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The Art of the Courtroom Sketch, and Other News

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On the Shelf

The Hustler Magazine case before the Supreme Court; Larry Flynt in foreground, his attorney, Alan Isaacman talking before the court (Dec. 2, 1987). Illustrated by Aggie Kenny. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Image via Hyperallergic

  • I hear you’re trying to knock over a library. May I suggest you get a hold of the blueprints? Thing about libraries is—librarians, cover your ears—many of them tend to reside in historical or at least oft-remodeled buildings with easily exploited blind spots. Let the architecture guide you: “Stephen Blumberg stole an estimated twenty million dollars’ worth of rare books and manuscripts from institutional archives and academic libraries around the United States. His plan for hitting the rare books collection of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles was characteristic: researching the history of the building, Blumberg had learned that a series of disused dumbwaiters had once functioned to deliver books between floors. The dumbwaiters were no longer active, but the shafts inside the walls of the library still offered a direct connection to book stacks that were otherwise inaccessible to the public … No alarms, no cameras, just narrow, chimney-like chutes invisible to outside view through which Blumberg could shimmy his way to treasure. And shimmy he did, successfully raiding the building from within.”
  • Today in things that are clearly art but that you’ve probably never really thought about as art: the Library of Congress has acquired ninety-six (they couldn’t just make it an even hundred?) courtroom sketches covering more than forty years of trials, featuring such prominent malefactors as Bernie Madoff, Charles Manson, and Larry Flynt. “The Thomas V. Girardi Collection of Courtroom Illustration Drawings at the Library of Congress enhances our existing holding by increasing the number of artists represented, especially female courtroom illustrators,” the curator Sara W. Duke told Hyperallergic. A press release confirmed the obvious: “The Girardi acquisition affirms the LOC as having the most comprehensive American collection of courtroom art.”
  • Adam Shatz on Nina Simone, whose “husky contralto” perplexed the jazz critics of her day but captivated just about everyone else: “Eroticism and suffering lay at the heart of Simone’s work from the very start: she seemed to have one foot in the deep South and another in Weimar cabaret … Simone cut deeper than her peers: she knew how to open the wound, to make pain audible and moving. So long as she felt adored, she was full of mischievous, salty banter in her mike breaks. But if she felt slighted, she could be explosive, even violent … Simone gave expression to a taboo emotion that, in a 1968 best-seller, two black American psychiatrists would define as ‘black rage.’ Her songs were peopled with avenging black angels, most famously a woman named Peaches who, in her 1966 song ‘Four Women,’ declares that she will ‘kill the first mother I see.’ Seldom has anyone combined art and protest to such a sublime effect, in the classical sense of fusing beauty and terror.”
  • To read Daniel Clowes’s graphic novels, you’d think he’s a total depressive, if not an out-an-out misanthrope, even. In fact, as Robert Ito writes, he’s a family man: “Unlike a lot of cartoonists, Clowes is a lot happier than the characters he creates. Most of his hapless protagonists spend much of their miserable lives futilely chasing after the sort of contentment and familial joy that Clowes has found for himself in Piedmont … Clowes acknowledges the huge impact that his own childhood—the divorce, the constant shuttling around—has had on how he views marriage and parenting today. ‘I always grew up wanting what I have now with my own family,’ he says. ‘A house, a wife, a child, everything very stable.’ ”
  • Facebook has introduced “Reactions,” a collection of five “graphicons” that allow you to respond to content (and everything is content) in one of five ways: Like, Love, Sad, Angry, Wow, Haha. If you’ve noticed that those words are, uh … syntactically nonparallel, you’re not alone in being confused and a little afraid: “The syntax of the new Facebook Reactions makes no sense. When Facebook asks you to respond to a status with that set of six words, it’s actually asking your brain to do something that’s slightly complicated: to fill in an implied sentence, or to ‘predicate’ it. Programmatic linguists call this ‘inferencing.’ The problem is, because these words are not the same category of speech, they require different predicates … If those inconsistencies bother you, you may in fact have a disorder called ‘grammar purism.’ Sufferers of GP have been known to correct mistakes on dinner menus and chew their cheeks in an effort not to correct their friend who always says ‘I have drank way too much tonight!’ GP has no cure, but some sufferers find poetry or Winston Churchill quotes soothing.”