January 31, 2017 On the Shelf The Talking Heads of Yesteryear, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Heinecken, TV Newswomen (Faith Daniels and Barbara Walters) (detail), 1986; image via Aperture Get a load of this, people—it’s the story so unbelievable, so astonishingly perverse, that George Eliot’s family doesn’t want you to know about it! I’m talking about the size of her hands—or of one of her hands, anyway. Kathryn Hughes has the hot scoop: “One day in the 1840s a young woman in her midtwenties was talking to her neighbor in a genteel villa on the outskirts of Coventry. At some point in the conversation Mary Ann Evans stretched out her right hand ‘with some pride’ to demonstrate how much bigger it was than her left. It was the legacy, she explained, of having spent her teenage years making butter and cheese on her family’s farm, eight miles outside the city … Over the next fifty years George Eliot’s increasingly genteel descendants periodically issued stern denials about the great novelist’s labors in the dairy. There was, they maintained, nothing remotely odd about her right hand: it had done nothing more taxing than practicing the piano and taking tea.” In times of deep suffering and anguish, solace can take unusual forms. Sleeping pills, for one. Or a long talk with an old pal. Or maybe just an enormous grid of old televisions reminding you that things have always been shitty. The Getty Center, opting for the latter, has opened an exhibition called “Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media,” which will console you with the terrors of administrations past—most of them perpetrated before the advent of social media, when the news was still fake, just in a different way. Travis Diehl writes, “One of the Television Political Mosaics (1968–9) by Donald R. Blumberg, like televisions splayed out on a contact sheet, includes row after row of vintage talking heads from the vetting of Richard Nixon’s own unlovable cronies. Others in the series superimpose a faltering transmission of then-candidate Nixon’s profile into a black and gray miasma. Further Zen might come from Blumberg’s Television Abstractions (1968–9), a picture of a grid of sixteen TVs, all tuned to static. The white noise has never been worse, yet this exhibition offers critical insight for those who would turn today’s cameras on today’s screens.” Read More
January 30, 2017 On the Shelf The Raging Flood and the Peaceful Pond, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Smithson, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill. Chris Ware has been reading a lot of Krazy Kat, as we all should in these trying times. In the Kat and his creator, George Harriman, Ware sees a tacit African American tradition: “Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a ‘surrealistic’ poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip … I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman’s lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African American. Krazy’s patois, social status, stereotypical ‘happy-go-lucky despite it all’ disposition all funnel into a rather pointed African American identity.” Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is classic land art: it’s dirt and sand and raw geology, and it’s all fun and games until someone decides to sell it. Phyllis Tuchman visited the work in the Netherlands, musing on its history and the difficulty its owner faces in passing it on: “At 6-foot-3 and often dressed all in black like a character in the B-movies he watched on West 42nd Street, Smithson cut a striking figure. His prescription aviator glasses, slicked-back brown hair, blue-gray eyes and pockmarked skin completed the persona he projected … Unlike his colleagues, Smithson accompanied his earthworks with films, which made them accessible to people who couldn’t travel to see them. But his death at age thirty-five in a plane crash in 1973 prevented the completion of the film of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill until 2011. In it, we learn how Smithson’s artwork relates to both the prehistoric past as well as more recent times … ‘Between violence and calm is lucid understanding and perception,’ Smithson also said in Arts magazine in 1971. ‘What goes on between the raging flood and the peaceful pond? I hope to make that an aspect of the film on Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.’ ” Read More
January 27, 2017 On the Shelf A Sip of This Cream, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Frognall Dibdin. Nonalternative fact: our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, is also an accomplished translator. In a new interview with Jessie Chaffee, he offers some of his favorite metaphors for translation: “A translator with only one metaphor is lost—he or she needs three, four, dozens! One of the great things about Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’—a thrillingly unfathomable essay for me—is the number of metaphors he gives us for translation, without settling on any one of them. He says translation is like a royal robe that amply enfolds the original; or else it is a series of vessel fragments which one pieces together with those of the original; or else it is like a tangent line that touches the sense of the original fleetingly at one point (which makes all the difference). He also says it’s like a transparency that lets the light of pure language shine upon the original. All of these analogies have appealed to me at one time or another and I don’t feel compelled to decide between them. Translation is most fun when it is ad hoc. I use whatever I have to hand. Sometimes a royal robe, sometimes a transparency.” Looking for the roots of bibliophilia—a tragic condition wherein otherwise sane people start to say shit like “I just love the smell of old books!”—Lorraine Berry looks back to Thomas Frognall Dibdin, a nineteenth-century English cleric who “was obsessed with the physical aspects of books, and in his descriptions paid an intense attention to the details of their bindings and printings (rather than the content) that betrayed his own love … Men who collected books were often portrayed as effeminate. In 1834, the British literary magazine the Athenaeum published an anonymous attack implying that one of the prominent members of Dibdin’s club was homosexual. Dibdin’s language, which has been noted for its sensuality, is full of double entendres and descriptions of book collecting in sexualised language; from his Bibliographical Decameron, some characteristic dialogue: ‘Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream?’ ‘Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it.’ ” Read More
