July 22, 2019 In Memoriam Farewell to Manhattan’s Secret Bookstore By Molly Crabapple Michael Seidenberg, the owner of Manhattan’s least-secret secret bookstore, Brazenhead Books, passed away on July 8, 2019. Molly Crabapple remembers the bookstore’s heyday. Michael Seidenberg at Brazenhead I knew Michael Seidenberg through Brazenhead, the illicit bookstore he built in a tiny rent-controlled apartment. How to describe utopia masquerading as a bookstore? It comes to me as a sense memory—the gold light and the sweetness of Michael’s pipe smoke, the feeling of leisure and vastness as we sprawled, talking, amid the books that smelled like burning leaves. The music he played sounded like it came from an old record player, even if it did not. Read More
July 22, 2019 Arts & Culture The Aesthetic Beauty of Math By Karen Olsson In 1939, as the buildup to war in Europe intensified, a brilliant French mathematician named André Weil made a plan to emigrate to the U.S. He was thirty-three and didn’t want to serve in the army; his life’s purpose was math, he felt, not soldiering. His escape turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated, in part because, as he would write in his memoir, “the Americans, who so warmly welcome those who do not need them, are much less hospitable to those who happen to be at their mercy”—as we’ve gone on to prove repeatedly since then. He was vacationing in Finland when the war broke out, and he tried to lay low in Helsinki but was arrested and returned to France, where he sat in jail during the spring of 1940, awaiting trial for desertion. While there, he took some consolation from the fact that jail allowed him to work undisturbed, as well as to read novels and write letters, in particular letters to his sister, Simone Weil, who was also remarkably talented, a philosopher and spiritual thinker. Though her brother’s incarceration infuriated her, Simone saw an opportunity. His work in advanced mathematics was to her, as it would be to most of us, esoteric. Since you have some spare time on your hands, she wrote to him, why don’t you explain to me exactly what it is you do? There wouldn’t be any point, he replied. Trying to explain my work to a non-mathematician, he wrote, would be like trying to explain a symphony to someone who can’t hear. Later he would rely on another metaphor, calling math “art in a hard material.” Mathematics is an artistic endeavor, his words suggest. Yet Simone was skeptical. What kind of art? What is the material? Even poets have language, but your work seems to rely on sheer abstraction, she wrote her brother. That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder, as Simone did, what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong. Read More
July 22, 2019 Arts & Culture A Graphic Novel before the Term Existed By James Sturm Pretend for a moment that there was a genetic testing kit for the modern graphic novel. The ancestry report would begin with the form’s most distant ancestors: prehistoric cave drawings, Sumerian pictograms, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Bayeux Tapestry, Japanese Buddhist picture scrolls, and Chinese hand scrolls. After that, closer relatives would be listed, like the work of the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), who is credited as the creator of the first European comics, and the pioneering woodcut novels of the Belgian graphic artist Fran Masereel (1889–1972) and the American Lynd Ward (1905–1995). Though the maternal line of the graphic novel has yet to be adequately documented, I’d imagine several books by the eminent children’s book artists Virginia Lee Burton (1909–1968) and Marie Hall Ets (1895–1984) would be noted. Burton’s Calico the Wonder Horse (1942) and Ets’s Oley the Sea Monster (1947) acknowledged and built upon the vocabulary of the comic books of their day but with greater sensitivity and subtlety of writing and design. You would expect to see the work of the family patriarchs in the report—Will Eisner (1917–2015), Harvey Kurtzman (1924–1993), and Art Spiegelman (born 1948)—whose paternity has been widely acknowledged and who have sired many offspring. And these days, what’s a genetic report without a few surprises? Beginning in the 1860s, Native American ledger drawings documented the history of the Plains tribes using a picture writing that bears a striking resemblance to many modern graphic novels. Another surprise would be William Gropper’s 1930 graphic novel Alay-Oop. Read More
