Oh, Thomas Bernhard! Bringing the thunder, bringing the classism—an excerpt from “Playing Watten” (translated by Kenneth J. Northcott), from Three Novellas:

We often maintain, to ourselves above all, and in so doing justify ourselves to ourselves, that we know something through and through, that we have completed something, only so as not to have to bother ourselves with this thing (this person), because we are afraid that we shall be embarrassed by this preoccupation and that this preoccupation will make us totally unreliable with regard to ourselves, dear sir, because we fear the nuisance, something that we have to regard as fatal, caused by occupying ourselves with this matter (this person!), because we despise ourselves. Nothing is indubitable, dear sir. Were I to go and play watten again, I say to the truck driver, the whole thing would be nothing but an elementary disorder and nothing but sorrow, which is basically nothing but wretchedness, which is more or less nothing but madness. We are at the peak of concentration when we are playing. Playing watten. In the theater, dear sir, even the impossible is entertainment, and even the monstrous, as the . . .

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Congratulations to the 2013 class of Guggenheim Fellows, announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Guggenheim, a “mid-career award,” which honors scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and writers, extends its fellowships to assist with research and artistic creation. As we’ve noted in the past, the fellowship possesses some tortured origins—(John) Simon Guggenheim, who served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and Republican senator from Colorado, seeded the award (1925) following the death of this son John (1922) from mastoiditis (Guggenheim’s second son George later committed suicide, and more infamously his older brother Benjamin went down with the Titanic).

We’re delighted to see included among the “professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts,” a roster of fellowship winners affiliated with the University of Chicago Press:

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African Studies

Jennifer Cole, professor of anthropology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, author of Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (2010) and coeditor (with Lynn M. Thomas) of Love in Africa (2009) . . .

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The American underground newspaper is a phenomenon both decidedly and ambiguously, well, American. Drawing its name from the underground presses and resistance networks that circulated among real and imagined communities along the European front in World War II, the alternative press-affiliated newspapers and zines embraced freedom of the press, low-cost offset printing, social distribution through channels ranging from freak-streeted headshops and anti-war political offices to grocery stores on college campuses.

In Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture: 1964—1974, Geoff Kaplan assembles more than 700 full-color images and excerpts from these publications, many of which have not been seen since they were first published almost fifty years ago. Alongside the images, he explores how the new media of the radical press marked a watershed moment in the history of American graphic design, where political engagement and critical self-representation created an archive of activist innovation that offered a story counter to that of mainstream culture. 

To see a gallery of images from Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture: 1964—1974, please click . . .

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“Connoisseurship has never been more popular. Long confined to the serious appreciation of high art and classical music, it is now applied to an endless cascade of pursuits. Leading publications, including The New York Times, routinely discuss the connoisseurship of coffee, cupcakes and craft beers; of cars, watches, fountain pens, lunchboxes, stereo systems and computers; of tacos, pizza, pickles, chocolate, mayonnaise, cutlery and light (yes, light, which is not to be confused with the specialized connoisseurship of lighting). And the Grateful Dead, of course.”—“In Pursuit of Taste, en Masse,” New York Times

When the Grey Lady acknowledges herself in an article about the democratization of connoisseurship, we realize how far we’ve come since the days of Giovanni Morelli—when to be a connoisseur meant to keep things close to the chest, so that the cultural treasures amassed might withhold the competition; when expertise in art historical commodities was a kind of pitiable materiality. But as the NYT points out, today connoisseurship is alive and well, if not “vital,” then at least an obviously channel of the zeitgeist for which the number of surfers is plentiful. Thomas Frank, founder and editor of the Hyde Park-originated journal of cultural and political . . .

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“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop. But that doesn’t preclude a wistful desire that we could somehow, quantum-style, both let people go and keep them where they’ve so long seemed to belong. (“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future”?)

That was our thought, shared, we suspect, by countless fans of poetry, when we heard that Christian Wiman would be leaving his post as editor of Poetry magazine at the end of June. He’ll be joining the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School, which seems like a good home for a writer who, as the copy describing his forthcoming book, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, puts it, “has had two constants in his life, two things that have defined him and given him solace in his times of need: faith and verse.”

Wiman will leave behind a magazine that he and coeditor Don Share have shepherded to unprecedented prominence and success. Under their stewardship, Poetry tripled its circulation and won two national magazine awards, the first in its history.

And then there was the centennial–which is where Chicago comes in. . . .

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