July 25, 2016 On the Shelf Photograph in C#, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, Photograph in C#, 48″ x 48″. Image via Nautilus Wherever there are Freudian dynamics afoot—whenever latent sexual tension and homosocial tendencies take the national stage—there you’ll find our country’s fan-fiction writers doing their best work. You can only imagine, then, the hay they’ve made of the 2016 election. Talia Lavin spoke to one especially fecund writer who goes by Chuck Tingle: “After the Brexit vote, Tingle published ‘Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union.’ Another recent Tingle story is about a character he calls Domald Tromp. In Tingle’s fictional universe, Tromp is the presumptive Republican nominee—although, unlike Donald J. Trump, Tromp has faked his birth certificate and is really a native of Scotland. More specifically, he is the Loch Ness monster in disguise. (‘There is something incredible about being taken by such a strong, patriotic beast, even if he is really from Scotland,’ the narrator, a twenty-two-year-old journalist, thinks at one point.)” In reality, though, the political scene is far less enchanting—though no less fantastical, as commentators on both sides have noted in the aftermath of the Republican National Convention: “When Trump’s speech had already leaked, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, whose adorable campaign to stop Trump has been going for months, bummed a cigarette off me. I told him I was heading to the Q after I’d read the speech. ‘I’ve read it,’ he said. ‘It’s like the plot of Batman.’ ” When politicians aren’t behaving like fictional characters or remaking the world in a kind of proto-fictional mold, they do, unfortunately, attempt to write nonfiction. Here, too, they are often thwarted. Take the case of Boris Johnson, Brexit architect and all-around turd—the Guardian reports that his “widely anticipated biography of Shakespeare is on ice, indefinitely. Originally scheduled for release this October—rather late for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death back in April—Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius ‘will not be published for the foreseeable future,’ says its publisher, Hodder & Stoughton … Among professional Shakespeareans—think the conspirators in Julius Caesar, only with sharper daggers—there has been a mixture of glee and remorse. On the one hand, many thought the biography wasn’t likely to be very good. On the other, everyone would have had a great deal of fun saying so. Even before the announcement, speculation was rife that not a word had actually been written, and that several prominent academics had been begged for last-minute assistance.” Now that I’ve got you in a pessimistic frame of mind: the early photos in a new survey at the Whitney Museum, “Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” remind of all varieties of sociopolitical turmoil. As Max Nelson writes, “Lyon has always taken risks to earn the status of sympathetic insider in the communities he shoots. The photographs he took across the South in his early twenties were forceful enough visions of outrage and disgust—a group of young black women languishing in the Leesburg stockade; a protestor splayed out in midair as the object of a violent tug-of-war contest between an onlooker and a pack of riot police—that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) soon made Lyon their staff photographer … Lyon would never align himself so completely with another group’s mission and goals, but most of his subsequent projects have involved a similar degree of intense, life-consuming commitment. To make The Bikeriders (1968), the first book of photographs for which he had sole credit, he spent a year as a member of the Chicago Outlaws; for Conversations with the Dead (1971), his third book, he lived in Texas for still longer taking pictures in the state’s prisons.” Maybe the only solace is in art without people. Resonantia, a series of portraits last year by the artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, finds beauty in cymatics—the patterns produced by sound waves in physical objects. “Louviere was struck by the idea that each note produces a particular shape in liquid. To investigate these patterns, he rigged up a contraption involving a frequency generator on his laptop, a rebuilt amp with a speaker pointing upward into a plastic vitrine filled with ink-black water, and a guitar tuner. Louviere vibrated the water with the amp by adjusting the generator’s frequency … He used his tuner to seek out the frequency of each of the twelve notes—A, B, C through G, plus the five halftones. While Louviere dialed the knobs, Brown stood on a ladder above the contraption illuminating the water with a ring light, her camera in hand. When the tuner registered a note—reading 220 hertz, the frequency that produces an A, for instance—Louviere stopped adjusting. As each note’s unique vibration induced its characteristic pattern into the water, Brown captured it with her camera. The pair worked together to obtain a ‘portrait’ of each of the twelve notes.”
