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Boston Globe
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In the essays of Jamaica Kincaid, the obsessions and fascinations of a singular writer
Kincaid was also writing for The Village Voice, Ms., and Rolling Stone, where she published essays like 1977's 'Jamaica Kincaid's New York' and 'Antigua Crossings: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea' in 1978. These essays demonstrate, on one hand, that very early in her career, she'd identified the elemental music of her unique prose style (Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s introduction explains that Kincaid writes with 'a driving, unremitting eye — though never without humor') and, on the other hand, that in her Caribbean familial story she'd located the limestone foundation on which to build her future efforts in fiction and nonfiction. Kincaid had already begun cultivating an array of overlapping, perennial obsessions: matriarchal power and mothers (specifically her own), banishment and excommunication from family structures, the British empire, colonial literary education, Antigua, and travel. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : Advertisement Several times in 'Putting Myself Together' Kincaid details the scene of her original subjection: when she was nine, her mother shipped her off to Dominica to live with her maternal grandmother and aunt. In the 2000 essay 'Islander Once, Now a Voyager,' Kincaid re-enters that wound: 'The first time I traveled anywhere, I was not yet a writer, but I can now see that I must have been in the process of becoming one. I was nine years old and had been the only child in my family until then, when, suddenly it seemed to me, my first brother was born. My mother no longer paid any attention to me; she seemed to care only about my new brother. One day, I was asked to hold him and he fell out of my arms. My mother said that I had dropped him, and as a punishment, she sent me off to live with her sister and her parents, all of whom she hated.' Advertisement Writing in the introduction to her 1996 edition of 'The Best American Essays,' Kincaid recalled that her early teachers taught her that the essay's formal principles require writers to make statements, build upon those statements, and sum up their building. '[H]ow dry, how impossible,' she writes of such formulae, and then of her realization that 'this definition was meant to be a restriction, and it worked very well; for how could I express any truth about myself or anything I might know in the form of state, build, and sum up when everything about me and everything I knew existed in a state of rage, rage, and more rage. I came into being in the colonial situation. It does not lend itself to any literary situation that is in existence. Not to me, anyway.' Kincaid iterates certain anecdotes and histories, both intimate and colonial, because her conception of the essay form demands a kind of elliptical experimentation, recycling expulsions, eras, poems, slavers, sailors, and crimes to reveal new layers of insight and truth. Though Kincaid is most frequently identified as an accomplished novelist — ' Advertisement In 'Putting Myself Together,' Kincaid's meditative essayettes and longform personal essays about gardens and gardening for Architectural Digest, The Paris Review, and Book Post, a Substack magazine, enhance her catalog significantly. In some of these she pivots from writing about 'myself, my mother, the place where I had grown up, myself and my mother again,' and enters the garden as a reader, taking up gardening catalogs and tomes about 'landscape design and also from accounts of Explorers and Conquerors.' The garden becomes 'an essential part of that thing called history' from Columbus to Thomas Jefferson to the Bloomsbury Group. Related : Yet, the garden holds all the world's concerns and all of Kincaid's obsessions, so, eventually, her ending returns to reading, her mother, and writing. Though arranged chronologically, the new book is a finely made garden: teeming, various, surprising. And she leaves readers desiring more. 'Putting Myself Together' 'will have some satisfaction — not complete satisfaction, only some satisfaction,' as she writes in her introduction to 'My Favorite Plant.' 'A garden,' she continues, 'no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden — Paradise — but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.' Advertisement Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974- By Jamaica Kincaid Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $30 Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of ' .'
