August 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Seven Books I’ll Never Read By Adam O’Fallon Price There comes a point in every reader’s life when they must make peace with all the books they’ll never read. This is true even for the most voracious reader in the world. They say Alexander Pope was the last person to have read every book ever written. Given today’s publishing release schedules and the advent of e-books, a newborn in 2018 who lived to be eighty and did nothing but read their entire life would not even read a small fraction of the world’s library, an exponentially growing Babel straight out of Borges’s most fevered fantasy. When you’re younger, you know logically that you will not, cannot, read every book. Yet youth’s convincing illusion of immortality is not confined to the realms of romance and illegal substances—it informs your reading as well, and it does so in two senses. First, all books possess a nimbus of potentiality, however faint. True, it may not be likely that you’ll read Finnegans Wake, but it’s possible. Second, believing you possess an infinite amount of life, you can fritter it away on books both trivial and great. A nostalgic rereading of The Hitchhiker’s Quartet? Sounds fun! An abortive yearlong stab at 2666? Why not! But as holds true for many other things, these illusions begin to fall away around the age of forty. You don’t have time to waste on bad books, and you know yourself better than to seriously think you’re going to learn French in order to read À la recherche du temps perdu in its original language. You know yourself well—too well, maybe. Your tastes can easily become circumscribed by habit, and you venture less frequently afield to the strange shelves that turned up unexpected favorites in your youth. These tendencies should be countered whenever possible, but aging unavoidably shapes a reader. Read More
August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Notes on the Death of Oxana Shachko By Jacqueline Feldman From Oxana Shachko’s Instagram (@oksanashachko). Oxana Shachko told me she preferred that spelling, with the x, in 2016, as I was finalizing an essay that would describe, among other things, her life. In news articles about her, which have multiplied since her death by suicide in Paris this July, journalists more typically use the Romanization Oksana. I will stick with the spelling she and I agreed on even though I knew Oxana, an artist who was thirty-one, to take things like this lightly, often changing her mind. My essay deals with the women’s group Femen, which Oxana helped found in Ukraine. Beginning in 2008, it protested corruption in government; the conscription of Ukrainian women into sex work, which Oxana described as an issue of poverty, of globalization, even; and the failings of the hospital in Khmelnytskyi, of the Kiev Zoo. By 2013, the founding members all lived in exile. Oxana and another cofounder, Sasha Shevchenko, had fled to France, where they would become political refugees. The third, Anna Hutsol, went to Switzerland, where she was denied asylum. By the time I met Oxana in Paris, Femen had added activists internationally. The group had attracted attention in the West for its performative topless protests as well as for a certain overreach, taking on issues as far afield as the situation of women in Muslim countries. It would have surprised people I knew in Paris, where Femen was famous, that these women had begun with issues local to Ukraine. My memory is that Oxana left Femen in 2014 and that even then she showed ambivalence. (She’d say, for example, that she affiliated not with Femen France but with Femen International.) In later accounts, the date moves up. A 2016 text published by a gallery says she left the group in 2013. I am wary of making too much of slippages like this, particularly in retrospect. Still, if Oxana’s life did reshape itself on the many occasions she had to tell of it, her death has cluttered the truth further. Web searches turn up the work of artists less accomplished than she was, the photographers and filmmakers who shot her. If you didn’t know her, you might struggle to identify the paintings that were hers. She was born in Khmelnytskyi, which is in western Ukraine, where at the exceptionally young age of eight she apprenticed herself to a Greek man who painted icons. A deeply religious child, she came to identify as an atheist, a materialist, a communist, and, at last, a feminist. In her late paintings, her technique with gold leaf, with the tempera she herself made out of egg yolk, translates into a political vernacular. Madonnas, haloed, wear niqabs. An archangel is gay, as denoted by a rainbow. Jesus and fishermen float in a comfortable boat as hands reach up from below them to break the waves. They are the hands of humans sinking, which the sanctimonious men ignore. Read More
