December 13, 2018 Arts & Culture The Labyrinth of Saul Steinberg By Harold Rosenberg All images © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Steinberg’s line is the line of a master penman and artist. It is also a “line”—that is, a kind of organized talk. The pen of this artist-monologuist brings into being pictures that are also words, e.g., the odd birds at a cocktail party. Or they are visualizations of things said, as in the drawings in his book The Labyrinth, where people utter flowers, strings of beads, heraldic decorations. Both because of his superb penmanship and the complex intellectual nature of his assertions, I think of Steinberg as a kind of writer, though there is only one of his kind. He has worked out an exchange between the verbal and the visual that makes possible all kinds of revelations. For instance, there is a drawing in which a triangle on one end of a scale weighs down an old, patched-up, decrepit question mark on the other. Axiom: A NEAT FORMULA OUTWEIGHS A BANGED-UP PROBLEM. To build his labyrinth, Steinberg had only to draw a line from A to B on the principle that the truth is the longest distance between two points: the result is an enormous scrawl within which the original two dots appear as the eyes of the Minotaur. As if the relations between words and objects weren’t complicated enough, Steinberg has thrust between them the illusions of the drawing paper. “There is perhaps no artist alive,” E. H. Gombrich testifies in Art and Illusion, “who knows more about the philosophy of representation.” A long straight line keeps changing its pictorial functions—first it represents a table edge, then a railroad trestle, then a laundry line, until it ends up in an abstract flourish. Steinberg is the Houdini of multiple meanings: the line with which he creates his labyrinth and entangles himself in it is also the string that leads him out of it. Read More
December 11, 2018 Arts & Culture Imagining a Free Palestine By George Abraham An ekphrasis on a fragmented nationalism. Installation view, Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006, stainless steel and neon glass tube. Photo: KhaoulaSharjah [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons. Somewhere in Tel Aviv, Israeli citizens are walking through an art exhibition called “Stolen Arab Art.” The title is not a metaphor—the show features four unattributed video art installations created by Arab artists, without the consent of those Arab artists. Here, the word Arab is a placeholder for Palestinian, but I suppose that goes without saying. In every interview, the curator (an Israeli who is not Palestinian) defends the installation as a comment against the cultural boycott of the Zionist state, claiming the exhibition is a “performative action,” hence all visitors are performers, and everyone—curators, attendees, and artists—is implicated in the theft. In a way, the curator is correct. At the center of all settler colonial projects is theft. All interactions with the settler colonial project, be they cultural or economic, normalize the existence of the aforementioned settler colonial project, which, again, is contingent upon theft by construction. The premise of the installation is a contradiction, much like the Zionist state: the curator, intending to criticize boycotts of the Zionist state, perpetuates the precise colonial theft being criticized. “Stolen Arab Art” is not an isolated phenomenon; earlier this year, an Israeli publisher released a translated collection of essays by Arab women without their consent to translate, print, or distribute the text. The publisher, Resling Books, titled the collection Huriya, which translates to “freedom” in Arabic. The contradictory metaphor is self-evident, and the trend is unsurprising in a historical sense. Within the walls of an exhibition and the pages of a book, Israelis dare to imagine works of Palestinian imagination as their own. Isn’t that how this all began? Read More
December 11, 2018 Arts & Culture But I Don’t Ever Lie: On Lucia Berlin By Rebecca Bengal LUCIA BERLIN IN ALBUQUERQUE, 1961. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence; Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. Less drag, high velocity; the story propels forward. Take this succession from the story “Strays,” set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: “Fallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.” Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Like this from “The Musical Vanity Boxes,” as Raúl, a father from Juarez, leads young “Lucha” and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: “Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.” Berlin’s first posthumous collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range; the second, Evening in Paradise, recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more: her life. Read More
