June 28, 2016 On the Shelf Cubists on Vacation, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Suzy Frelinghuysen, Steve Morris (younger brother of George Morris), and their friend Natalie Merrill wearing driving masks and goggles in the Swiss Alps. Courtesy of Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio. Image via T. Most of us struggle to interest our friends in our vacation photos, even in real time. (My Instagram of Six Flags only got two likes.) But in the midthirties, George L. K. Morris and Suzy Frelinghuysen, the so-called Park Avenue Cubists, traveled to such exotic locales that their photos and home movies are still of interest some eighty years later. As Hilary Reid writes, “the Frelinghuysen Morris Home & Studio is a window into the artists’ lives: their books, clothes, midcentury modern furniture and even their liquor bottles and Frelinghuysen’s hair dryer … This summer, visitors can view never-before-seen sixteen-mm color films taken by Morris and Frelinghuysen during their travels to Latin America and Switzerland between 1936 and 1938 … In Switzerland, we watch as Frelinghuysen hops in a convertible with Morris’s younger brother Steve and their friend Natalie Merrill, all wearing driving goggles and masks. The Russian avant-garde artist Esphyr Slobodkina joins them in one shot; and in another, they shimmy and laugh their way out of an ice tunnel.” Not unrelatedly: twelve years after he left Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel took a relaxing trip to Disneyland. He loved it—so much so that he dedicated a whole column to it in the Forverts, a Yiddish newspaper. “Several times in the article, Wiesel reflects on his appreciation of Walt Disney—‘the person who created this land, this universe, must be a genius, a rare genius’—and then shares the anecdote that he was told of how Walt Disney often walks around Disneyland in disguise. Wiesel understands why: ‘If one wants to calm his nerves and forget the bitter realities of daily life, there is no better-suited place to do so than Disneyland. In Disneyland, the land of children’s dreams, everything is simple, beautiful, good. There, no one screams at his fellow, no one is exploited by his fellow, no one’s fortune derives from his fellow’s misfortune. If children had the right to vote, they would vote Disney their president. And the whole world would look different.’” Brexit raises plenty of unanswerable questions, chief among them being, What the fuck? More fruitfully, we might ask: What effect will this have on the English language? “In 2012 a report found that 38 percent of the EU’s citizens speak it as a foreign language … A sort of Euro-English, influenced by foreign languages, is already in use. Many Europeans use control to mean ‘monitor’ because contrôler has that meaning in French. The same goes for assist, meaning ‘to attend’ (assister in French, asistir in Spanish) … Many nouns in English that don’t properly pluralize with a final s are merrily used in Euro-English, such as informations … Britain may be a polarizing, unusual EU member, but English has become neutral, utilitarian; it is useful because others understand it. Its association with Britain is already weak and set to weaken … Dreamers have long hoped for a neutral auxiliary language that is common to all. Some have even gone to the trouble of inventing such languages. Who knows? English might one day fulfil the destiny intended for Esperanto.” Black Flag played their last show thirty years ago, and our ears are still ringing: “Doesn’t it all sound like another world? It probably was. To foist your bohemia on an indifferent public, to harrow the complacent, to shake it up … Joe Carducci, the outsider intellectual who helped run Black Flag’s label, SST, takes the long view: ‘Our closing frontier,’ he writes in his 2008 memoir, Enter Naomi, ‘was the sixties cultural revolution as it died out in the seventies and early eighties. In retrospect the Black Flag/SST story looks like a cultural analogue to the Manson-Weathermen-S.L.A.-Black Panther-Nixon White House-People’s Temple endgame—art just had more life in it than crime or politics or religion.’ ” “Must not forget to commit suicide,” the poet Alejandra Pizarnik wrote in her diary—a decade later, she died of a barbiturate overdose. “She was known for working long and obsessively on a little chalkboard, typically on a single poem at a time, exhausting its possibilities before moving on, erasing a word one day, replacing it the next, rearranging the lines (about a dozen at most, presumably all that would fit on the slate) of her small, lapidary poems with an obsessive care that has been obscured by their obvious debts to surrealism and automatic writing … Nothing has colored the reception of Pizarnik’s work more than her death by her own hand.”
