“Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.” —John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction No. 45
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In Karuizawa, a tony mountain town an hour outside of Tokyo, Hanya Yanagihara admires a swath of unconventional homes: “The real curiosity of Karuizawa … is not its landscape nor its residents, but rather, its collection of spectacular avant-garde houses, most of them designed by prominent Japanese architects. There is Makoto Yamaguchi’s Polygon House, a quasi-Brutalist geode of distressed steel and glass that perches on a hill in a forest like an abandoned space pod; the concrete, glass and larch wood Omizubata N House by Iida Archiship Studio, whose dramatically steepled roof recalls an ancient Norse ship; TNA’s Passage House, where a horizontally oriented front entryway functions as a trap door, giving visitors the sensation that the forest floor beneath—over which the ring-shaped house hovers—is the ground floor of the structure, and the house itself its attic. Perhaps most splendid of all is TNA’s Ring House, a miniature tower deep in the forest constructed of alternating layers of wood and glass: In the evening, when the sky is dark blue and the house is lit from within, it appears as stacked slices of pure light, its bands of wood receding into the ink of the night.”
In his letters, John Steinbeck had to admit that it was lonely at the top—and that fame offered no solace: “The loneliness and discouragement are by no means a thing that has passed,” he wrote. “In fact they seem to crowd in more than ever. Only now I can’t talk to anyone much about them or even admit having them because I now possess the things that the great majority of people think are the death of loneliness and discouragement. Only they aren’t. The last time I saw Chaplin (this don’t repeat please but it is a part of the same thing) it was the night when the little lady [Paulette Goddard] was leaving him for good. And he said, ‘When I get this picture opened and all the formal things done, can I please go up to your ranch and kick all the servants out and just talk a little bit quietly about how lonely and sad I am? It will be self indulgence but I’d like to do it.’ ”
Writing cultural criticism, Jo Livingstone is determined to avoid the Trump trap—is there really no way, she wonders, to look at art now without thinking of the executive branch? “Painting, music, television, the visual culture of the internet, poetry: These art forms and their consumers and critics represent an aesthetic space whose boundaries are not defined by the president. Unless we believe in and nurture this space, the critic is stuck forever explaining how this or that book is crucial reading ‘in Trump’s America.’ But this type of reviewing hobbles thought, because it reduces all art to the structure of satire. It is as if Trump is a spider in the middle of a web, and every review that tethers the meaning of a pop song to his regime strengthens it. I am guilty of this type of criticism, in very recent weeks. But I know that I write such things as an emotional defense of my own place in the culture. Nobody wants to feel useless.”
The future looks so shitty now. Sure, maybe in fifteen, twenty years we’ll be able to get through airport security without taking our shoes off, or we could watch streaming high-definition video while we get an MRI. But we’ve lost sight of the one advance that really matters: building a luxury hotel on the moon. In 1967, Barron Hilton, scion of the hotel magnate, had his eye on the prize: at a conference for the American Astronautical Society, he shared his vision. Daniel Oberhaus explains, “The crown jewel of the Lunar Hilton would, of course, be its Galaxy Lounge. ‘If you think we are not going to have a cocktail lounge, you don’t know Hilton—or travelers,’ Hilton quipped. In the Galaxy Lounge, lunar tourists would be able to ‘enjoy a martini and see the stars!’ Although the lounge would be underground, the guests would enjoy a view of Earth and outer space through ‘thermopane windows.’ All cocktails would be prepared by a robotic wait staff, which would only need to drop a tablet into a glass of pure ethyl alcohol and water and voila: an instant martini, Manhattan, or gin … He was, by all accounts, very serious about trying to make them a reality. ‘I firmly believe that we are going to have Hiltons in outer space.’ ”
John Steinbeck was born on this day in 1902.
You know on my left hand on the pad just below the little finger, I have a dark brown spot. And on my left foot in a corresponding place I have another one almost the same. One time a Chinese, seeing the spot on my hand, became very much excited and when I told him about the one on my foot he was keenly interested. He said that in Chinese palmistry the hand spot was a sign of the greatest possible good luck and the one on my foot doubled it. These spots are nothing but a dark pigmentation. I’ve had them from birth. Indeed, they are what is known as birthmarks. But the reason I brought it up is this. For the last year and a half, they have been getting darker. And if I am to believe in my spots, this must mean that the luck is getting better. And sure enough I have Elaine [Mrs. John Steinbeck] and what better luck could there be. But the spots continue to darken and maybe that means that I am going to have a book, too. And that would be great good luck, too.
Read the entirety of his Art of Fiction interview from issue no. 48 (Fall 1969) here.
A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals.
One must distort one’s own way of life in order to simulate the normal in other lives.
After many years, to start a story still scares me to death.
We’re incredibly excited to announce that we will be publishing Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke next year.
Imagine Wanting Only This is a haunting graphic memoir about leaving, and those left behind.
After the sudden death of a beloved uncle, Kristen becomes obsessed with the abandoned places – derelict Midwestern mining towns, an Icelandic village preserved in volcanic ash, Cambodian temples reclaimed by jungle.
At the same time, she examines what it means to be an artist, to be hungry for the next experience, to be always in transit.
We can’t wait to share our edition with you.
Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke will be published by Jonathan Cape in April 2018