January 16, 2015 First Person Obstacle Course By Javier Marías The perils of growing up surrounded by books. Illustration: Mark Fearing This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of The Threepenny Review. They’re celebrating with Table Talk from the Threepenny Review, a new book collecting a hundred essays from their Table Talk column—a casual, intellectually curious series first launched by Leonard Michaels in 1990, with subjects ranging from Emily Dickinson and rats to prominent holes in Kansas. This piece, by Javier Marías, appeared in their Winter 2011 issue. Like all the other apartments I’ve ever lived in, the apartment in which I spent my childhood was full of books. However, the word full doesn’t really come near the truth; neither do the words crammed or crowded, because not only was every wall covered with shelves (each of which was packed with volumes from every imaginable century), but the books also sometimes served as rugs, tables, sofas, chairs, and even, almost, beds. I don’t mean that there was no furniture in the apartment and that we sat on piles of books or ate from other still taller piles—with a consequent disquieting sensation of constant instability—but that the rugs, tables, sofas, seats, and even beds were often buried beneath vast tomes: for example, the complete and very abundant works of the late-Renaissance philosopher Francisco Suárez. I remember those in particular because, on one occasion, I had to wrestle for hours with the philosophers Suárez and Condillac in order to make a large enough space on the floor to play with my toy soldiers. Bear in mind that my size at the time (I was seven or eight) didn’t really equip me for the easy removal of those large seventeenth- or eighteenth-century volumes obstructing my innocent games. In fact, for myself and my three brothers, the house was one long obstacle course, almost two hundred yards long, the obstacles always taking the form of books. That is why, from an early age, I became used to negotiating the words of the great philosophers and writers, with the inevitable result that I have a deep-rooted lack of respect for anyone who writes, myself included. It still surprises me when I see how other people (especially politicians and commentators) kowtow to writers or else fight to appear in photos accompanied by some scribe or other, or when the state rushes to give succor to ailing, ruined poets, privileging them with a treatment that only heaps humiliation on equally ruined or ailing street cleaners, businessmen, waiters, lawyers, and cobblers. My scant respect for the trade to which I belong (from the most ancient of academicians to the most youthful of libelists) derives from a childhood home in which, as I have said, I grew used to mistreating and misusing almost all the seminal texts from the history of culture. Having too much respect for the kind of individuals who partially soured my childhood and invaded the territory occupied by my thrilling games of bottle-top soccer would seem to me masochistic in the extreme. Read More
January 16, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Interview By Sadie Stein Illustration: Robert Huffstutter You know those moments when you feel like you’ve mastered adulthood? When you think, Wow, this is it—I’m on assignment in a city across the country, interviewing somebody interesting, wearing sunglasses. Someone who saw me now would totally think I was a real grown-up! That was me yesterday, in California. Everything was going well. The tape recorder was working, the coffee was good, the café was chic and filled with beautiful people dressed in expensive rags. Our egg salad had sliced radish on it. In the way of such things, I had to use the bathroom. “May I use your bathroom?” I asked the owner, who was dressed in a striped French sailor’s shirt. “We have an employee bathroom you can use,” he said. “Make a left, go down the alley, and you’ll see a flight of stairs. The bathroom is at the top.” Now, I don’t like using the employee bathroom any better than I should—in my experience they are generally depressing, even when they don’t involve “alleys”—but it was kind of them to give me access, and the café itself was so charmingly appointed, filled with wildflowers and expensive chocolate bars involving things like sunflower seeds and cheerful employees, that I figured this specimen would be better than the common run. Read More
