October 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Theodore Dreiser’s New York By Mike Wallace Teddy Dreiser tries to make it. Theodore Dreiser, 1917. In late November 1894, in the depths of the 1890s depression, Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York. He soon headed for City Hall Park, where he bulled his way into the World building, successfully evading the hired muscle who barred the doors of most Park Row newspapers, keeping desperate job seekers at bay. Once inside, he managed to land an unsalaried position as a space-rate reporter, paid by the column inch, on the strength of having served a lengthy journalistic apprenticeship in various midwestern cities. Dreiser liked newsmen. He appreciated their cynical dissent from prevailing pieties. “One can always talk to a newspaper man,” Dreiser would write, “with the full confidence that one is talking to a man who is at least free of moralistic mush.” His own life had rubbed him free of Victorian illusions. His family was grit-poor, his father a beaten man. The Dreisers were always on the move—being evicted or chasing cheaper rents—and ostracized as trash by “respectable” people. The slums of Terre Haute and Chicago taught him that life was hard, amoral, and indifferent to the individual—ideas reinforced by his readings of Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin. Read More
October 26, 2017 First Person On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck By Aisha Sabatini Sloan Jean-Michel Basquiat, Back of the Neck, 1983, silkscreen with hand painting. While visiting Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I strained my back. My mother gave me the name of her former chiropractor. As I stood before him, I listed my symptoms, and in one quick gesture he ripped my pants down, without warning, just below the cheek. He hadn’t really looked at me while I spoke, so I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the way he’d stripped me. It was like he was going to spank or fuck me. He used a TENS machine to electrostimulate my muscles and I left with almost no back pain. A bit ambitious, I walked the several miles back to my hotel. It’s only now that I wonder what else might have prompted that need to wander so far by myself. I went to see another chiropractor in Tucson when my back froze up again. I waited for what seemed like hours, watching other walk-ins pass quickly through to the other side. I think we were ushered in based on seniority, and I was new to the place, but I kept a close eye on those who came and went, what they looked like. The chiropractor listened to my troubles. He moved my head quickly and I heard a click in my neck. After a few more adjustments, he told me to come back the following day and had the receptionist sell me a multi-visit package. The next day, I was still in pain, but my body refused to obey when I tried to drive back to claim the appointment I’d already paid for. I turned down a side street and pulled over. I will likely never see a chiropractor again. Because they know how to break my neck, I’m afraid they might. Read More
October 26, 2017 In Memoriam Ain‘t That a Shame: Fats Domino By Brian Cullman Nobody but nobody communicated joy and pleasure better than Fats Domino. Oh, the Beatles came close, but early on John got mopey, George got petulant, and Ringo simply kept his head down, so that doesn’t count. But for Fats Domino, happiness was a given. At a time when rock ’n’ roll seemed rife with sex and noise and the wild beat of anarchy, Fats Domino was the odd man out. A date with Elvis would start and end in bed, a night out with Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would probably land you in jail, but a date with Fats Domino would probably just involve pork chops. From his first recordings in the early 1950s through his final album in 2006, his style never changed, nor did it need to. With his sly, loping piano mixing barrelhouse with boogie-woogie, with those warm, casual vocals, his way of stretching words halfway around the block, and with Earl Palmer, the best drummer in New Orleans, and arranger, cowriter Dave Bartholomew in tow, his records sounded like nothing else on the radio. Read More
October 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Alec Soth’s Mississippi Dreamers in a Nightmare America By Rebecca Bengal Alec Soth, Joshua, Angola State Prison, Louisiana. All photos from Sleeping by the Mississippi. Courtesy the artist and MACK. The photographs in Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, which have just been published in a new edition, contain a freedom-seeking, derelict melancholy: deceptively clean, silver early-morning surfaces, a mattress floating in a swampy puddle, a casually arranged set of rescued furniture resembling a wall-less living room in some forlorn woods, a family of bikers grieving underneath a canopy of Spanish moss, weeds growing wild through the springs of an abandoned bed frame. When the book was originally published, in 2004, I was drawn to the vagrancy of its title, the down-by-the-river evocation of it. It took me another minute to consciously realize that “sleeping” pointed naturally to dreaming. Its portraits and scenes formed a larger story about individual longing; the way we impress upon our tiny worlds; the way we project our desires and the idealized pictures of ourselves onto our walls and out into our yards and onto the symbolic river. The third image in the book depicts a drooping, loosely made, ordinary-seeming bed left on a porch—outside, where, we all know, even deeper, stranger dreams happen. Read More
October 26, 2017 Life Sentence The Complete Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our new eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven will take apart and put back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro will illustrate each sentence Dolven chooses. Image © Tom Toro What is a sentence? But that is such a formal question. How about, what is a sentence for? Less formal, perhaps, but obviously impossible to answer, for sheer variety. There may be some human purposes that don’t find their way into sentences, but writers keep trying, and for any limit we experience there may be a sentence in waiting and a writer to try it. Nonetheless, embarking on what will be a set of eight meditations on the sentence—what it is, what it can be for or about—I’ll propose one purpose that all sentences have in common. The purpose of a sentence is to end. If this is a property of all sentences, any ought to do for an example, but here is one particularly determined to be done with itself: 1 The world is everything that is the case. It comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as translated from German into English by C. K. Ogden in 1922. Beginning, as it does, with a capital letter (let’s ignore the number for the moment), and ending with a period, it advertises its own completeness. The completeness is grammatical: there is a subject and a verb, the minimum conditions, then a predicate nominative, and then a simple relative clause. It is also complete rhetorically, with the double “is” almost suggesting a palindrome, folding neatly in the middle. You could just about read it backward as well as forward. That wouldn’t be a good idea logically, but it asserts a certain self-containedness, a certain autonomy, which a sentence is supposed to have. Read More