August 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich By Sandra M. Gilbert Adrienne Rich. Toward the end of “Diving into the Wreck,” one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth Here, she says, is the imperative of investigation: needful research into “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” Arguably, as she confided that she discovered sometime in the sixties, such research into reality—“the thing itself and not the myth”—was a major aim of her work as a poet. But perhaps it hasn’t yet been clearly enough understood how crucially her writings in prose complemented, supplemented, enriched, and, yes, inspired her writing in verse. For in these writings she was not just one of many contemporary poets illuminating her verse through confessional glosses but a major memoirist, essayist, theorist, and scholar. Read More
August 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Is Nanette? By Matilda Douglas-Henry Still from Nanette. When I look at Hannah Gadsby, I see myself. The stand-up comedian from Tasmania holds her body like a tall woman is wont to do: chest puffed out, shoulders turned inward, weathered from years of hunching. I know this because I am a tall woman. I have hovered around the six-foot mark since I was twelve. Then there are her delightful inflections: the thick, broad Australian accent that clicks between tongue and teeth, the dips in cadence (it can be squeaks or muffled growls depending on the level of immersive impersonation). I am most endeared to her deployment of slang, the familiar turns of phrase I didn’t even realize were locale specific until I moved from Melbourne to New York. “Aw, it’s a bit much, really,” she says as a default response to anything she finds inappropriate, bespectacled eyes squinting, eyebrows jumping up above the frames. She is comfortable in her awkwardness: mouth close to the microphone, hands slipped in pockets, a stutter that peaks and breaks in its proclivity. The charm here is in the “bit”; the crucial dip in register falls on this syllable, turning a throwaway sentence into a charged moment of linguistic intimacy. I am in the SoHo Playhouse theater on Vandam Street, sitting on a brown leather chair that doesn’t quite accommodate my height. The set is pleasant and simple: the trademark glass of water on the wooden stool, the microphone, and a backdrop of leafless trees against a watercolor blue. It seems as if everyone in the audience feels a certain kinship to Gadsby, even if they themselves aren’t Australian, tall, and queer, and perhaps that is one of the reasons her Off-Broadway debut, Nanette, has had its run extended by two months. Read More
August 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Vanishing of Reality By Michiko Kakutani Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. —Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant” Surreal and chaos have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, when artificial-intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN. Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the sixties, when society began fragmenting and official narratives—purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites—started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth writes of American reality: “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complains, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise … ” Read More
July 31, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings By Katy Kelleher Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Czardas dancers, 1908. Inside an old brick building in Somerville’s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as the Museum of Bad Art. “You won’t ever see this stuff in the Museum of Fine Arts,” the curator Michael Frank says. Frank is the kind of guy who can’t pass a yard sale or a flea market without stopping to browse. He loves ugly things, but for him, ugly is a problematic word. “When I read your email, I thought, Uh-oh,” he admits. “Calling something ugly is like calling something beautiful. The minute you say it, you’re in a difficult spot, trying to define what that really means.” Frank prefers to think of these paintings as “badart,” one word, no hyphen. Badart is not the inverse of “good art”; it’s the inverse of “important art.” Some might call these pieces outsider art, and in the past, many of them could have been termed primitive or art brut. I prefer to think of them as ugly. Charming—like the dancing dog wearing a tutu or the nineties eyebrows on one particularly serene Virgin Mary—but ugly nonetheless. However, I understand where Frank is coming from. For Frank, ugly is a word that suffocates, depriving his favorite paintings of their rightful playful air. Ugly is also a word that carries hard moral implications; for centuries, ugliness has been associated not only with sickness and deformity but also dishonesty, violence, aggression, and bigotry. Consider the term ugly American or the repeated critique of Trump’s “ugly” acts. The word itself comes from the equally discordant-sounding ugga and uggligr, two Old Norse adjectives that mean “dreadful, fearful, aggressive.” (Other words that bloomed from the “dreadful” root include loath and loathsome.) The meaning changed only in the fourteenth century, when uglike stopped meaning “terrifying” and began to mean “unpleasant to look at.” Even though the word ugly is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do not negate each other. Read More