September 12, 2018 Arts & Culture James Joyce’s Baby Talk (and Swift’s and Lear’s) By Anthony Madrid I don’t know that much about what babies actually say. I don’t have any. The ones I’ve seen in people’s apartments didn’t say anything. In one of my poems, I call babies “the crying people.” Heard plenty of that. The ones who said things were a bit older. The tiny ones gurgle. It doesn’t matter. When we talk about baby talk, we’re almost never talking about what comes out of the mouths of infants. We’re talking about the stuff we do that bears an important resemblance to what comes out of the mouths of infants. It’s all about (a) saying a lot more than you’re saying and (b) cute-ing it up. Everybody remembers the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Read More
September 11, 2018 Arts & Culture The Post-9/11 Generation By Daniel Torday Lights at the 9/11 memorial. I’ve been teaching college students for the past decade or so, and every year, I pose the same question to my freshmen: Where were you on September 11, 2001? My first year of teaching a freshman writing seminar, the question led to a disarming conversation about how their eighth-grade teachers handled the news. Students from Manhattan and Brooklyn had parents who’d worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. They recounted with visceral detail how it felt not to know until late that day if their parents were okay. The eternity of waiting. Five years later, the discussion was different. Now freshmen described a glimpse of a memory of a third-grade teacher attempting to figure out how to talk as events unfolded. If pushed, they had to admit they didn’t know if they remembered watching news footage of the attacks that day or if their memory was of seeing that footage over and over years later. One student was certain her third-grade teacher made a point of not showing them the smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center towers. “I was sure I saw it that day,” another student said, “but now that we’re talking about it, I honestly don’t know.” When I recounted my own story of watching the events unfold from Brooklyn and then Manhattan that day, as I found myself doing each fall, they listened more intently than past students had. I was recounting a history they didn’t wholly remember. Last year, when I asked the question, I found myself a bit in shock at the response. I hadn’t prepared myself for the answer. Last year’s freshmen were not yet a year old on September 11, 2001. They knew of it only as a number or from reading about it. To them, it was history. Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Writers’ Cribs By Jane Mount Roald Dahl When Roald Dahl and his family were living in Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK, he realized his kids were so noisy that he needed his own writing space. After seeing Dylan Thomas’s shed in Wales, he built a shed of his own in his garden. Dahl wrote all his major works here, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. Dahl collected lots of photos, objects, and memorabilia, including part of his own hip bone. Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction By Amanda DeMarco Beijing. “I’m so tired of the future.” It was late in the day at the Tsinghua University Art Museum, and I was getting whiny. My boyfriend and an acquaintance thumbed through some catalogues near the exit and managed to ignore me. We had reached the end of an exhibition of architectural models from the firm Foster + Partners: London’s Gherkin, a cruise-ship terminal, sundry airports. I’m a Berliner, and the most dizzying display was a table of alternate models for the Reichstag dome, a dozen potential realities in balsa and cardboard. In the final room, an animated video envisioned some sort of building project in space—on Mars, maybe?—but I couldn’t really muster the energy to watch it. It’s been said that the past is a foreign country, and I’ve come to believe that the future is too. I’d just never been so immersed in it before. In Beijing this summer, I read about two thousand pages of work by Cixin Liu, possibly the world’s most important living science-fiction author and certainly among humanity’s most imaginative prognosticators. (A recent London Review of Books piece called his Three-Body trilogy, published in English in 2016, “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”) Like life in Beijing, the experience was magnificent and exhausting and thrilling and flawed. Science fiction might be the genre best suited to Chinese society today; the breakneck pace of change becomes a constant, and to live in the present is to anticipate what is to come. When we told our acquaintance that we’d like to return next summer, she responded as many of our Chinese friends did: “You might not recognize it here.” Living at this pace requires flexibility and ingenuity; you are making up the story of the future as you go along. Everything, the first time we do it, is a fiction. The surety of truth comes only with repetition and belongs to things we know from the past. But the past also becomes rapidly unfamiliar once we’re not repeating its methods—another friend, when we told him that we didn’t have Chinese bank accounts and therefore couldn’t use our phones to pay for purchases or order takeout, looked at us with fascinated pity, murmuring, “It’s like you’re living some sort of social experiment!” Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: Ugly Design By Katy Kelleher This is the second of a three-part series on the aesthetics of ugliness. You can read the first installment, on ugly art, here. Photos: Ugly Design. I covet a piece of technology that never existed and likely never will. I can’t stop thinking about it. I covet the seashell e-reader from the 2014 film It Follows. The movie is one of my all-time favorites because it so fluidly combines three of my main interests: awkward sex, sudden death, and timeless design. Typically, when someone calls a car or a handbag or a piece of furnishing “timeless,” they mean it will look just as classic and classy in a few decades as it does today. This is not what I mean about It Follows. Here, the overall look is timeless in that it is outside time. The cars are ugly and retro—low-riding, boxy boats that patrol the middle-class suburbs, emitting low, guttural growls. The houses are ugly, too, with brick lower levels topped by vinyl-sided second stories with a smattering of carelessly placed rectangular windows. This is intentional, according to the film’s director, David Robert Mitchell. In an interview with Paste magazine, he says it was “very much part of the plan” to “make the film exist outside of time in a way that it resembles a dream or a nightmare.” This includes introducing “anachronistic production design elements,” including things from various eras and “things that don’t quite exist” but could, somewhere, in some alternate universe or timeline. Read More
September 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Prevalence of Ritual: On Romare Bearden’s Projections By Mary Schmidt Campbell Romare Bearden in his Long Island City studio with the photograph of his great-grandparents Henry and Rosa Kennedy on their porch around 1920 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo: Frank Stewart (1980) On October 6, 1964, at the height of the American civil rights movement, fifty-three-year-old Romare Bearden, a mature artist with a moderately successful career as a painter behind him, debuted nearly two dozen billboard-size, black-and-white, photographic enlargements of collages—Projections, he called them. Instead of the large abstract work he had been painting up to then, he filled his canvases with the faces of black people. Their expressions, unflinching and intense, dominated crowded city streets, southern cotton fields, and ecstatic rituals. Spontaneous passions seemed to erupt from these works, filling the walls of Cordier-Ekstrom, Bearden’s gallery on the Upper East Side of New York. Some called his creations a sign of the turbulent times: the 1950s Montgomery bus boycott and Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling; 1960s lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, the March on Washington, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the year of Projections. A surge of civil rights activism swept the country, compelling an urgent need for change. Figures in Bearden’s Projections embody that urgency, confronting their viewers like characters in a play caught in mid-action. At first glance the figures in Projections look ordinary, as if the artist were merely reporting a news event, except faces are fractured and dislocated, their hands swollen to twice their normal size, bodies pieced together from startling juxtapositions, including, as one commentator notes, “parts of African masks, animal eyes, marbles, corn and mossy vegetation.” “Grotesque” might be too harsh a word to describe some of the figures in the Projections. Yet they evoke a history of distortions of black life even as they also re-envision that life. Bearden’s friend Ralph Ellison used the word “disturbing” to describe the figures in the work; their stridency, he noted, was completely out of character for an artist who, until that exhibition, was not known for representations of race. Why did Bearden so emphatically and comprehensively change the style and subject matter of his art? Read More