July 19, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mothers, Moons, and Marc Maron By The Paris Review Oliver Beer. Photo: Adam Reich. © the artist. Every object, the British artist Oliver Beer said as he introduced his Vessel Orchestra last Friday at the Met Breuer, makes a sound, different for each object but always the same sound, constant and unchanging: the thing sings forever at an unchanging pitch. In this installation, thirty-two objects drawn from around the museum, including a Miró vase from 1942 and a five-thousand-year-old ceramic jar from Iran, have been hooked up to tiny microphones and speakers. I don’t at all understand how this works, but when a certain note is played, you can hear the object whose note it is respond. The Vessel Orchestra will be on view at the Met Breuer until August 11, and every Friday, a different group of musicians and writers will, essentially, “play” it. The artists at the performance I attended were the band Mashrou’ Leila and the novelist Rabih Alameddine, who read a series of texts about robing and disrobing, veiling and unveiling. The experience was mysterious to me, the songs being sung mostly in a language I don’t understand, the vases and jars resonating via a process as inexplicable to me as the one that creates consciousness. But there was resonance, harmony, and it made me think that perhaps those are the things we should be seeking—trying not to change ourselves in whatever ways are fashionable but to tune ourselves, to find our own frequencies; trying not to make ourselves heard but just to find resonance with whatever out there is tuned the same. —Hasan Altaf Read More
July 19, 2019 Arts & Culture Auden’s Grumpy Moon Landing Poem By Nina Martyris Shortly after Apollo 11 put men on the moon and brought them safely back to earth, W. H. Auden, widely regarded as the greatest living English poet of the age, wrote a poem about it. It’s called “Moon Landing,” and from start to finish, it’s one long grumble. Untouched by the sublime romance of the moon mission, Auden’s poem opens: It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure it would not have occurred to women to think worth while, made possible only because we like huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time Auden’s prolific career is divided into Early Auden (his years in England) and Later Auden (his American years). “Moon Landing” falls in the latter category. But it works better as a funny, peevish, poignant example of an important subgroup: Grumpy Auden. Read More
July 19, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Bruno Schulz By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. I have unusually clear memories of early childhood, including one about the bright-white lines of a tennis court when I could only just crawl and one about learning to walk. I can recall being so small that the lower confines of the kitchen assumed the grand scale of a castle, the floor textural and crumb-scattered; its landmarks included a drawer of copper jelly molds and another of potatoes with hairy black eyes. As an older child, I had seemingly endless Big Wheel range of our suburban neighborhood, and my memories are of the rooms created by the undersides of shrubbery, of my painstaking collection of wet stones (which all dried disappointingly gray), of the delicate plant “surgeries” I performed on beds of glistening aloe. It seems impossible, but I recall that my thoughts at this age were mostly metaphysical; I would hide along the foundations of our house imagining infinity or seeing how many steps of “I’m thinking about thinking about thinking … ” I could grasp. Someone had told me that children forgot early childhood, so I swung in our hammock and tried to imprint the feeling of its abrasive fibers on my skin, for recollection when I got old. Nothing has ever returned me to that childhood feeling like the work of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), a Polish Jew born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who lived his entire life in the provincial village of Drohobych (now part of Ukraine). Schulz was a funny little man, poor and unassuming, who taught art in a boys’ school and privately made semierotic drawings of cruel ladies in high-heeled shoes. His literary output was minuscule—two books of short stories in nine years—and his life was tragically cut short by the Holocaust. A devoted biographer, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, may have saved him from obscurity, and admirers such as John Updike and Philip Roth helped introduce Schulz’s work to the West. The admiration could not be more deserved. Schulz is inimitable in both his prose and his metaphysics. (A note on the prose—it’s so spectacular it’s almost untranslatable, and having read two translations side by side, I much prefer the older Celina Wieniewska to the newer Madeline Levine.) His stories create what Ficowski calls a “Schulzian mythologic,” where the events of the writer’s life, the people and houses and town around him, the surrounding countryside, the sky, the sun, the groceries from the market, a friend’s stamp collection or the Emperor Franz Josef—all of it lifts off like a Chagall painting, is impregnated with new language and unmoored from time. What’s revealed is not a flight of fancy but the indwelling qualities of everything. Read More