (VQR,’08)

by Natasha Trethewey

In 1956, just two years after Brown v. Board of Education, Robert Penn Warren set off on a journey south to explore the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision. The slim volume he produced, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, offered insight into the people caught in what the Saturday Review later termed “a storm they can neither conquer nor fully comprehend.” Now, a half century later, the Gulf South struggles in the wake of another storm, Hurricane Katrina, and faces a rebuilding effort not unlike the effort to rebuild the culture of the South after the legal walls of segregation had been struck down. The plight of the people, post-Katrina, is still mediated not only by class but also by color, the future is uncertain, and the ongoing identity of the Gulf South will be determined not only by how it will be rebuilt but also by how its past will be remembered. The region stands as a test for the whole nation. Are we hopelessly divided? Or can we still bridge …

Where you come from is gone,

where you thought you were going to never was there,

and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

-Flannery O’Connor

June 14, 2012

Getting to Know Natasha Trethewey Through Her Writing: On Whitman, Civil War Memory, and My South (VQR, ‘05)

by Natasha Trethewey

(Copyright University of Virginia Spring 2005)

O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!

O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!

-Walt Whitman

I. The New South

A few years ago I was interviewed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution-a newspaper whose slogan used to be “Covering Dixie Like the Dew”-and later, when the article appeared, the headline read, “Poet Digs at secrets in Her South.” Not long after that, I received several e-mail and phone messages from a marketing representative who wanted to get a few lines from me about “my South.” In the messages, he said it wouldn’t take long and that his firm couldn’t pay me for my comments. Well, I was busy, and besides that, I figured he didn’t want to hear what I really think about the South. Most likely, he probably wanted some sound-bite clichés about how I like my grits, sweet tea, or barbecue, about how we southerners like sitting on porches and after-church visiting.

December 10, 2011

How Heavy Metal Saved My Life

by Steve Almond, Virginia Quarterly Review 2005

I spent three years as a rock music critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived at the tail end of the eighties and where I came of age, in a sense-grew old enough, that is, to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in nature and that it had everything to do with rhythm and aggression and desire and conquest and physical release and death, which is to say, with sex.

But I’m not here to lecture on sex, or The Social Mores of the Headbanger Subculture, circa 1989. My job, as I understand it, is to suggest how heavy metal saved my life, which it surely did, and not by inspiring me toward complex thought, but by the opposite process: the complete annihilation of thought in favor of instinct-. To live dangerously, absurdly, even fallaciously-this was the legacy of my metal days. To believe one might get laid, sucked off, gulped down, on any given night, anywhere on earth-a hidden stairwell, a crowded bathroom, your neighbor’s porch, anywhere.

But please don’t ask me, did it happen and how and what did she smell like, because you’re missing the point. It isn’t the facts I’m speaking of here, but the desire. Not the deed, but the possibility. What is a piece of art, after all, but the possibility of a particular truth? And what are artists but suckers talented enough to win a few converts?

8:42pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZWwsByD4-r_q

(Notes: 6)

Filed under: heavymetal longreads virginiaquarterlyreview music musicwriting rock kiss metallica slayer longreads

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