November 21, 2016 On the Shelf Impersonating Trump in China, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring In China, Tang Xinhua, a retired music professor, is preparing for a new career as a Trump impersonator. Photo: Zou Dangrong, via the New York Times. You know times are hard when you find yourself looking forward to reading the nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Maybe their heinousness will be the ultimate distraction from Trump—in the same way that you can divert your attention from a headache by punching yourself in the arm repeatedly, forcefully. Here’s some bad sex from Tom Connolly’s Men Like Air: “The walkway to the terminal was all carpet, no oxygen. Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo.” Impersonation is a hot ticket in China—with practice, chutzpah, and a little bit of luck, you can make a good living pretending to be a famous politician. (And they say America is the land of opportunity.) So now a national search is on for an ersatz Donald Trump, a swaggering caricature who can really channel that bigoted je ne sais quoi. Zou Dangrong, who runs an agency of impersonators in Beijing, believes he’s found the perfect ringer: a retired music professor named Tang Xinhua. But can they get his skin to look orange enough? “The goal is to get Mr. Tang looking enough like Mr. Trump that he can impersonate the president-elect and entertain at lucrative company debuts, shopping mall openings and New Year’s galas … It is all good, clean fun with high artistic standards, [Mr. Zou] said … ‘The hair color can easily be changed with dye jobs—temporary color, not permanent, keeping it in for an hour or two,’ [Mr. Zou] said. ‘We’ve asked tailors to make the same clothes that Trump wore in his campaign, though maybe from less expensive material.’ ” Read More
November 18, 2016 On the Shelf “Painting Like a Man,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Grace Hartigan, The Massacre, 1952, oil on canvas. © Estate of Grace Hartigan; collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Image via The Atlantic. I always like to talk about The Paris Review’s shadowy CIA past. True, it all happened well before I was born, let alone before I was employed here, but I feel it lends my personal story an air of roguish midcentury intrigue. But I should knock it off, because the fact is this: the CIA’s alliance with belles lettres was quietly despicable, a mark on the magazine’s history. Rob Spillman spoke to Joel Whitney, the author of the new book Finks, about the broader, soft-power implications of the CIA in the early Review’s aesthetics: “[Review editors] interviewed Europeans and Americans who they put in a belles lettrist context. They basically were politicizing the apoliticization of art. They made it seem apolitical, and did so very effectively … There’s a de-emphasis on historical truth. You see that across all the CIA aesthetics that they championed. Abstract expressionism was depoliticized against the backdrop of social realism. You have new criticism, which was almost rabidly not interested in historical or the post-colonial context. The Paris Review pretended they didn’t do politics … If it looks apolitical, that doesn’t necessarily make it so.” Looking to the same period, Sarah Boxer renews a sixties-era argument about women and art: “Women artists have been put down in many ways over the years, but the basic technique boils down to this: A critic, a curator, a dealer, or an art historian describes how women paint differently from men, then declares this quality inferior. Women are pegged as controlled, tentative, personal … Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss. It is no accident that ‘painting like a man’ used to be dished out as a supremely delicious compliment. Irving Sandler once asked Grace Hartigan ‘if a male artist ever told her she painted as well as a man.’ She replied tartly, ‘Not twice.’ ” Read More
November 17, 2016 On the Shelf Don’t Be Fooled, Nerds Are Evil, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Revenge of the Nerds. In the black art of recent years, Thomas Chatterton Williams sees parables of wokeness: a worldview that sees historical black suffering stretching backward and forward through the generations, marked by fatalism and deeply skeptical of any notion of progress. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award last night, represents his first woke novel, Williams writes, and that makes it a radical departure from Whitehead’s previous work, arguably not for the better: “It’s difficult to accept that Whitehead really did squeeze himself into the artistic confines of wokeness. I would prefer to believe that the story he has given us operates on at least two levels, the second of which many of his new admirers may not immediately notice. I would like to think that he recognizes the patterns we are in thrall to, the ways we have come to rely on concepts such as the legacy of American slavery not as historical fact or even societal debt but as parable, as a teachable moment that can’t be—and never should be—conclusively apprehended. It’s a lesson that gains meaning not in the teaching but in the reteaching. It is here, in the realm of the parable, that most black art right now is being made … But the question remains whether parables of wokeness are the most effective tools for the task. Can you really extinguish a fire with more flames? Can you ever hope to disrupt a