March 12, 2015 On the Shelf What You Can Build, What You Should Build, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Diplomatic Club in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1980. Photo © Atelier Frei Otto Warmbronn Frei Otto, the German architect whose tensile, tent-like constructions were marvels of structural engineering, has died at eighty-nine. He designed his bubbles, webs, and wings to use as few materials as possible; they challenged conventions of durability and permanence. “Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary?” he once asked. “We can build houses which are two or three kilometers high and we can design halls spanning several kilometers and covering a whole city—but we have to ask, What does it really make? What does society really need?” Tim Youd’s project to retype all of Lucky Jim, mentioned here yesterday, is an act of intellectual lunacy lifted straight from the pages of Borges—in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Borges tells of a man who aspires to rewrite all of Cervantes’s masterpiece line-by-line by inhabiting the depths of its author’s soul: “The initial method that he imagined was relatively simple. Get to know Spanish well, recover his Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or against the Turk, forget the history of Europe between 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure … but dismissed it as too easy.” “A well-traveled branch of futuristic fiction explores worlds in which artificial creatures—the robots—live among us, sometimes even indistinguishable from us … Take Twitter. Or the Twitterverse. Twittersphere. You may think it’s a stretch to call this a ‘world,’ but in many ways it has become a toy universe, populated by millions, most of whom resemble humans and may even, in their day jobs, be. But increasing numbers of Twitterers don’t even pretend to be human.” James Gleick on the gradual, mediocre rise of Twitter bots, which have introduced a kind of artificial intelligence that almost no one is in awe of: “this is how the future really happens, so ordinary that we scarcely notice.” On academe’s willful ignorance of African literature: “As long as critics and publishers frame African literature as always on the cusp, it will continue to be an emerging literature whose emergence is infinitely deferred. It will remain utopian, just out of reach. It’s long past time to get over this narrative. Its function is, simply, to excuse and legitimize the ignorance of those who have chosen to ignore African literature.” On December 4, 1891, America had what’s believed to be its first suicide bombing. Its target was Russell Sage, a financier who “reportedly had more ready cash at his disposal than any other person in the U.S. What nobody yet understood—except for the unfortunate occupants of the financier’s wrecked office—was that a crazed man had just targeted Sage for attack. Even though Sage survived it, the assault had an effect that the assailant never intended: a remarkable redistribution of the vast riches of one of the most notorious robber barons of the Gilded Age.”
March 11, 2015 From the Archive A Very Normal Person By Dan Piepenbring Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Tokyo noir. From the cover of our Spring 2006 issue: detail from “My Darling Monkey.” Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who created a dark, noirish style of Japanese manga he called gekiga, meaning “dramatic pictures,” died last week at seventy-nine. We featured a portfolio of Tatsumi’s work in our Spring 2006 issue. “Tatsumi’s gekiga,” the editors wrote, is distinguished by its discordant placement of flat, almost crudely sketched ordinary characters within gritty, naturalistic backgrounds. The drawings alternate between impressions of mundane daily life and images of surprising violence and sex, conveying a sense of individual alienation within the rapidly changing throng of postwar Japanese society. […] In tone and style, Tatsumi’s gekiga shares an obvious kinship with the “alternative” or “literary” comics that began proliferating in North America in the mid-1980s—yet it predates that work by as much as three decades. The stories from which the images in these pages were selected are all set in Tokyo in the 1960s. […] When asked whether he wanted to say anything to English-language readers coming to his work for the first time, he said: “I myself am a very normal person. Please do not interpret these stories as representative of the author’s personality.” Below, in memory of Tatsumi, are a few excerpts from that portfolio. Read More
March 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Elder Abuse By Sadie Stein Alexander Orlowski, Head of an Old Man in a Fur Hat, 1815. For something that inhibits creativity, depression inspires a lot of metaphors. You can read about it likened to a vine-covered house or a black dog or a dreary balloon, or see it portrayed as a lowering cloud. Maybe because it’s a state so characterized by its lacks—of joy, of fun, of perspective, of energy, of hope, of self-love, of memory—people are eager to imbue it with substance. When it hit me—in the abrupt way it does when you’ve forgotten to take your meds—I was on the subway. It was like being deluged by a tidal wave—no, make that a wave of slush from a passing taxi. The drear was powerful and immediately exhausting. I told myself it would pass. We all have our tricks. When things aren’t too bad, I can sometimes get myself to the dog run. The best thing to do is to help someone else, although this is easier to say when you’re not in the grip of it. When the prospect of dressing or bathing seems beyond contemplation, when keeping yourself from others seems like one of the few good things you can manage, the energy required in engaging with others is daunting. Read More
March 11, 2015 Big, Bent Ears Big, Bent Ears, Chapter 1: There Are No Words By Dan Piepenbring From Joseph Mitchell’s collected objects. Photo by Ivan Weiss We’ve posted the first chapter of Big, Bent Ears, Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty.” If you missed it, we launched the series last week; it’s a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in various arrangements and states of completion. This week, Sam and Ivan examine the overlap between two of their projects, one focused on the writer Joseph Mitchell and the other on the Big Ears Music Festival, featuring the musician Jonny Greenwood and the Wordless Music Orchestra, among others: At some point that week, though, the word ear began, well, ringing in ours. The Knoxville music festival is called Big Ears, recalling Mitchell’s “bent” ones. We now wonder whether the type of careful, concentrated sonic experience on display at Big Ears—where the audience is invited to move outside their comfort zones and immerse themselves in new sounds—is analogous to Mitchell’s old-fashioned manner of venturing out into the back alleys of New York to hear people talk. Read the piece here. The next installment comes in two weeks, on March 25—stay tuned.
