From the cover of Afterland

“In American Apparel I feel old. Especially when I ask one of the hotties for help.” So begins one of the dozens of prose poems in Jeremy Sigler’s new book, My Vibe. Another one: “I want to be watched so bad. I want a voyeur to be here so bad. A secret admirer.” Some of Sigler’s lines read like poetry (“Words like flat barges trace slowly past the jagged architecture. Buildings punch the sky like staple guns.”), but by and large, the poems are nimbly unpoetic. They’re conversational, and Sigler’s persona is like that weird, boozy guy who corners you at parties and won’t stop talking and one subject leads seamlessly into another and you keep looking over his shoulder for escape but he doesn’t notice and sentences keep spilling out of his mouth. Except that in this instance, I don’t want to escape. I find the poems incredibly charming because they are observant, indulgent, and funny: from flirting with a hipster stewardess to get an aisle seat on a plane by admitting bladder-control issues, to awkwardly complimenting a woman on her Yayoi Kusama hoodie and then discoursing briefly to the reader on Kusama’s art. “Being a Freudian,” Sigler writes in another poem, “my research is, um, dreaming. So I’ll have no choice but to drop my pen and take a nap.” —Nicole Rudick

I already mentioned it this week, but I haven’t been able to shake Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile of Gerhard Steidl. I’d heard that Steidl, who runs the world’s most meticulous photography press, was an eccentric, but Mead brings the intensity of his commitment into sharp relief. He is, somehow, a technician aesthete, consumed equally by specificity and beauty. (Maybe only Germany could produce such a person.) His fastidiousness flirts with the ridiculous: even the notecards for his dinner table were custom-made at a Swedish paper mill dating to the nineteenth-century. But there’s no denying the almost monastic clarity of his vision. Steidl lives onsite at his factory in Göttingen, and he leaves as rarely as possible. His advice on this point flies in the face of contemporary wisdom about work/life balance, but I find it difficult to ignore. “It makes a huge difference,” he says, “when you are not isolated from your work, when working and living is a symbiosis. Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment. You are working there all day, and then in the evening you drive home and you have your pleasant place to stay, with clean air, while poor people have to live with the dirt you are producing. I control my noise, because I am sleeping there, with an open window, every night.” —Dan Piepenbring  Read More