September 22, 2010 Arts & Culture Good-Bye to All That: The Art Boom and Bust By David Wallace-Wells Art Basel Miami during the boom. “The plug was pulled, but life went on—invigorating life,” Jerry Saltz wrote last fall in a typically optimistic survey of “art after money.” You could hear the refrain everywhere, in galleries and studios, museums and bars: The bull market had been unbearable, turning work into a kind of mortgage payment, so maybe the bust would be good for art in this town. Saltz said it already was: “It’s as if a bunch of spotlights went out when the market crashed last October, and now, as they flicker back on, we’re able to see new green shoots busting out of the establishment’s cracks.” But not much has changed in New York since 2008, when that speculative boom ended and an exercise in disaster capitalism began. This season, the big-deal September show at the biggest-deal New York gallery, Gagosian, is the blue-chip debut of derivative Deitch darling Dan Colen. Money is still cool-hunting. This week, Saltz called the Gagosian show, dismissively, “an event straight out of 2007.” But one of these is an elephant and one is a gnat, and the market is stampeding again. New galleries have emerged since the crash, whole neighborhoods of them in fact, and new work has been assembled, sculpted, painted, and filmed—some of it very good work. But we are still beholden to art fairs, where the hustle is the spectacle, and we still anxiously await future auctions, when we’ll learn how well we’ve done—in collecting, in working, in making assessments. We are still enamored of gags, puns, and trompe l’oeil. We still tend to follow the scent of sweat where it pools—that antinomian territory called, in the generation after Basquiat anyway, downtown. Better would be to chase uptown, so to speak, after shows that, if young, aren’t insolent; if brash, aren’t gimmicky; and that do not rely for their power on the incongruity between the work and its staging. From here that frisson looks like a form of irony—and we want to say good-bye to all that.
September 21, 2010 At Work April Ayers Lawson on “Virgin” By Lorin Stein April Ayers Lawson’s short story “Virgin” appears in our new issue. It is Lawson’s first appearance in a magazine with national circulation. Last week she was kind enough to answer a few questions from her home in Greenville, South Carolina. In “Virgin” you describe sexual frustration and desire very convincingly—and very specifically—from a man’s point of view. How did you do it? Close observation. Male frustration seems to me more focused, more linear, than female frustration. This interests me a lot. Also, I enjoy asking men about what they think it means to be a man. I like to hear about the women in their lives—how they view their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives. I like to try to understand what it means to be “manly,” what it means for a man to think he’s failed to be manly. The more I understand men, the more I understand women. Also, when a story is about women—I consider the story to be mostly about the women—it makes more sense to me to feel them from the perspective of a man. Did you ever feel out of your depth? The perspective came naturally. If it didn’t I’d have aborted. When I write I’m doing it as an act of discovery. Also to get high. What I’m writing should feel at least as real to me as what’s physically around me. It should rise out of and also sustain a heightened sense of emotional reality. Otherwise, no point, no pleasure. The stories of yours that I have read are all set in the South among Evangelical Christians. Do you write with a Southern Christian reader in mind? Read More
September 20, 2010 On Translation Survival of the Fittest By Lydia Davis For a while I thought there were fourteen previous translations of Madame Bovary. Then I discovered more and thought there were eighteen. Then another was published a few months before I finished mine. Now I’ve heard that yet another will be coming out this fall, so there will be at least twenty, maybe more that I don’t know about. It happened several time while I was doing the translation that I would open a newly discovered previous translation of Madame Bovary and my heart would sink. I would say to myself: Well, this is quite good! The work I’m doing may be pointless, after all! Then I would look more closely, and compare it to the original, and it would begin to seem less good. I would get to know it really well, and then it would seem completely inadequate. For example, the following seems good enough, until I look at the original: “Ahead of them, a swarm of flies drifted along, humming in the warm air.” But they were flitting (voltigeait), not drifting—a very different motion—and they were buzzing (bourdonnant), as flies do, not humming. (The “warm air” (air chaud) is fine.) Another example concerning insects, on the last page of the book, from a different translation: “Cantharides beetles droned busily round the flowering lilies.” Again, this might seem all right until you check the French: “des cantharides bourdonnaient autour des lis en fleur.” Then you have to ask, why the gratuitous and rather clichéd addition of “busily,” personifying the beetles—especially when Flaubert was so careful to eliminate metaphor? So, if a translation doesn’t have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story. And the story itself is powerful enough, in a great book, so that it shines through a less than adequate translation. Unless we compare it to the original, we don’t know what we’re missing. Of course we may have any number of translations of a given text—the more the better, really. We say to ourselves, complacently looking to Darwin, that they will compete with one another and the fittest will survive. But a significant problem is that the fittest will not necessarily be the best, although it, or they, may be. The ones that survive may be the best edited, and/or the best promoted, and/or the cheapest, and/or the ones accompanied by the most useful apparatus—survival may be helped by how much the publisher pays the chain bookseller to display the book prominently; or how cheap the paper and how low the other production costs may be, to keep the price of the book down; or how many smart academics contribute essays to the volume, to accompany a poor translation. Here is an example of this problem from the past, as reported by William St. Clair in the TLS, April 6, 2007: The Homer and Virgil to which most anglophone readers had access in the early nineteenth century were the Augustan versions made by Pope and Dryden a century before. And this was not because there had not been translations, some excellent, in the intervening decades, or because early nineteenth-century readers actively preferred the older versions, but because the legal abolition of perpetual intellectual property in 1774 enabled the Pope and Dryden translations to be profitably produced in huge numbers at low prices. They were abridged, adapted, anthologized in school books, and otherwise made available to a growing anglophone readership outside the elites. Lydia Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary comes out on September 23. Over the next two weeks she will be writing for TPR Daily about the tasks and sins of the translator. On October 4, she will be speaking at the 92nd Street Y. See Also: “Why a New Madame Bovary?”
