March 22, 2017 Arts & Culture The Little Peach By Edmund Gordon Angela Carter’s travels in America. In the U.S., Angela Carter was astonished to find so much advertising for burgers. Edmund Gordon will discuss his book The Invention of Angela Carter, from which the below is excerpted, tonight at McNally Jackson with Christian Lorentzen. Angela Carter and her husband, Paul, flew to New York on July 29, 1969. They arrived in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, when the city was fractious and twitchy in the midsummer heat. A few weeks earlier, the first American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam (an outcome Angela thought was “in human terms … the single most glorious event since the abolition of slavery”), but in August the headlines were dominated by gun battles between Black Panthers and police, the bombing of the Marine Midland building on Broadway by a radical left-wing activist, and the gruesome murders perpetrated by the Manson family in Los Angeles and the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco. Angela felt that the status quo “couldn’t hold on much longer. The war had been brought home.” She found Manhattan “a very, very strange and disturbing and unpleasant and violent and terrifying place … The number of people who offered to do me violence was extraordinary.” The trip was the basis for the Expressionist portrait of New York in her novel The Passion of New Eve—it’s depicted as a society in the last stages of moral and economic collapse—which she described as “only a very slightly exaggerated picture, not of how it was in New York but of how it felt that summer.” She met one of the models for Tristessa—the novel’s transvestite leading lady—in Max’s Kansas City, the legendary nightclub in the East Village where the house band was the Velvet Underground,and the clientele was composed largely of artists, writers and musicians, including such luminaries as Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Patti Smith. Angela and Paul spent three days in the city before traveling by Greyhound bus through Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Angela wrote to her friend Carole Roffe: Read More
March 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Muscle, Smoke, Mirrors By Oliver Lee Bateman What self-truths are bodybuilders hiding under all that muscle? A scrawny teenage boy sat on the beach with a girl. They were friends, but he wanted more: to hold her hand, to go steady. Then a bully, 220 pounds of brawny masculinity, appeared on the scene. He behaved as any toxic alpha male would: he walked past them and kicked sand in their faces. The boy stood to challenge him, but he grabbed the boy’s thin forearm and squeezed. “I’d smash your face … only you’re so skinny, you might dry up and blow away,” the bully said. By now, the girl had sidled up to the bully, and the boy was shaking with anger. “Oh, don’t let it bother you, little boy,” she told him, her voice dripping with contempt. The chastened boy went home, gambled a stamp on a free pamphlet about isometric exercise, and waited. After the pamphlet arrived, he performed the exercises, each push-up and handstand bringing him closer to precious manhood. Read More
March 16, 2017 Arts & Culture The Library at Grey Gardens By Lesley M.M. Blume Photo: Lesley M. M. Blume A few years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that Grey Gardens was up for rent, I thought it had to be a bizarre joke: What kind of a sick twist would pay to spend time in the notorious cat-and-rot-scented squalor so memorably depicted in the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens? I knew Jackie O had paid to rehabilitate the place after Long Island authorities had nearly condemned it and ousted its inhabitants, Jackie’s aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and cousin Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie). After that embarrassment-driven overhaul, the place seemed briefly, passably pâté-worthy again—but still, it would have to be classified as “for niche tastes only.” It turned out Grey Gardens had long since been renovated back into a glistening private playground for the intelligentsia A-list. (My ignorance of this fact confirmed me as an intelligentsia C-lister, at best.) After the demise of Big Edie, the Washington journalist and social doyenne Sally Quinn bought the house with her husband, Ben Bradlee, the Watergate-era executive editor at the Washington Post. The capital’s quintessential power couple paid a mere $225,000 for the house and grounds, and lovingly restored the estate to its 1930s glory; there, amid the rose bushes and chintz chaise lounges, they entertained the gods and goddesses of the film and political worlds. More recently, they offered to share Grey Gardens by renting it to those willing to pay $150,000 a month for the privilege. (It’s now on the market for nearly $20 million.) Read More