January 26, 2017 On the Shelf Mr. Coffee Mansplains, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “This is how a man makes coffee … ” The churlish “alternative facts” coming out of the Oval Office have led to an uptick in sales of 1984, which remains America’s go-to dystopian fiction: whenever our liberties are trampled on, someone’s reaching for the Orwell. Yes, Orwell, Orwell, he’s our man, if he can’t articulate the all-consuming dread of the totalitarian surveillance state, no one can! But Josephine Livingstone argues that there are better metaphors for our times: “When we suspect that we are living in a dystopia characterized by clumsy propaganda, it’s the book we buy from Amazon.com … But there is no Amazon.com in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because it is not a novel about globalized capital. Not even slightly! Nineteen Eighty-Four does not pastiche a world ravaged by capitalism and ruled by celebrities—the kind of world that could lead to the election of someone like Trump. Instead, it depicts suffering inflicted by state control masquerading as socialism.” Better, Livingstone says, to pick up some Kafka, which is right on the money: “In The Trial, Josef K. wakes up on his thirtieth birthday and is arrested. He cannot really conceive of what is happening: ‘K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?’ ” But did you ever wonder about what the other side of the Iron Curtain was reading? Before we were oohing and ahhing over Orwell, the Soviet Union was gaga for Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly, an 1897 novel about “revolutionary zeal, religious devotion, clerical betrayal and romantic love.” Benjamin Ramm writes, “It was in the newly created Communist states of the Soviet Union and China that the book found its most dedicated readership. Arthur, the embodiment of a Romantic tragic hero, was repeatedly voted Russia’s most popular literary figure, and cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in space, credited its influence.” Read More
January 25, 2017 On the Shelf Stay Humble, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hans Memling, Vanité (detail), ca. 1490. Our contributor Ben Nugent appears on Selected Shorts’ “Too Hot for Radio” podcast this week to discuss his short story “God,” which appeared in our Fall 2013 issue. Here’s how it all started, he says: “One of my best creative-writing students, Megan Kidder, a well mannered girl from rural Maine with dyed black hair, a silver nose ring, and a studded belt dropped by my office and informed me, I wrote a poem about how this one guy prematurely ejaculated … ” Here’s Carina Chocano to remind you that you’re probably misusing the word humbled, you misinformed braggart, you duplicitous self-promoter, you smarmy pretender to humility: “To be humbled is to be brought low or somehow diminished in standing or stature. Sometimes we’re humbled by humiliation or failure or some other calamity. And sometimes we’re humbled by encountering something so grand, meaningful or sublime that our own small selves are thrown into stark contrast—things like history, or the cosmos, or the divine … To be humbled is to find yourself in the embarrassing position of having to shimmy awkwardly off your pedestal, or your high horse—or some other elevated place that would not have seemed so elevated had you not been so lowly to begin with—muttering apologies and cringing, with your skirt riding up past your granny pants.” Read More
January 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Majesty of the Potato, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Charles Jones, Potato Majestic, nineteenth century. Image via the Clark Institute Oh, to own one of the first cameras—to approach photography without any preconception of what a photograph could or should do. To take the first portrait, the first landscape, the first dick pic—what a rollicking time that would be. Louis Menand, writing on the Clark Art Institute’s new exhibition “Photography and Discovery,” conjures the bumptious energy of the medium’s earliest days—and the unlikely corners into which the first cameras looked: “The albumen print, the collotype, the cyanotype, the daguerreotype, the Woodburytype, gelatin silver prints, gum dichromate prints, platinum prints, salt prints, halftones, photogravure: all these reproductive technologies are represented in the show, and each yields a different visual texture. The effects can be stunning … My favorite in the show is a picture of potatoes. The label explains that the photographer, Charles Jones, was a gardener who worked on major estates in nineteenth-century Britain, and who had a practice of making photographs of things he grew, arranged as still lifes. His photographs were discovered in 1981 in a suitcase in an antiques market. And there they are, six potatoes on a plate—nature’s most plebeian foodstuff looking as pleased with itself as any duke. And the best thing about the piece, in case you miss the point, is the title, Potato Majestic.” Jorie Graham, talking to Sarah Howe, elaborates on the difficulty of facing the blank page in times like these: “Increasingly now, it’s a matter of using poetry to try to find a way to keep the proportions right, to not be overwhelmed by grief, horror, fear, shame, rage; to use this precious medium I trust to guide me to find at least a way to ask the right questions, a way to hold ‘reality and justice in one thought’—as Yeats admonished me to do when I was a young poet … Our enemies are despicably small, but their actions are capable of destroying the earth now, not just civilization. So, like every poet writing today, what I ask of my poetic tools now feels more urgent than ever, what I ask of the blank page. Not just urgent, but baffling. I have never written so slowly—each poem an attempt both to try to understand how to reenter the current of existence with some understanding of what will suffice—what will permit one to go on as if there were a purpose—and to try to understand what poetry is for under these conditions.” Read More