July 22, 2016 On the Shelf A Big Glooby Blob of Sad Blufush, and Other News By Robert P. Baird Kerouac photographed by John Cohen, 1959. Image via The Spectator. Remember that time Henry James met Winston Churchill? The encounter took place in December, 1914, when Churchill was forty years old and James, his elder by three decades, was still a year from the stroke that would have him signing letters as Napoleon to arrange for “the decoration of certain apartments and palaces … of the Louvre and the Tuileries.” According to Louis Menand, “Churchill had no idea who James was, found him tedious, and behaved crudely.” After the event, James told his host, Violet Bonham Carter—a friend of Churchill, daughter of the prime minister, and grandmother of Helena—that the “interesting” experience had “brought home to me, very forcibly and vividly … the limitations by which men of genius … purchase their ascendancy … over mankind.” In 1931, during what he described as his wilderness years, Churchill launched an American speaking tour in an effort to make back the money he’d lost in the stock-market crash two years earlier. While crossing Fifth Avenue in New York, Churchill looked the wrong way for traffic and was hit by a taxi, an accident he later wrote up as “My New York Misadventure,” which essay he sold to the Daily Mail for twenty-five hundred dollars. (Yes: about forty thousand dollars in today’s money.) Earlier that year, some three hundred and fifty miles from the site of Churchill’s lucrative debilitation, the hard-bop jazz pianist Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark was born in a Pennsylvania coal patch. Clark’s career was often torturous, in no small part thanks to the heroin addiction that killed him in 1963. But he found a wide following in Japan, and, as Sam Stephenson wrote for the Daily in 2011, “no jazz pianist was more drenched in minor blues” than he was. Clark would have been eighty-five yesterday. Clark released Sonny’s Crib, with John Coltrane on the tenor saxophone, in 1957, the same year Jack Kerouac published On the Road. For Geoff Dyer, “there has never been a better-looking male writer. The Kerouac of the 1950s—athletic, muscular forearms emerging from plaid shirt, dark hair roughly quiffed—could step into a bar in Brooklyn today and he’d still look hip.” But Kerouac’s time at the top was brief: “From the moment his achievement was recognized his talent was in decline. He became imprisoned by the method of composition—spontaneous prose—that had liberated him. The breakthrough that enabled him to become a great writer condemned him to often being a pretty terrible one. Sinking into alcoholism, living with his mum in Florida and Massachusetts, he became ‘a big glooby blob of sad blufush.’ ” Kerouac’s father, a French Canadian printer, died of stomach cancer in 1946, the same year a former domestic servant from Scotland gave birth to the man who last night became the Republican Party’s official candidate for president of the United States. About that last fact you may read a word or two today, but in the midst of the frenzy let us not forget the welcome counsel of Julian Barnes, namely that “this has been a rich time to explore nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting.” A new show at the Fondation Custodia, in Paris, includes paintings by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, a Danish painter who studied under Jacques-Louis David. “The Paris show,” Barnes says, reveals Eckersberg “to be always securely himself, yet frequently on the move.”
July 21, 2016 On the Shelf Tension Minus the Genitals, and Other News By Robert P. Baird From the cover of Exquisite Masochism. If there exists, as Susan Sontag once insisted, a “terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things,” nobody seems to have warned John Gruen. Born in France, in 1926, Gruen (né Jonas Grunberg) fled Hitler and then Mussolini before landing in New York in 1939, where he learned English by watching movies. Gruen, who died on Tuesday, spent his seventysomething years on this continent as a book buyer at Brentano’s, a publicity director at Grove Press, a composer, a photographer, and, in his words, a “writer, critic, journalist, bon vivant, gadfly, busybody, father, husband, queer, neurotic workaholic,” as well as a “handmaiden to the stars, reveler in reflected glory and needy intimate of the super-famous.” In a 2008 interview, he told Time Out: “One of the big problems is that I never really settled on one thing … I kept them all going, like a juggler, but none of them really took hold in a way that would catapult me as this one creature.” At the same time, he said, “As Miss Piaf sang, ‘Je ne regrette rien.’ ” I’ll claim any person who dies with “Renaissance Man” in the headline of his obituary as an instant culture hero. But after learning that Charles Dickens turned his deceased cat into a letter opener, I’m beginning to feel a terrible, mean American resentment toward artists who try to make their dead pets do too many things. I can believe, for instance, that Le Corbusier loved his schnauzer Pinceau, just as I can believe that he loved Cervantes’s Don Quixote with all his heart. What I cannot bring myself to believe is that the adequate response to both loves was to bind the latter book in the former’s tanned and hairy hide. And yet. But what do I know? Love is strange like that. Sex is even stranger, especially in Victorian novels, where it often isn’t sex at all. In her new book, Exquisite Masochism, Claire Jarvis suggests that for many of the fictional characters who had the bad luck to be stuck in a Victorian marriage plot, “withholding sex … is a perverse way of having it. In a novelistic milieu where illegitimacy or adultery can be the motives for serious tragedy, a fully developed sexual life presents a frightening threat. By describing erotic life in ways that avoid depicting sexual intercourse in favor of nongenital tension or intensity, novelists can render the frisson of sexual desire without the attendant plot risks.” Andrew O’Hagan, reporting from the Department of Overlaps, finds a shared lesson in Joyce’s Ulysses and The People vs. O.J. Simpson: “the tendency of reality to give way to the fiction-maker’s abuse.” And yet, he notes, that abuse is also the guarantee of a certain immortality (what was that about exquisite masochism?), which helps explain why “Dubliners lining up at Sylvia Beach’s shop in Paris in 1922 were desperate to see if they’d been included, or, Holy Mother of God, left out … In a way, Ulysses is like the greatest ever newspaper—all that was fit and unfit to print in one day—and its abundance depends on the idea that nobody is nothing.” If nobody is nothing, does that mean that everybody is something? And if so, what? Or better yet: Who? At New York, Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger visit Whoville, a social-media limbo that often appears more insubstantial than the one Dante devised in the fourth canto of the Inferno: “Now that we’ve all been thrown together on—and get our news from—enormous social platforms with seamless, instantaneous sharing, it’s more likely than ever that we’ll be confronted with stories about people who sound made up. The traditional A-list-to-D-list hierarchy no longer makes sense when people whose names you’ve never heard before are trending on a social networks with hundreds of millions of users. Instead, the subjects of gossip coverage can be divided into two categories: Whos (as in: *furrows brow* Who?) and Thems (as in: ‘Oh, them.’)”
July 20, 2016 On the Shelf This Picnic Is Over, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Barry Haynes. Image via Hyperallergic/Wikipedia. Christian Lorentzen is at the Republican National Convention, scoping out the merch downtown, where the spirit of small-time entrepreneurialism is something like that of the parking lot outside a Phish show: “In the afternoon I walked through downtown Cleveland’s festival of reaction, past hawkers of Trumpian kitsch: T-shirts with Trump on a Harley, Trump as Captain America, golden silhouettes of his hair, and Hillary for Prison; Trump Flakes cereal; Trump condoms ‘to keep you safe like the wall.’ I missed out on the early pro and anti-Trump rallies, but I did see a man walking another man on a leash, his ‘Trump dog’, their message not entirely clear. I bought a sandwich and sat on a bench beside an elderly African American man with a few Trump T-shirts to sell but making little effort to do so. A young African American man passed by and started yelling at him: ‘I can’t believe your black ass is selling a motherfucking Trump shirt. You’re blacker than me, you stupid motherfucker.’ The man beside me was unfazed.” Across the ocean, meanwhile—but not unrelatedly—Zadie Smith is grappling with Brexit: “The painful truth is that fences are being raised everywhere in London. Around school districts, around neighborhoods, around lives. One useful consequence of Brexit is to finally and openly reveal a deep fracture in British society that has been thirty years in the making. The gaps between north and south, between the social classes, between Londoners and everyone else, between rich Londoners and poor Londoners, and between white and brown and black are real and need to be confronted by all of us, not only those who voted Leave.” Let us turn now, for the sake of our sanity, to less pressing matters. But you can lose sleep over these, too. I was up last night wondering what fate will befall the World’s Largest Picnic Basket, which served, until recently, as Claire Voon writes, as the offices of the Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio: “Completed in 1997, the 182,000-square-foot building was headquarters for 500 workers when it opened; about a dozen remained when it shut its doors last week after months of gradual migrations, according to the Dispatch—the last people able to claim that day after day, they went to work inside a larger-than-life basket. The design was Dave Longaberger’s own: the businessman, who founded the company in 1973, had demanded that architects model a building specifically on his company’s trademarked Medium Market Basket, and that’s exactly what he received. The finished result, 160 times the size of the hardwood maple best seller, came courtesy of Korda Nemeth Engineering and architecture firm NBBJ, whose senior manager at the time described it as ‘a piece of pop art.’ ” Today in wild new frontiers for the humanities: in a new book, the German sociologist Jens Beckert uses literary theory to explain economics. “Rarely do scholars explore the role of imagination in economic life systematically,” Brooke Harrington explains. “In a realm dominated by economic and financial scholarship that aspires to be ‘scientific,’ fantasy and creativity in envisioning the future are often ignored; they don’t fit well into a model of research whose aim is to reduce unknowns and to eliminate surprises as much as possible … Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics, makes a thorough, exhaustively documented argument in support of what many have suspected about capitalism: It’s a castle in the air, built on fantasy shading into fraud. He makes a compelling case that no corner of the market is untouched by the process of generating imagined futures. The novelty of his work lies in offering a way to understand that process as a social system in which everyone, from individuals to institutions, is implicated.” At The Paris Review, we pride ourselves on knowing a thing or two about the art of the interview. But I’m willing to admit when we’re licked. And Robin Leach—of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous fame—may well have licked us. He told a classroom recently, “The one piece of advice I would give you students about the art of interviewing is to listen. There is a joke about a television newscaster who asked all of her questions from a blue card that was prepared by or for her. So instead of listening to the answer to the question she asked, she would busy looking at the next question in order to ask it. I never go into an interview with questions on cards. It is a conversation, designed to elicit information, and you get information only by listening. The follow-up question is more important than the original question. And there is nothing better than eliciting a response by remaining silent.”
July 19, 2016 On the Shelf Jeff Koons the Union Buster, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring You can make these all day long—just don’t organize your labor. Still haven’t planned your summer getaway? It’s never too late for a trip to balmy Orlando, where, at a theme park called the Holy Land Experience, “Jesus is crucified most afternoons around five P.M. … Miracles are the stock-in-trade of this Christian theme park, which welcomes about a quarter-million people per year. They might come to the Holy Land Experience (HLE for short) out of faith or fascination or a misplaced sense of irony, but they all pay fifty dollars for entry, and some will spend a little extra for a ‘My Cup Overflows Refillable Souvenir Cup.’ In return, they get a curious kind of history lesson, plus a dose of American prosperity theology, which turns spending into a higher calling and spiritual pathos into gaudy pageantry.” You’d think one of the nation’s preeminent research institutions would have an innovative approach to digitization. But the Library of Congress is still lumbering in the general direction of the Internet. Kyle Chayka spoke to one activist who called it “a national embarrassment,” and he took a look himself: “The LOC takes scholarly care in digitization, assuring that the replicas it creates will be authoritative and stable, but the process is slow and inefficient. Every object from the collection that gets digitized must first be removed from the LOC stacks or its storage warehouses offsite in Maryland, evaluated for its ability to endure physical scanning, and then hand-fed through a scanner. The resulting data is processed and uploaded to the Internet with proper tagging and citations, following standards that the LOC itself developed. A single print could take as long as a day to scan and upload.” Jeff Koons, the artist whose medium is capitalism, has laid off fourteen of his painters because they attempted to unionize: “Multiple anonymous sources say that the painters had begun the process of unionization over the past few months … Around the same time, management at Jeff Koons LLC decided to give the painters a raise. It is unknown whether or not this decision was related to the unionization. But at the time, it was speculated by some of Koons employees that this move was intended to satiate the demand for a union. It’s also notable that there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of painting work to be done, which caused some employees to question the timing of the raise. The studio has no major upcoming shows and has only been working on a solo retrospective entitled, ‘Now,’ for Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery. Otherwise, the painters were working on backlogged commissions … Repeated phone calls to Jeff Koons LLC have thus far gone unanswered.” Welcome to the final horizon of academe: boredom studies. Randy Malamud attended the third annual Boredom Conference, in Warsaw, and he was pleasantly surprised by how much there was to pay attention to: “I roundly nominate boredom for the catalogue of interesting new things for academics to study, all the more enthusiastically for the paradox lurking therein. We have nothing to lose but our chains. Like coffee, masturbation, and bullshit, boredom promises fresh terrain: untrammelled