September 17, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Smart and Bored; Big Pretzels of Wisdom By Lorin Stein Which books would you recommend to a smart, bored, somewhat alienated teenage girl trapped in the suburbs? —Alice The first recommendation that leaps to mind is Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03—a book all about being a smart, bored, and extremely alienated teenager trapped in the suburbs. I love it. I hesitate to recommend it only because it is so peculiar. It’s written in long sentences, without paragraph breaks, and nothing happens in it. I’m not sure I’d have liked it when I was the protagonist’s age (sixteen). At that age, I remember loving Steppenwolf—even after my—smarter, more bored and alienated—friend Wawa told me it was trash. (I haven’t gone back to decide for myself.) I also remember loving The History of Luminous Motion, a novel you don’t hear much about these days but which held up very well last time I looked. At that age (your age?), I mainly loved books that held out the promise of a more glamorous, more real world. (Washington, D.C. wasn’t the suburbs, but it didn’t feel real.) Elif Batuman has written memorably about her first, teenage encounter with Anna Karenina: Think of the time it must have taken Tolstoy to write it! He hadn’t been ashamed to spend his time that way, rather than relaxing by playing Frisbee or attending a barbecue. Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified, and meaningful in terms of plot. I remember reading Anna Karenina (in the smoking section of the Bagel Bakery across the street from school) and feeling the same way. Ditto Susan Sontag’s essay collection Against Interpretation. It implied a whole world of culture, and cultural events if you know what I mean. Screenings. After-parties. Midnight debates with women in mascara. I also liked The Counterfeiters because it depicted a world (1920s Paris) in which a brilliant teenager could become a celebrated writer without first waiting to grow up. I think I would have fallen in love with Two Girls, Fat and Thin if I’d known about it. But I probably also would have (secretly) loved The Secret History. I bet The Rachel Papers—Martin Amis’s first novel, about a kid trying to get into Oxford—is almost as funny as I remember. When I was sixteen it blew my mind. There is one other recommendation I hesitate to make—for very different (obvious) reasons. When I was fourteen I was given a copy of The Paris Review. I certainly liked reading those stories, poems, and interviews, but they also gave me a connection—my only connection, really—to a thriving literary scene. I like to think another fourteen-year old might feel the same way today. Read More
September 17, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: MFA Microculture, Comfortable Middle Age By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading. The Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin’s uncollected prose. So absorbing I woke up thinking about it this morning, showered and shaved, and stepped back into the shower. (“You’re wet. You showered,” was my first non-Baldwin thought of the day.) —Lorin Stein “The First Tycoon of Teen,” Tom Wolfe’s 1964 profile of pop wunderkind Phil Spector—“the first millionaire businessman to rise up out of the teen-age netherworld.” At 23, Spector had already produced “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” “He’s a Rebel,” “Be My Baby,” “Da Do Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Uptown,” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.” “I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music,” Spector tells Wolfe. “It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have presidents like Lincoln anymore either.” —David Wallace-Wells A recent poem from The New Yorker called, “On the Inevitable Decline Into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age.” It goes: “O Sting, where is thy death?” —Daisy Atterbury In the midst of a renewed discussion about female writers and their relationship with the literary establishment, This Recording re-published a piece written by Margaret Atwood in 1976 entitled “On Being A ‘Woman Writer.’” Atwood is clear, calm, thorough and undeniably relevant: it wasn’t until I got to the bottom of the essay that I realized the piece was over thirty years old. —Miranda Popkey Elif Batuman’s astounding “Get A Real Degree” in the London Review of Books, which begins as an focused inquiry into the MFA program microculture but expands outward and outward and outward again, until the entire horizon of post-Quixote literature has been pulled into view. —D. W.-W. I recently watched The Red Stuff, a documentary about the Soviet Union’s race to space. It’s bizarre to see Russian astronauts, especially those now past their prime and overweight, surrounded by Russian space memorabilia. But what I wanna know? Space ice cream. Do the Russians now sell it at their science museums like we do? Also recently viewed: IMAX: Hubble 3D, about the last flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. The images of earth are so beautiful that I cried. —Thessaly La Force A mesmerizing essay in The Nation on Javier Marías and his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy by the man I’m beginning to think is the best critic writing today, William Deresiewicz. “Marías’s Europeanness is of the autumnal variety, much in evidence in recent decades, the product of a ripened civilization that feels itself equipped for nothing but the harvest,” Deresiewicz writes. “Reflection in James or Proust,” he continues, “isn’t a commentary on the story; it is essential to the story. It hugs the plot like a lining of a coat. It exposes character, develops relationships, shapes action. It gives utterance to feeling and direction to choice. It evolves, as the protagonists themselves evolve. But reflection in Your Face Tomorrow rarely does any of those things; it simply sits alone in its study, watching the plot go by.” —D. W.-W.
