February 2, 2015 On Games A Question Without an Answer By Dan Piepenbring The cover of Amnesia. Tom Disch, who would’ve celebrated his birthday today, is best known for his science fiction and his poems, some of which were first published in The Paris Review. But he also wrote, in 1986, a text-based video game called Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia, which has become a kind of curio in the years since its publication—an emblem of a brief time when gaming and experimental fiction shared similar agendas, and when “interactive novels” seemed as if they might emerge as a popular art form. Amnesia begins the only way such a project could: in a state of total confusion. “You wake up feeling wonderful,” Disch writes, But also, in some indefinable way, strange. Slowly, as you lie there on the cool bedspread, it dawns on you that you have absolutely no idea where you are. A hotel room, by the look of it. But with the curtains drawn, you don’t know in what city, or even what country. Read More
February 2, 2015 Arts & Culture Affectionate, Yet Arch: An Interview with Vanessa Davis By Evan Kindley Vanessa Davis is a cartoonist and illustrator living in Los Angeles, the author of the collections Spaniel Rage and Make Me a Woman. Her father was the photojournalist Gerald Davis—last year came Strange Stories, a book commemorating his photography. Selected by the designer Todd Oldham, the images in Strange Stories make a strong case for Gerald Davis as a unique and under-recognized talent, a keen observer of mid to late twentieth-century American life with a wry, playful sensibility that falls somewhere between William Eggleston and John Waters. Late last year, in a busy, light-filled café on Sunset Boulevard, I talked with Vanessa about the book and her father’s life and work. Your dad was born in New York City. Was he always into art? He was born in 1940, in Brooklyn, but he grew up in the Bronx. When I was a kid, he would tell stories about growing up and it sounded like a classic 1940s Bronx-Jewish childhood. He played stickball, people called him Slim, he had a girlfriend named Cookie. I know he went to Baruch College to study petroleum distribution—whatever that is—but at the same time he was hanging around at the New York Times photo library, where my Uncle Danny worked. And after that he took a class at The New School with the photographer Lisette Model. He went to museums all the time, but it just seemed like something that was sort of organic, part of his New York experience. He didn’t live in the world of fine art—being an artist wasn’t part of his identity in a really self-conscious way. But he was very art-minded. Like, he loved the painter Morris Louis, and he used to talk about this one time when he just sat in the Museum of Modern Art and looked at Picasso’s Guernica for an hour. Read More
February 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Bright Lights, Big City By Sadie Stein From the giveaway table. I’ve mentioned my building’s giveaway table in this space before. If you’re clearing your bookshelves, you can leave just about any volume on the table and find it snapped up with gratifying alacrity. I’ve scavenged treasures aplenty there, and marveled at all manner of curiosities: The Kosher Cajun Cookbook, Celebrity Vineyards, Who’s Who in Dogs, a CD of music for kids called Oy Baby!, and The Winds of Fortune: the Memoirs of Guy de Rothschild. (Incidentally, if anyone is studying macroeconomics, there’s a pretty good line in used textbooks.) But over the weekend, I picked up something different. It’s an old Modern Library hardcover of War and Peace, the Constance Garnett translation. And there, on the flyleaf, is an inscription: Read More
February 2, 2015 On the Shelf Renaissance Painters Gone Wild, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Piero di Cosimo, Scena di caccia (A Hunting Scene), ca. 1490. “Among twenty reasonable comments, / The only livid thing / Was the caw of the trollbird.” From an anonymous versificator striking at the very quintessence of the contemporary experience: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Trollbird.” The paintings of Piero di Cosimo, a Renaissance-era artist who ate nothing but boiled eggs and painted scenes of alarming violence and sensuality, are coming to America for the first time in seventy-five years. “While Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci were all making worlds of ideal perfection, their contemporary, Piero di Cosimo, had set out on a different, more twisted path, bewitching his fellow Florentines with his visual fables and mythological fantasies … Piero’s ability to conjure the macabre, the monstrous and the miraculous offers its own distinctive pleasures and a rare insight into the more neurotic recesses of the Renaissance imagination.” On Prince Albert Hunt, a twentieth-century fiddler from Texas who met a grisly end: “Prince Albert recorded only nine sides … and they are fiercely sought after due to their forceful, bluesy nature … Although Hunt didn’t alter the course of vernacular folk music, and his influence on Western swing is minimal, he did leave a testament etched in the shellac grooves of his few recordings to an idiosyncratic sound that reflected the mongrel eccentricities of his time and place. Hunt played exactly what the people of Deep Ellum wanted: uninhibited fiddle dance pieces and an occasional waltz.” How to destroy the history of painting: make a black square on a white background, hang it on the wall of a Soviet gallery in 1915, and tell others to jump through it, where “the free white sea, infinity, lies before you.” Kazimir Malevich did this. Worked like a charm. The “quotative like” (“I’m like, What do you mean I have to be in by ten?”) is now “one of our language’s most popular methods of talking about talking … linguists see these expressions as something like the Swiss Army knives of reported conversation. Their versatility and usefulness means they’ll probably be around for a long time.”
