April 18, 2017 On the Shelf The Art of the Lobotomy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yikes. Happy National Lobotomy Day! Take a moment to reflect on the pioneers of this innovative, deeply disturbing procedure, which proudly lives on in our nightmares, where it continues to stain the reputation of psychiatry. Clyde Haberman recalls one Dr. Walter J. Freeman, who helped popularize everyone’s favorite brutally efficient surgery in the mid-twentieth century. (He even gave a lobotomy to a Kennedy once.) Haberman writes, “Freeman, who died in 1972, presided over an estimated 3,500 lobotomies from 1936 to 1967. Early on, the actual cutting was done by his neurosurgeon partner, Dr. James W. Watts. He sawed two holes in the skull and, with a device called a leucotome, lopped off cells in the brain’s frontal lobes. The partnership dissolved a decade later when Dr. Freeman embraced a procedure called a transorbital lobotomy. It was not for the squeamish. Dr. Freeman would insert a tool resembling an ice pick beneath each eyelid, hammer it into the patient’s brain through the eye socket, and maneuver it to cut away frontal lobe cells believed to be trouble spots … Dr. Freeman set out on his own, performing hundreds upon hundreds of what, unsurprisingly, came to be known as ice pick lobotomies. He delighted in a craft that critics deemed reckless. Part showman, he even barnstormed the country. In one twelve-day period, he operated on 225 people during a swing through West Virginia.” Doreen St. Félix profiles Kara Walker, whose 2014 work A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, “a chimera of unvarnished American desires,” was the largest piece of public art ever to appear in New York City. Now Walker has her sights on something new, St. Félix writes: “It’s been nearly three years since the Sphinx, and Walker has spent the time interrogating what it means to make monumental and political art—representational or abstract—on the terrain, sites, and buildings in which the lives of black people have been compromised in some way. That is, how to exhume the traumas and delights of an environment rather than fabricating scenes out of black paper—and how to guide the problem of how people look. ‘I am still wrestling with my relationship to what my art might do in the public space,’ she says. ‘How I can control it’ … She sometimes refers to herself as a ‘Negress of noteworthy talent,’ a reference to the slave girl-child character Hilton Als once identified as the ‘saint figure’ of her compositions. She looks to the languid narrators of Southern novels like Gone with the Wind for the flamboyance and piquancy of her drawings. To Walker, art is description, not advertisement.” Read More
April 17, 2017 On the Shelf Join Me in Polar Paradise, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring William Bradford, An Arctic Summer: Boring though the Pack in Melville Bay, 1871. My fantasies of the Arctic derive from the backsides of kids’ cereal boxes: I want colonies of penguins in sleek jumpsuits navigating a labyrinth of ice luges and dancing on geysers of anthropomorphic frost. This, as Kathryn Schulz points out, is not so far off from the contemporary ideal of polar life: we want “a faraway frozen land unspoiled by humankind.” But in the nineteenth century, Schulz writes, the Arctic gripped the national imagination for just the opposite reason; explorers wanted to discover a place that was warm and hospitable to human civilization. She writes, “An ancient myth had mutated into a serious scientific hypothesis: the theory of the open polar sea. The most ardent supporters of that theory believed in a kind of Nordic El Dorado. Beyond the eightieth parallel, they held, the ocean was not merely ice-free but actually warm, leading to a kind of tropical paradise—possibly complete with a lost civilization—tucked away at the top of the planet … It is difficult, these days, to appreciate just how deeply everyday citizens of the Victorian era were absorbed in Arctic arcana, how central the otherwise remote poles came to seem. Nineteenth-century Britons sang polar-themed songs, attended polar-themed dinner parties, and flocked to re-creations of polar expeditions staged in the temperate bowers of Vauxhall. And, as Henry Morley observed, they read every polar-themed story they could find.” Marshall Berman, the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, fused his Marxism to a freewheeling cultural criticism. A new collection of his essays, Modernism in the Streets, finds him at odds with most of the leftists of his day, Max Holleran writes: “In many of these pieces, his thoughts on freedom, alienation, and community are filtered through an exuberant appreciation of culture, from William Blake to Cyndi Lauper. To make a lasting impact, he believed, the left had to combine the wisdom of Das Kapital with an all-out attempt to recapture American culture through music, art, and poetry … Berman was a philosophy professor in the image of Allen Ginsberg rather than Lionel Trilling. He reveled in Cyndi Lauper at a time when most people in his circle were decrying the depoliticization of mainstream music. For Berman, pop animated debates over values for a large audience, even if the artists were not expressly political.” Read More
