January 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Scenes from Gerald Murnane’s Golf Club By Tristan Foster The Goroke Golf Club in Victoria, Australia. Photo: Tristan Foster The Australian writer Gerald Murnane is a man of profound contradictions. A recluse who craves attention. A Luddite who uses his smartphone to google himself. An author who retired long ago, then went on to produce his richest work. He was recently treated for prostate cancer, and yet he’s still the sprightliest person in the room. The room on this occasion was a small golf club in Goroke, Murnane’s rural hometown in Victoria, Australia, not far from the state border. We had gathered from faraway places to attend “Another World in This One,” a one-day symposium on Murnane’s fiction, and to mark the publication of what is by every account his final novel, Border Districts. The club was furnished with vinyl chairs and tables with the covers tacked on. It had views of the golf course, the flags for each distant hole waving between spindly gum trees. The attendance for the symposium was capped at forty people—the club is cozy and the kitchen only able to turn out so many scones and sandwiches. Attendees included Murnane’s tireless publisher at Giramondo Publishing, Ivor Indyk; Alexis Wright, another of Australia’s major writers; academics; poets; and passionate readers. Rumors abounded that noted fan J. M. Coetzee was due to make the drive from Adelaide. That he had other engagements was perhaps for the better—his presence would have been too much for the little golf club to bear. Read More
January 25, 2018 Arts & Culture The Questionable History of the Future By Nick Montfort Many centuries ago, as history was being developed and before there was an idea of what prehistoric humans were like, societies generally imagined themselves to be of divine origin and to have always lived in a condition similar to their current state. People were most concerned not with invention, trade, discovery, or learning new things but with the natural forces that beset them, which could threaten their lives or provide for a good harvest. Nature and these forces might manifest differently at different times, of course. But it was thought that nature would stay more or less the same over the years. There was no reason the future would be different. Later, when human nature rather than the natural world became central to people’s concerns, the belief in the static nature of societies persisted, with unchanging human nature taking the place of unchanging nature. The historian and economist Robert Heilbroner cites Machiavelli, who wrote early in the sixteenth century, “Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same result.” This idea, of course, exhorts those seeking to foresee the future to look at history—but for very different reasons than we would imagine now. Reading history would not show the seeds of the current situation and help one think about how it might grow into the future. It would simply be an opportunity to look at some documentation of essentially the same stasis as that in which we currently reside, to understand people of the past who are the same as people today. Read More
January 24, 2018 Arts & Culture How French Libertines Are Reckoning with #MeToo By Lauren Elkin Henri Gervex, “Rolla” , 1878 It’s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. (When she got too mouthy, the Jacobins arrested and executed her.) Feminism here has always been articulated not as a philosophy of equality, as it has in Anglophone countries, but around a philosophy of difference. This has often resulted in essentialist ideas about women’s experiences; as the feminist journalist and activist Lauren Bastide put it recently, the universalist French feminist context “is the opposite of intersectionalist feminism. You’re never going to be able to say that being a black woman is different from being a white woman.” Still, unlike the U.S., France has actually taken steps to address inequality between the sexes. The new Secretary of State in charge of equality between men and women, Marlène Schiappa, is actively trying to implement legislation against street harassment. And in 1999, for instance, a law was passed that specified that political parties had to submit an equal number of male and female candidates for office or lose public funding in proportion to the inequality. By 2012, only two parties had even slightly approached parity: the Greens and the Communist Party. And, more recently, Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! saw 40 percent women elected, which was a record. Macron himself promised when he was elected that he would make a woman prime minister, if he found someone competent. His choice for PM? Édouard Philippe. It’s just a question of competence ladies, nothing more. Enjoy your march. Read More
January 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Donald Barthelme’s Slick City-Sophisticate Disguise By Thomas Pynchon We are sorry, but this post has been removed.
January 23, 2018 Arts & Culture How Much for That Pepe? Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction By Daniel Penny Blockchain technology could reshape the digital-art market for years to come. Digital art collection by artists from dada.nyc The first Rare Digital Art Festival, aka Rare AF, aka Rare as Fuck, was held on a cold January Saturday in the offices of Rise New York. The organizers, Kevin Trinh and Tommy Nicholas of the Rare Art Registry Exchange, had announced the event only a few weeks earlier, but by midmorning, the airy coworking space was swarming with crypto boosters and speculators, gamers, meme aficionados, artists, and collectors. This unlikely crowd (mostly young men, though I heard one audience member marvel at “all the women” present) had gathered for panel discussions, demos, an initial-coin-offering announcement, free sandwiches, and a live digital-art auction. Like many tech events, the aim of the conference was ambitious bordering on grandiose: the attendees of Rare AF believed they were witnessing history. They were certain that blockchain technology would reshape the future of digital art for years to come. All the panels shared an underlying premise: The rise of digital media has made every kind of art widely accessible, but it has also created many problems. Because people can copy and share files freely and infinitely, artists don’t receive compensation for their work. Worse, an increasingly powerful cadre of middlemen services (Amazon, Spotify, etc.) have been fracturing the media landscape while reaping almost all of the profits. Enter the blockchain, a decentralized and immutable ledger of digital transactions with the power to reintroduce scarcity and property rights to the digital-media economy. Many conference participants held strong beliefs about the superiority of a particular blockchain (Bitcoin vs. Ethereum), but for artists and collectors, the processes and results of these competing cryptocurrencies are fairly similar. An artist creates a limited-edition crypto collectible—the digital equivalent of a signed print—and exchanges it with a buyer for some cryptocurrency. The new buyer truly owns this digital object; they can keep it in their crypto wallet, show it off in a virtual gallery, or project it from a digital picture frame hung on their wall—a service offered by panelist Vladimir Vukicevic’s company Meural. Just as you can share reproductions of the Mona Lisa, someone could still copy and paste the image, but the provenance and price history of the original are accessible to all. The original of these works is identifiable and cannot be replicated, which is why they are called “provably rare.” Kieran Farr, a panelist representing a virtual-reality platform called Decentraland, summed things up to a round of applause: “Finally, authenticity has value.” Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture The Poet Upstairs By Aysegul Savas Avigdor Arikha, “Anne in Summer,” 1980 We call her Upstairs; she calls us Downstairs. From our ground-floor apartment in Paris, my husband and I can look across the courtyard to her apartment on the top floor, with its large, curved windows. “Downstairs,” she writes, “before drawing the curtain for the night, stepped out on the balcony, and saw your light on; which was good news.” Each message from her is a treasure: “When next we meet, we’ll salute each other like two lamp-posts, lighting up at the same time. Have a lovely day without rain.” She tells us often that we live in a village. She says that’s a lucky thing. She has a way of molding the mundane into harmony, of living in music. “Look at me walk,” she says, and sets off singing to the rhythm of her walking stick. “Un, deux, trois. Un, deux, trois.” She rhymes when she jokes, recites poems out of the blue, as if she had the lines flowing through her without cease. One morning, when we run into her at the Saturday market, she tells us she’s been reading the phone book and that it made her cry. “All those names,” she says. This is our neighbor, the poet Anne Atik. Read More