June 27, 2016 On the Shelf The Typefaces of Blade Runner, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Blade Runner. At ninety-seven, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still telling stories, hanging out with Sterling Lord, and drinking Merlot, as one does: “The partnership between Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Lord, two towering legends in the publishing world, traces back to the heady, early days of the Beat movement, when a literary and cultural revolution was ignited by a band of iconoclastic writers … Both men attribute the longevity of their lives and careers partly to the fact that they weren’t as wild as the Beat writers they championed. Mr. Lord, who cycled through four marriages, hung around with many of the rebellious, semi-feral writers he represented, but he was always the straight man. He never even smoked cigarettes, at least not in the last half-century. ‘I did smoke a little, in my thirties,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t inhale.’ ” The biographer Michael Shelden would like to say that Herman Melville had a mistress, and William Giraldi would like to say that it doesn’t really matter: “Biographers have long known about Sarah Morewood, the Melvilles’ bewitching neighbor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts—an indefatigable thrower of parties and the Berkshires’ top literary hanger-on—but Shelden wants you to know her in the Biblical sense. ‘Sexy beyond measure,’ Morewood is ‘one of the great unsung figures in literary history,’ a woman who ‘didn’t like to take no for an answer.’ Shelden describes her as Melville’s ‘goddess in his Berkshire paradise,’ the ‘powerful key to unlocking his secrets,’ an ‘untamed spirit’ whose ‘seductive powers worked their wonders on more than a few men.’ Her supposed years-long affair with Melville was ‘so intimate and revealing that it colored every aspect of his life.’ Shelden’s panting, cliché-choked style soon has you reaching for the light switch and candle, then the cigarette and bonbons.” Eliot, Auden, and Yeats all praised David Jones’s 1937 In Parenthesis as a masterpiece, the best long poem to come out of World War I—so how come no one reads it anymore? “Fuelled by direct experience, but highly composed, with a frame of reference that reaches across centuries, In Parenthesis works at the level of poetry, yet isn’t verse, nor, I’d argue, a poem. Multiple narrative possibilities are deployed throughout, fragmented lyricism giving way to sections of prose, dialogue, stream of consciousness, slang and song. The flow between these modes and registers never feels anything less than organic, and yet the work is built upon a parenthetical structure of mathematical precision; a subterranean architecture of image, pace and movement that provides a governing background rhythm to the multiple transitions of voice, perspective and cadence … In the seventy years since its publication it has been too rarely read, or even known, though it has maintained an influence on writers and poets working in its wake.” Isn’t it time you took a good, hard look at the typefaces and art design in Blade Runner? The movie is set in 2019, and that’s right around the corner—best to be prepared. Don’t worry. A lot of it will be familiar, including “a neon advertisement for popular American food processor manufacturer Cuisinart … Cuisinart are far from the only 1980s company advertised in 2019’s Los Angeles cityscape, however. We once again meet American flag-carrier Pan Am … popular carbonated sugar-water Coca-Cola … perennial halitosis-mitigator Dentyne … extraterrestrial game manufacturer Atari … regularly product-placed watch manufacturer Bulova … alcoholic beverage brand Budweiser … and genius, irreverent, sexy mythical perfume brand Jōvan.” Spending time in Berlin this summer? I know this cool artists’ collective curating this cool Biennale you might want to che—oh … wait … “the Berlin Biennale has, under DIS’s curation, transformed from one of Europe’s most critical pinnacles of contemporary art into a vast obsolescent pageant of irrelevance, a disposable cobranding opportunity made to measure for privileged shareholders with little (if any) connection to the numerous issues facing Germany, Europe, or the international community today. Instead, what DIS have come up with is an exhibition so vacuous, ideologically apathetic, ahistorical, sarcastic, and dehumanizing, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been blacklisted solely on account of its conformity to commodity fetishism.”