April 14, 2017 On the Shelf Talking Is Overrated, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Talking has never done much for people. A speech act is a lot of hooey, if you ask me. Singing—that’s where the action is. It’s got all the expressiveness of language, without all that language. In her interview with Ben Lerner, the artist Steffani Jemison discusses—among other things—her interest in musical systems as a potential form of communication, especially among marginalized cultures: “It began with my interest in the work of a nineteenth-century composer named François Sudre who developed Solresol, an artificial universal language designed at a time when individual nation-states were consolidating in Europe. Sudre envisioned ‘speaking’ through the seven pitches of the diatonic scale, or the syllables assigned to those pitches in the solfège singing system, or really any system with seven units … A pre-Esperanto musical Esperanto. Every word is a combination of pitches. So a word might be (sings) do-re, which means ‘you.’ Or it might be [she sings] do-mi-sol-re, which means ‘power.’ Each melody indicates a different word. The symmetrical reversal of the melody has the opposite meaning. So re-sol-mi-do means ‘the opposite of power,’ however one might understand that. Of course, artificial languages don’t work, but I’m interested in why they recur at two extremes: first, in utopian visions of logical, frictionless communication (like Solresol); second, in completely opaque private languages like the kind I invented to write in my diary when I was a kid. Black Americans have a long history of creating and sustaining private and culturally specific languages and codes.” It’s important to sample the cuisines of other nations, especially when those cuisines are mass-produced and cheaply imported as part of the inexorable march of global capital. To that end, Talia Lavin has some great news: Russia’s best fast-food chain has arrived in America. She writes, “Teremok, a low-key purveyor of Russian staples, is almost comically ubiquitous in Moscow; a map of its locations shows a city Dalmatian-spotted with kiosks and restaurants, all boasting the company’s signature red nesting-doll logo … The two New York branches—in Union Square and Chelsea—are the chain’s first forays outside Russia, and are the result of a process years in the making. Why America? In an interview with the Russian magazine Forum Daily, the chain’s founder, Mikhail Goncharov, had a simple answer: ‘It’s the motherland of fast food’ … Buckwheat groats—known in Russia, where they are omnipresent, as grechnevaya kasha—have been repackaged as a ‘superfood’; the familiar Russian beet is touted for its vitamins.” Read More
April 13, 2017 On the Shelf If You Must Spy, Do It Silkily, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Emily Hahn. Rarely does a piece of writing combine my two all-time favorite interests: midcentury cryptography and secret silk squares. Today there’s such a piece. It’s about Emily Hahn, who was once, as Taras Grescoe writes, “one of America’s most widely read, and notorious, literary adventurers.” Hahn had an affair with a Chinese aristocrat; she picked up an opium habit, because why not; she held role-playing parties in her apartment and could often be found puffing cigars. And, as Grescoe reveals, the U.S. government once suspected she was a spy: “In a file in Hahn’s papers at the Lilly Library, in Bloomington, Indiana, I’d found a square of white silk, covered from edge to edge with typewritten names, cryptic messages, and several lines of Japanese poetry. The file also contained letters, on F.B.I. stationery, indicating that customs agents had discovered the silk square sewn into a sleeve of her daughter’s dress. Hahn, suspected of spying for the Japanese, was detained and interrogated for several hours. The silk cloth was sent to Washington to be examined for coded messages. In the files, I found a letter from the Treasury Department, sent four months later, acknowledging its return. But I couldn’t be certain what, if anything, the cryptographers had discovered. I was hoping [Hahn’s daughter Carola] Vecchio could explain at least some of the messages to me.” Our editor, Lorin Stein, interviews Richard Price about the role Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn played in his genesis as a writer. Price first read the novel when he was seventeen, on an interminable bus ride to Ithaca: “I’ve always been attracted to what I guess would be loosely called social realism. Sort of urban oriented, cement and working-class and squalling babies … I always found it a little grim. It felt not so much like a novel to take you away but a novel to convince you of a certain point of view about social justice. And I always found that a little leaden. But I liked the subjects. And when I had read Last Exit to Brooklyn as a kid, and specifically the first chapter, ‘Another Day Another Dollar,’ it was like he found a way to write about the same things but in almost incantatory bebop way. He was part of that scene in the late fifties, early sixties where jazz influenced a lot of writers. He had a lyricism to the work … I just felt like, If I’m gonna write about this, if this is the subject that draws me, I wanna have rhythm. I wanna have a little Selby bebop in the way I write.” Read More
