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The Daily

April 23, 2019
Arts & Culture

Notes from an Exiled Revolutionary

By Victor Serge
The writer and revolutionary Victor Serge was one of the few prominent opponents of Stalin to escape the despot’s wrath. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Terror, Serge fled the Soviet Union for France. When the Nazis took Paris, in 1940, he fled to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days in an exile rife with poverty and grief. In a sense, his notebooks became his new home, a place where he felt comfortable to contemplate everything from World War II to Russian literature, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the beauty of an erupting volcano. A new volume from New York Review Books Classics, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, presents for the first time in English Serge’s notebooks in their entirety. Below, in a series of entries from 1944, Serge marvels at the brilliance of his daughter’s art critiques, mourns his friends Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Max Jacob, and muses on the darkness of a world at war.

August 9, 1944

Read today:

A dispatch from Istanbul saying that a Turkish ship transporting 296 Jewish refugees was sunk on the Black Sea; a half-dozen people were saved.

Another dispatch on the water shortage and famine in Florence, an open city around which fighting is going on.

Notes on London’s nightmare, bombed by rocket missiles. It’s an absurd massacre and people have become accustomed to living under it.

An article by Léon Dennen on the extermination of Hungary’s Jews—hundreds of thousands of Jews—by means of asphyxiation cars in a camp in Upper Silesia. The Nazi army brings with it Judenvernichtung Abteil [extermination cars for Jews] that function like efficient offices.

The report by an American journalist on the collective suicide of the Japanese population of the island of Saipan, occupied by the Americans. People witnessed an officer decapitating his last soldiers and then, saber in hand, throwing himself on a tank; young girls brush their hair and wash themselves before jumping into the sea; families perform their ablutions and then drown themselves to the last member … (The Americans nevertheless tried to reassure the civilian population and succeeded in interning a portion of it.)

An official report of the execution by hanging of eight German generals rightly or wrongly implicated in the recent “plot” against the Führer. (I know how plots of this kind are manufactured.)

Scientific reports from America on the famine in China and the variety of deaths by starvation.

Saw, almost without emotion, photos showing the ruins of ancient churches in Russia and Italy; prostitutes in Cherbourg with their heads shaved; French collaborationists hunted down on the streets and begging for mercy on their knees.

We’ve reached the level of the dark times of the early Middle Ages. Need to reflect on this. Extreme difficulty of reflecting on this. Read More
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- Victor Serge
April 23, 2019
Mess With a Classic

The Stupid Classics Book Club

By Elisa Gabbert

In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).

Vintage advertisement from 1972

Last fall, at a party, my husband and I and two friends decided to start a “Stupid Classics Book Club.” It began as a joke, and then struck us as a genuinely good idea. The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never did. None of us had been English majors, so we’d missed a lot. I pulled out a notebook, and we spent the next hour and a half in a corner, coming up with a list of “stupid classics.” As we went, we had to figure out exactly what we meant by “stupid”—we did not mean lacking in intelligence, or bad. For me, “stupid” meant relatively short, accessible enough to be on a high school syllabus, and probably rehashed into cliché over time by multiple film adaptations and Simpsons episodes. The quintessential example was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anything too long or serious—Proust, Middlemarch—was excluded from the list, even if we all wanted to read it, due to failing those criteria. We did not assume any of the classics would actually be stupid.

We were wrong on that last count. The first book we chose to read was Fahrenheit 451. We’d all read some Ray Bradbury as kids, but not this one. A couple weeks later, when my friend Mike texted to say he had almost finished it, I texted back “No spoilers.” He responded with a semispoiler: “It’s … good for this book club.” I opened it up and read the first page:

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April 22, 2019
Postcards

Easter in Sri Lanka: Today Is Loss That Isn’t Loss

By Vyshali Manivannan

Vyshali Manivannan has written extensively about the decades-long ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, her parents’ home country. Having spread her father’s ashes a year ago to the day, Sunday’s bombings came as a reminder that the cycle of violence continues, along with the trauma it leaves in its wake.

Sun setting over Kandalama Lake, Sri Lanka (photo: Steve Weaver)

Today is loss that isn’t loss. It’s loss that’s become as acceptable as the parallelogram of skin on my ankle that I perennially shave off. I didn’t even notice the first time, stepped out in my towel tracking rivers of blood, Amma pronounced, all over the clean floor. We’ve known this floor since 1983, which is to say there never was a time I didn’t know it, right up to the end of the war, which retrofitted the foundation of what a war story could be, it seemed, across the Tamil diaspora. The story of how we learned of it, if we weren’t there.

Nearly ten years ago, I fled my apartment for a friend’s downtown, then abandoned their air mattress for higher ground, crouching on the back of their sofa with a laptop balanced across my knees. No one had yet taught me it doesn’t matter that the floor isn’t lava, the earth needs no heat to swallow you whole. How many times must I relearn? I found out the war ended by the way I was labeled with vicarious trauma: two people, out of everyone I knew in proximity, were willing to engage, while others politely checked their empathy larders for an I’m so sorry, you and yours are in my thoughts. Every simpering thank you I performed restocking their shelves.

