July 19, 2013 First Person An Incident on Canal Street By Sadie Stein In July of 2001—I was in college at the time, working as a part-time waitress and part-time fact-checker—I found myself on Canal Street on a sweltering afternoon. It had been a long and unglamorous summer, hot in the way everyone knows from New York summer movies, but not, I remember thinking, even remotely iconic, or at least not any frame into which I happened to wander. I frequently wore a series of enormous house dresses I had gotten at a yard sale, and tried very hard to like certain classic albums by listening to them, intensely, on a loop. Somehow it seemed imperative, then, to fight violently for a spot on the lawn at Bryant Park, no matter what film was showing. I was too young to drink. I was acutely aware of being a total waste of time, and also found this interesting. It is hard to overstate my unsexiness. Two people I knew were involved with Shakespeare productions that were designed as thinly veiled allegories concerning the political situation. Everyone was wearing those mesh slippers, bedecked with sparkly flowers, which you could buy in Chinatown for a few dollars. At home, my dad was fighting with my teenage brother, who had a penchant for stealing the family car. “Your brother,” said my dad, “has a total disregard for the dictates of the social contract, as they apply to him. In this way, he is like Hitler. Well,” he amended, “Hitler and Edwin Booth.” On that particular day, the street was packed with vendors and workers and tourists looking for bags (although it should be noted that this was prior to the real designer-knockoff bag boom, or indeed, the ensuing crackdown.) This was no country for old men, although obviously it was full of old men. I had detoured through Chinatown in order to get some of the slippers, and also some five-for-a-dollar dumplings, and in the process of acquiring them had learned to add sugar to the soy sauce and sriracha on offer (this is a tip I share with you now) and seen three rats, which one assumes, but is always nice to have verified, I suppose. Read More
July 19, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Psycho-Biddies, Illusions, MTV By The Paris Review It’s hard to read in a heat wave, but the July issue of Asymptote is so absorbing I hardly notice my sweat drops hitting the keyboard. Even more impressive than the diversity of things translated—book reviews in Urdu, fiction in Bengali, poetry in Faroese—is their quality. I’ve especially enjoyed the excerpt from Operation Massacre, a novela negra by the great Argentinian writer Rodolfo Walsh, and the interview with David Mitchell about his translation of a memoir by Naoki Higashida, an autistic Japanese thirteen-year-old. Here is Mitchell on the misery of translation: “As a writer I can be bad, but I can’t be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right.” —Robyn Creswell I usually behave at museums, but last weekend, at “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective,” currently at the Met, the guards were just waiting for my friend and me to leave. A number of the amorphous, neon, strangely suggestive ceramics for which Price is particularly known appeared to have small windows carved out of their exteriors to reveal dark, hollow interiors (see, for example, Price’s Pastel). But upon closer examination, it became difficult to tell whether the windows truly exposed new space, or whether they were simply painted on—perfectly executed optical illusions. Clearly, the only option was to get even closer. This is not allowed. Repeat offenses were unavoidable, though; I wanted an answer! The sculptures gleamed so! I felt taunted. A definitive answer could not be determined before we were ultimately shooed away. A partner exhibition of Price’s work, at the Drawing Center, which I hope to see this weekend, consists only of works on paper; it will be easier to be better there. —Clare Fentress Read More
July 19, 2013 Arts & Culture What Reader Species Are You? By Sadie Stein I had, I admit, become a jaded infographic skeptic. No more! I said to myself. And then, one day, in the midst of a heat wave, you run across an infographic so intriguing, so well laid-out, so Linnaean, that you think: Yes. I am a human being and man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is, etc. (Click to view at original large size.) Infographic by Laura E. Kelly.
July 19, 2013 On the Shelf New Joseph Heller Story, and Other News By Sadie Stein A first edition of The Cuckoo’s Calling—signed by Robert Galbraith—has sold on AbeBooks for $4,453 (£2,950), and the remaining copy is listed for $6,193.24. Anyway, now we know who leaked J. K. Rowling’s identity: her law firm. “Almost Like Christmas,” a short story written post-war by a young Joseph Heller, will be published next week by Strand Magazine. It is unclear whether teachers (according to a Pew study) abhor the Internet’s influence on student writing … … or welcome it.
July 18, 2013 Arts & Culture The Golden Age of Soviet Children’s Art By Justin Alvarez Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920–35: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times is a stunning compendium of illustrations from the twenties and thirties. As Philip Pullman writes in his introduction, In the dark and dangerous world of revolutionary Petrograd, a group of Russian poets and artists, among the greatest of the century, came together to create a new kind of book for children about to enter a Brave New World. These artists and writers dreamed of endless possibilities in a new world where children and grown-ups alike would be free from the bitterness of ignorance. For a time, when children’s publications still escaped the scourge of state censorship, their books became a last haven for learning, poetic irony, burlesque and laughter. Pause Play Play Prev | Next
July 18, 2013 Arts & Culture Sexy Librarians, Secret Service, and Tangents: With “The Book Lovers” By Alex Moore Part I: “The Book Lovers” On a Sunday afternoon in March, when the rest of New York’s art world was swarming through the Armory’s annual art fair, I found myself lurking among the stacks at St. Mark’s Bookstore, thumbing through literary reviews and scanning the crowd for a familiar face. I was waiting to meet with David Maroto, a Spanish artist who recently cocurated an exhibition of artist novels—“The Book Lovers”—at the Elizabeth Foundation. Once I found him, nose deep in a book, we meandered to an empty bar and talked about art, novels, experimentation, and engaging the public. David is an artist with strong, creative convictions and a healthy distrust for art institutions. We met five or so years ago at an artist residency, and it is serendipitous that he should be one of the curators of this show. Or perhaps it is just a demonstration of how small our circle is—a tribe within a tribe, the small overlapping area of the Venn diagram where visual art and writing intersect. David thinks this is a growing field, that the novel has run its historical course and is an empty vessel for artists to pick up. I disagree that the novel is defunct, but it does seem that the book form is full of potential for artists and becoming an increasingly popular choice of medium. “Artist novels” is a vague genre, so David and his cocurator, Joanna Zielińska, define it as any work 20,000 words or longer in which the narrative is moved primarily by text rather than images, and written by someone with an active visual art practice. Some of the results could simply be novels with art-world insider lines such as Sexy Librarian’s “he could make her more emotional than a Félix Gonzáles-Torres retrospective,” but David and I are both most intrigued by the books that are a critique of the form or an active expansion of the artist’s studio practice. It can provide a path into the art for the uninitiated and build additional layers of insight and complexity. Read More