September 17, 2010 Department of Sex Ed There Are Books a Young Man Should Read By John Wray A lesson on how not to get laid. George Bataille There are books a young man with literary pretensions should read if he wants to get laid—see the other entries in this department—and then there’s Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. This slim little packet of social anthrax was delivered to me six weeks into my freshman year at college by another very nice young man with literary pretensions who purported to be my friend. Let the record state that this individual wore a cinnamon-colored beret around campus and listened to exactly one album, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Haus der Lüge, on repeat on his jet-black Sony Discman. Let the record also state that this individual had (or seemed to have) a lot of sex. As far as I could tell, the world had gone insane: where I’d grown up, my new friend would have been beaten into a quiche-like gruel every Saturday night as a trust-building exercise for the rest of the community. But I was only too happy to accept his reading recommendation, if only because my first month at school had been a washout. If talking in a fake Scottish accent and brewing non-alcoholic absinthe in your dorm room had sexual currency in this new world, after all, there might actually be hope for me. Story of the Eye, for those of you who may not have attended a militantly freaky liberal-arts college in Ohio in the heady, uninhibited early nineties, is a dirty book by an unhappy Frenchman. It chronicles the amatory hijinks of a nameless but extremely open-minded narrator, his girlfriend Simone, an English voyeur named Sir Edmund, and Marcelle, a suicidal, mentally ill sixteen-year old. A staggering amount of mirthless sex is had by all, much of it in front of Simone’s middle-aged mother, who is not amused. Fornication is indulged in alongside of, on top of, and eventually with corpses; various oblong and/or spherical objects are inserted into sundry cavities; a priest is seduced, corrupted and finally murdered at the moment of orgasm, after which one his eyeballs is recycled in a manner I blush to recount. Then things proceed to get a bit risqué. Not what girls back in Buffalo had been into, broadly speaking, but who was I to judge? Within my first week at college, I’d been mocked for my Allman Brothers bootlegs, yelled at by a beautiful lesbian for holding a door open, and generally exposed as the terminally unsophisticated yokel that I was. I was farther than ever from my top-secret goal of convincing one of my fellow students to take off her clothes in my presence; I was painfully out of my element, whatever “my element” might be. What could Story of the Eye possibly do but make me seem, however fraudulently, a more profound and cosmopolitan person than I was? Lots of things, as it turned out. The author of such notable works as The Pineal Eye, Slow Slicing, and The Solar Anus turned out to be the worst conversational topic imaginable for the handful of dates I managed to line up in those first few hapless months of my adult life. Whatever it was that drew the ladies to my beret-sporting friend, it seemed, Mssr. Bataille wasn’t it. Carla K. was instantly disgusted by my description of Story of the Eye; Stephanie T. got bored so quickly and absolutely that she seemed to have had a small stroke; and Liz H. became so engrossed in the book that she forgot about me altogether, which devastated me (and, to be honest, kind of creeped me out). I was not to be discouraged so easily, however. I’d resolved to become a flagrantly alienated person, a filterless cigarette-huffing degenerate, and nothing could sway me from my chosen calling. Not for a few months, at least. I cringe to think of it now, but I pressed ahead with my plan long after any sensible person would have seen the fatal error in his strategy. Common sense reasserted itself eventually, but by then the novel had long since done its evil work. To this day I feel a subtle thrill of revulsion at the sight of hard-boiled eggs, and I try to avoid traveling to France if I can possibly help it. I’ve also recently decided to stop having sexual relations with my girlfriend, at least when her mother is looking. A modest step forward perhaps, but an important one. John Wray’s most recent novel is Lowboy.