January 16, 2015 On the Shelf Tolstoy’s Insufficient Firmness, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Tolstoy in 1851, when he just couldn’t seem to do a single damn thing right. Here’s a self-effacing diary entry from March 1851 in which Tolstoy chronicles his flaws, hour by hour—part of a larger project in which he evaluates his own ethics. How many of these peccadilloes have you committed today? “Koloshin (Sergei) came to drink vodka, I did not escort him out (cowardice). At Ozerov’s argued about nothing (habit of arguing) and did not talk about what I should have talked about (cowardice). Did not go to Beklemishev’s (weakness of energy). During gymnastics did not walk the rope (cowardice), and did not do one thing because it hurt (sissiness).—At Gorchakov’s lied (lying). Went to the Novotroitsk tavern (lack of fierté). At home did not study English (insufficient firmness).” Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life has become an unlikely hit for its publisher, Tyrant Books—but success can come with its own problems. “When the Times review appeared, Ms. Urban [Lish’s agent] asked Mr. DiTrapano [his publisher] how many books were in print. ‘He said 3,500,’ Ms. Urban recalled. ‘I wanted to kill myself.’ ” Art critics—prepare to give notice by the dozens. Now there’s Novice Art Blogger, an algorithm that reviews art and is not altogether terrible at it. “The bot is simply articulating what it interprets; there is something very noble about that, that it is not passing judgment.” Is science fiction our new religion? “We gather in our millions in the darkened cathedrals of multiplex cinemas to silently venerate our superhero gods. All religions have their holy stories, and the immense respect given to SF novels like 1984 and I, Robot by their fans is very close to an act of faith … Let’s not think about L Ron Hubbard.” Paperbacks give publishers a second chance to find an eye-catching cover design, but the results are often confounding. “After spending so much time, effort and money on getting the dust jacket just right, most publishers go back to the drawing board to design the paperback version. That always seems to me like a waste of hard-won brand awareness, but I’m told most books don’t sell well enough to establish any brand awareness.”
January 15, 2015 Look Crepuscoli (Twilights) By Dan Piepenbring Errata Corrige #2234, 2013, vintage book, inks, nails on wood panel. In a new show at Rome’s Sara Zarin Gallery, the Russian-born artist Ekaterina Panikanova presents work composed of old books, which she arranges into a kind of jigsaw puzzle of palimpsests. (We’ve featured her on the Daily before.) “Paper, cards, and books have a fundamental value in my work,” she says. “I see them as a body of rules, dogmas, traditions, religious beliefs, and scientific discoveries, which, right or wrong for their time, human beings had put in cages.” “Crepuscoli (Twilight)” is on display through February 7. When Panikanova looks at “the rules of the home [and] education,” she’s said, she sees only “eventual imprisonment.” Accordingly, in this new show she hangs her spreads in a spare room furnished with a spartan table, an uninviting couch, and pairs of shoes, among other housewifely touches. The ersatz domestic setting makes her work seem freighted with fatalism, and imagery that could be twee—cakes, rabbits, antlers—instead appears deeply troubled. I say that, of course, as a compliment. You can see more of Panikanova’s work at Colossal. Read More
January 15, 2015 In Memoriam Jane Wilson, 1924–2015 By Nicole Rudick Jane Wilson, Frozen Fields, 2004, oil on linen, 30″ x 36″. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York. Last month, I got a peek at a private collection of work by the painter Jane Wilson. Tucked away in a Midtown East town-house office are a handful of her diminutive watercolors and a very large oil painting depicting one of Wilson’s characteristic landscapes—a sweeping, hazy view of a sliver of land and a limitless sky. Last fall, I saw a host of such paintings in Wilson’s show at DC Moore Gallery. Yet there’s a difference between admiring her evocative landscapes—or, more precisely, skyscapes—in a gallery setting and discovering them in a secret spot, where, I imagine, they exist for their owner as a private portal, an escape—out of the office, out of the city, out of one’s own life. Imagine sitting in a darkened, quiet office and looking up at Wilson’s plush, golden altocumulus clouds or at the purple and blue striations of storm clouds over a teal sky or at the dappled, cobalt blue of twilight. Where couldn’t you go? Read More
January 15, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Mad Hatter By Sadie Stein From “Wacky Hats from Gay Paree,” a fifties-era magazine feature. In the first half of the twentieth century, America experienced what might be called the “silly-hats craze.” Maybe it was the influence of the surrealists, who were by then commercialized and nonthreatening. Perhaps it was a spate of postwar frivolity. Or maybe it was just a safe way to act out—still conventional (no one was suggesting you actually go hatless!), but fun, wacky, and full of safely contained “personality plus.” In this lineup of “Wacky Hats from Gay Paree” you can see the form at its most extreme. A search reveals atomic hats, hats made of lightbulbs, hats that look like flowerpots. Nothing was off-limits, and glossies delighted in featuring examples of millinery whimsy. Read More