Looks Are Not Styles, and Other News

Filters, bro.

The police murders of so many black men have been caught on video, putatively for the sake of justice. But these videos perpetuate themselves with the same moral ambiguity that comes with war photography or any document of suffering. As Ezekiel Kweku writes of Alton Sterling, “I was detached enough to critique the video of his death, classify it, find myself consigning it to genre. I’ve long passed the point at which watching these videos makes me feel like a helpless bystander—I am another distance removed. At this point, I am a critic of images of men like me, dying. I’m a connoisseur … For these videos to prick the conscience, that conscience must already value the lives of those who are dying. Otherwise, the videos are simply lurid entertainment, the modern version of the postcard-size images of lynchings that were passed around during the last century.”

While we’re on the power of images: Ricky D’Ambrose contrasts the “looks” of the Instagram-and-design age with legitimate style. “Style annuls the impersonal … A look—insofar as it has any resemblance to style at all—is a kind of instant style: quickly executed and dispatched, immediately understood, overcharged with incident. To say that a film, a photograph, a painting, or a room’s interior has a look is to assume a consensus about which parts of a nascent image are the most worthy of being parceled out and reproduced on a massive scale. It means making a claim about how familiar an image is, and how valuable it seems.”

Americans and Canadians. What could ever unite these two disparate peoples, given their distinct views on the welfare state and their radically different approaches to bacon? I’ll tell you what: a library. Sarah Yahm reports that “for nearly 200 years Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, essentially functioned as one town. Citizens drank the same water, worked in the same tool factory, played the same sports … They also shared the same cultural center, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, an ornate Victorian edifice built deliberately on top of the international border in 1901 by the Canadian wife of a wealthy American merchant … Against all logic, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House continues to serve both Vermonters and Quebecers, and remains a transnational space that residents from both the U.S. and Canada can enter without a passport. Today, it is the only library in the world that exists and operates in two countries at once.”

Emma Cline remembers discovering the perversities of Archie comics: “As we grew older, we began reading the comics with a sharper eye. Catching spelling errors, repetitive story lines. Continuity problems. The innocence started to rupture around the edges. There was only one black character in Riverdale … Or Betty and Veronica, teen-age girls drawn with pervy precision by the male cartoonists, men who traced the bodies of the girls over and over and over, who posed them like pinups, often barely clothed. Their nipples obvious through tank tops, their skirts riding up their thighs when they sprawled on their pink beds. In some panels, a segment of their white underwear could be seen. It had been there all along, underneath the adamant wholesomeness—flashes of the world the comics had been trying so hard to keep out.”

And Tim Parks, reading a new biography of Dante, finds a rich irony in the poet’s present-day cultural standing: “Excluded from his home culture in his lifetime, Dante is absolutely at the center of it seven hundred years on. Pathetically wrong when he supposed that his own self-important interventions might swing the course of history, he was triumphantly right when he prophesied that the vernacular would prevail over Latin and that he would be numbered among the great poets of all time. In the early 19th century, Giacomo Leopardi would remark that the factional fragmentation of Italian society was such that no Italian past or present was ever entirely honored or dishonored ‘since there can be no honor without a shared sense of society’. Dante is the exception that proves the rule, more honored it seems to me than any other Italian in history, perhaps because his great work so completely captures and in its way celebrates the endless divisiveness that unites Italy’s present with its past.”

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