January 19, 2012 Arts & Culture Design for Living By Elaine Blair If you’ve been a tourist in Russia you’ve probably visited a “house museum,” one of those great, daft halls of pedantry that strive to preserve the former homes of Russian writers and other luminaries exactly as the luftmenschen kept them. Fidelity to the writer’s own domestic arrangement is broken only by the addition of the writer’s death mask, typically hanging on a wall. So, for instance, the poet Aleksandr Blok’s white ceramic statuette of a dachshund still sits on his desk next to his inkwell. The docents who give tours of Blok’s St. Petersburg apartment emphasize his interest in the latest furniture designs and interior arrangements of the 1910s. But one has to work to see the novelty: Blok’s apartment, like Bloomsbury rooms, no longer strikes viewers as “modern” at first glance. Not so with the Charles and Ray Eames living room, a full-scale steel-and-glass replica of which is now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a part of their giant survey of California design, “California Design 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way.” (“California Modern” is itself part of the multi-institution California art exhibition called “Pacific Standard Time”). The museum has reassembled the contents of the designer couple’s living room precisely as they kept it circa 1958, down to the arrangement of sculptures and shells and little vases of fresh flowers and piles of woolen blankets and magazines. Though its contents are old, the room somehow looks new: mid-century modern is still what we think of as modern. Read More
January 18, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Evelyn Waugh. A cultural news roundup. R.I.P. Reginald Hill. Bad news for bookstores. But they fight back! The Edgar Allen Poe Graveside Society and Cognac-Drinker’s Club. “Spare a thought for the authors who pass from celebrity to oblivion within their own lifetimes.” Is it acceptable to answer a phone call with an e-mail? And other modern conundrums. To republish Hitler? And other eternal conundrums. Cormac McCarthy, screenwriter. Everyman’s library? #FactsWithoutWikipedia A comic take on the blackout. Downton vs. Brideshead.
January 18, 2012 On Design Getting in the Habit By Perrin Drumm Harmony Hood ($208), Alban Cloak ($489), and Agnes Dress ($412). Photo by Julia Sherman. Modest, natural, and snazzy—those were the three directions Mother Mary Magdalene gave artist Julia Sherman for designing the habits for the Community of Compassion, Mother Mary’s new Anglican Catholic order in Fort Worth, Texas. “You can’t just go to the store and buy a habit,” Mother Mary wrote to me. “Every order has to have a distinct one designed by the foundress, and you’re not supposed to copy anyone else.” The difference between two orders can be as simple as a few extra pleats in the skirt or as noticeable as Mother Teresa’s blue-striped, sari-inspired head covering. But Sherman’s habits are something entirely new. Moreover, the JF & Son store in New York has partnered with Sherman to produce and sell the habits for secular customers. So while Mother Mary is praying in her peach-colored harem pants in Forth Worth, a young New York woman might be traipsing across Fifth Avenue in the very same design. Mother Mary found Sherman after she saw the artist’s work photographing nun dolls from the Nun Doll Museum in Indian River, Michigan, a shrine to more than five hundred dolls and mannequins, each dressed in the traditional garb of men and woman from religious communities in North and South America. Sherman, whose previous photographic work has focused on the intricate process of creating wigs for Jewish women, clearly has a thing for religious accessories. Read More
January 17, 2012 Arts & Culture Pronoun Trouble By Caleb Crain Elizabeth Bishop, "Cabin with Porthole." Elizabeth Bishop was a painter as well as a poet, and the paintings that she left to her partner Alice Methfessel, who died in 2009, are now being sold. I’ve been to see the paintings a couple of times: last winter in the office of James S. Jaffe Rare Books, and a few weeks ago in the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. The paintings are quiet. Some are domestic still lifes, including pansies in a wicker basket, a candelabra on a table, a tea set, and a doll-like lover asleep in bed. Others feature vernacular architecture: a Greenwich Village apartment building of ivy-covered brick, a wooden church in Key West, a county courthouse grand in the way of the nineteenth-century South. Most are in watercolor and gouache on vellum paper, whose delicate translucence no reproduction quite captures; lines are sometimes drawn in ink or pencil. Bishop didn’t have a steady or a precise hand, but her eye for color was fine, and she understood how to make the most of patterns, such as the radiations of a palm leaf, the stripes of a comforter cover, or the palings of a fence. She also had a Walker Evans–ish appreciation of the way that words, when they appear in the world as things, can seem both monumental and silly. The county courthouse is childishly labeled as such on a gable. On a street near a cemetery, each of five tombstones leaning against a shack reads “FOR SALE.” The choice of subject and the modesty of style suggest that the paintings were for Bishop a personal matter. She usually signed them, when she signed them at all, with her initials or just her first name. Read More
January 17, 2012 At Work Paul Maliszewski on ‘Prayer and Parable’ By Amie Barrodale Paul Maliszewski is a friend of mine. He recently published a short-story collection called Prayer and Parable. Around the end of last summer, I asked him if I could interview him about it. We exchanged questions by e-mail for a week. Several times I said that I was incompetent—forget the whole thing—but Paul reassured me I was doing fine. What I especially like about the book is that Paul doesn’t compromise when it comes to portraying reality. He’s a little like Fellini in 8 ½: he preserves the confusion, meaninglessness, suddenness, and asa nisi masa of the everyday. I have a question that might be a little bit unanswerable. I know you think a lot about individual sentences, and I wondered what makes a good sentence. Am I right in thinking that you give a lot of time to them? I do give a lot of attention to sentences, but mainly because they don’t come out right for me on the first go-round, or the second, or the eighth, or the thirtieth. Revising takes me a lot of time. I drive myself crazy. I’ll just stare at lines. There are sentences in this book where I had a page, back and front, of all the different versions I was at one time trying. One sentence I’m thinking of was not particularly long or complex, but it was at the end of a story, and I didn’t want it to seem too ending-y, or pat. So there I was, scratching out, writing something new, circling back. Reading like that is a hard thing to turn off. I catch myself revising e-mails and I think, What are you doing? When I’m working on a story or essay, if I find something messed up, I make myself start over and read it through again. If I find something else wrong, I start back over, and I keep starting over until I can read it without stopping, until I don’t suffer any doubts. That takes a long time, Worse, sometimes revising one sentence throws things off further down the page. It’s like I’m working on a pipeline and making a repair at one point, and whatever fix I make feels right, but it twists things around so that they get gummed up later. Read More
January 16, 2012 Arts & Culture Document: Manuscript Pages of ‘Great Expectations’ By Charles Dickens In the 1830s, the Reverend Chauncey Hare Townshend, suffering from various maladies, began to develop an interest in mesmerism, the cult of hypnotism that was then enjoying considerable popularity in Europe and which was said to possess healing powers. Townshend studied under Dr. John Elliotson, a leading practitioner of mesmerism who helped establish University College Hospital as well as the city’s Phrenology Society. In 1840, Dr. Elliotson introduced Townshend to another of his brightest students: Charles Dickens. Read More