March 20, 2018 Arts & Culture Crossing Over By Rebecca Solnit Rebecca Solnit on transgression—in language, in the landscape, and in the art of Mona Hatoum. Mona Hatoum, Jardin public (detail), 1993, painted wrought iron, wax, and pubic hair, 32 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Mona Hatoum. Photo: Edward Woodman To transgress means to break a law or custom, to go beyond the boundaries or limits, says the dictionary, and then it says that the word traveled from Latin through French to reach English, a nomad word whose original meaning was only to step across or carry across. Borders are forever being crossed; to draw a border is to just demarcate the line across which we will carry dreams, wounds, meanings, bundles of goods, ideas, children. Even the threshold of a doorway is a liminal space between public and private, between mine and ours; even liminal means a sensory threshold, often in the sense of hovering between states rather than crossing over from one to another. Transgression is sometimes spatial, but sometimes an act is carried across rules or ideas or assumptions rather than across literal lines and spaces. We have, after all, pain thresholds and ethical boundaries. Sometimes a chair has a little triangle of pubic hair on it as though some portion of a sitter had been left behind, as a reminder that clothed people are nevertheless transporting their erogenous zones with them as they sip tea or wait for an appointment or draw up a plan, as we all do, as we pretend we don’t, as we carry on as though we did not carry over, as though our lives were not continual transgressions. Sometimes assumptions become transgressions, of at least the truth and sometimes the complexity; sometimes people walk across a landscape on which the lines we know have not yet been drawn. The Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is often described as one of the first white men to reach Texas when he and his companions landed on makeshift barges and boats made of horsehide near Houston on the Gulf Coast, after a disaster. Though the histories might as well describe that moment in 1528 as when the first black man reached Texas, since Cabeza de Vaca traveled with a Moroccan man described as negro in the Spanish narrative. That man is remembered as Estevanico, though that was not his original name, which has been lost to history. Read More
March 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Where to Score: Classified Ads from Haight-Ashbury By The Paris Review From September 1966 to February 1969, the Oracle of the City San Francisco—better known as the San Francisco Oracle—published twelve issues of poetry, mysticism, and psychedelic art. Produced in Haight-Ashbury, with contributions by Bruce Conner, Rick Griffin, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, the underground newspaper became exceedingly popular among counterculture communities. Its back-of-the-book classified section was full of sexual propositions and pleas. But it was also populated by ads from parents who begged, longingly, that their kids come home, or at least pick up the phone. In Where to Score, a pocket-size paperback coming out later this month, Jason Fulford and Jordan Stein collect the best of these classifieds and present them anew. Here is a selection. Read More
March 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Slap the Wave: Online Therapy as Performance Art By Ross Simonini Last month, I made an appointment to get “wrixled.” I knew little about the practice except that it was a new service available only online. Wrixling.com describes its product with language that is simultaneously straightforward and frustratingly opaque: it’s an “abstract therapy” that draws upon LARP (Live Action Role Playing) and attempts to “rescale” the “self.” Wrixling is a “one-on-one online participatory-psychic scrambling” and “word surgery,” which, to me, suggested that the experience would be invasive, entertaining, uncomfortable, and perhaps therapeutic. Read More
March 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Memoirs of an Ass: Part 2 By Anthony Madrid A recap for those who missed part 1 (which is available here): Second century A.D., a strange and gigantically influential Latin text was written and passed around: Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. It’s a kind of first-person picaresque romance, ’bout two hundred pages long, where a guy, “Lucius,” is just too darn curious about magic and winds up transformed into a hee-hawing, much-listening donkey for most of the book. He has various adventures, he overhears a couple dozen stories, and at the end he becomes a human being again. The book is ramjam with sneaky-pete authorial maneuvers. Apuleius teases; he tips the wink; he lets you in on the joke; he locks you out. That, and the fact that there are dirty parts, has ensured the work’s continuing vitality for eighteen hundred years—’specially since the Renaissance. I, Anthony Madrid, am obsessed with this book. What follows is a jumble of short entries, notebook-like, to help whip up interest in the thing. There are a lot of people out there in Paris Review land who would love it if they would only give it a try. Read More