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Critic Who Translated Jazz Into Plain English
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. 'Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,' the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis 'an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.' Davis wrote for The Atlantic for more than three decades, from 1984 to 2016, and was a contributing editor for much of that time. He also had a high-profile stint at The Village Voice, where he originated an annual jazz critics' poll that continues today elsewhere and now bears his name. (His influence can also be detected on NPR's Fresh Air, which is hosted by his widow, Terry Gross, and where he served as the program's first jazz critic.) Corby Kummer, a longtime Atlantic staffer who edited Davis, told me that one thing that set Davis apart was how catholic his taste was. 'There were no avant-garde novels or musicians or art-house movies he didn't know, and he knew absolutely everything mainstream,' Kummer said. 'He was high-low before 'high-low' was a concept. He took everything into account.' You can see Davis's breadth in, for example, his 1992 rave review of Seinfeld, which doubles as an erudite history of popular television. 'So much in Seinfeld is new to TV, beginning with its acknowledgment of the absurdity in the ordinary, that you tend to forget that it's based on a premise as old as the medium,' he wrote. Twelve years later, he wrote a moving eulogy for Johnny Cash, 'a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who didn't play the flag card.' But Davis's jazz writing stands out the most, and means the most to me. He came to The Atlantic under the direction of the editor William Whitworth. As my colleagues Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel wrote in an obituary last year, Whitworth was a serious jazz fan who had also been, in his youth, a serious trumpeter; he eventually chose a journalist's life over a musician's. Davis 'might have been Bill's favorite writer,' Kummer told me. The two men would trade album reviews and listen to music together, and Whitworth gave Davis wide latitude to follow his interests. That might help explain how, in the same calendar year, Davis published deep and definitive profiles of Benny Carter, an alto saxophonist who had been recording since the 1920s, and John Zorn, an impish and sometimes earsplitting avant-garde composer who shared little with Carter save the alto sax and the imprecise label of jazz. 'Zorn, in short, is exactly the sort of rude, overgrown adolescent you would go out of your way to avoid, if only he weren't so … well, interesting, important, and influential (at least potentially),' Davis wrote. (Davis's prediction has borne out: Zorn remains a central and only slightly calmer figure today.) Davis lamented that the music he loved was viewed as elitist, but he wrote about it in terms that could reach both serious fans and casual listeners. His confiding but lightly sardonic presence on the page brought you in, and his ability to translate jazz into plain English brought you along. In 1988, he captured how the members of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's band 'sound as though they were playing in four different time signatures. But actually they are stretching a basic quadruple meter four different ways, accenting different beats in every measure, and trusting that the listener will feel the downbeat in his bones. The effect is mesmerizing.' Davis's fundamental interest, though, was less musicological than anthropological. 'What does music mean to people?' he wondered. 'What does it signify to them?' I've always loved his description of the deceptively relaxed guitarist Bill Frisell: 'Even at its most melodic and high-stepping, Frisell's music seems haunted and disquieted, more Edward Hopper than Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell, evocative not just of rivers and prairies and small-town parades but of lost highways, dead-end streets, and heartbreak hotels.' Although Davis could write an immaculate sentence, his goal was not flash or provocation. 'He wasn't interested in being a cultural authority,' Kummer told me. 'He was interested, as the best writers are, in understanding what he thought by writing it out.' This meant that when he did make a judgment, it carried a great deal of weight. His verdict on Marsalis's retrospective orientation feels as solid now as it did 37 years ago: 'Progress is frequently a myth in jazz, as in most other aspects of contemporary life. But it is a myth so central to the romance of jazz that the cost of relinquishing it might be giving up jazz altogether.' The sureness of Davis's judgments makes me hesitate to contradict him, but I must. What I believe was Davis's final published piece was an essay in January that accompanied his eponymous poll, in which he disclosed that he'd entered hospice. His outlook on jazz journalism was grim. 'Maybe I was the last to learn that criticism had outlived its usefulness as far as the arts and entertainment industry were concerned,' he wrote. 'Or maybe only I have outlived mine.' On the contrary, his criticism has and will outlive him, much to the benefit of the listeners and readers who do too. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Critic Who Translated Jazz Into Plain English