At the limits of gratitude for such gestures at sympathy, we understand that loss is preconfigured as fleeting. People blink by nature. When the war ended, when Appa died, when the bombs went off on Easter Sunday, I was contagion, shut-eyed into quarantine by silence, then condolences, now thoughts and prayers, hearts, sad faces, thumbs-up likes. Eight bombs, ten dead, then one hundred, then two, nearly three, and four, then five hundred injured. I shave the way I always have, slowly and against the grain, doing comparative math around bodies, explosions, hashtags, emojis, the number of times the razor snags.

It’s not the floor that’s lava, it’s everything.

Somewhere they mop away the chunks of inarticulate flesh and today it pays off that I never learned to stop counting the dead. We consigned Appa’s ashes to the water one year ago, Luna Park’s ferris wheel bright in the distance, and this alone should have taught me to expect rivers on this first anniversary. Catastrophe suits me because it must. How skillfully you dodge me in this new state of emergency, just as you did in the last.

Vyshali Manivannan is a writer and professor based in New York.

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April 22, 2019
The Big Picture

The Unknowable Artist: Stéphane Mandelbaum

By Cody Delistraty

Where is the line between genius and madness? The Belgian artist, poet, and art thief Stéphane Mandelbaum’s attempt to create a lasting mythology of himself led to a macabre, untimely death.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Arthur Rimbaud. 1980

To understand the Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, it is best to begin at the end of his life. Few agree on how he lived, but most agree on how he died. It was garish and violent. He was shot in Namur, in central Belgium. Acid was splashed on his face to make his body harder to identify. His corpse was thrown into a landfill. He was twenty-five years old. His bright, brief life and his art-brut style are often compared to those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, but whereas Basquiat found his way to the center of the art world, Mandelbaum was always an outsider. His life was a mixture of realities and self-imposed fictions that were so potent that even he forgot who he was. At the crucial moment of his death, Mandelbaum thought he was a hardened criminal when, in truth, he was closer to a doughy artist, a controversial but ultimately bashful poet of the visual.

His death came in December 1986 when he had attempted to steal a painting by Amedeo Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo from an elderly woman’s home in Ixelles, a tony suburb of Brussels, along an avenue studded with art deco buildings. He had been promised money for the painting from friends who had connections to the black market. Having made almost no money from selling his own art, which was largely deemed too perverse and risqué, he desperately needed the funds. The problem was that there is no such painting by Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo. What he stole was entirely fake. It is impossible to know whether Mandelbaum was aware of this or not—or whether or not the woman who owned it knew—but, when he turned it over, his buyers realized the truth and murdered him. That is, at least, the most agreed upon story. Almost nothing about Mandelbaum is certain. Read More

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April 22, 2019
Look

Look, It’s Earth Day

By The Paris Review
Happy Earth Day! When the oceans have boiled over and the birds have died out, when the coasts have receded and the scorched vegetation ceased smoking, at least we’ll still have the work of the sixteenth-century miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel by which to remember the natural world. A new book, Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt, examines how Hoefnagel became infatuated with nature. It contains eighty color facsimiles of his masterwork, Four Elements, in which he depicts all manner of flora and fauna in stunningly detailed watercolors. A selection of these pages appears below.

Joris Hoefnagel, Animalia Qvadrvpedia et Reptilia (Terra): Plate LXI, ca. 1575/1580, watercolor and gouache, with oval border in gold, on vellum. Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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April 22, 2019
Arts & Culture

A Walk with Fame

By Aysegul Savas

Inside the church at Tepoztlán

One winter in January, I stood with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in front of a glass coffin, in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán. Inside, a figure lay under a purple cloth.

“Is that a saint of some kind?” Muldoon asked. “Do you think that’s real?”

I said I doubted it.

“That’s disappointing. Where I come from in Ireland, in the cathedral in Armagh, is the head of blessed Oliver Plunkett. A church without a head is really no church at all,” he said, with the bare trace of a smile. “When your expectations are as high as mine, almost everything is going to be disappointing.”

We had walked to the church together from town, retracing the poet Hart Crane’s footsteps around Tepoztlán. Muldoon walked slowly, his tweed jacket flapping, his brows knit together behind his thick frames. I was nervous and enthusiastic, wanting to make a good impression. I was standing next to a real writer; someone I’d read and admired.

We were in Tepoztlán as part of a writing program—Muldoon was leading a poetry class, I was participating in a cultural journalism workshop. I’d traveled there from Paris, where my husband and I had recently moved for my husband’s work. I’d never been published, despite many dozens of story submissions. I kept a blog, which was read by my mother and three friends. I worked odd, exhausting jobs, determined not to commit myself to any serious work that might get in the way of writing, but was rapidly losing faith in my own potential. Read More

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