May 1, 2015 On the Shelf The Flexible, Forgeable American Signature, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Geheime Korrespondenz, 1891. On etiquette, art, and the increasing complications of public space: “Taking a selfie in a museum may be disruptive to others, and antithetical to the experience of art, yet given the option, most people will avoid walking through the line of sight and ruining someone else’s photograph … In the end, that is the fundamental paradox of art and public space: We go there both to be free and to submit.” The Patriots’ tight end Shrek Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski has inspired a cottage industry—people can’t seem to write enough erotic novels about the guy. (Sample salaciousness: “Suddenly, all I wanted to do was watch Gronk do his thang-thang in the zone place there. My vagina demanded it.”) Now a couple is suing the author of A Gronking to Remember for using their image on her cover without permission. “Historical fiction has become a byword for middlebrow wasteland.” But Hilary Mantel and Penelope Fitzgerald, whom critics are fond of comparing, have written novels that make a compelling case for the genre—so much so that people have started bickering about whether they’re really “historical” fiction at all … “I think something happened, somewhere around Love’s Labour’s Lost and the early history plays and going into Romeo and Juliet. Either he fell in love or he just grew up, but something happened to him where he suddenly ‘got it’ about women and there was a profound shift in his writing.” In which Shakespeare gets acquainted with the female psyche. The demise of the signature: a new poll suggests that very few Americans give a hoot about our John Hancocks. “While 61% of responders sign paper at least once a week or more, nearly half do so in a hurry and a full 30% just scribble something fast to get it done … 30% said they have a ‘flexible’ signature, with 64% saying it’s because of computer use. A full 81% of people admitted to faking someone’s signature three or more times a year, and a quarter said they wouldn’t be able to tell if someone had forged their own.”
April 30, 2015 Arts & Culture Say Stupid Shit By Dan Piepenbring Richard Lindner, Boy with Machine, 1954. According to Guattari and Deleuze, the painting validates one of their theses: “the turgid little boy has already plugged a desiring-machine into a social machine, short-circuiting the parents.” From The Anti-Oedipus Papers, a set of notes and journal entries by Félix Guattari. When Guattari, born on this day in 1930, cowrote Anti-Oedipus (1972) with Gilles Deleuze, readers and scholars were baffled by their process; Guattari’s extensive diarizing pulls back the curtain on their collaboration. 10/06/1972 I’m strapped to this journal. Grunt. Heave. Impression that the ship is going down. The furniture slides, the table legs wobble … Writing so that I won’t die. Or so that I die otherwise. Sentences breaking up. Panting like for what. […] You can explain everything away. I explain myself away. But to whom? You know … The question of the other. The other and time. I’m home kind of fucking around. Listening to my own words. Redundancy. Peepee poopoo. Things are so fucking weird! […] Read More
April 30, 2015 Look Prim and Proper, Crude and Vulgar By Dan Piepenbring Mel Bochner, Enough Said, 2012, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″. © Mel Bochner Our Spring issue, available now, features “Thesaurus Paintings,” a portfolio of text-based paintings and drawings from Mel Bochner. They have a focus on ordinary language, specifically the “emotional trajectory” that emerges when one riffs on words and phrases of a certain theme. The direction, Bochner says, is evident in how one gets from the first word to the last word—from the prim and proper to the crude and vulgar. I concentrate a lot on the sense and sound of the language. The flow of words has to have a certain kind of rhythm—or a certain kind of lack of rhythm. That’s how the narrative of the painting is constructed. You can see what he means by looking at Easy/Difficult, a painting that wends its way from a breezy, “easy” high point, to, well, “some deep shit,” as optimism shades into fatalism: Read More
April 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Save the Date By Sadie Stein Photo: Dafne Cholet Let’s say you’re going about your day, footloose and fancy-free. Let’s say a friend e-mails you. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I’m really not feeling well. Can we reschedule?” It comes back to you in a rush: the long-ago volley of e-mails; the consensus on a date that, at the time, seemed impossibly far away; the failure to note said date on the calendar. Maybe you have even made other plans for the same time. But you write back with magnanimity: “No problem. Just concentrate on feeling better!” Read More
April 30, 2015 On the Shelf “I Will Not Be Trifled With!” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Adolf Emil Hering, Wilhelm II, Deutscher Kaiser, 1910. Finnegans Wake, in all its difficulty, was only “crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires.” A wealth of new projects online aim to help readers parse, demystify, and/or grapple with the text; “maybe, just maybe, future generations will look back on early discussions of Finnegans Wake’s unreadability and wonder what the hell was the matter with us.” Borges’s “The Library of Babel” has been re-created online, too, in the form of a site that, if it’s ever completed, “would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lowercase letters, space, comma, and period … The library creates a tantalizing promise of reason—somewhere in its pages are all the works lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and every future masterpiece—but drowned out by infinite pages of nonsense.” A lost 1972 interview with Ray Bradbury, animated for Blank on Blank: “People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, ‘Hey, we got a crazy man in the community,’ and they’ll begin talking to you.” A new documentary, Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, follows W. S. Merwin’s attempts to plant a forest of palm trees in Hawaii. “For forty years, [he] planted a tree every day that he could, restoring nineteen acres of land in Haiku, Hawaii, even as it seemed the world might well be ending, first from military conflict and then from ecological crisis. The film is a chronicle of a man struggling to make meaning through tiny, trembling acts.” Kaiser Wilhelm II liked to talk—a lot. “Virtually everything the Kaiser said, no matter how risible, was recorded and preserved for posterity … he cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors with fantastical geopolitical speculations, crackpot plans, sarcastic asides and off-color jokes. Reading Wilhelm II on every conceivable subject … is like listening for days on end to a dog barking inside a locked car.”
April 29, 2015 From the Archive On the Ship By Dan Piepenbring C. P. Cavafy. “On the Ship,” a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy from our Spring 2005 issue. Cavafy was born on April 29, 1863; he died on his seventieth birthday. It certainly resembles him, this smallpencil likeness of him. Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;an enchanting afternoon.The Ionian Sea all around us. It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.To the point of sickness—he was that sensitive,and it illumined his expression.Handsomer, he appears to me,now that my soul recalls him, out of Time. Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—The sleuth, and the ship, and the afternoon Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn.