June 10, 2016 On the Shelf Of Milan and Miniskirts, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Valentina Rosselli in Nessuno. Photo courtesy Scott Eder Gallery, via Hyperallergic Today in simulacra, simulation, and other heavy Baudrillard-type shit: Why are so many tech bros convinced that reality is an illusion created by our futuristic descendants? “Many people have imagined this scenario over the years, of course, usually while high. But recently, a number of philosophers, futurists, science-fiction writers, and technologists—people who share a near-religious faith in technological progress—have come to believe that the simulation argument is not just plausible, but inescapable … ‘Maybe we should be hopeful that this is a simulation,’ [Elon] Musk concluded, last week, since ‘either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.’ If you hope that humanity will survive into the far future, growing in power and knowledge all the while, then you must accept the possibility that we are being simulated today.” Fun pretentious dinner-party trick: ask if anyone has read Byron’s memoirs and mock anyone who answers in the affirmative, because those memoirs don’t exist, duh. “Byron’s memoirs—which might have finally provided the ‘truth’ about his life—were destroyed soon after his death. The story goes that three of his closest friends (his publisher, John Murray; his fellow celebrity poet, Thomas Moore; and his companion since his Cambridge days, John Cam Hobhouse), together with lawyers representing Byron’s half-sister and his widow, decided that the manuscript was so scandalous, so unsuitable for public consumption, that it would ruin Byron’s reputation forever. Gathered in Murray’s drawing room in Albemarle Street, they ripped up the pages and tossed them into the fire. The incident is often described as the greatest crime in literary history. It has certainly served to fuel curiosity and conjecture about Byron’s personal life for another couple of centuries. What was the damning secret his friends needed to protect? Domestic abuse? Sodomy? Incest? Probably all three, we imagine.” “Starchitects” like the late Zaha Hadid present themselves as benevolent aesthetes, designing public works that revitalize moribund cities around the world. But really they’re just helping rich people and promoting globalization: “Many leading architects, and most architecture critics, fail to acknowledge the basic reality that architecture isn’t just a vacuum of aesthetic virtues and vague adjectives—it is a product of its political, economic, and social context … Because architects are largely beholden to their clientele, their predilection for designing luxury lodging is partly attributable to changes in the housing market and the global economy. But we shouldn’t let them off the hook that easily. By and large, elite architects have disengaged from efforts to make the most fundamental unit of architecture available to all … Prime movers in gentrification, Hadid and her fellow starchitects have deployed their talents in service of an urban development model that erects symbolic monuments for elites rather than improve the lives of ordinary people.” Contrary to popular belief, Milan in the sixties was no place to wear a miniskirt. Just ask Valentina Rosselli—she’s fictional, but she’ll tell you anyway: “Inspired by American silent screen star Louise Brooks, Valentina Rosselli is the heroine of illustrious Italian comic book artist and graphic novelist Guido Crepax, who started drawing the famous character in 1965. Through his outstanding technique, cinematic compositions, and subtle use of ink and line, Crepax created an introspective and consciously sensual character, a photographer living in the midst of a feminist revolution, that would become his trademark. Through Valentina, Crepax unhinged the sexual taboos of Italian society dominated by the doctrine of the Catholic Church.” Finally, let’s talk about history’s oldest cuss words: “Latin obscenity was in some ways much like our own, being based around sexual and excretory taboos. The Roman sexual schema was quite different from ours, however, leading to some distinctive swearwords. It was socially acceptable for a Roman man to have sex with anyone of any gender, in any way, as long as he was the active partner. To insult someone, then, a Roman would not use futuo (the Latin f-word)—he would more likely say ‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,’ as the poet Catullus does to critics who have accused him of effeminacy. He threatens them with oral rape and anal rape, basically—he will humiliate them by putting them in the passive position. The worst insult you could throw at a Roman man was that he practiced cunnilingus—this was to be passive with respect to a woman, a shame almost not to be borne.”
June 9, 2016 On the Shelf They Call It “Photography,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Adolphe Braun In the seventies, Barbara Williamson founded the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research, “a nudist community that promoted personal freedom through open marriage and group-sex parties.” She became known as “the most liberated woman in America,” but in 1975 the foundation closed for good and Williamson, leery of the Reaganism to come, dropped off the map. Now Alex Mar has paid her a visit and found that she’s raising big cats: “Barbara asks me to choose from the boxes of tea in the open cupboard—‘Lemon ginger? Green? Chamomile?’—as the lynx has rounded the corner from the living room and is now trailing me from one counter to the next. She is making a sound that’s unmistakable, even to someone who has never before spent time with an exotic cat. A deep, low, insistent growl … Barbara shoos the lynx away, but the animal does not listen.” I love book reviews, but sometimes they’re just so long—so subtle! Some parts of the book are good, some parts are bad, some parts kind of depend, blah, blah … It’s like, why don’t you just give the book a fucking letter grade and be done with it, so I can pursue my reading life with the standards of a Consumer Reports subscriber? Fortunately, Book Marks is here, the new “Rotten Tomatoes of Books” that assigns every book a grade. The only problem: every book passes with flying colors. Alex Shephard writes, “Nearly all of the more than 100 books graded by Book Marks seem to be worth reading, which renders it somewhat useless as a recommendation resource … If it is doing exactly what it was designed to do—reflecting the current state of literary criticism—then the real problem is that literary criticism, like America’s universities, is suffering from severe grade inflation.” In London, a new show, “Seizing the Light: Photography in the Age of Invention,” gathers some of the earliest examples of photography from the nineteenth century, when “pioneers began to document the world around them with unprecedented accuracy … [Prince Albert] and Queen Victoria, who had a darkroom in Windsor Castle, were early photography enthusiasts … As well as portraits of Pope Pius IX and Franz Liszt, Adolphe Braun made Alpine and Alsatian landscapes, and specialized in carbon print reproductions.” Today in over versus more than, one of my favorite longstanding usage battles: “Someone has recently created a new Twitter account, @over_morethan, dedicated to the idea that over may not be used with numbers: one thing may physically only sit over another thing, in this view. But to write, as The Economist has recently, of ‘over two-thirds,’ ‘over 150 fellows of the Royal Society,’ or ‘over a year’ is to take a pure preposition and debase it with metaphorical usage … Using over with numbers was even banned by the Associated Press (AP) stylebook, which many American newspapers use as their own, and which thus gives it a kind of sanctified status. According to one account, there was an audible gasp at the meeting of the American Copy Editors’ Society when AP announced that it was abandoning the ‘rule.’ ” The oldest gallery in New York is hosting an exhibition of twenty-five Hudson River School paintings, including work by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand. “It becomes clear that there is another pair of kindred spirits in these Hudson River School pictures: on the one hand, the natural world—already under siege by an expanding economy and the ravages of the Industrial Revolution—and, on the other, sojourning humanity. It was a nodding acquaintance, as Emerson described it in Nature: ‘The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable,’ he wrote. ‘I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.’ ”
June 8, 2016 On the Shelf Finally, a Phone Book on CDs, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Museum of Intellectual Property Let us mourn the tech culture of the late twentieth century, which bore only a superficial resemblance to the libertarian, Objectivist, misogynist creep fest that is Silicon Valley today. Flipping through old issues of Wired, Anna Wiener admires an earlier (if ultimately no more forgivable) strain of techno-utopianism: “Wired’s recurring gadget spread, ‘Fetish,’ is where I always flip first: a catalogue of mid-nineties stuff-lust, resplendent with fine-art mouse pads, data gloves, chunky digital cameras, personal stereos, and vibrating office chairs for the gaming élite. Some of these products are unimaginable now, like SelectPhone, a digital phone book for all fifty states contained on four compact disks … In early Wired, technology wasn’t just entertaining; it was a tool, meant to liberate and enlighten. Products were positioned as socially transformative (‘We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email’). I was strangely moved by an article about Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network, an online town hall used by the city’s homeless and wealthy alike.” There are around 117,000 speakers of Cree, an indigenous language in Canada that, to go by the sample phrases in this piece, we would do well to save—and to learn ourselves: “With entries ranging from pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, the Cree word for pizza—‘the throw-up bread’ in literal English—to môniyâw-matotisân, a sauna or a ‘white-man sweat,’ a crowdsourcing project documenting the vitality and evolution of the most widely spoken indigenous language in Canada is about to be published. Neal McLeod, a poet and indigenous studies professor at Trent University, set out to connect with other Cree speakers on Facebook, aiming to gather together classical Cree vocabulary and to ‘coin and develop’ words relating to contemporary life … ‘One of the things on my bucket list … is to translate Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope into Cree,’ writes McLeod, before laying out Cree for Attack of the Clones: kâ-môskîstâkêcik aniki kâ-nipahi-nâh-naspitâtocik, ‘literally, “when the Ones who resemble each other in an uncanny fashion attack”,’ and tâpwê mamâhtâwisiw awa, ‘the Force is strong with this one.’ ” As the Soviet Union fades into the rearview mirror, it’s becoming harder to find reliable, intimate accounts of life in the USSR. A new graphic novel is trying to change that: “The Italian graphic novelist Igort went to Ukraine in 2008 and stayed for nearly two years. He met people at marketplaces and on country roads, and drew their lives. ‘Word by word I listen to the account of an existence that has become an undigested mass,’ he writes, at the beginning of one section. ‘It pushes its way out from the gut. The following is a faithful transcription of that story’ … These phrases sum up everything that is good and everything that is not so good about The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule … The translation, sadly, is often tone-deaf and downright sloppy—the peculiarly unappetizing language in this passage is just one example. But the stories he has collected are indeed an undigested mass, often a mess, and this is a good thing.” Today in old encyclopedias: the Britannica’s eleventh edition, from 1910–11, has earned a reputation over the past century as a grade-A reference text. What makes it so? “I think the eleventh more than any other edition is a feat of editorial engineering. The editor, Hugh Chisholm, actually had a vision for what an encyclopedia could be and then molded together all the contents that he had to work with to create a single statement about the optimism of the age and the triumph of technology and what progress is … Part of it is the way Chisholm templated the articles. He was a newspaper guy, Chisholm kind of looked at each one of these articles as a story. According to Janet Hogarth, who worked with him, the templates were exhaustive. Even when he didn’t know what the subject was, he knew how a story should be look and feel—how it should be structured. The result of that is a compulsive readability. There are people that sit around for hours reading the eleventh because its just such a pleasure.” A new film festival looks at genre flicks helmed by women: “The word genre comes from the French term for ‘gender,’ an etymology that’s especially salient in a kicky, wide-ranging two-week series at Film Forum that spans more than a century. Curated by Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, ‘Genre Is a Woman’ highlights what should be a well-known fact but is too commonly overlooked: that female directors, ever since the birth of the medium, have not limited themselves to the pink ghetto of romantic comedies and aspirational weepies. Distaff auteurs—beginning with cinema pioneer Alice Guy Blaché, whose The Pit and the Pendulum (1913) is likely the first-ever screen adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe—have made their marks in, among others, noirs, westerns, road movies, science fiction, and grindhouse, all types of films often thought of as the sole province of their male counterparts. ‘Genre movies’ have actually been, to some degree, equal-opportunity employers.”
June 7, 2016 On the Shelf At Once Document and Symbol, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Gordon Parks, Emerging Man, Harlem, New York, 1952, black-and-white photograph. Photo via The New Yorker Our editor Lorin Stein talks to Frederick Seidel about his poems, his persona, and the kind of seedy back-alley porn shops you just can’t find in London anymore: “I think it’s too bad, but unsurprising, that this myth of the beautifully outfitted, elegant, elegantly sinister, Baudelaire sort of fellow striding and sliding down the streets of New York has become a way of not talking about the poems. Some reviewers over the years have liked that figure, liked summoning him up. He doesn’t exist, and isn’t really in the poems. Baudelaire is a hero of mine. Baudelaire and how he did it is of great interest. But this persona does get in the way, I think … Personally, I enjoy someone saying to me: I very much enjoyed that poem, I was moved by that poem, that poem really surprised me. I like the simplicity of statements of that sort. I understand they do not a review make, however large their meaning may be, or however much they may contain.” Because even hell must have a sound track, there is music playing at Penn Station, and someone is responsible for managing the playlist. Bizarrely enough, that unenviable task falls to three women in a windowless office in Austin, Texas: “Amy Frishkey, one of the programmers, understands the otherness of picking the music that people hear between the train-boarding announcements … The puny-sounding speakers at Penn Station play a stream of classical pieces along with ‘easy instrumentals’ that sound like dentist-office arrangements, mostly contemporary piano and guitar solos—and, one afternoon last month as the evening rush was approaching, a Sinatra hit that seemed to have been arranged for French horn. The result is a Beethoven quartet one minute, something vaguely New Age the next … ‘It’s almost as if you’re trying to D.J. the world’s largest wedding reception,’ Danny Turner, Ms. Frishkey’s boss, said. But it is a reception without a bride or groom, and the 650,000 people who pass through Penn Station every day do not dance to the music.” In 1947, a small magazine asked Ralph Ellison if he’d want to do a photo essay on Harlem’s Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic, which had made a name for itself by standing against