January 30, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Getting On, Getting Away, Getting Organized! By The Paris Review “Together We Can Do It!” The latest issue of n+1 opens with an edifying symposium on labor and magazines, two subjects more historically entwined than you might think. Nikil Saval has an excellent primer on the first strike in publishing, and Gemma Sieff tells the still-contentious story of Harper’s unionization—but what really got me was Daniel Menaker’s recollection of tensions at The New Yorker in the seventies, when employees twice tried to stand up for better pay. William Shawn may have been an extraordinary editor, but a manager he was not. “We should have had a policy that after ten years,” he said in a speech to the staff, “if [employees] didn’t rise to something, then they should leave. They’re eccentric, unusual people, and we keep them on.” It’s a lot of inside baseball—I’m not sure, frankly, if anyone who doesn’t work at a magazine will care—but it will nurse the flame of the populist in your soul. And it provides a bracing counternarrative for the publishing industry, which is too often depicted as a kind of rarefied good-old-boys’ cabal. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must agitate for collective bargaining among the staff of a certain literary quarterly. Editors of the world, unite. —Dan Piepenbring Maybe I’ve been watching too much Girls or Transparent or Togetherness, or reading too much Trollope (see below), but for my money, no comedy on TV can compete with season two of Getting On, a show with old, sick people in it, and with smart, passionate, deluded, lonely protagonists—none of whom is trying to get famous. Such people do exist, and their problems are funny, too. —Lorin Stein While I was in England a few years ago, someone recommended I arrange to see an Evensong concert. The majesty of the experience doesn’t translate to anything I’ve encountered in the U.S.—the tightly enclosed chapels and their unspeakably beautiful designs, the intensity and reverberation of the voices, the ritual of it all. I was reminded of the experience—one that I repeated as many times as I could—when I came across the Choir of New College Oxford’s version of “Shenandoah.” (Leave it to an Oxonian choir to offer the most hauntingly beautiful version of an American folk song.) —Stephen Hiltner The New York Times wrote that Kathleen Ossip’s first collection of poems, The Cold War, “conjures delightful and unexpected muses in this socio-poetical exploration of post-World War II America.” Her second collection, The Do-Over, is an equal delight. It uses the same socio-poetically shrewd eye to consider America’s pop-culture milieu, distilling its own understanding of mortality and death. Unassuming and masterly, Ossip’s poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy, and surprising you the moment you let your guard down; “her poems are fun and deadly serious at once,” as NPR put it. The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
January 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent I Swear By Sadie Stein In 1904, Roland D. Sawyer launched a crusade against obscenity. No one ever heard my grandmother, in all her eighty-three years, utter a bad word. I can only once remember her even raising her voice. “It’s all fouled up!” she cried then, shaking a broken TV set. She said it with such frustration and despair that it expressed at least as much as any curse word might have. In fact, besides the time I heard a four-year-old in my brother’s playgroup call his sister Mary-Ellen a “fuckindamnshit,” it was the most shocking thing I’d ever heard. Her husband, my grandfather, was considered foul-mouthed in the family; his language was a constant cause of distress to her. But in fact, he didn’t use real swear words either—certainly not compared to that little boy. It was usually a savage Goddammit! Or Hell’s Bell’s! His worst outbursts were reserved for his weekly gin game. It was then that he’d reach for the worst epithet of all: “I’ll be dipped.” Read More