March 20, 2025 Document “A Threat to Mental Health”: How to Read Rocks By Brian Tucker Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, became a national sensation in the forties with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued. Public fascination with his writings subsided during the fifties, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. In about 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these “rock books.” Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called “the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.” Frustrated that the equipment needed to fully decipher the dense rock books was lost to time, Shaver undertook strategies to make at least a fraction of the books’ content clearly visible. Initially, he made drawings and paintings of images he found in the rocks, developing idiosyncratic techniques to project a slice of rock onto cardboard or a wooden plank. Shaver also produced conventional black-and-white photos using 35 mm film, often showing a cross section of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to indicate scale. Sometimes he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He attached photos to typewriter paper where he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets images, details his photo techniques, and expresses disappointment at the conspicuous lack of academic or journalistic interest in his findings. Read More
March 14, 2025 Document Dreams from the Third Reich By Charlotte Beradt J. J. Grandville, A Dream of Crime and Punishment, 1847, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Charlotte Beradt began having strange dreams after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. She was a Jewish journalist based in Berlin and, while banned from working, she began asking people about their dreams. After fleeing the country in 1939 and eventually settling in New York, she published some of these dreams in a book in 1966. Below, in a new translation from Damion Searls, are some of the dreams that she recorded. Three days after Hitler seized power, Mr. S., about sixty years old, the owner of a midsize factory, had a dream in which no one touched him physically and yet he was broken. This short dream depicted the nature and effects of totalitarian domination as numerous studies by political scientists, sociologists, and doctors would later define them, and did so more subtly and precisely than Mr. S. would ever have been able to do while awake. This was his dream: Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up. Read More
January 23, 2025 Document James Baldwin in Istanbul By Osman Can Yerebakan At the peak of his literary fame, James Baldwin yearned for seclusion. He found it in Istanbul, where he lived on and off between 1961 and 1971. Baldwin was suffering from writer’s block when he arrived in the Bosporus-divided city thirteen years after settling in Paris. Soon after, he completed Another Country, a manuscript that had long been haunting him. In Istanbul, the author found the time and inspiration for some of his career-defining works, and he later wrote about the city in an unfinished novel. He also made friends, among them Sedat Pakay, a young engineering student and amateur photographer who was twenty years his junior. The pair met through a mutual friend at a party in 1964. The younger man, then a member of his university’s photography club, offered to shadow Baldwin with his camera. Baldwin accepted. Over the next several years, Pakay accompanied Baldwin as he wandered across Istanbul, producing a series of photographs as well as an eleven-minute-long film, James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973), that document Baldwin’s time in the city. Pakay’s photographs of Baldwin are currently on view in Turkey Saved My Life: Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961–1971, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. The show was co-curated by Atesh M. Gundogdu, the director of Artspeak NYC, along with the library’s Cora Fisher and Lászlo Jakab Orsós, and it occurs in the middle of what would have been Baldwin’s one hundredth year. (He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three.) The pictures displayed narrate Baldwin’s unlikely bond with a young man from Turkey who had a discerning lens. From 1966 to 1968, Pakay lived in the United States, where he had enrolled in an M.F.A. program in photography at the Yale School of Art. During this time, he kept up a correspondence with Baldwin. Today, Pakay’s letters are in the collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The archive is a donation from Pakay’s widow, Kathy, and their son Timur. Below are six photographs from Turkey Saved My Life, which runs through March 15, 2025. Baldwin working on his novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, 1965. Read More
January 7, 2025 Document A Diagram of My Life By Gerald Murnane GERALD MURNANE WITH HIS WIFE, CATHERINE, IN BENDIGO, 1989. In his Art of Fiction interview, published in our new Winter issue, Gerald Murnane shows his interlocutor, Louis Klee, the chart he used until the mid-sixties to map out the major events and memories of his life—including his birth, James Joyce’s death, his childhood moves around the suburbs of Melbourne, the advent and return of personal crises (“nihilism,” “disaster,” “recover,” and “back to nihilism,” in one short stretch of 1960), his discovery of the writer and theologian Thomas Merton, his forays into poetry, and his courtship with the woman who would become his wife. From our interview: MURNANE Now, see this colored chart? Represented by about twenty-five colored lines is a diagram of my life. Gray is for vagueness. Everything, for me, has to be put in diagram or spatial form. The chart is a means of remembering. “88 River Street South,” that’s my address. Now, there’s when I met my wife. I knew her at teachers’ college a bit. We weren’t interested in each other then. But I met her again at the start of ’64. “C.L. 1”—that means the first time we went out together, in the middle of ’64. See there? INTERVIEWER Yep. MURNANE Right. And then all these lines are events in our courtship. And our courtship was a bit rocky. We separated at one time—it was her choice. And then, “Engagement to C.M.L.” All of them from then on are “C.M.L.” “At Brunswick with C.M.L.” “Marriage to C.M.L.”—then I abandoned the chart. INTERVIEWER Why is that? MURNANE Let’s say I’d struggled, as a person, to find out what the whole thing was about, and then I found somebody I was able to talk to, found someone to listen to me. I thought my troubles were all over. A friend of the Review, Matt Benjamin, made the six-hour drive from Melbourne to Goroke, the rural town in Australia’s West Wimmera plains where Murnane lives, to scan the pages below. Read More
November 21, 2024 Document Sixth and Seventh Sleepers: Graziella Rampacci and Françoise Jourdan-Gassin By Sophie Calle In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited twenty-seven friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. She photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversation once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits, and dreams. The following text is Calle’s narrative report of her sixth and seventh guests’ stay, and is the fourth and final in a series of excerpts from the project to be published this week on the Daily. Previous installments: “Third Sleeper,” “Fourth Sleeper,” and “Fifth Sleeper.” I do not know Graziella Rampacci. Françoise Jourdan-Gassin gave me her telephone number. She immediately agrees to sleep without asking for any more details. She will come Tuesday, April 3, from midnight to 8 A.M. I know Françoise Jourdan-Gassin. She had declined to participate. She simply came to accompany Graziella Rampacci whom she’d recommended I invite. She decides at the last minute to share the night with her friend. Tuesday, April 3, at midnight, they take over for Gérard Maillet. Françoise says to Graziella, “What if I slept with you?” G: Oh! That would be wonderful! F: Are you inviting me? G: I’m inviting you. This will be my first time sleeping with you. Bizarre, considering how long we’ve known each other. F: To know someone for eight years and never sleep together. G: I’ve wanted to for so long, Françoise. Then we leave the bedroom. They wait for Gérard to come out, dressed in my father’s robe, before they get settled. They change the sheets. Graziella brought red pajamas with a jabot collar. I serve them a glass of champagne. I leave. Read More
November 20, 2024 Document Fifth Sleeper: Gérard Maillet By Sophie Calle In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited twenty-seven friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. She photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversation once the door closed. She served each a meal and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits, and dreams. The following text is Calle’s narrative report of her fifth guest’s stay, and is the third in a series of four excerpts from the project to be published this week on the Daily. Earlier installments: “Third Sleeper” and “Fourth Sleeper.” I barely know him. We saw each other, one time, several years ago now, at the home of a mutual friend. That friend told him about my idea. Gérard Maillet calls me to offer his services. He wants to be paid—a symbolic sum. He says he’s unemployed, that any time works for him. He’ll sleep Monday, April 2, from 5 P.M. to midnight. Read More