June 20, 2018 Arts & Culture Marlene Dumas’s Metamorphoses By Larissa Pham Marlene Dumas, from “Myths & Mortals.” In bed some nights, too tired to read, I lie on my side with my phone plugged into the wall and scroll through Instagram. Lately, perhaps because of the algorithms, process videos of illustrators painting have risen to the top of my feed. My favorites are the ones where the artist begins without a drawing, the canvas blank as a sheet; I like the mystery of the movement of the brush, following its slow dance across the paper. After thirty seconds, a minute, the strokes come together, and on the glowing screen, an image rises up, like an omen out of water. A face, a flower, a still life. I could watch them all night and often do, mesmerized by the startling process of creation. The drawings at the center of Marlene Dumas’s current show at the David Zwirner gallery, “Myths & Mortals,” take their subject from Shakespeare’s poem “Venus and Adonis.” That poem is itself a retelling of Ovid’s Venus and Adonis, which is itself one iteration of a classic myth told around fires long before Ovid wrote it down. In this story, Venus, the goddess of love, has helplessly fallen for a young mortal hunter, Adonis. How impossible that the goddess of love could be a victim of love herself—and yet. Pricked by Cupid’s bow, she succumbs. Overcome by passion, desire courses through her body, making her cheeks pale and the sweat stand out on her brow. Read More
June 19, 2018 Arts & Culture One Word: Castration By Gavin Francis Anonymous, Non biedt kat vis aan in ruil voor penis (detail), 1555 We defend ourselves not against castration anxiety but against death, a far more absolute castration. —Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death The university library at my medical school was shared with students of veterinary medicine. Sometimes I’d find myself at a desk opposite one of the vet students; we’d glance at one another’s textbooks with curiosity, occasionally open at the same subjects—hematology, say, or orthopedic surgery. It was reassuring to see how much common ground there was between medicine for humans and medicine for animals. One day, I was revising prostate cancer: the appearance of its malignant cells under a microscope, the stages of its spread, the radiotherapy, brachytherapy (embedding of radioactive pellets into the tumor), and standard chemotherapies used to treat it. In health, the prostate gland stores semen and mature sperm; it has strong muscular walls that squeeze during ejaculation. Exposure to a lifetime of testosterone increases the growth of the gland as well as its susceptibility to cancers. Many treatments for prostate cancer work by blocking testosterone’s generation within the testicles—with no testosterone, the growth of the tumor slows. “All that for prostate cancer?” asked one of the vet students, glancing over at my notes. “Sure,” I said.“What do you guys do to treat it?” “One word,” he laughed, “castration!” Read More
June 19, 2018 Arts & Culture On Frankenstein, A Monster of a Book By Hernan Diaz Behind the scenes of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. In 1818, it probably would have been more shocking to have a novel about a Victoria Frankenstein doing perfectly normal, boring science than one about Victor making a hodgepodge of body parts come to life. In more than one way, Victor Frankenstein embodies the double contradiction at the core of the mad scientist outlined in the previous installment of this essay. First paradox: though deprived of reason (mad), this character is also the ultimate embodiment of reason (a scientist). Second paradox: even though mad scientists are always outcasts who rebel against the establishment, they tend to represent that very establishment—they are, for the most part, well-to-do white men. True enough, every now and then, Frankenstein looks beyond Europe—for example, in search of a habitat for its monstrous offspring and sedatives that may quiet the nightmare of reason. After his first nervous breakdown, following the creation of the monster, Victor, saturated with Western knowledge, “found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists.” Together with his friend, Clerval, he learns Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew and reads the texts in the original: Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country. When you read their writings, life appears to consist in a warm sun and garden of roses,—in the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome. Read More
June 16, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be a Mad Scientist? By Hernan Diaz Photograph from the soundstage of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus Theatrical as it is, the cliché of the mad scientist—a wild-haired, goggle-eyed maniac pacing around a laboratory, operating buzzing contraptions with the help of a hunchbacked assistant—reveals something important about our relationship to knowledge. At least since Aeschylus, science and technology have been bound to madness and criminality: when Prometheus rebels against Zeus, steals the “fire that makes all skills attainable” from the gods, and gives it to the humans—together with tools, technical and scientific knowledge, language, and reason itself—he “is mentally straying, robbed of [his] wits, like a bad doctor who has fallen sick.” Some two thousand years later, a different incarnation of this paradox helped give birth to modern science. Descartes, one of the founding figures of our scientific method, started out by imagining a “malicious demon of the utmost power” that deceived him and confounded his mind so that he doubted everything that presented itself to his senses and his mind. “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement,” he writes in his first Meditation. “I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.” Descartes’s radical skepticism, a deliberate form of madness, is the cornerstone of his method: the demon makes him doubt everything—except that he doubts and therefore thinks and therefore exists. Rationalism is, then, the product of an evil genius. To this day, metaphors of insanity and normalcy are ingrained in the philosophy of science: epistemologists like Thomas Kuhn call “normal science” all work that is done within an accepted paradigm. This, of course, implies that all revolutionary science is, at first, abnormal—or “Abby Normal,” as Igor calls the brain he gets for the creature in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Read More
June 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Autobiography of a Professor, Tattoo Artist, Gay Pornographer, and Sexual Record Keeper By Jeremy Mulderig Courtesy of the estate of Samuel M. Steward. When I pick up a biography, I have certain expectations about how the book I am holding came to be. I assume, for example, that the biographer has a broad and deep knowledge of his or her subject’s life and has approached the task of representing that life in narrative form with professional objectivity. My expectations for an autobiography, however, are quite different. Knowing from experience that all lives are shaped by a subjectivity that filters and orders our perceptions of ourselves, I can’t demand objectivity from the autobiographer. Nor do I wish to, for it is the very subjectivity of autobiography—that inevitably self-conscious construction of the self for an imagined reader—that draws me to autobiographies in the first place. But when an autobiographer writes two versions of his or her life—two narratives in which elements are selected and arranged and considered differently—how is the reader to regard the disparate selves encountered in the texts? Which account of a given incident should one accept, and on what basis? These are the questions that I faced in editing and blending the published and unpublished autobiographies of Samuel Steward (1909–1993), the English professor, tattoo artist, pornographer, and sexual record keeper whose important place in twentieth-century gay history and literature was established in 2010 by Justin Spring’s landmark biography, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward. The life that Steward sought to present in his autobiography was by any measure a remarkable one. When he sat down at his typewriter on August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, to compose it, no one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: he had been a popular university professor of English for more than twenty years; a close friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas as well as Alfred Kinsey and Thornton Wilder; an accomplished tattoo artist using the name Phil Sparrow; an essayist and short-story writer who published prolifically in European gay magazines under a variety of pseudonyms; and the author, as Phil Andros, of a series of widely circulated pornographic gay novels in the sixties and seventies. He was also a compulsive record keeper who maintained a massive journal and meticulous card-file index documenting his forty-five hundred sexual encounters with more than eight hundred men, including all the members of his high school basketball team, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, Roy Fitzgerald (later known to the world as Rock Hudson), a number of his university students, and many sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago. His books late in life included an edition of Gertrude Stein’s and Alice Toklas’s letters to him, a novel based on the life of the painter Sir Francis Rose, a book about the tattoo business, another on gay hustlers, and two murder mysteries featuring Stein and Toklas as sleuths. Read More
June 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? By James Frankie Thomas Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses. “Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College. No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it. It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. Read More