March 11, 2015 On the Shelf Home Is Where the TV Is, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s okay—you belong! Photo: © Michael Galinsky. The artist Tim Youd is retyping Lucky Jim, word by painstaking word, in public at the University of Leicester, on an Adler Universal typewriter—the same model Kingsley Amis used. “I’ve read everything before I retype it, so the suspense is gone. The appreciation happens on a deeper level. I get to examine the structure, the style in the course of the most active form of reading … At its heart, the performance is a devotional exercise. It is an extreme, perhaps slightly absurd dedication to the author’s words.” Post-Internet poetry takes for granted that the Web, as a medium, can inspire and inform a poem—it doesn’t make a show, that is, of turning the poet into a kind of DJ, “weaving together samples of preexisting language into something unique. Of course, this is nothing new. The cento—snagging lines from other poems to make your own—has been around for nearly two millennia. But what’s new is [the] use of Google as an oracle, the results from which are strained through [one’s] own subjectivity, leading to poems that are at once organic and mechanical, personal and, in a sense, objective.” “More than 300 million people live here, and they had descended over the course of a very few generations from a huge number of disparate cultures, with different histories, ways of behavior, worldviews, and experiential backgrounds. All of them, sooner or later, had been required to relinquish their old culture and enter the new one. That must be why the most striking thing about the United States was its sameness … And that must be why every American movie was made after the same template and why, in this sense, every movie expressed the same thing. And that must be why all these TVs were hanging on the walls, unwatched; they created an immediate sense of belonging, a feeling of home.” Knausgaard’s travels in America continue. Kristin Dombek on Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth: “Sonic Youth turned the war of sound into a war on the reproducibility of music for consumption, and the failure to create the perfect rock product into music itself … Since guys liked Sonic Youth, learning to like them had seemed like a way to borrow a little male bonding, like wearing flannel, skipping class to drop acid, or fumbling my way through a hacky sack circle.” Don’t pretend you don’t care about the sociology of flatulence. “Heterosexual men were the most likely to think it was funny and the most likely to engage in ‘intentional flatulence’ … Heterosexual women felt like they were violating gender norms if their farts were stinky: ‘The worse it stinks,’ said one, ‘the nastier they think I am.’ ”
March 10, 2015 Look Crashed/Crushed By Dan Piepenbring Ron Arad, Pressed Flower Yellow, 2013, steel, glass, leather, plastic, and vinyl, 145 5/8″ x 98 3/8″ x 7 7/8″. Image via Paul Kasmin Gallery In 1970, before he started on Crash, J. G. Ballard staged an exhibition of totaled cars at London’s New Arts Laboratory—“three crashed cars in a formal gallery ambience,” he called it in his Art of Fiction interview: The centerpiece was a crashed Pontiac from the last great tail-fin period … What I was doing was testing my own hypotheses about the ambiguities that surround the car crash … I hired a topless girl to interview people on closed-circuit TV. The violent and overexcited reaction of the guests at the opening party was a deliberate imaginative overload which I imposed upon them in order to test my own obsession. The subsequent damage inflicted on the cars during the month of the show—people splashed them with paint, tore off the wing mirrors—and at the opening party, where the topless girl was almost raped in the rear seat of the Pontiac (a scene straight from Crash itself), convinced me I should write Crash. The girl later wrote a damningly hostile review of the show in an underground paper. Read More