April 12, 2017 On the Shelf That’s One Uncomfortable Switch-Hitter, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Topps trading card from the sixties. Pity the switch-hitter, baseball’s ambidextrous magician, for he is divided against himself. Sure, he can hit right-handed, he can hit left-handed—he seems, on the face of it, a living testament to the falseness of binaries—but those gifts are taxing to the soul. What I’m trying to say is, it’s really, really hard to be a switch-hitter. Sam Anderson, reading the memoir of the Atlanta Braves’ third baseman Chipper Jones, finds it unexpectedly wise: “Switch-hitting requires constant struggle and discipline. The brain always wants to default to the familiar … So much of what is worthwhile requires us to choose discomfort: to learn a foreign language, speak to a stranger, resist the potato chips, start a difficult conversation with someone we love. Eking out even the smallest progress means repeatedly forcing ourselves to risk failure, disappointment, and humiliation. And so the sports memoir transforms into an accidental self-help manual: Living, like switch-hitting or flossing or answering our email, is a decision that we have to make over and over again.” Selin Thomas moved to gentrifying Harlem with a “kind of guilt”—and she discovered from a ship’s manifest that her father’s grandparents, free blacks, had arrived to the same neighborhood more than a century earlier, a distance that haunts her and speaks to Harlem’s vexed and singular history: “Their nearest relative and friend in the U.S. is listed, an Afro-Caribbean man called Percy Edmead. The manifest shows they stayed with him, in a brownstone at 138 West 131st Street, ten blocks from my own apartment … In these square blocks are a fogged-up, choked-up pluralism and a potential born of the irony of the black American existence, both the resentment of the land of one’s birth and the need to identify with it. That—a split constitution—is the conflict within any descendant of America’s sordid oppression, but in Harlem this fantastic complexity is manifest in sharp relief. A man at 116th can sometimes be found screaming that he knows the smell of blood. A barbershop man called Morris Bone, perpetually unable to pay rent for all his sixty-plus years, is regarded by his grandchildren through the lens of their high degrees in social science. Women shrouded in black cloth but for their gated eyes, meeting yours, float by in groups of three and four … Harlem—this vortex—is more than ever that scene and symbol of the black American’s persistent and even inherent estrangement from his own country.” Read More
April 11, 2017 On the Shelf Keep an Eye on the Bees, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Mind this bee, and all the others. I hope you’ve been paying attention to the bees. They’re certainly paying attention to you. Oh, yes, yes they are, they know all about you. And they care. When you’re lonely, think of the bees. Feeling exhausted? The bees. In a new interview, the neuroscientist Christof Koch offers a concise summary of the bees’ intellectual gifts, which amount, in his eyes, to a kind of consciousness: “They do very complicated things. We know that individual bees can fly mazes. They can remember scents. They can return to a distant flower. In fact, they can communicate with each other, through a dance, about the location and quality of a distant food source. They have facial recognition and can recognize their beekeeper. Under normal conditions, they would never sting their beekeeper; it’s probably a combination of visual and olfactory cues … The complexity of the bee’s brain is staggering, even though it’s smaller than a piece of quinoa. It’s roughly ten times higher in terms of density than our cortex. They have all the complicated components that we have in our brains, but in a smaller package. So yes, I do believe it feels like something to be a honeybee. It probably feels very good to be dancing in the sunlight and to drink nectar and carry it back to their hive. I try not to kill bees or wasps or other insects anymore.” Akhil Sharma discusses his new short story in The New Yorker, about a boy who watches his mother become an alcoholic: “Don’t ideas of basic morality shift when one lives in a Western democratic society? If you look at how many women in America have been physically abused by their boyfriends and husbands (approximately a third), there seems no necessary reason why immigrant men who do such things (and only a very small percentage do) would treat their wives differently, just because they are living in America. Also, you have to remember that many people are narcissists. If someone is a problem for them and that person just goes away, they will not spend a lot of energy thinking about why the disappearance occurred. This conscious obliviousness also plays a role in such behavior … I asked an acquaintance who is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous in Jaipur whether there were many female alcoholics in the group. He, sounding startled, said, ‘Oh, no! We kill them.’ The idea came from this.” Read More