May 27, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Bringer of Jollity By Sadie Stein “The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.” —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair A friend described to me yesterday what he considers the Three Degrees of Being Stood Up. As he explained, these proceed as follows: First Degree: Standing someone up entirely, with no warning, and no subsequent apology. Second Degree: Canceling on someone at the last minute, possibly after he or she has set out for the appointment in question. Third Degree: Breaking a date. He agreed that we have all been guilty of the third. I know I have, too often, and, indeed, was somewhat surprised to hear it grouped with the other two offenses. And yet, he was right: such things inconvenience others and maybe even hurt them. Besides practical questions of schedules and reservations, there are matters of disappointment and broken trust. After a certain point, you cease to depend upon people who make a habit of breaking dates. Maybe that’s what we want. It was funny that this should come up just when it did, because only a few days before, another friend had observed, “people should have the self-esteem to know that their absence matters to other people.” Read More
May 27, 2014 Arts & Culture A Conversation About John Cage and William Gedney’s Iris Garden By Jason Fulford and Leanne Shapton Iris Garden is a 2013 book that combines John Cage’s stories with William Gedney’s photographs—including several of the composer himself—with an ingenious design evoking Cage’s affinity for chance. The stories and photographs were selected by the photographer Alec Soth: twenty-two of the stories are from Cage’s series Indeterminacy, conceived in 1959, which featured stories of varying length, each intended to be read aloud over the course of one minute; and forty-four photographs from the William Gedney archive, shot from the 1950s to 1989 and housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford are the founders of J&L Books. Leanne Shapton: As soon as I started flipping through this book, I thought, I’m so happy art publishing allows for this. It’s a strong book, but it’s quiet and subtle, and the design would never make any marketing department happy. Jason Fulford: The book comes completely apart, literally. Even the endpapers slide out, and the cover can be unfolded—so you can read it in any order. It reminds me of how my Hasselblad disassembles. You can take all of the pieces apart and lay them out on a table. LS: I went to the back of the book and read Cage’s statement, which helped me “read” the book. He wrote: “My intention in putting these stories together in an unplanned way is to suggest that all things—stories, incidental sounds from the environment and by extension, beings—are related, and this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.” JF: Cage stays with you your whole life. You keep coming back to things you loved about him when you were fifteen, and they still relate to you at forty. Actually, I guess I probably learned about him in my twenties. Did I ever tell you a story about Lee Elickson, the American filmmaker who lives in Amsterdam? When he was fourteen or fifteen, he had a chance to meet John Cage. He brought an empty sheet of music and asked Cage to sign it. Cage asked, What are you gonna do with it? So Lee had to think fast and said, After you sign it I’ll put it on the forest floor for a week, let nature make its marks, and then have it performed by an orchestra. So Cage was like: Oh, okay. Lee still has the paper, but he hasn’t found an orchestra yet to perform it. Read More
May 27, 2014 On the Shelf Hey, Babe, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Frédéric Soulacroix, The Cavalier’s Kiss Julian Gough’s celebration of Joyce wins the award for Title of the Year: “James Joyce: You can’t ignore the bastard.” “Joyce entered your life very differently in rural Ireland in the early 1980s. Back then, he still existed outside the official system. Too difficult, too scandalous for school. It was still possible for teenagers to read Joyce as an act of rebellion against teachers, government, church. You read Joyce the way you listened to late punk, or early rap.” What’s the point of infantilizing pet names? “In the mid-twentieth century, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that babies’ cuteness is an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation without which they wouldn’t survive; adults need some sort of incentive to provide them with constant care, and Lorenz thought that motive was admiring their cuteness. He believed men carry this preference into adulthood by looking for women who retain elements of babyish ‘cuteness.’” The story of an art historian’s shrewd detective work: “A supposedly minor work from the Qing dynasty turned out to be a masterpiece nearly 700 years old.” In 2012, before Kara Walker’s exhibition arrived there, David Allee photographed Brooklyn’s dilapidated Domino Sugar Factory. “While his pictures could not convey the smell of the factory—‘crème brûlée mixed with mold and rot’—he hoped to communicate something about its complicated history … Inside the prison-like spaces, there was also ‘a visceral sense that the work that took place here was torturous.’ At the same time, he said, ‘everything is literally sugar coated.’” In the sixties, TV and film writers dreamed up a bunch of supercomputers with one thing in common: they were hell-bent on annihilating humanity.
