April 2, 2015 Look Night Time By Dan Piepenbring Hans Op de Beeck, still from Night Time, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. © Hans Op de Beeck The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s new show, The Drawing Room, opens tonight at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Among its sculptures and watercolors—painted after nightfall, when “all of the machines in his studio were switched off, the phones stopped ringing, and his staff had left”—is a fifteen-minute animated film, Night Time, produced from some six years of paintings. These three stills give a sense of its perturbing, placid, faintly vatic style: they read as a series of nocturnal establishing shots, each a study in tranquil desolation. They put me in mind of Daniel Lopatin’s synthesizer composition “Zones Without People.” “I just like the spectator to be on his or her own,” the artist told Elephant Magazine in 2011. “Having a fictional or fantasy character sitting there would be like an interruption.” The Drawing Room shows through May 2. Read More
April 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent My Mistress’ Face By Sadie Stein Albert Gottschalk, Eftermiddag i april (Afternoon in April), 1897. The variable nature of April weather has long made it fodder for poets. (Or for poets in temperate climates, at any rate.) If you’ve come into contact with any choral pieces in your time, chances are you’ve come across this Thomas Morley pastoral: April is in my mistress’ face, And July in her eyes hath place; Within her bosom is September, But in her heart a cold December. The popular madrigal, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, was published in 1594; it’s believed to have been based on the work of the Italian baroque poet Livio Celiano. Orazio Vecchi, who set the poem, was a well-known composer; his “Madrigal Comedies,” sort of a cappella proto-operas, were all the rage amongst the late sixteenth-century nobility. Read More
April 2, 2015 The ‘Mating’ Book Club 5: “If I Overdwell on This It Can’t Be Helped” By Mark Krotov From “Grace Acts” through “Grace, Again,” pp. 90–116 This is the fifth entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along. “So here he is, after all this setup: Denoon.” That’s how Joshua Cohen began his post last week, and the moment when we finally confront our “genuinely goodlooking man” does feel exactly that dramatic. It’s a strange kind of meet-cute: girl meets boy at furtive political symposium; girl is foisted on boy by boy’s not-quite-ex-wife. This section takes in two run-ins between our narrator and Denoon: the first inside the guesthouse of the USAID director’s opulent home, the second near the outhouse on the Tutwane family plot in Old Naledi. After this, our narrator shares a meal with Grace, the not-quite-ex, at the humble Carat Restaurant, “which was doomed to fail because they gave you too much food for your money.” Cohen wrote that last week’s one-act “operat[es] on multiple time lines,” but so does the novel as a whole: our narrator writes from an undefined future, looking back on life pre-Denoon until we “plunge into Denoon and what followed.” As hints accumulate of the disagreements, passions, and disappointments ahead, our expectation grows fevered, even as the details of the meeting itself remain wonderfully unknowable. Even though we’ve been working our way toward this encounter, and even though we know that this is where the story truly begins, the moment still feels wildly significant. The narrator speaks of “a feeling of fatedness”: “The feeling was that this was supposed to happen, according to the stars in their courses.” Read More
April 2, 2015 Correspondence You Too Can Be a General By Dan Piepenbring Hemingway with Lanham on September 18, 1944, after the breakthrough of the Siegfried Line in Western Germany. From Ernest Hemingway’s letter to Colonel Charles T. Lanham, April 2, 1945. Hemingway described Lanham as “the finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known”; he did, in fact, go on to make general. Original spelling and punctuation retained. Now I just feel homesick, lonely and useless. But will pull out of it. Because have to. Also have cut out heavy drinking … and since Liquor is my best friend and severest critic I miss it. Also have explained to my old girls there is nothing doing—and this light drinking, righteous Life isn’t comparable to always haveing at least two bottles of Perrier Jouet in the ice bucket and the old Kraut Marlene [Dietrich] always ready to come in and sit with you while you shave […] Read More
April 2, 2015 On the Shelf Strandelion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a 1960 German postage stamp. The politics of genre fiction: “the current preoccupations of the crime novel, the roman noir, the krimi lean to the left. It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world … The thriller, on the other hand, tends towards the conservative, probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down.” Mark Strand’s final interview takes a fittingly existentialist turn: “I don’t know why I was born … here I am: a sentient being, talking about life. I had the luck to be born a human being who can speak. I might have been a dandelion or a goldfinch. I might have been a buffalo in the zoo. A fly! I don’t know why I’m here.” Philip Pullman has a transcendently simple (and hyperrealist) way of working through writer’s block: “If you’re stuck, if you’re really desperate—dialogue: ‘Hello.’ ‘Oh hello.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Not too bad, thanks. How are you?’ ‘Not too bad.’ Half a page already.” Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “was one of the only books that James Joyce, his eyesight fading, allowed himself to read while taking breaks from Finnegans Wake.” (Other admirers: Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, E. B. White, Sherwood Anderson, William Empson, and Rose Macaulay.) Before he decamped for England and a lifetime of Anglophilia, T. S. Eliot “spent his formative childhood summers in a wood-shingled, seven-bedroom seaside house on Gloucester’s Eastern Point, built for his family in 1896.” The T. S. Eliot Foundation plans to turn the house into a writers’ retreat.
April 1, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Juvenilia By Sadie Stein From the April 1923 issue of St. Nicholas. The introduction of The Paris Review for Young Readers seems like a good time to think about one of its predecessors: St. Nicholas Magazine, which was published from 1873 to 1940. Though it wasn’t the only children’s magazine of its time, during its heyday St. Nicholas was generally considered the best—a showcase for fine adult writers and a lab for young ones. Scribner’s, a magazine run by the famous publishing house, approached the successful children’s author Mary Mapes Dodge to be St. Nicholas’s editor. At its inception, Dodge wrote that her publication would not be just “a milk-and-water variety of the periodicals for adults. In fact, it needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other.” She felt that because children spent their days at school, “their heads are strained and taxed with the day’s lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine.” Read More