April 30, 2015 On the Shelf “I Will Not Be Trifled With!” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Adolf Emil Hering, Wilhelm II, Deutscher Kaiser, 1910. Finnegans Wake, in all its difficulty, was only “crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires.” A wealth of new projects online aim to help readers parse, demystify, and/or grapple with the text; “maybe, just maybe, future generations will look back on early discussions of Finnegans Wake’s unreadability and wonder what the hell was the matter with us.” Borges’s “The Library of Babel” has been re-created online, too, in the form of a site that, if it’s ever completed, “would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lowercase letters, space, comma, and period … The library creates a tantalizing promise of reason—somewhere in its pages are all the works lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and every future masterpiece—but drowned out by infinite pages of nonsense.” A lost 1972 interview with Ray Bradbury, animated for Blank on Blank: “People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, ‘Hey, we got a crazy man in the community,’ and they’ll begin talking to you.” A new documentary, Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, follows W. S. Merwin’s attempts to plant a forest of palm trees in Hawaii. “For forty years, [he] planted a tree every day that he could, restoring nineteen acres of land in Haiku, Hawaii, even as it seemed the world might well be ending, first from military conflict and then from ecological crisis. The film is a chronicle of a man struggling to make meaning through tiny, trembling acts.” Kaiser Wilhelm II liked to talk—a lot. “Virtually everything the Kaiser said, no matter how risible, was recorded and preserved for posterity … he cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors with fantastical geopolitical speculations, crackpot plans, sarcastic asides and off-color jokes. Reading Wilhelm II on every conceivable subject … is like listening for days on end to a dog barking inside a locked car.”
April 29, 2015 From the Archive On the Ship By Dan Piepenbring C. P. Cavafy. “On the Ship,” a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy from our Spring 2005 issue. Cavafy was born on April 29, 1863; he died on his seventieth birthday. It certainly resembles him, this smallpencil likeness of him. Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;an enchanting afternoon.The Ionian Sea all around us. It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.To the point of sickness—he was that sensitive,and it illumined his expression.Handsomer, he appears to me,now that my soul recalls him, out of Time. Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—The sleuth, and the ship, and the afternoon Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn.
April 29, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent World Dream in Six Words By Sadie Stein If you look at the trending hashtag #WorldDreamin6Words you’ll see such tweets as: “Less ‘Them’ and ‘They’, more Us.” And “No More Violence in the Streets.” And “Self love and acceptance for all.” And “Ending the Stigma on Mental Health.” And “We all get a hamburger today.” And “A world free of animal abuse.” And “Love each other NOT imaginary dictators.” And (from the same person) “International Casual Friday with Keg Parties.” “Ham, eggs, and corncob pipes for everyone.” (That last one is from “Mark Twainz.”) Read More
April 29, 2015 At Work Good World to Be In: An Interview with Lisa Yuskavage By Thomas Gebremedhin Lisa Yuskavage in her studio, Brooklyn, New York. Photo by EJ Camp, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London Since her arrival on the art scene some twenty-five years ago, Lisa Yuskavage has made a name for herself with paintings that use classical techniques to depict unabashedly taboo subjects. Her creations—awash in radiant, hallucinatory colors and featuring hedonistic heroines unlike anything else in art today—are instantly identifiable. Her latest show, which opened last week at David Zwirner in New York, explores the idea of the incubus and succubus, and includes images of men—Dude Looks Like Jesus, for instance—a first for the artist. “I was thinking a lot about Dürer,” she says. “There’s this obsession with a certain look, which has to do with a revolutionary kind of guy.” I met Yuskavage, who is fifty-two, at her spacious Brooklyn studio earlier this month, where our talk touched on a variety of subjects, including her process, her past, and her experimentation with Grindr, the gay dating app. We’d intended to take a trip to her favorite bookstore, Ursus Books, afterward, but we stayed at her studio instead, conversing as pale yellow light crept along the floor. When critics discuss your work, they talk a lot about gaze—whether the figures depicted are inviting us to look or whether we’re intruding upon something private. It’s interesting because in order to make some of these paintings of men, I did something a few years ago—I didn’t realize why I was doing it at the time. I joined Grindr. I had a Grindr persona. You didn’t think I was going to say that today, did you? Do you remember your username? I don’t remember, but I eventually took it down when I almost hooked up with someone. I met someone by accident. My husband has a very nice body, and I took a picture of his torso. He had pants on. I didn’t want to be that vulgar, because I didn’t want to present myself as being just interested in sex. So I was at Le Pain Quotidien on Bleecker Street having my stupid vegan soup. I was looking at Grindr and imagining the Dionysian possibilities of life. It seemed like the air was full of sex. Not just sex, but hopefulness. Then I see that there’s someone who, whatever you call it, poked me or tapped me. He was ten feet away. I was like looking around and then I saw someone looking around. He was looking for me, and he couldn’t find me because I didn’t exist! Read More
April 29, 2015 On the Shelf Goya’s Gallows Humor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Francisco Goya, Wicked Woman, 1819–23. Via NYRB When he was in his early seventies and gravely ill, Goya began a series of private drawings, full of piss and vinegar and intended to amuse his friends—among them were pictures of naked witches, newborn babies tied to poles, and a procuress fingering her rosary and slugging some rotgut. “The captions are minimal: ‘Monk,’ ‘Nothing is known of this,’ ‘I can hear snoring’ … Goya’s drawings may leave us up in the air, filled with a disquieting unease. Yet in the end, the witches and old people are tokens of life, not death—even the tired, ancient man shuffling on his sticks, mockingly captioned Just can’t go on at the age of 98.” By piecing together years of letters, diaries, and newspapers, one scholar believes she’s discovered the man who inspired Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy. She noted, for instance, “that the physical similarities between the Earl and the description of Darcy are ‘obvious,’ with the former looking ‘very intense.’ ” An airtight case. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, for thirty-five years, a gated storefront hid an artist’s studio. “Behind the black gate was a world of color, hundreds of abstract works created and hidden away by Mr. [Leo] Bates, who had a promising start as a painter in the 1970s before renouncing the art world and retreating to his storefront to paint.” Eight rare books, including one by Benjamin Franklin, had long-ago disappeared from the New York Public Library. A woman who recently tried to sell them to an auction house “said the books have been in her family for decades, and there’s no proof that her late parents obtained the books illegally.” Everyone loves a good sentence—and clauses, subordinate or not, are beloved throughout the land—but what of the paragraph, that other indispensible unit of prose? Why do we speak so often of “a great writer of sentences” and so rarely of “a great writer of paragraphs”?
April 28, 2015 Events The Norwegian-American Literary Festival Comes to New York By Dan Piepenbring Knausgaard’s band, Lemen. You may have noticed a Knausgaard theme on the Daily today, between our interview with his translator Don Bartlett and Ian MacDougall’s probing analysis of the author’s scatological side. We’re celebrating the release of My Struggle’s fourth volume—but we’re also celebrating the latest Norwegian-American Literary Festival, a series of readings, conversations, and musical performances coming to New York for three nights next month. The festival begins on Wednesday, May 20, at the Westway in the Meatpacking District, where Karl Ove Knausgaard’s reunited college band, Lemen, will take the stage. James Wood’s band, the Fun Stuff, will perform, too, and Lydia Davis will begin the night in conversation with Dag Solstad about writing family history. Solstad is one of Norway’s preeminent writers, the author of thirty-three books translated into thirty languages. Davis learned Norwegian by reading his latest novel, a four-hundred-page epic whose title translates, roughly, as The Insoluble Epic Element in Telemark in the Period 1591–1896. Read More