May 26, 2014 Quote Unquote Party Like Bilbo By Dan Piepenbring Alan Hollinghurst is sixty today. Photo: Larry D. Moore HOLLINGHURST I was rather a goody-goody as a child. I hated the idea of being in the wrong and dreaded being punished. Everyone at my prep school was being beaten by the headmaster with the back of a hairbrush round the clock, and I was keen to avoid that. It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it. INTERVIEWER What were you reading at that age? HOLLINGHURST There was a bizarre library at the school that had a lot of old-fashioned children’s adventure books by G. A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne. I got very involved with Rider Haggard—I still have the tie-in paperback for the film of She with a picture of Ursula Andress on the front, “the most beautiful woman in the world.” I also became an avid collector of a series called The Pan Book of Horror Stories, edited by Herbert Van Thal. I still have these as well, and the gruesome covers take me back—the whole atmosphere of the school suddenly closes in on me when I look at them. In my school reports, one of the masters was worried about this “macabre reading,” but by the following year, I had discovered Tolkien, with whom I became totally obsessed. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. I made charts of the kings of Rohan and so on. I used to write letters to my friends in dwarfish runes. The English master took a dim view of this and made me read Barchester Towers as an antidote, when all I wanted to do was to get back to Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party for the seventh time. I’ve never been able to read Trollope since. —Alan Hollinghurst, the Art of Fiction No. 214
May 26, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 30, or Triple X By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, Canto XXX We’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: flesh-eating, incest, the lute-man, and more! Dante has shown that almost every canto in the Inferno obeys a certain logic. First, Dante and Virgil enter a new circle or ditch; Dante notices a small cluster of sinners being subjected to a gruesome, albeit clever punishment (shit-eating for the flatterers, amputation and disembowelment for the schism-makers); then Virgil will encourage him to approach a sinner, who inevitably ends up being an Italian eager to tell the story of his life in a way that downplays the gravity of his sin. Virgil and Dante move on afterward. Salt, pepper, and serve. This formula is so apparent that had Dante been less skilled, his stories less heartrending, the Inferno would’ve been a heavy-handed entertainment instead of a lyrical masterpiece. The opening of canto 30 abandons this formula. We pick up where canto 29 left off, as Dante meets the alchemists and the Falsifiers of Others’ Persons. In order to convey exactly how psychotic these sinners are, Dante compares their violence to two famously macabre stories from the ancients. First he tells the story of the goddess Juno, who arranged the death of Ino by sending Ino’s lover into a fit of madness during which he took Ino’s son and “whirled him round and dashed him on a rock.” Ino jumped into the ocean after her dead son and drowned. That’s plenty gruesome, but then Dante tells a second story, this one about Hecuba of Troy, who saw her two sons killed and went mad with grief. These mad Thebans and Trojans, Dante writes, are nothing compared to the crazed sinner we encounter here, in the Tenth Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell, who bites into the neck of a fellow sinner. Capocchio, one of Dante’s former classmates who was introduced in Canto 29, is the guy being bitten; Griffolino, another sinner who was introduced in 29, explains that the aggressor—the biter—is Gianni Schicchi, who, when he was on earth, pretended to be the late Buoso Donati in order to help his own family inherit a sum of money. Griffolino also points out Myrrha, who appears in The Metamorphoses as the daughter of the King of Cyprus. She so lusted for her father that she put on a disguise and seduced him. Oops! Read More
May 26, 2014 On the Shelf The Wide World of Typewriter Art, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Otto von Bismarck (1898), typewriter art published in George Mares‘s The History of the Typewriter (1909) The Glasgow School of Art’s library, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, caught fire over the weekend, but the art school is confident that most of its holdings are intact. A new anthology of typewriter art explores “the development of the typewriter as a medium for creating work far beyond anything envisioned by the machine’s makers.” Remembering the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919: “Just after noon on January 15, 1919, a hail of gunshots rang out in the North End. The thunderous cascade of collapsing metal caused the ground to rumble and shake. Residents barely had time to register the sounds before an astonishing sight greeted them: a two-story wave of molasses barreling down the streets at thirty-five miles an hour.” The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a number of utopian preconceptions of what would become the Internet. Among them was Paul Otlet’s plan for “electric telescopes,” which he hatched in 1934; the telescopes “would allow anyone in the world to access to a vast library of books, articles, photographs, audio recordings, and films … Otlet also wrote about wireless networks, speech recognition, and social network-like features that would allow individuals to ‘participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.’” The many lives of Aubrey Lee Price, “the Bernie Madoff of the South.”