May 2, 2019 Arts & Culture Stuck in Limbo By Dan Fox John Buckley, Untitled 1986. Photo: Henry Flower at the English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)). One August morning in 1986, a twenty-five-foot shark became stuck in the attic of a terraced house in Headington, a suburb of Oxford. The fish appeared to have plunged headfirst from the clouds, although there had been no reports of a freak deluge of cats, dogs, and chondrichthyes the previous night. Like all sharks, it snuck up without asking first. Jammed inside the slate-tiled roof, tail cursing the sky, this new addition to Oxford’s dreaming spires divided local residents. “Ooh it makes me mad, I think it’s a damn monstrosity,” said one neighbor. “I mean, sharks don’t fly, do they?” She was right. No sharknado witnesses stepped forward. Oxford City Council tried to have the predator removed. First they cited public safety concerns, then changed tack and accused the shark of violating planning regulations. The shark refused to budge. A lengthy battle ensued. The fate of the fish was eventually placed in the hands of central government, and in 1992 the Department of the Environment, encouraged surprisingly by Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, ruled that it could stay. “The Council is understandably concerned about precedent here,” wrote government inspector Peter Macdonald. “The first concern is simple: proliferation with sharks (and Heaven knows what else) crashing through roofs all over the City. This fear is exaggerated. In the five years since the shark was erected, no other examples have occurred. Only very recently has there been a proposal for twin baby sharks in the Iffley Road. But any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington Shark be allowed to remain.” The monster—genus Untitled 1986—had been built from fiberglass by the local artist John Buckley. He installed his sculpture under cover of night to mark forty-one years since the detonation of the Fat Man atomic bomb over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. For Buckley it was an oblique gesture of outrage at the existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Untitled 1986 arrived the year Gorbachev first mentioned Glasnost. This was the era of Chernobyl, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. That spring, USAF Ravens dispatched from nearby Upper Heyford airbase had been seen in the skies over Oxfordshire on their way to bomb Tripoli. “One question only comes to the lips: Why?” asked a puzzled BBC reporter at the scene. Bill Heine, a local radio personality and the owner of the house, explained: “The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation.” Heine, a U.S. expatriate, had a reputation for rubbing Oxford residents the wrong way. As proprietor of two local independent cinemas he had previous form, commissioning large sculptures for his theater facades: a pair of high-kicking cancan dancer legs at Not the Moulin Rouge, a few hundred meters from the shark, and, unfortunately, Al Jolson’s minstrel hands over the entrance to the Penultimate Picture Palace in nearby Cowley. For one middle-age man interviewed by the BBC about Untitled 1986, Heine could go sling his hook: “I grew up in this town, and in my view the majority of people in this town are sick and tired of the publicity stunts of this crazy Canadian [sic] nutcase and if any of the Great British Public wants him on a free transfer they can have him today.” Read More
May 1, 2019 Look Old Ghosts By The Paris Review Advances in technology, despite their benefits, often coincide with spikes in fear, paranoia, and doubt. Just as the internet has fertilized the rich soil of conspiracy theory, the advent of photography and the birth of modern spiritualism in the nineteenth century are inextricable. Purported paranormal encounters, previously the subject of rumors and candlelit retellings, could now be reproduced and circulated in so-called spirit photographs. Emboldened by new forms of communication, such as the electric telegraph, more and more people sought to commune with the beyond; séances experienced a boom in popularity. In the midst of all this excitement about lost souls, scientists stayed committed to their constant mission: pinning down how the world works. The magician and psychologist Matthew L. Tompkins’s new book, The Spectacle of Illusion, chronicles the struggles of the scientific community to understand—and sometimes debunk—the illusions and mysteries that have so captivated the general public since the eighteenth century. A selection of archival photographs and illustrations from the book appears below. William S. Marriott seems lost in deep thought as a trio of mysterious spirit forms approach him. The magician worked tirelessly to expose the tricks that mediums used to exploit credulous individuals, who may well have been seeking contact from recently deceased loved ones. Marriott and Three Ominous Materializations, 1910. Image from The Spectacle of Illusion, published by D.A.P. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Read More
