October 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Alec Soth’s Mississippi Dreamers in a Nightmare America By Rebecca Bengal Alec Soth, Joshua, Angola State Prison, Louisiana. All photos from Sleeping by the Mississippi. Courtesy the artist and MACK. The photographs in Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, which have just been published in a new edition, contain a freedom-seeking, derelict melancholy: deceptively clean, silver early-morning surfaces, a mattress floating in a swampy puddle, a casually arranged set of rescued furniture resembling a wall-less living room in some forlorn woods, a family of bikers grieving underneath a canopy of Spanish moss, weeds growing wild through the springs of an abandoned bed frame. When the book was originally published, in 2004, I was drawn to the vagrancy of its title, the down-by-the-river evocation of it. It took me another minute to consciously realize that “sleeping” pointed naturally to dreaming. Its portraits and scenes formed a larger story about individual longing; the way we impress upon our tiny worlds; the way we project our desires and the idealized pictures of ourselves onto our walls and out into our yards and onto the symbolic river. The third image in the book depicts a drooping, loosely made, ordinary-seeming bed left on a porch—outside, where, we all know, even deeper, stranger dreams happen. Read More
October 25, 2017 Arts & Culture Mark Twain’s Get-Rich-Quick Schemes By Alan Pell Crawford From the cover of How Not to Get Rich. Like most of us, Mark Twain hated writing checks to other people. But there were times when he happily paid out large sums. Issuing a check for $200,000 drawn on the United States Bank of New York on February 27, 1886, for example, made him almost giddy. The check was made out to Julia Dent Grant, the widow of Ulysses S. Grant, the former president of the United States and commanding general of the Union Army, who had died of cancer the summer before, just after completing his remembrances of the Civil War. That payment represented the first profits from sales of volume one of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published only a few months earlier by Charles L. Webster and Company, a start-up publishing house Twain had established two years before. He had installed a nephew, Charles “Charley” Webster, as its business manager. Webster got his name on the letterhead and a salary, but that’s about all he got out of the position, besides aggravation. Twain made all the business and financial decisions, except when he didn’t feel like it. Twain would have been pleased to have published Grant’s memoir even if it had not broken all American publishing records for sheer profitability. Just landing the contract had required Twain to persuade General Grant to break a handshake deal with another publisher. The other publisher had offered Grant a 10 percent royalty. Twain countered by offering a royalty share unheard of then, or since: 75 percent. The other publisher offered no advance against royalties. Twain said he would pay $25,000 upfront. Read More
October 25, 2017 Arts & Culture On Learning to Understand (and Love) British Culture By Jennifer Schaffer It was the kind of story that enchants me, it seems so unlikely, and so often happens. —Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year The night I met my husband, I should have been in Paris. I had made the necessary plans. But you know how these things happen: a misread date in the calendar, the late realization of a prior commitment—in this case, a ball with a ticket too expensive to write off as a loss, and of course I know how ridiculous that sounds. I spent the week prior trying to sell my spot; no one would have it. So Paris was cancelled—delayed, I thought—and we met, and all the rest, and now I live in England, a country I thought I knew well, but which, it turns out, is as foreign to me as Bolivia or Slovenia or Mars. When I decided to move here three years ago, I had assumed London would be much the same as New York, perhaps just slightly better-read and more anaemic. But when I arrived, I found that comparing New York to London is like comparing a corset to a straitjacket. England and America may be kin, but they are not kindred spirits. I felt so dislocated that there were days I wished we didn’t even have language in common. Then I could track my progress through Duolingo and assign the shortcomings of my assimilation to a trick of grammar, instead of what I knew was to blame: my stubborn, unmistakeable, unfailing Americanness, which hung over every interaction like a bold neon diner sign. Read More
October 18, 2017 Arts & Culture When Oscar Wilde Colluded with the Russians By Jennifer Wilson Oscar Wilde In 1880, Oscar Wilde made the uneventful decision to write a play about Russian terrorism. I say it was uneventful because the play (his first), Vera; or the Nihilists, appeared amid a deluge of other crime thrillers, adventure tales, and even romance novels about Russian nihilists and their terror plots. The Vera of Wilde’s play was inspired by the real-life figure of Vera Zasulich, whose attempted assassination in 1878 of the governor of Saint Petersburg made her an international lightening rod, especially in England where the public feared Russian nihilists might stoke domestic tensions and inspire Irish separatists. In many ways, fears of Russian interference unfolded in Victorian Britain in a manner not unlike what we see today. As was the case in Wilde’s era, the specter of an external threat had a way of unmasking internal strife. English publishers were eager for anything that satisfied the public’s demand for terrorist intrigue, especially when seen through the lens of the Russian outside agitator. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 short story, “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez,” Sherlock Holmes solves a murder involving fugitive Russian nihilists. Henry James’s 1885 novel, The Princess Casamassima, follows a London bookbinder named Hyacinth who becomes involved in a terrorist plot; the novel was James’s homage to Ivan Turgenev’s novel about Russian nihilism, Virgin Soil (1877). These “dynamite romances” (as they were called) frequently starred Russian femmes fatales who enticed innocent, unsuspecting British men into the dark underworld of nihilist conspiracy and terrorism. For instance, in George Alfred Henty’s adventure novel Condemned as a Nihilist (1892), the protagonist, a young man named Godfrey Bullen, is seduced by an agent named Katia into taking part in a plot to secure the escape of a revolutionary leader. After unintentionally becoming implicated in the conspiracy, Godfrey is exiled to Siberia … of course. Read More
October 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Duchamp’s Last Riddle By Jillian Steinhauer Serkan Ozkaya, We Will Wait, 2017, installation view. Photo: Brett Beyer and Lal Bahcecioglu By now, the story has become a legend: in 1917, artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, signed it with a pseudonym, and submitted it for an exhibition put on by the Society of Independent Artists—who rejected it. Fountain, as he winkingly titled the urinal, was one of his ready-mades: a manufactured object that he deemed artworks in an effort to throw off the yoke of what he called “retinal art” in favor of a more conceptual and cerebral one. Duchamp was good at gestures. Just six years after the Fountain controversy, he announced he was quitting the art world and would devote the rest of his life to his other passion, chess. Most people believed he had. But when he died in 1968, at the age of eighty-one, his grandest gesture was revealed: Duchamp had been constructing an artwork in secret for twenty years. He left it behind in his studio on Manhattan’s East Eleventh Street—a mysterious, life-size tableau. It featured a realist sculpture of a naked woman lying on a bed of twigs and leaves with her legs spread open. She could have been dead or unconscious, except that her left arm held aloft a gas lamp, behind which glowed a landscape of colorful trees and a waterfall. The uncanny scene was visible through a cutout in what seemed to be a brick wall, which itself was fronted by an old wooden door with two peepholes in it. Looking through the peepholes was—and still is—the only way to see the tableau. Read More
October 17, 2017 Arts & Culture Happy Accidents By Eileen Myles On the pleasures of stumbling upon books in the wrong places. Jean Stafford, in 1945. I found Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion at a thrift in Marfa. I thought, I ought to read some Western fiction, you know? It just seemed like, The Mountain Lion—who could be interested in that? I almost bought it as a joke. I don’t like reading logically. I love having a library of lots of odd books around me, and whenever I’m staying somewhere for a while, I buy a ton of books; I like to reproduce a kind of mini used-bookstore experience wherever I am. So I picked this book up on a whim. Right away, I could see what a fine stylist she was, though there were so many things that were of the period, including amazing racism, just casual racism. But as the book proceeded I began to see a doubleness there—Stafford’s speaking truthfully about her era without being simply of it. I started to realize that this is an astonishing writer. Read More