March 13, 2018 Arts & Culture On Finally Reading Joseph McElroy’s Lost Magnum Opus By Adam Dalva Obsession had brought me to Joseph McElroy’s apartment building. I was vibrating from too much caffeine. I had been up late with his 1,200-page novel, Women and Men, suffering the long-forgotten nervousness of cramming for a difficult final. The elevator opened directly into his apartment—a surprise. I hadn’t prepared my facial expression. McElroy, in a purple checked shirt tucked neatly into neutral pants, greeted me cautiously. As he led me through a maze of books, I noted the strength of his voice and the way, at eighty-seven, he walked with only the faintest hint of caution. I sat in his study beneath a large printed photo of McElroy himself staring angrily down at me. For the past decade, every time I’d entered a used bookstore, it was with the hope of finally finding a copy of Women and Men. Now I was interviewing its author, something that I’d had no desire to do. My interest in the novel began with Jonathan Franzen’s “Mr. Difficult,” a takedown of William Gaddis. I wasn’t yet aware of the phenomenon of big-game hunting, the youngish critic making a case for their own fiction by taking down a writer who is either too lofty or too dead (ideally both) to punch back. Franzen’s argument relied on a binary: there was the “Status model” of evaluating novels—artistic greatness regardless of the novel’s popular success—and the “Contract model”—a friendly egalitarian compact between writer and reader. While Franzen allows that certain novels like House of Mirth can be appreciated in both modes, the categories diverge over challenging works. For a contract reader, difficulty is an impediment. I took note when he identified a status canon of “intellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers … Pynchon, DeLillo, Heller, Coover, Gaddis, Gass, Burroughs, Barth, Barthelme, Hannah, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin.” I had never heard of Joseph McElroy, whose 1987 book regularly sells for more than three hundred dollars on eBay. The one volume in the New York Public Library system is impossible to secure, there is no e-book, and I grew fascinated with the elusiveness of Women and Men. I wasn’t alone. Most online discussions of the book are tips on finding it. The novel was notorious, eleven years of labor that quickly vanished from cultural consciousness. Many books go out of print because they are unremarkable, but few acquire the cult status of Women and Men. We who hadn’t read it all had the same questions: Why was it so long? And was it good? And why, despite its failure, did it still fascinate so many? Read More
March 13, 2018 Arts & Culture Duncan Hannah’s Seventies New York By M. H. Miller Duncan Hannah in his studio and apartment in Brooklyn. Photo by David Coggins. In the last decade, a cottage industry has sprung up around wistful recollections of New York in the seventies, from memoirs authored by people who lived through it, like Richard Hell (2013’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp) and Patti Smith (Just Kids, which won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction), to novels by people too young to have been there (Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire) to television series that gleefully depict the city when it was near bankruptcy and had a harder edge (The Get Down, about the burgeoning hip-hop scene, and The Deuce, about the golden age of pornographic theaters in Times Square). Some of these works are endearing pieces of art, but all of them inevitably look back with a glimmer of sentimentality—and perhaps envy—at a time when it was still possible to live comfortably as an artist in New York without a trust fund. Twentieth-Century Boy, by the painter Duncan Hannah, a collection of the artist’s notebooks from the seventies, has none of the retroactive fondness afforded by distance. Beginning at age seventeen, Hannah meticulously documented his conservative upbringing in Minnesota (against which he rebelled with a combination of alcohol, LSD, and a part-time job as an usher at the Guthrie Theatre, where he got to live out his hero-worship of figures like Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin) through his art education at Bard College in Upstate New York and his move, in 1973, to the city to attend Parsons and try to make it as an artist. Read More