segregation. Ellison and the photographer Gordon Parks took the assignment, but the magazine soon folded—and so their work is only now coming to light. Vinson Cunningham writes: “In a conceptual note, outlining what he called the project’s ‘pictorial problem,’ Ellison wrote that Parks’s prints ‘must present scenes that are at once both document and symbol; both reality and (for the reader) psychologically disturbing “image.” ’ Parks’s ingenious solution to this ‘problem’—which, essentially, is a re-articulation of what we mean by photographic art—can be seen in an image of a shadow-shrouded man walking in an alley. Before him sit huge, indiscriminate mounds of rubble. Lines of white laundry hang far above his head, between tenement fire escapes. Light travels from the upper corner of the composition, softly through the drying clothes, then slantingly toward the camera’s eye, making the man little more than a silhouette while—somewhat paradoxically—throwing every detail of a nearby wall into sharp, sculpted relief.” Today is Prince’s birthday—the Minnesota governor has declared it Prince Day, and I’m wearing my Purple Rain T-shirt. “The Morning Papers,” a collection at Media Diversified, invites writers of color and Prince devotees to reflect on his legacy. Tanuja Desai Hidier, who was many moons ago an intern at the Review, remembers him in the poem “Zindagi bhar nahin bhoolegi woh Purple barsaat ki raat”: “Pulsing purple Om. / Love symbol. Id. / Strumming us home: / A compass. The Kid.” And in “Camille Ain’t Dead, Honey,” Gemma Weekes mulls on his death: “We remembered all his talk about the Spooky Electric. Some of us thought The Kid was irresponsible and that the Spooky Electric was a train he’d jumped on in the middle of the night, taking him off to some traitorous adventure elsewhere. He’d not read section 3, passage 33 of the Town Rules that stipulated he choose a successor before quitting city limits … A growing percentage theorized that The Spooky Electric was a It wanted his light. It wanted to stop his light from spreading, so The Kid was kidnapped, or scrubbed free of glitter and buried under a thousand layers of darkness.” In which Diana Hamilton embarks on a journey to define “fictional poetry”: “I realized I had never been writing about ‘postconceptual poetry’ at all, but about something I started to call ‘Fictional Poetry’—i.e., poetry that uses the style, plot, characterization, or forms of fiction … Key to this sense of the ‘fictional’ is a quality of aboutness that prevents overemphasis on form—and on the repetition of the forms that often characterizes the appearance of schools—and especially resists the belief that the shape a poem takes, rather than its ‘topic,’ is always the source of its politics / interestingness / literariness / purpose. Instead, the books I want to write about don’t mind being about things … A lot of contemporary poetry does not deal very directly with its ‘content’; or rather, it seems contentless. Most things that pass for poems today are list poems without knowing it: by trying to focus on the lyrical image’s mediation of reference, they become mere collections of images that pride themselves on their irrelevance.”
June 6, 2016 On the Shelf A Female President for the Nineties, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Peter Lindbergh/DKNY We’re closer than ever to electing a woman president—a political outcome that seemed fantastical even in 1992, when Donna Karan made an almost farcically outlandish ad campaign called “In Women We Trust” depicting a woman in high office: “Karan’s ads make the presidency look like it was art-directed by Lana Del Rey—all slo-mo and high contrast, shallow focus and delicate, practiced ennui. In Madame President’s ticker-tape parade, her crisp oxford blows open to reveal a presidential décolletage supported by what looks like a black lace bustier. She juggles childcare duties with required reading in a tube top. Our suspiciously youthful commander-in-chief commands the respect of her old, male associates in double-breasted pinstripes and a skirt slit up to there, hair always blown back, nary a part nor pore in sight. It’s a dream within a dream: A woman makes it to the top of the political food chain with her composure, mood lighting, and sensual wardrobe intact.” Say it’s 1661 and the Catholic Church has just locked you away because you’re Jewish. There’s a good chance you’ll be burned at the stake. You could mope about it. Or you could do what Francis von Helmont did: “he took his imprisonment in stride, and between trips to the torture chamber he conceived his theory of language. Usually referred to as the Alphabet of Nature, the small book outlines Francis’s concept of Hebrew and his scheme for teaching deaf-mutes to speak it. The frontispiece to the book shows Francis sitting at a table in his cell in Rome; facing a mirror, he is scientifically measuring his lips with a pair of calipers … Given Francis’ belief that all true knowledge is latent in our microcosmic bodies—accessible through divine revelation—it is not surprising that his model of language imagines the Hebrew characters as being almost engraved inside us, physically wedded to our mouths.” You probably read the Boxcar Children as a kid—many generations have—not realizing that those children were capitalist shills, seducing you with images of an illusory meritocracy: “There remains something mildly and even pleasurably heretical about the way the Boxcar Children locate the outer limits of amusement in decorous productivity—the way that, for them, there’s no better use of total independence than perfectly mimicking the most respectable behaviors of adults. They earn money, do chores when no one’s watching (‘The children could hardly wait to put the shining dishes on the shelf’), and