June 24, 2016 On the Shelf Poets Saving Parks, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a WPA poster for Yosemite. When I think of the Beats, I think of drugs, of brooding nights in dens of iniquity, of casual misogyny. But it’s time to revamp their public image: they were also, as Timothy Egan writes, eloquent proponents of our national parks. “They were known as literary subversives, rebel voices in the era of Silent Generation conformity. But among their other contributions to American life are words that some of the Beats marshaled on behalf of wild places. Kerouac, inspired by Snyder’s rapture about a summer spent in the clouds, followed him as a lookout to an area that eventually became North Cascades National Park in Washington State … In this year when the Park Service is celebrating its centennial with all sorts of hand-wringing about the future, it’s instructive to remember how language can save landscape. Powerful prose has been put to good use in the cause of America’s Best Idea.” Cynthia Ozick, at eighty-eight, is still a force of midcentury belletristic intellectualism—even her regular cabdriver in New Rochelle is quick to say that “the old lady” still has “all her marbles.” Giles Harvey paid her a visit: “Like her characters, a sorry gaggle of pallid shut-ins and thwarted fantasists, Ozick doesn’t get out much. She has spoken of her aversion to stages and of her impatience with what Henry James, her lifelong inspirator, called ‘the twaddle of mere graciousness.’ She writes at night, for years at the Sears, Roebuck desk she has owned since childhood, measuring her existence ‘in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail.’ When I first wrote to her to propose this article, she responded with a detailed message about her unsuitability. As far as she could tell, her life was altogether devoid of public action, public interest. ‘I once wrote that I’d flown cross-country, solo, from the Westchester County airport to the Rocky Mountains in a single-engine 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee,’ she added promisingly. ‘But that was a lie.’ ” In which Emma Cline offers a glimpse into her past as a child actor: “For that week of filming, it was like I had a new team of parents … I thought the blessing would never end. And my mother must have felt it, too: she had met people who would chat with her during downtime, crew members who brought her bottles of water, other parents of kid actors who would commiserate over work permits and Screen Actors Guild dues. She belonged and so did I, marked by rare luck, sanctioned by all the busyness and effort that surrounded us. And who wouldn’t want to believe that the world took notice of you, made a space for you, fussed over your presence and wished for your success?” Tim Parks has read The Vegetarian—Han Kang’s Man Booker International Prize–winning novel, translated from the Korean—and he has just a few questions. “Unable to compare translation and original or even to check single English words against the corresponding Korean, since I cannot distinguish one Korean character from another, I have but one resource. I must consider the relationship between content and style in the English translation … Looked at closely, the prose is far from an epitome of elegance, the drama itself neither understated nor beguiling, the translation frequently in trouble with register and idiom. Studying the thirty-four endorsements again, and the praise after the book won the prize, it occurs to me there is a shared vision of what critics would like a work of ‘global fiction’ to be and that The Vegetarian has managed to present itself as a candidate that can be praised in those terms.” True-crime stories are more popular than ever—and so, too, by extension, are white dudes with martyr complexes hoping to solve cold cases. James Renner’s new book True Crime Addict tells a familiar tale: “Cold cases have long attracted hangers-on like Renner, who work for years on ‘solving’ the crime but never do. In cases that broke before the advent of Internet sleuthing, they often called themselves ‘private investigators,’ which represented a shockingly diverse category. Now many of these people gather on the Internet, posting on sites like Renner’s. The result is a complicated morass of uncontrolled speculation. It certainly isn’t justice … I’m frankly surprised that a major publishing house decided to release Renner’s book.”
June 23, 2016 On the Shelf Art for Art, Blast Furnaces for Truth, and Other News By Robert P. Baird A wonderful thing. “Art! Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.” That’s one view, anyway, one that gained currency in Europe in the nineteenth century. But where does the defense of l’art pour l’art stand today? “Since art categorizable as ‘art for art’s sake’ is usually produced tangentially to hopes of making money, of reaching a large audience or of being immediately useful, it tends to be the darling of the many-degreed. And because art takes time to make, its makers are often those with a luxury of time—usually the wealthy, occasionally the poor. But there is a way in which art for art’s sake is the art most open to all comers, and the most (potentially) ethical.” If you’re moved by the notion that art need serve no master other than itself, then you will all but certainly cheer the news that UNESCO has designated the Exeter Book as “the foundation volume of English literature, one of the world’s principal cultural artefacts.” The book, a tenth-century anthology of Old English verse, include poems such as “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “Christ I,” which gave J. R. R. Tolkien the name for Middle