May 1, 2019 Arts & Culture How Not to Be Forgotten By Lauren Kane On the legacy of Esphyr Slobodkina, one of America’s first abstract artists. There is no biography of Esphyr Slobodkina at the New York Public Library. There is, however, an eleven-hundred-page typewritten manuscript self-published by Slobodkina in the eighties, titled Notes for a Biographer. The manuscript is intended to be raw material—“I wrote Notes for a Biographer so that somebody can pick it up where I have left it and put it into more usable form,” Slobodkina told the now-defunct Long Island Journal in 1999. However, though she was an influential avant-garde artist in the thirties and forties, and a founder of the American abstract art movement, interest in Slobodkina’s work and life has yet to materialize. If you scribble out the call number on a carbon-paper slip at the New York Public Library, you’ll receive the manuscript in five volumes, bound in hardcover. Reproductions of personal photographs on sturdy card stock are pasted onto pages. You can’t check Notes out of the library, and you can’t buy any copies anywhere. Contained within the physical immensity of these pages was a project of legacy making, coping with the author’s acute dread of obscurity. At a storage facility on Long Island, in a corner unit nested inside a quiet labyrinth of sickly-yellow walls, Ann Marie Sayers, the person closest to Slobodkina at the end of her life, pulled the Bubble Wrap off painting after painting. “I feel like I’m in a candy store. I don’t know what to show you next,” she said. The plastic popped as she revealed Slobodkina’s bright, confectionary-colored abstract paintings. Some were finished pieces, five by five feet, and others were small studies, on canvases the size of printer paper. There were boxes of sculptures made from typewriter parts and boxes of handmade clothes and handbags. A dress mannequin stood in the corner. More boxes, with labels like “polychrome books” and “Hindu embroidery,” were stacked high, beside shelves of the children’s books Slobodkina had written and illustrated—most famously Caps for Sale. The variety and abundance of objects made the storage unit thrum with energy. “She never gave thought to her age, except for what she had to get done. But never frantic, always meticulous,” Sayers said. “She was always engaged in a project, almost how you are if you feel you’re going to run out of time.” Read More
April 30, 2019 Redux Redux: April in Paris By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Sketch by Ivy Nicholson, 1956. This week, we’re listening to that old jazz standard “April in Paris” and reading Françoise Sagan’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Zygmunt Haupt’s short story “In Paris and in Arcadia” and Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Parisian Dream.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15 Issue no. 14 (Autumn 1956) I had read a lot of stories. It seemed to me impossible not to want to write one. Instead of leaving for Chile with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That seems to me the great adventure. Read More
April 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be Australian? By Nam Le David Malouf. Photo: Conrad Del Villar. © Conrad Del Villar. There he is, in his fat golden tie, accepting the honor of his lifetime (so far). In his steady, high-pitched voice, David Malouf delivers his Neustadt Lecture at the University of Oklahoma, under the aegis of World Literature Today. He speaks of “the power of language as a means of structuring, interpreting, remaking experience; the need to remap the world so that wherever you happen to be is the center.” Later, he describes himself as “a writer whose immediate world and material happen to be Australian.” Happen to be. In the precise, lapidarian chiselings of Malouf’s prose, this repetition takes on special significance. Happen, as in deed, but also as in happenstance. Something occurs and something is. This is the accepted order. What occurs—in this instance—is Australianness. And here, at this point of deep concurrence, Malouf and I most meaningfully part ways. * Concurrence first. For his Complete Stories, a collection that gathers up at least three decades of work in the short form, Malouf picks his epigraph from Pascal’s Pensées: When I consider the brevity of my life, swallowed up as it is in the eternity that precedes and will follow it, the tiny space I occupy and what is visible to me, cast as I am into a vast infinity of spaces that I know nothing of and which know nothing of me, I take fright, I am stunned to find myself here rather than elsewhere, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, and now rather than then. There is, in Malouf’s work, an innate awareness of the arbitrariness of things. An awareness that each of us—and what art we might make—is a product of chance and random concatenation. That against the questions of why here and not there, now and not then—there is no reason. This is the first, and prerequisite, principle of moral awareness. For first-worlders, especially, it slows us from thinking we deserve what we’ve merely happened into: our bodies and brains, with what faculties they possess; our genealogical, cultural, and linguistic inheritances; our situation in place and time, with its appurtenant advantages in health, education, and technology; our array of advantages themselves. Read More
April 30, 2019 Arts & Culture The Siege of Clarice Lispector By Mike Broida In 1949, Clarice Lispector found herself in a bit of a funk, despite the effusive acclaim surrounding her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, six years earlier. After the difficulty she’d faced getting her second novel, The Chandelier, published in 1946, her attempt to find a publisher for her third novel, The Besieged City, was proving no easier. The publisher of The Chandelier had rejected it, and so had many of Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious publishing houses. How was it that an author who had revolutionized Portuguese writing several years earlier, whose debut novel was praised as “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language” suddenly couldn’t get her name in print? The Besieged City’s translation into English would be even more arduous—it is only arriving now, in 2019, seventy years after its initial publication and forty-two years after its author’s death. Read More