intellectual exploration … The myriad tropes and venues of boredom range from Nietzsche’s ‘windless calm of the soul’ to Beckett’s claustrophobic infinite stuckness. The historian Jeffrey Auerbach, who presented at last year’s Boredom Conference, is completing a monograph called Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire, about the bureaucracy, loneliness and disenchantment that accompanied England’s exploitative world domination; it turns out imperial oppression wasn’t that much fun after all.” On the face of it, Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is just your average midcentury sex romp, stacked with extramarital affairs and cuckolded husbands and even (why not) some incest. But it’s really, Gabe Habash argues, “a surrealist novel in the guise of a realist novel … Murdoch smashes the old rule that you can’t have more than two coincidences in a narrative, and so the book passes through any dubiousness and out the other side … Somewhere around the second or third revelation that one of these characters is sleeping with another one, you stop expecting the unexpected and begin expecting everything. It’s as if Murdoch is saying, ‘Yes, that can happen. And so can this.’ ”
July 18, 2016 On the Shelf Fucking with the Feds, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring James Baldwin with Charlton Heston, left, and Marlon Brando, 1963. If you’re a best-selling author, here is a great way to piss off the FBI: announce that you’re writing a book about the FBI. In 1964, writing in an issue of Playbill, James Baldwin mentioned some future projects he had in mind, including one on “the FBI and the South.” Cue federal anxiety: “When [J. Edgar] Hoover himself was informed of the project, his response was characteristically curt—‘Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?’ This being Hoover’s FBI, that was not a rhetorical question, and it launched an additional inquiry in the nature of Baldwin’s ‘perversion.’ Whatever the FBI planned on doing with this information, it all ultimately proved rather moot—Baldwin never wrote the book, and there’s strong evidence he never planned to.” The artist Bruce Conner once provided a list of adjectives to describe his work: the first four were “beautiful, horrible, hogwash, genius.” He was, somehow, right on the money. J. Hoberman remembers the first time he saw a Conner piece: “As a fifteen-year-old Pop Art aficionado wandering through the Whitney Museum’s 1964 Sculpture Annual, I discovered Conner’s work in the form of the assemblage Couch. There was no warning. It was like rounding a corner and bumping into Death … a derelict remnant of a nightmare haunted house. Conner took a moldering, paint-spattered, wax-encrusted Victorian divan and managed to imbed it with a child-sized mummy. The simulated, decomposed corpse was nestled into a corner. On closer inspection, it looked as though it might have been strangled.” It’s widely accepted that one of the few attractions of a career in medicine is regular exposure to nude people. In the eighteenth century, aspiring doctors had such a hankering for nudity that they took it upon themselves to construct very, very, very detailed wax women: “Known today as Anatomical Venuses, these wax figures of women were life-sized and fully dissectible, with their removable organs completely exposed to all, while their faces were kept intact with beautiful, oddly serene features … I was especially struck by a number owned by the French doctor Pierre Spitzner (whose collection is now at the University of Montpellier), which date to the second half of the nineteenth century: one was a wax automaton, featuring a Venus who ‘breathed,’ with a rising and falling chest; another is of a girl in an impeccably white nightgown undergoing a caesarean section, with four distinctly male hands prodding her revealed organs, bizarrely attached to no bodies—phantom hands, complete with white cuffs and the sleeves of black jackets to add an extra layer of eeriness.” In the age of the seven-figure advance, as Nathan Scott McNamara writes, “major presses are inadvertently helping foster an environment where American indie presses can thrive by doing the very thing they’re best at: being small and, by extension, focusing on creativity and originality over sales … In reorganizing the priorities of book publishing—by inventing new models rather than trying to repeat past success, by valuing ingenuity over magnitude, by thinking of sales as a way to make great books possible rather than the point—indie presses aren’t just becoming the places where the best books are published; they’re already there.” Let’s finish things off in the gutter, where a group of dirty-minded linguists have started to name all the words that sound sexual but aren’t. For starters: cordwangle, invigilation, formicate, uvula, quincunx. Mark Liberman writes, “A colleague (who has request anonymity) and I have developed a fondness for perfectly innocuous words which, to the linguistically unwashed masses, sound sexual. My colleague’s example sentence is ‘Because her husband was intestate, she sought to dilate her fungible assets; despite cunctation for titivating, she managed to masticate and lucubrate far into the night.’ ”