Earth. But it also includes riddles, including this lusty tribute to, well, not what you’re thinking: “I’m a wonderful thing, a joy to women, / to neighbors useful. I injure no one / who lives in a village save only my slayer. / I stand up high and steep over the bed; / underneath I’m shaggy. Sometimes ventures / a young and handsome peasant’s daughter, / a maiden proud, to lay hold on me. / She seizes me, red, plunders my head, / fixes on me fast, feels straightway / what meeting me means when she thus approaches, / a curly-haired woman. Wet is that eye.” It’s easy enough to blame economics and technology for the death of the weirdo local record stores of yore. But what if the real culprit is philosophical? “Genre itself—or, more specifically, genre affiliation as a means of self-identification—feels like another End hovering in the atmosphere this week. No one is asked to choose one affiliation at the expense of another. Instead, it is perfectly normal, even expected, that a person might have a little bit of everything stacked up in her digital library. The idea of ‘Other Music’ as it was conceived in 1995 is unknowable now.” Speaking of philosophy, if there’s one thing I’ve always appreciated about blast furnaces, it’s their unyielding passion for truth. I was glad to learn that the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher agree: “In 2008, Hilla was asked, ‘But why furnaces and conveyor belts?’ She replied: ‘Because they are honest. They are functional, and they reflect what they do—that is what we liked. A person always is what s/he wants to be, never what s/he is. Even an animal usually plays a role in front of the camera … We studied this anonymous architecture, object after object, until we understood the enormous variety of the subject … We learned how blast furnaces worked, how they were constructed, what parts they had … And then it was easier to find out whether there was a front and back. At some stage we asked ourselves: Does a blast furnace have a face?’ ”
June 22, 2016 On the Shelf Briggflatts, Bibliophagy, and Other News By Robert P. Baird “You’ll eat your words,” God told Ezekiel, and lo, Biblical literalism was born. Image via Gallica. If your daily commute this past year was anything like mine, then your daily commute was nothing like Basil Bunting’s in 1965. That was the year Bunting composed Briggflatts, his magnum opus, while riding the train to and from his day job as a newspaper subeditor. Bunting started the poem not long after Tom Pickard showed up at his door and told him, “I heard you were the greatest living poet.” (At the time, Bunting had not published anything in thirteen years; he later said he wrote Briggflatts “to show the boy how it was done.”) The result, first published fifty years ago, in Poetry, was, as August Kleinzahler has it, “a very particular Northumbrian British flowering of all that Pound and Eliot had earlier achieved in their modernist project, while at the same time more emotionally freighted, more ‘human’ than The Cantos or The Waste Land.” Ask my sixteen-month-old whether books ought to be devoured or digested and he’ll be quick to demonstrate, locking jaws on his favorite compendium of fire-truck photos, that he’s a “both and” kind of guy. In the eighteenth century, it seems, the question was merely metaphorical: “Educational manuals, essays and advice books pitted ‘digestion’ against ‘devouring’ in order to slow down the increasingly fast-paced reading habits of their modern world, realigning reading with the process of character formation. ‘Readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual Food … for want of digesting it by proper Reflections,’ cautioned Isaac Watts in The Improvement of the Mind (1741). This distinction allowed writers to position ‘digestive’ reading as an ethical ideal, while condemning ‘devouring’ as unthoughtful and hedonistic.” I stopped watching Game of Thrones when I realized that the show existed only to supply grist for Sarah Larson’s ecstatic mill. Why watch the rough draft when you can go straight to the finished objet? This week’s episode pushed her to peak form: “A snow begins to fall, and Sansa, fittingly, gets the last word with Ramsay, who’s tied up in a dungeon, with the vibe of Hannibal Lecter. ‘Hello, Sansa,’ he whispers. She gives him a good cold speech and then reminds him that he hasn’t fed his dogs. Ah, the old bark-and-chew. Never have I been so happy to see someone’s face pounded in, then eaten off by his own dogs. Sansa watches calmly, then smiles. You’ve come a long way, baby. Or she’s become a monster, and so have I.” In March, the New York Times held a three-day conference in Qatar, which featured Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, and Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the newspaper’s publisher and chairman. The conference addressed such themes as “What is the civic responsibility of the collector in the digital age?” and “How can true, untrammelled, artistic creativity be harnessed in the service of social and economic wellbeing?” It did not, apparently, worry much about what “true, untrammelled, artistic creativity” might mean in a country that imprisoned a poet, Mohammed al-Ajami, for writing poems that criticized Qatar’s autocratic emir: “The inflammatory issues of the region’s present—censorship, labor rights, dynastic succession—are left unaddressed in the Times’s plenary sessions. Rather, the proceedings circulate around the placid lexicon of TED Talks, platitudes of futurism veering into the apolitical and commercial. But in Qatar, you cannot separate politics from art, in large part because the emir’s family is the patron of the arts.”
