July 6, 2011 Arts & Culture On Acknowledgements By Anna North Anyone who wants to study writers’ idiosyncrasies need look no further than their acknowledgments. One contemporary author thanks her therapist, another his probation officer, a third someone he calls the “Infamous Frankie G.” In the backs of books I’ve found shout-outs to the Ship Manager of HM Frigate Unicorn; a book on Satanism; and an ice hotel. But alongside the quirky is also the heartfelt. I’ve encountered declarations of love—“my children, my jewels”; “without you, I’d be sunk”; “not only the most supportive parents a writer could ask for but the most loving, kind, and inspiring people I know.” One set of thank-yous closes with the code IALYAAT, which I hope means, “I Always Love You At All Times.” Acknowledgments also offer an all-too-rare view of the writer as actual human being. We often think we’re seeing the author’s real self when we read her fiction, but as any author who’s ever been asked what happened after she fled her family of international superspies and threw in her lot with a group of itinerant circus performers knows only too well, this is a delusion. The acknowledgments at the back of a novel are tantalizing because they’re often the only true thing amid a pack of lies. And at the end of a really great book, how wonderful to recognize that it was written not by a monolith or a beam of white light or the manifestation of the goddess Athena, but by a living, breathing person who remembered to thank her agent. Read More
July 6, 2011 Poetry Poem: Tender Range By John Rybicki Today’s poem, John Rybicki’s “Tender Range,” is an incantation that seems particularly fitting for a crisp fall day. It’s a series of lyrical fragments arranged as a kind of stay against loss and death. We liked this poem for the way it subtly but persuasively finds a fresh language for the sense of imperilment that lurks around us, as in the eerie lines “I don’t know anything / about blowing a child out/ like a balloon, or what comes after— .” —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
July 5, 2011 Nostalgia Fair Game By Sadie Stein “Here’s one for you,” the driver said as soon as the taxi door had closed. “If you’re standing in a house, and every window faces south, what color bear are you looking at?” I was caught off guard; it seemed to me late in the day for riddling. I stifled a sigh and marshaled my meager resources. If you’re standing in a house, and every window faces south, what color bear are you looking at? I know next to nothing about geography, but it seemed clear that the riddle dealt with a geographically anomalous zone. Probably a pole. Which meant … “A polar bear?” I suggested. “What color bear?” he repeated, clearly disappointed. “Oh. White.” I said. He sighed, deflated. “Yes.” He said, and we drove in silence for a few minutes. “What exotic meats have you eaten?” he asked after a while. “Let’s see,” I said thoughtfully. “Ostrich, alligator, elk, bison … I guess venison doesn’t count, does it?” “Oh, it counts all right,” he said with suppressed violence. “I count it. So you’ve never had bear? Moose? Bear?!” Read More
July 5, 2011 Studio Visit Dan Walsh By Daisy Atterbury and Lily Swistel Photograph by Bronwen Roberts. Dan Walsh’s elevator is like the inside of a lunch box, a room coated with a loud, almost orangey mustard. The artist moved to his Williamsburg loft before Kent Avenue became, as Walsh calls it, “like Miami Beach,” when he could only see the skyline, the bridge, and the Domino Sugar refinery. And even though the view has changed, Walsh has stayed put. In our interview, Walsh tells me that he’s interested in exploring a space where the perceptual meets the symbolic, where meaning is created outside of historical codification. He is known for his large-scale geometric paintings that play on repetition, grids, and blocks. Lately, he has been creating artist books, which explore repetition, progression, and layering on a more intimate scale. Space is important to me—you could say the minimalists organized the space and what is in-between. Historically, minimalism rejected “pictorial space.” I am using the formats of minimalism, but not following the goals. As matter a fact, I always regarded the space in a painting as the soul of a painting. I’m working to find a space I can interact with on a day-to-day basis, something neutral and malleable: one of the goals of minimalism was to experience qualities of materials, forms, colors and remove psychological space. I have always tried to put myself in the best “place” (be it living space or painting space) to think clearly—to make the next decision. Photograph by Bronwen Roberts. Read More
July 2, 2011 Arts & Culture Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview By Sarah Fay Today, as you may know, is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov’s death. There won’t be parades, but there will be an abundance of talk, mainly on NPR, about his most famous novel Lolita or his penchant for butterflies. On no other day will the words lepidopterist—one who studies a large order of winged insects, including butterflies and moths—and nymphet—which Nabokov forever altered to mean “a sexually attractive or sexually mature young girl”—be used with such frequency. What probably won’t be discussed is Nabokov’s shrewd and savvy approach to publicity and fame. Perhaps more than any other writer in the twentieth century, he knew how to control his image. As John Updike wrote in Assorted Prose, Nabokov was not only one of the best writers in English, but also “a solid personality” giving a performance “scarcely precedented in American literature.” It would be hyperbolic to place Nabokov in the same category as celebrity doyens like Madonna or Lady Gaga, but he could certainly have taught them a thing or two about fame and the art of the interview. Fame descended on Nabokov after the 1958 publication of Lolita. He was sixty years old at the time and held a lectureship at Cornell. My father took Nabokov’s American literature course and says he can’t remember anything about it except for the way that Nabokov, wearing a black cape, used to sweep into the lecture hall with Vera, his wife and assistant, in tow. Nabokov would then deliver his lecture from prepared notes to great affect. His dramatic performances in class drew students to him, and, according to Nabokov’s most meticulous biographer Brian Boyd, his European literature course was second in enrollment to Pete Seger’s folk-song course. As a literature teacher, Nabokov emphasized the importance of reading for detail, assigning students fewer books in order to read them slowly. He quizzed students on the pattern of Madame Bovary’s wallpaper and sketched the path that Bloom walks in Ulysses on the blackboard. According to Nabokov, this approach “‘irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends,’ and ‘schools,’ and ‘myths,’ and ‘symbols,’ and ‘social comment,’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.” Read More
July 1, 2011 At Work Timm Kölln on ‘The Peloton’ By Peter Conroy Left: Manuele Mori. Right: Andy Schleck. In 2005, photographer Timm Kölln began an ambitious five-year project to document professional cycling through the voices, faces, and bodies of the athletes who define it, traveling to major races around Europe and shooting riders alone against a white backdrop moments after they stepped off the bike. The result, The Peloton: Portrait of a Generation, collects ninety-six photographs and interviews with professional cyclists—some superstars, some journeymen, others now-forgotten names of the sport. Kölln’s photographs capture the utter limits of physical experience in an athlete. His interviews (conducted by journalists from the magazine Rouleur) skip the familiar clichés of sports journalism to offer unvarnished and nuanced perspectives on what it means to spend a life on two wheels. Looking ahead to the start of the 2011 Tour de France tomorrow, I recently spoke to Timm from his home in Berlin. For you, was it the cycling or the photography that came first? Photography. I grew up in Spain, and when I was a kid my parents wouldn’t let me have a bike. They thought it was too dangerous to ride in Barcelona. But I always had this dream of having a racing bike. And when we moved back to Germany, the first thing I did—I think we’d been in Berlin for two days—was buy a bike, not a racing bike, but a bike. I was always inspired by older sports photography, and that also influenced me in my approach to cycling. When thinking about how to do the portraits for The Peloton, I thought the only way to get as close as possible to the riders’ states of mind and efforts on their bikes was to shoot them without helmets and without glasses, an image we rarely get in sports media. Read More