December 10, 2018 Arts & Culture The Faces of Ferrante By Miranda Popkey Still from the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend In most respects, HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is merely serviceable. It’s a re-creation, competent and faithful, of the events described in the first novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The performances are convincing, the movement from scene to scene is pleasurable, the music is complementary but unobtrusive, and the set decoration is impeccable. One expects, from a production branded with the HBO logo, nothing less. And yet, in one respect, the series is in fact brilliant. Take it from this terrone: they got the faces right. My Brilliant Friend is an account, painstaking and digressive and emotionally devastating, of the friendship between Elena (Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo between the ages of six and sixteen. (The adult Lenù, now a successful writer in late middle age, narrates all four novels.) But it is also a portrait, universalizing precisely because of its attention to particulars, of small-town Southern Italy in the years after World War II, years during which economic privation and casual violence were the rule, years during which (very recently ex-) Fascists retained local power, their authority, like their comparative wealth, unquestioned. I say comparative wealth because even those who had money had little, and what they could buy with it was meager: a small convertible, a single television. My Brilliant Friend ends in the year 1960, midway through the Italian “economic miracle”—il boom—that helped modernize the then-rural South. But the effects of Northern industrialization seem to have barely trickled down to Ferrante’s Neapolitan suburb; the poverty, the miseria, is still everywhere. Sara Casani and Laura Muccino, the Italian casting directors, understand what that miseria looks like, how the body wears struggle. They know that what we call beauty is often just another marker of class. They know that if you don’t feel like you belong, you’ll never look like you do, either. And so they have populated Lenù’s neighborhood with, my god, such faces: sloppier and saggier, more wrinkled and more weathered and more crooked than many American readers will have imagined for these characters. Read More
December 7, 2018 Arts & Culture The Celestial Memory Palace By Aysegul Savas Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Great Tower of Babel, 1563 Wordsworth’s Prelude, subtitled “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” exists in many versions, written throughout half a century and revised until the poet’s death. It seems fitting that there should be so many, expanding revisions in parallel with the accumulating layers of a life. In an 1805 letter to the art patron Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth says of his greatest work that it is “a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.” During the many years that he wrote it, he did not think that he could be justified in “giving [his] own history to the world” unless he published it alongside a sober, philosophical work, The Recluse. Wordsworth spent years talking about The Recluse without ever really writing it. But the idea was always there, in his correspondence, in his descriptions of future work, and in the rest of his poetry. In 1814, he published The Excursion, which he called “a Portion of The Recluse,” outlining the rest of the unwritten work in three sections. Eighteen years later, he had made little more progress on The Recluse, but had completed the fourteen-book Prelude and was still editing it. His daughter Dorothy wrote in a letter: Mother and he work like slaves from morning to night—an arduous work—correcting a long poem, written 30 years back … and not to be published during his life, The Growth of his own Mind—the ante-chapel, as he calls it, to The Recluse. Wordsworth’s procrastination on The Recluse seems almost pathological; and as the years pass, his constant references to it appear naive, even delusional. So much so that in reading them, one begins to wonder whether the looming idea of The Recluse, which was never written, might have been the driving force for completing The Prelude. Was the blueprint of a different great work the necessary illusion that allowed him to compose a different, equally demanding one? Read More
December 5, 2018 Arts & Culture On Writerly Jealousy By Elisa Gabbert Illustration from Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century) Recently, while reading a new book of poetry, I noticed a certain signature of influence: a poem with a macabre playfulness that reminded me of “Daddy.” Plath-y!, I wrote in the margin beside it. I pulled my copy of Plath’s Collected Poems off the shelf (inscribed Merry Christmas, 1994, Mom & Dad; I would have just turned fifteen) and reread “Daddy” for the whatever-eth time. For most of my life I read “Daddy” quite literally, as a renunciation of Plath’s father: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” She all but calls him Hitler, with his “neat mustache” and “Aryan eye.” As Janet Malcolm points out in The Silent Woman, the poem “has had a mixed reception.” She quotes Leon Wieseltier in The New York Review of Books, 1976: “Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews.” Irving Howe, writing in 1973, found “something monstrous, utterly disproportionate” in the metaphor. I think of the Sharon Olds poem “The Takers,” which begins, “Hitler entered Paris the way my / sister entered my room at night.” (My friend Chris, in grad school, read these lines and said, simply, “No.”) However, in 2012, newly released FBI files on the German-born Otto Plath suggested that he may have been a Nazi sympathizer. As the Guardian reported at the time, “the files reveal that he was detained over suspected pro-German allegiance.” Unlike her critics in the twentieth century, Sylvia may have had the inside scoop on those allegiances. She may have meant to literally call him a Nazi. Read More