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. 'Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,' the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis 'an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.' Davis wrote for The Atlantic for more than three decades, from 1984 to 2016, and was a contributing editor for much of that time. He also had a high-profile stint at The Village Voice, where he originated an annual jazz critics' poll that continues today elsewhere and now bears his name. (His influence can also be detected on NPR's Fresh Air, which is hosted by his widow, Terry Gross, and where he served as the program's first jazz critic.) Corby Kummer, a longtime Atlantic staffer who edited Davis, told me that one thing that set Davis apart was how catholic his taste was. 'There were no avant-garde novels or musicians or art-house movies he didn't know, and he knew absolutely everything mainstream,' Kummer said. 'He was high-low before 'high-low' was a concept. He took everything into account.' You can see Davis's breadth in, for example, his 1992 rave review of Seinfeld, which doubles as an erudite history of popular television. 'So much in Seinfeld is new to TV, beginning with its acknowledgment of the absurdity in the ordinary, that you tend to forget that it's based on a premise as old as the medium,' he wrote. Twelve years later, he wrote a moving eulogy for Johnny Cash, 'a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who didn't play the flag card.' But Davis's jazz writing stands out the most, and means the most to me. He came to The Atlantic under the direction of the editor William Whitworth. As my colleagues Cullen Murphy and Scott Stossel wrote in an obituary last year, Whitworth was a serious jazz fan who had also been, in his youth, a serious trumpeter; he eventually chose a journalist's life over a musician's. Davis 'might have been Bill's favorite writer,' Kummer told me. The two men would trade album reviews and listen to music together, and Whitworth gave Davis wide latitude to follow his interests. That might help explain how, in the same calendar year, Davis published deep and definitive profiles of Benny Carter, an alto saxophonist who had been recording since the 1920s, and John Zorn, an impish and sometimes earsplitting avant-garde composer who shared little with Carter save the alto sax and the imprecise label of jazz. 'Zorn, in short, is exactly the sort of rude, overgrown adolescent you would go out of your way to avoid, if only he weren't so … well, interesting, important, and influential (at least potentially),' Davis wrote. (Davis's prediction has borne out: Zorn remains a central and only slightly calmer figure today.) Davis lamented that the music he loved was viewed as elitist, but he wrote about it in terms that could reach both serious fans and casual listeners. His confiding but lightly sardonic presence on the page brought you in, and his ability to translate jazz into plain English brought you along. In 1988, he captured how the members of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis's band 'sound as though they were playing in four different time signatures. But actually they are stretching a basic quadruple meter four different ways, accenting different beats in every measure, and trusting that the listener will feel the downbeat in his bones. The effect is mesmerizing.' Davis's fundamental interest, though, was less musicological than anthropological. 'What does music mean to people?' he wondered. 'What does it signify to them?' I've always loved his description of the deceptively relaxed guitarist Bill Frisell: 'Even at its most melodic and high-stepping, Frisell's music seems haunted and disquieted, more Edward Hopper than Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell, evocative not just of rivers and prairies and small-town parades but of lost highways, dead-end streets, and heartbreak hotels.' Although Davis could write an immaculate sentence, his goal was not flash or provocation. 'He wasn't interested in being a cultural authority,' Kummer told me. 'He was interested, as the best writers are, in understanding what he thought by writing it out.' This meant that when he did make a judgment, it carried a great deal of weight. His verdict on Marsalis's retrospective orientation feels as solid now as it did 37 years ago: 'Progress is frequently a myth in jazz, as in most other aspects of contemporary life. But it is a myth so central to the romance of jazz that the cost of relinquishing it might be giving up jazz altogether.' The sureness of Davis's judgments makes me hesitate to contradict him, but I must. What I believe was Davis's final published piece was an essay in January that accompanied his eponymous poll, in which he disclosed that he'd entered hospice. His outlook on jazz journalism was grim. 'Maybe I was the last to learn that criticism had outlived its usefulness as far as the arts and entertainment industry were concerned,' he wrote. 'Or maybe only I have outlived mine.' On the contrary, his criticism has and will outlive him, much to the benefit of the listeners and readers who do too.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Dean of American rock critics' Robert Christgau and his love for this band from Alabama