June 21, 2016 On the Shelf Portraits by Kitty, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A 1978 photo from Kitty’s, a South African portrait studio. Courtesy the Walther Collection. Image via The New Yorker. I don’t keep a diary. I prefer the raw material of anxiety, guilt, and neurosis—my “special sauce”—to remain entirely unprocessed in my brain. But for those who diarize with reckless abandon, there emerges a question of audience, as Elisa Segrave writes: “Compulsive diarists are ambivalent: we want to be private but we want our thoughts to be appreciated. When Jean Lucey Pratt, some of whose diaries have been published as A Notable Woman, began her first in 1926, aged sixteen, she wrote: ‘This document is private.’ But as her life unfolded and she realized that her career as an author was not going to take off, she started to treat her diaries more seriously. On Christmas Day 1934, she wrote: ‘7 p.m. A diarist must do what other writers may not … His purpose is special and peculiar. He has to capture and crystallize moments on the wing so that future generations will say as they turn the glittering pages, ‘This was the present then. This was true.’ ” Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray met once for a tremendously awkward dinner, and in the 165 years since, people have clucked at the severe dress she wore to the encounter: plain blue and white, buttoned up to the neck. (Her contemporaries would’ve gone in for something more low-cut—in silk, maybe, or velvet or lace.) New analysis suggests that Brontë had better fashion sense than history has credited her for—but the dinner itself was still nothing to write home about. “The dinner, with other literary and artistic guests invited to meet the best-selling author, was an abject failure. Conversation faltered, and [Thackeray] later recalled her shocked look as he reached for another potato. One guest recalled it as ‘one of the dullest evenings she ever spent in her life’ … One guest, desperate to break the silence, asked Brontë if she was enjoying London. After a long silence, she finally replied: ‘Yes; and no.’ ” Luke Mogelson teases out that nauseous link between journalism and Schadenfreude: “I do my best to observe things firsthand … This approach, despite its obvious journalistic advantages (you’re less likely to get stuff wrong), can frequently put you in awkward positions. You can find yourself, for instance, visiting a river every morning hoping to find a murder victim. Most foreign correspondents I know would probably object to my use of that word, hoping. They would probably say that we don’t want bad things to happen; we just want to witness them if they do. It’s a legitimate distinction, but one that, in the field, can feel semantic. In the field, we are actively, aggressively seeking to see with our own eyes the reality of war, famine, disaster—and who isn’t at least somewhat gratified when he discovers what he’s sought, at least somewhat disappointed when he doesn’t?” I see you’re smiling, Internet user—you’re probably pretty jazzed about that new form of creative expression you’ve found! But I’m here to tell you that it’s doomed to commodification. Witness the death of the emoji and the GIF: “When emojis and GIFs are filtered through the interests of tech companies, they often become slickly automated … Buying into these features means giving tech companies the power to shape our creative expressions in ways that further enrich the companies themselves. A limited emotional range helps collect data on users’ states of mind. Twitter advertisers can now target users based on the emoji they tweet … The commodification of digital culture has engendered more explicit corporate branding, too. On Snapchat, where users embellish their selfies with emoji, crayon scribbles, and elaborate ‘lenses’ that cover their faces with virtual masks, marketers like McDonalds are seizing the opportunity to write their messages across people’s faces.” In 1957, S. J. “Kitty” Moodley opened a neighborhood portrait studio in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. A newly discovered trove of photos from Kitty’s—fourteen hundred of them, dating from 1972 to 1984—offers an intimate glimpse of life under apartheid: “Every detail in the photos hints at an untold story. A full-length portrait of a woman bedecked in intricate beads and bracelets, her breasts uncovered, was probably taken to send to a fiancé who had left a rural home to find work in the city. Two dapper young men in pageboy caps and khaki trousers are wearing the outfit that young Xhosa men would wear for about six months after their coming-of-age circumcision ceremony. A woman sits for a straight-ahead portrait, possibly a picture for the identification document that all non-white South Africans were required to carry during apartheid. (In a shot of the exterior of Kitty’s studio, this service is advertised on a sign using the colloquial, objecting term dompass, literally, ‘dumb pass.’)”