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"Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him-despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father-the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was. A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger's own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own"--… (més)
After having received this book from the publisher (Thank you, SFWP), and being in tears by the time I got to page three, I believed this would be a book I would want to read in its entirety.
This is the story of a Lilly Dancyger’s love for her father. It is a complicated story because, not only were both of her parents heroin addicts, but her father died when she was only eleven years old, and her dad was still a fairly young man. It’s hard to believe that the author waited until she was in college before opening her father’s notebooks to explore more about his life. I know there was grief after his death, but I doubt if I would have had the patience to wait as long as she did before she started learning more about him with those notebooks of his so close at hand.
I found it interesting that the author, a New York City high school dropout, found great pleasure in reading, especially the classics. It was her curiosity and love of reading and writing that ultimately led her to further education, writing, and to the creation of this book. Her father, Joseph Schachtman, was an artist whose strange and provocative art, a lot of it sculpture, was usually carefully crafted with odd items such as discarded objects of others or items found in nature, such as wood, hair, and even feathers from roadkill.
Lilly’s parents divorced at a time when her dad’s heroin use led to financial problems and complete lack of hygiene. Heroin use may or may not have been the direct cause of his death. That is not really clear, although lab tests showed he was clean when he died in bed at his own home
The loss of Lilly’s father at a young age put a spirit of longing in her to recapture him as he was. Through people who knew him and through his art, which she displayed with black-and-white photographs carefully arranged throughout the book, she gave honor to a fallible person she loved dearly. She was able to overlook her father’s faults and give praise where it was due.
One part of this memoir that brought me to tears was near the end where Lilly tells about her dad taking her to Friday night services “finding religion for the first time in his life”. I found that especially moving as I find comfort from time to time in religion as well.
I see that there was an inner warmth in Schachtman’s art work that appeared outwardly strange and unapproachable. In cataloguing and exhibiting her dad’s art work in this book and doing research among people who knew her dad, Lilly not only brought out that inner meaning for others to see but created a lasting record of his life’s work.
This is an honest, beautiful, and thought-provoking memoir unlike any other that I have read. While reading, I never missed an opportunity to stop and write down special passages that captured my heart. I liked the author’s idea that her father continues to talk to her through the art he created. This story was a pleasure to read. ( )
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
For my father Joe Schactman.
And for everyone living with an absence.
Primeres paraules
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
There’s a photograph of my father laughing on the last day I saw him alive.
Citacions
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
The notebooks hadn’t given me more of him, they’d just reminded me that he was gone, and he would never be any less gone.
I felt cheated. I felt there must be something more, somewhere. Something that he left behind that would let me have a conversation with him across time and death.
I learned to understand the world around me by trying to recognize what my father might think was beautiful—understanding that every walk we took was a scavenger hunt, and that anything could be sculpture material.
But then I was just doing the same thing to him that he had done to Cathy, trying to apply logic to addiction, where it has no foothold. I should have known better.
I thought of the guidance counselor from Bard who’d told me I’d end up on the street if I didn’t “ straighten up and fly right” (she really used those words), and imagined mailing her a photocopy of my master’s degree with “FUCK YOU, CUNT” written across it in Sharpie.”
Journalism appealed to me as a way to have a respectable career and a more stable life than my parents ever did, but still move freely around the edges of society and challenge authority and follow my own interests wherever they led me.
I was shocked at myself for feeling such anger at an addict, as if addiction were a simple issue of willpower.
A relationship with someone I actually trusted to catch me if I fell—someone who understood who I really was, not just who I was trying to be—introduced the possibility that maybe stability was something I could relax into. Maybe it wasn’t about constantly striving until I successfully became a different person, but about creating a life with room to exhale. The idea that stability could be a state of calm, rather than a prize just always out of reach, was a revelation. And that it was actually attainable for me was even more baffling.
When we started going to temple, his family wasn’t just a dead mother, a father who wouldn't speak to him, a sister who lived far away, a wife who had left him, and a daughter he lived in constant fear of disappointing—it was thousands of years of history.
Until then I had a vague understanding that I was Jewish insofar as I was not Christian, and I was apparently required to enjoy rye bread.
Darreres paraules
Nota de desambiguació
Editor de l'editorial
Informació del coneixement compartit en anglès.Modifica-la per localitzar-la a la teva llengua.
"Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him-despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father-the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was. A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger's own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness her father hid from her, as well as her own"--
Google Books — S'està carregant…
(3.8)
1
This is the story of a Lilly Dancyger’s love for her father. It is a complicated story because, not only were both of her parents heroin addicts, but her father died when she was only eleven years old, and her dad was still a fairly young man. It’s hard to believe that the author waited until she was in college before opening her father’s notebooks to explore more about his life. I know there was grief after his death, but I doubt if I would have had the patience to wait as long as she did before she started learning more about him with those notebooks of his so close at hand.
I found it interesting that the author, a New York City high school dropout, found great pleasure in reading, especially the classics. It was her curiosity and love of reading and writing that ultimately led her to further education, writing, and to the creation of this book. Her father, Joseph Schachtman, was an artist whose strange and provocative art, a lot of it sculpture, was usually carefully crafted with odd items such as discarded objects of others or items found in nature, such as wood, hair, and even feathers from roadkill.
Lilly’s parents divorced at a time when her dad’s heroin use led to financial problems and complete lack of hygiene. Heroin use may or may not have been the direct cause of his death. That is not really clear, although lab tests showed he was clean when he died in bed at his own home
The loss of Lilly’s father at a young age put a spirit of longing in her to recapture him as he was. Through people who knew him and through his art, which she displayed with black-and-white photographs carefully arranged throughout the book, she gave honor to a fallible person she loved dearly. She was able to overlook her father’s faults and give praise where it was due.
One part of this memoir that brought me to tears was near the end where Lilly tells about her dad taking her to Friday night services “finding religion for the first time in his life”. I found that especially moving as I find comfort from time to time in religion as well.
I see that there was an inner warmth in Schachtman’s art work that appeared outwardly strange and unapproachable. In cataloguing and exhibiting her dad’s art work in this book and doing research among people who knew her dad, Lilly not only brought out that inner meaning for others to see but created a lasting record of his life’s work.
This is an honest, beautiful, and thought-provoking memoir unlike any other that I have read. While reading, I never missed an opportunity to stop and write down special passages that captured my heart. I liked the author’s idea that her father continues to talk to her through the art he created. This story was a pleasure to read. (