engage in none of the mischief that other literary children take to when left to their own devices … Hard work, here, is presented as at once deviant and rewarding, and kids respond to this—I know I did—with their rarely united desires to be both unsupervised and good.” If you’ve always wished that “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” was a photo essay, your prayers have been answered: for his series “End of Crisis,” William Minke embarked on not one but two cruises, photographing the diversions on ships that aren’t exactly state of the art. “I’ve always been fascinated by heterotopias and coexisting worlds,” he says: “After reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace I decided to go on a journey of cruise ships because his description of on-board life sounded very bizarre … As a traveller one can leave behind everyday life on thirteen decks of roulette tables, bingo and shopping malls twenty-four hours a day.” Indonesia is enormous, beautiful, heterogeneous, populous … but no one is bringing its literature into English, Louise Doughty writes: “There are some countries so vast and diverse that any attempt to summarize them feels insulting: such is Indonesia. With a population of 258 million, it is the world’s fourth most populous nation and the largest formed by an archipelago. When it was guest of honor at the Frankfurt book fair last year, it appeared under the banner ‘17,000 islands of imagination,’ a phrase describing its geography but also encapsulating the complexities of representation … As yet, little of its literature has been translated into English … According to Goenawan Mohamad, Indonesia’s most well-known public intellectual and founder of Tempo magazine, which was banned for a while under the Suharto regime, ‘Asian writing is noticeable only when it comes from the site of calamity. Normally, a prolonged war, preferably one involving the U.S., or a genocide, or a tsunami, brings it to the focus of the world media, and the literary market comes next.’ ”
June 3, 2016 On the Shelf Bigger, Uglier, Lonelier Cities, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Daniel Brown Furthering a grand tradition I like to call “strong opinions about parts of speech,” Colin Dickey has mounted a defense of the adverb, which had come under fire as early as last week. Anyone who finds adverbs imprecise doesn’t know how to use them, he writes: “Anne Carson writes of adjectives that they ‘are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity.’ Adverbs, then, curtail and refine—but in doing so they can pick out the unexpected resonances, the hidden valences in the words they modify. An adverb, at its best, offers a sudden shift in direction or tone, all the more unexpected considering the adverb’s seemingly slavish subservience to the word it modifies … Deployed skillfully, the adverb backstabs lovingly, subverts daintily, insurrects gallantly.” In an equally grand tradition, “strong opinions about Russian translation,” Janet Malcolm rehabilitates Constance Garnett, whose once revered translations have fallen out of favor: “A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations … As for the charge that Garnett writes in an outdated language, yes, here and there she uses words and phrases that no one uses today, but not many of them. We find the same sprinkling of outdated words and phrases in the novels of Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot. Should they, too, be rewritten for modern sensibilities?” Most of the world’s monotonous, massive, forbidding cities were built by people. Big mistake. Daniel Brown’s photography proves that algorithms can do it better: “Brown makes his images using generative design software he wrote himself. It creates enormous, complex 3-D patterns that he searches until finding something interesting … ‘I set about programming algorithms to generate an imaginary city,’ he says. ‘One that I could populate with buildings and structures without having to draw or 3-D model’ … Brown isolates the shape, and tweaks it until he arrives at something he likes. Then the program applies bits and pieces of public domain photos of 1970s apartment buildings. The result is hulking, maze-like structures that appear to go on forever.” Sasha Chapin became addicted to chess, which he regards as an infection of the brain: “Chess is what they call a perfect information game. At every moment, you are informed of everything taking place. There’s no bluffing. No guessing. No suspicion. If that notion doesn’t immediately excite you, take a second to consider all the imperfect information games you play all the time. I don’t mean games like poker. I mean dating, for example. Have you ever, a month into a relationship, unearthed some hidden facet of your new partner that makes you think, Holy shit, get away from me? Slowly discovering things about people is wonderful, in theory, but we often find that the mysterious reaches of the human soul contain bear traps and poison darts. Imagine if you could instantly behold the entirety of a person before you, and say, ‘Hi, let’s go to the beer location,’ with perfect confidence?” Need a good weekend read? Might I recommend Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research by that most laureled of authors, the NSA? “This book appears to be excellent,” Paul Ford writes. “A reasoned, thoughtful overview of the Web as an entire system, written for intelligent people who had a need of expertise and mastery over the medium. The book throughout emphasizes security and privacy, and it’s as complete as possible. It tells you how to secure your Wi-Fi, and what things to uncheck in your Internet Explorer. It helps you with complex research problems. It’s granular, and dry, and exhaustive—and thus incredibly helpful.”