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — It's not uncommon for music to be playing between 12 to 18 hours a day in Robert Christgau's apartment. Then, when he's ready, he starts to write about what all the sounds that had been swirling around in his head for the better part of a day make him feel. It's a process that has earned the esteemed writer the moniker of 'dean of American rock critics,' covering the thousands of albums and artists he has covered since the 1960s for places like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Esquire, NPR to his own Substack, 'And It Don't Stop.' Over the years, he has covered and reviewed work as varied as The Allman Brothers Band and Kraftwerk to Nina Simone and Fela Kuti and countless others. In recent years, however, Christgau has taken a shine to one particular band from Alabama: Drive-By Truckers. 'They're a great f****** band,' Christgau told CBS 42 during a recent phone interview. 'It's as simple as that.' Christgau's association with the band goes back to their sophomore album, 'Pizza Deliverance,' in 1999. 'Rockers playing sorta-country with rough enthusiasm and nothing like a sound, they make their mark detailing the semivoluntary poverty DIY musicians share with the highly subsuburban constituency they imagine,' he wrote at the time. As the band put out new music and members came and went, Christgau continued to cover the band and with a couple of exceptions — he felt DBT's sophomore album 'Alabama Ass Whuppin'' had 'loads of stories, not much music' — remains a loyal fan. 'Without fussing over bridges and such, they treat their job like a calling–verses are packed with stories they need to tell and choruses ring out with why,' Christgau wrote of 'Decoration Day.' Christgau, 82, even dedicated an extended essay about the band for the Barnes & Noble Review in 2011, highlighting their work up to 'Go-Go Boots.' 'The Drive-By Truckers aren't bigger than Jesus,' he wrote. 'They aren't even bigger than Kings of Leon, or Jesus' Son. But body-of-work-wise, they deserve to be.' An avid reader as well, Christgau also favorably reviewed Stephen Deussner's biography of the band, 'Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers.' 'Everything Deusner has to tell us about the evolution of this remarkable band is of interest,' he wrote in 2023. 'They've led a long, complex, and idiosyncratic artistic life that's far from over.' Even Patterson Hood, the band's primary singer and songwriter, has gotten the Christgau treatment on his solo albums, including his latest one, 'Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams,' which was released earlier this month. 'I found the head Drive By Trucker's quasi-autobiographical songwriting here so varied and indeed interesting that I dipped back two decades to reaccess his 2004 solo debut 'Killers and Stars,' which I assayed in 120 B plus/A minus words for Blender but never gave it its own review in the Consumer Guide,' Christgau wrote in his latest Consumer Guide on 'And It Don't Stop.' 'Not bad, right, only the new one's even better.' When reached at his home in New York City, Christgau said one aspect of Hood's work on his latest solo album is the way he articulates his emotional life, especially on love. 'Ideologically, it's an important part of how I've organized my life,' said Christgau, who has been married to the writer Carola Dibbell for over 50 years. With DBT, who kick off their next tour in Texas on May 29, Christgau will continue to follow the band's work. 'I think they're an absolutely A-level band,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
South China Morning Post
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Who is Thor actress Kat Dennings' musician husband, Andrew W.K?
Musician Andrew W.K first launched his musical career in the early noughties with rock and metal songs about partying. He shot to fame with his 2001 anthem 'Party Hard', which remained a popular track for years after, appearing in adverts, movie trailers, video games and even at ice hockey games – it's the goal song for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Despite his hard rocker image, W.K – whose full name is Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier – also became known for his motivational speaking and self-help work. He wrote an advice column for New York newspaper The Village Voice, hosted a children's game show on the Cartoon Network, and gave lectures on positive partying at universities including Oxford, Yale and NYU. And then he disappeared. Andrew W.K had disappeared from social media for two years until his wedding to Kat Dennings. Photo: @katdenningsss/Instagram Just a few weeks after releasing his sixth studio album God Is Partyin g in September 2021, W.K went off the grid. He deleted all his social media accounts and the tour he had announced was cancelled. Numerous conspiracy theories were floated by fans until about two years later, he began to be seen more frequently when his actress partner – Thor and 2 Broke Girls actress Kat Dennings – confirmed they were married. Here's what you need to know about the rocker. The fame train Andrew W.K and his wife Kat Dennings. Photo: @katdenningsss/Instagram Andrew W.K is a classically trained pianist, having begun lessons as a five-year-old with teachers from the University of Michigan Music School. He played in bands as a teen, then applied to and was accepted into the Art Institute of Chicago. Before the term even started, though, he had decided to move to New York and make music. In 2001, W.K's song 'Party Hard' became an instant rock anthem and by the time he released his debut album , I Get Wet – with its now famous cover of him drenched in sweat with a bloody nose – he had solidified a cult following.
