June 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Indignity of Celebrity Suicide By Jill Bialosky The day we learn Kate Spade took her life we are in Rivella, Italy, a small town on the Amalfi Coast—it finds us even in this small corner of the world, stamped on the front page of the International Times and in international papers that line the table where we breakfast. The reporting is invasive and crude. Lines from Kate Spade’s suicide note, the last words to her daughter are printed worldwide. Speculation and implication of marital troubles at the bottom of it. Next news cycle. Kate Spade’s sister speaks out, saying that she was not surprised; Kate had suffered from bipolar depression but was afraid to get treatment lest the news break out. A life comes to a tragic end reduced by simplistic statements. After breakfast, our plan is to tour the Villa Cimbrone. In Roman times, the brochure of the walking tour tells us, Villa Cimbrone was an agricultural estate that produced timber for naval use. At the end of the nineteenth century it was abandoned and later rediscovered by an English traveler, Ernest William Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe. He was a member of the group of intellectuals who made the grand tour to Ravello. His personal mission was to recuperate from a deep depression after the death of his beloved wife. The beauty of the estate, the joy it brought, led him to buy it in 1904, to restore it and transform it into his own artful creation. The estate became an elegy to his lost wife; a place where he could honor his grief and preserve her memory with its austere beauty. Carved into the wall of a stone bench are these words: LOST TO A WORLD IN WHICH I CRAVE NO PART I SIT ALONE AND COMMUNE WITH MY HEART PLEASED WITH MY LITTLE CORNER OF THE EARTH GLAD THAT I CAME NOT SORRY TO DEPART. I’m drunk by the overpowering scent of flowers in the many gardens, along trellises and walls, by the views of the lemon groves and the Mediterranean, dust from the antiquated stones and walkways, by the history of this place embedded in every stone and wall and the ghosts of suicides that in this particular moment are unleashed. Read More
June 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag By Varlam Shalamov Official NKVD photo from Varlam Shalamov’s 1937 arrest. For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more. 1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings. 2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there. 3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face). 4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent. 5. I realized that Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent—an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days. Read More
June 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Future Is a Struggle: On Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless By Alexandra Kleeman “I make nothing new, create nothing: I’m a sort of mad journalist,” Kathy Acker writes in 1989, on Empire of the Senseless, her fifth book from a major publisher and first venture into the realm of science fiction. At first glance, journalism seems an odd analogy for this work, an obscene and mind-bending saga set in the shadow of Reagan’s presidency and told from the alternating perspectives of Thivai, a pirate, and his intermittent lover, a half-human, half-robot woman named Abhor. But even as the novel extends into a speculative near future—where Paris has been overrun by Algerian rebels and the CIA conducts clandestine operations to turn this chaos to their strategic advantage—it remains insolently rooted in the world in which we belong, anchored by Acker’s stubborn commitment to rendering visible the sexist, racist, capitalistic, father-fucking societal ego of her time—and of our own. Kathy Acker is a muckraker in the original sense, one who dredges up the dirt and puts it on display to the delight and horror of the reading public. “Knowing much information and not feeling anything doesn’t get you anywhere,” a terrorist tells Abhor early on.“The answer to your question is that democracy doesn’t get you anywhere.” As heterodox as Acker may be in form and structure, this novel is concerned with elemental political questions: How should we navigate the nowhere of the present, and where else is there to go? Empire was written within what Acker calls a “post-cynical” period in American society, where faith in the sanctity of middle-class white domesticity had been displaced by post-Watergate disillusionment. She felt little need to further explain why, how, or in what way society was rotten, and gravitated instead toward the utopian, in the older archaic sense of the term: an elsewhere, a reality deferred. The elsewhere she crafts is equal parts Neuromancer, Story of the Eye, and Huckleberry Finn, a slurry of histories that points the way to a future, another way to be. “We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth,” Acker writes. “Empire of the Senseless is my first attempt to find a myth, a place, not the myth, the place.” Read More
June 11, 2018 Arts & Culture A Few Words to the Graduates By David Sedaris The following is taken from David Sedaris’s commencement speech at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Thank you so much for having me and for presenting me with this honorary degree. It’s not necessarily better than the one I earned by going to classes and putting myself into debt, but I’m trying to collect a stack of them before I die, so I really appreciate it. And congratulations, graduates. This is quite an accomplishment. Like most of you, I am incredibly grateful for the education I received. A good public school followed by college. I went to three in all, looking for the right fit. The first two were okay, I guess, but midway through my sophomore year, I got heavy into drugs and dropped out. Everyone said that was it—I’d made an irreparable mistake at age twenty and could never correct it. But I did. The place that I eventually graduated from, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has its qualities but is nowhere near Oberlin when it comes to academics. It might be different now, but in 1984, if you could draw Snoopy on a cocktail napkin, you were in. I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987, when I was thirty. Our commencement speaker was a conceptual artist named Vito Acconci. He’d done a lot but was best known for constructing a wooden ramp in a New York gallery. Then he hid beneath it and masturbated for several weeks without stopping. “Well you could do that!” my mother said when I explained to her who he was. “I mean, isn’t that the goal? Doing what you love and getting paid for it!” I don’t think she understood a word of the man’s commencement address. I’m not sure I did either. In preparing for today, I asked myself what he might have said that would have had an effect on my future. Read More
June 8, 2018 Arts & Culture Ode to the Dinkus By Daisy Alioto The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit … a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space —James Joyce, Ulysses Three months ago, I was a normal person. Now all I think about 24-7 is the dinkus. Did you know that dinkuses is an anagram of unkissed? I did. For the uninitiated, the dinkus is a line of three asterisks (* * *) used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars. The dinkus has none of the asterism’s linguistic association with the cosmos, but that’s why I love it. Due to its proximity to the word dingus, which means, to define one ridiculous word with another, “doodad,” dinkus likely evolved from the Dutch and German ding, meaning “thing.” To the less continental ear, dinkus sounds slightly dirty, and I can confirm that it’s brought serious academics to giggles. For me, a writer and reader, its crumbiness is its appeal. I need some crumbs to lure me down the page. This is especially true when I read online, where the chance of distraction is high. Fortunately, plenty of websites have filled their text breaks with a unique dinkus of their own. At The Awl (now defunct), text was broken up by a tiny awl. (At The Awl’s sister site The Billfold, it’s a billfold.) Over at The Outline, squiggles guide the eye from section to section like rubbery fishing lures. Hazlitt and Lit Hub employ a single asterisk aligned to the left margin. Read More
June 7, 2018 Arts & Culture The Surprising Literary History of Skin Care By Gavin Francis Evelyn De, The Love Potion, 1903. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, there’s a scene of miraculous rejuvenation accomplished by a magical cream. Margarita Nikolaevna, a thirty-year-old woman, is sitting on a bench in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens when a suspicious fang-toothed man (later revealed as an agent of Satan) presents her with a golden casket, heavy and ornate as a reliquary. He tells her to wait until exactly half past eight that evening before opening it and applying the contents to her skin. For reasons too complicated to summarize, she agrees. At 8:29 P.M., Margarita can’t wait any longer: she lifts the heavy box of gold and opens the lid. The cream is yellowish and oily and gives off the aroma of earth, marshland, and forest. She begins rubbing it into her forehead and cheeks, where it is absorbed quickly and greaselessly, producing a tingling effect over her skin. Then she looks in the mirror and drops the casket in shock. Read More