Random Splendor

“Merely to say, to see and say, things / 
as they are”: This was how James Schuyler defined his aspiration as a poet. It sounds humble, but for Schuyler this commitment to empiricism entailed a whole philosophy of form. Reading Schuyler, you get the sense of an attentive mind occupying an atmosphere of rare serenity. Yet, even if his poems exuded such calm, the poet lived a troubled and tumultuous life. Prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for decades. His recurrent mental illness—never definitely diagnosed—took an enormous toll on his friendships, his romantic relationships, his finances, and his literary career. Reviewing a new biography of the poet, Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other, Evan Kindley writes that the story of his life “provides a wealth of detail about a figure who, while hardly unknown, has long retained an air of mystery.” It also reveals an entirely different side to his often pacific and sharply observant poems. “The miracle,” Kindley notes, “was his poetry, which is one of the permanent joys of American literature, carved out of a life that had more than its portion of misery. Kernan’s invaluable book gives us a fuller sense of just how unlikely that miracle was.” Read “The Miracles of James Schuyler”

Crash Out

The premise of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal is simple and yet preposterous: The idea that one can better manage life’s most stressful moments by preparing via highly realistic practice runs. In the first season of the series, that meant helping a trivia whiz confess that he lied about attending grad school, and staging a months-long re-creation of a Brooklyn woman’s fantasy of homesteading and motherhood. In the second season, Fielder confronts plane crashes—specifically, he sets out to fix a dysfunctional pattern in cockpit communications that he discovered while studying aviation disasters “sort of as a hobby.” Both rehearsals are absurd and can be at times painful and heartwarming—though the second, of course, has potentially far more dramatic consequences. Reviewing the second season, Erin Schwartz argues, “It’s impossible to say whether the show is kind or cruel, earnest or insincere. But through discomfort and ambiguity, Fielder is trying to say, in the latest season of his show, something more profound: Our inability to hear unwelcome information is literally killing us. Perhaps comedy can help.” Read “Who Does Nathan Fielder Think He Is?”