March 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Null und Eins: Aphorisms By Hans Abendroth Hans Abendroth was the eldest of three children born to an upper-middle class family in Frankfurt in 1909. Against the wishes of his parents, who hoped he would go into law, he studied classical philology at the University of Freiburg. There he was among the students of Martin Heidegger, a famous cohort that included Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, and Hans Jonas. Written under Heidegger’s supervision, Abendroth’s “Habilitation Thesis,” which analyzed the developing conception of the psyche in the literature and philosophy of classical and Hellenistic Greece, is regarded as a seminal document in the field. In 1935, Abendroth moved to Berlin, where, as a member of a research group at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he was responsible for translating and preparing a German edition of the Akhmim Codex, a recently discovered Gnostic manuscript dating to the fifth century A.D. Until his early retirement in 1949, he taught courses on Greek philosophy, early Christian theology, and Hellenistic literature at the University of Berlin. Read More
March 9, 2017 Arts & Culture At the New York Antiquarian Book Fair By Sarah Funke Butler A swatch of midcentury wallpaper inspired by Romeo and Juliet, available at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair (Booth E17: Honey and Wax, New York; $250). The Park Avenue Armory is a vast preserve of space and air on a cramped island. I can imagine no better place for the Fifty-Seventh New York Antiquarian Book Fair of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). Open tonight and through the weekend, it boasts more than two hundred dealers, tens of thousands of items, and combined hundreds of years of experience and scholarship. More important, it offers oxygen to a reading public choking on alternative facts—among the most insidious of which, often repeated in print, is that print is dead. This year’s fair illuminates a shift toward literary properties that live and breathe—manuscripts, letters, and original material, much of it defined by context. This is the stuff through which authors speak to us as they did to their publics and to one another; today their words sting in much the same way and in many of the same places. Imagine rare-book dealers as hunter-gatherers of primary source material, heading out with spears and sacks, returning with troves that speak to our present political moment as much as they do to the past. Book collecting has grown from a traditional quest for bibliographic completeness—such that one collection could be more or less the same as another—into a hybrid of subjective, curated material contributing to larger questions: What was happening in the life Sylvia Plath while she wrote the Ariel poems? Why did Hemingway answer a call to social justice when he had seemingly sold out to Esquire? How real is Moby-Dick? When Duke Ellington wrote Black, Brown, and Beige, was he making a patriotic statement? Below, some highlights from the fair. Read More
March 8, 2017 Arts & Culture Women Hold Up Half the Sky By Nicole Rudick See Red Women’s Workshop, Women’s Day March (detail), 1975. A calendar for 1977 by the British art collective See Red Women’s Workshop shows the month of February as a chutes-and-ladders-type “game for working women.” Wealthy daddies and husbands can help the player swiftly advance, but the game’s hazards are many: “Careers officer suggests domestic science,” “Trouble finding nursery—needs part-time work,” “Shopping in lunch hour, housework in evening—exhausted.” Even the end of the game is booby-trapped: “Over 40, promotion given to younger man.” The other months in the calendar spin out the game’s thematic pitfalls: racism, sexual orientation, housework drudgery, social-service cuts. August exhorts women of different ethnicities to unite and organize against the National Front. November excoriates the discomfort inherent in beauty regimens—girdles, waxing, heels. September revises a child’s primer so that Jane thinks, “Stuff this! It’s about time I got myself out these sexist books and started giving girls an example of all the other things we can do!” Jane’s purposeful finger to the patriarchy embodies the aim of See Red. In 1974, a group of women answered an ad calling for those in the visual arts to gather to help promote the women’s liberation movement and counter the prevailing negative images of women in advertising and the media. Like many women at the time, the members of See Red were disillusioned with the Left; the story they relate is an old one: “We found ourselves marginalized within these campaigns and were expected to stay in the background, keep quiet and make the tea.” The members worked collectively and non-hierarchically: from idea to concept to design to production, decisions and process were undertaken as a group. Notably, the new book See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974–1990 lists no authors in the front matter, and the essay detailing the group’s history is written in the first-person plural. Read More