cycle of inequality by insisting ever more adamantly that it has and will always exist? At their best, artists like Whitehead show us another possibility.” Remember nerds—the nerds in high school movies? They seem so quaint now, don’t they, always getting shoved into lockers for their squirmy, pale, quietly noble nerd ways. Today’s “nerds,” by contrast, are busy spewing hate online and constructing a massive white-nationalist machine. It makes you wonder, as Willie Osterweil writes, what the notion of “nerdiness” was really obfuscating all along: “The nerd appeared in pop culture in the form of a smart but awkward, always well-meaning white boy irrationally persecuted by his implacable jock antagonists in order to subsume and mystify true social conflict—the ones around race, gender, class, and sexuality that shook the country in the 1960s and ’70s—into a spectacle of white male suffering. This was an effective strategy to sell tickets to white-flight middle-class suburbanites, as it described and mirrored their mostly white communities. With the hollowing out of urban centers, and the drastic poverty in nonwhite communities of the ’80s and ’90s, these suburban whites were virtually the only consumers with enough consistent spending money to garner Hollywood attention.” Read More
November 16, 2016 On the Shelf When a Heap Is Not a Heap, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Tailings from a gold mill abandoned in the 1930s. The Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year is post-truth, and if I have to tell you why this is good and smart and funny, well then you can crawl right back into your hidey-hole, young man. Being a dictionary, they’ve provided a definition for the adjective: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” And a history: “Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.’ ” In China, meanwhile, the word on the lips of officialdom is comrade. President Xi Jinping would like to bring the term—tongzhi, in Chinese—back in vogue for the ninety million members of the Communist Party; it went out of fashion during the eighties, as Westernizing influences swept in. But there’s a problem, as Amy Qin reports: “Among gay men, however, tongzhi became a term of affection and solidarity and eventually a catchall label for sexual minorities. A gay and lesbian film festival held annually in Hong Kong has been called the Hong Kong Comrade Film Festival since 1989. And the Beijing center for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people calls itself the Beijing Tongzhi Zhongxin—or the Beijing Comrade Center. Even Google has caught on. Enter the characters for tongzhi guanxi—literally ‘comrade relationship’—into its translator, and it gives you ‘gay relationship.’ ” Read More
November 15, 2016 On the Shelf Get This Wine Bottle Away from My Short Story, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via Web Urbanist What can writers and intellectuals do to stem the rise of fascism in America? Well, we should look to history, of course, where theorists stand time and again with quivers of poison-tipped arrows, their bows pointed at the eyes of tyranny. Take the Frankfurt School, for instance. In the twentieth century, facing seemingly insurmountable adversity, they steeled themselves and—oh … wait … “As the 1930s progressed, a number of the Frankfurt School idealists ‘lost faith … in the power of critical thinking to transform society.’ What role could the left-leaning intellectual have in a time when the socialist revolution was failing and fascism seemed set to conquer Europe? Max Horkheimer was one of those who despaired of the struggle, fearing that the ‘commodity economy’ would bring a period of progress so that ‘after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.’ ” Still struggling to understand Donald “I Love the Poorly Educated” Trump? Maybe it’s your Facebook bubble. Or maybe, as Pankaj Mishra writes, you haven’t read enough Rousseau lately: “Beginning with his first major publication, in 1751, Rousseau, too, defended unlettered folk and their simple ways. Significantly, he did so just as the world’s first well-educated, networked élite—the Enlightenment philosophers—came into being, advocating a far-reaching program of progress through the use of science, reason, and international commerce. Rousseau’s more radical move was to position himself against the project that we now call modernity; he practically invented the category of ‘the people.’ ” Read More
November 14, 2016 On the Shelf Terror That Makes Knees Tremble, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From an early edition of Absalom, Absalom! When Toni Morrison looks at Trump’s victory, she sees echoes of Faulkner: “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble … William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In Absalom, Absalom, incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its ‘whiteness’ (once again), the family chooses murder.” Publishers: someone should print an affordably priced pocket-sized edition of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1998). Then every philosophy major could carry it at all times, and whenever anyone mocked you for having pursued this seemingly worthless degree, you could pull out Achieving and flip to the part where Rorty predicted—with such prescience that it’s almost painful now—the rise of Trump: “The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…” Read More