April 23, 2019 Mess With a Classic The Stupid Classics Book Club By Elisa Gabbert In Elisa Gabbert’s column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general). Vintage advertisement from 1972 Last fall, at a party, my husband and I and two friends decided to start a “Stupid Classics Book Club.” It began as a joke, and then struck us as a genuinely good idea. The project of this book club would be to read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never did. None of us had been English majors, so we’d missed a lot. I pulled out a notebook, and we spent the next hour and a half in a corner, coming up with a list of “stupid classics.” As we went, we had to figure out exactly what we meant by “stupid”—we did not mean lacking in intelligence, or bad. For me, “stupid” meant relatively short, accessible enough to be on a high school syllabus, and probably rehashed into cliché over time by multiple film adaptations and Simpsons episodes. The quintessential example was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anything too long or serious—Proust, Middlemarch—was excluded from the list, even if we all wanted to read it, due to failing those criteria. We did not assume any of the classics would actually be stupid. We were wrong on that last count. The first book we chose to read was Fahrenheit 451. We’d all read some Ray Bradbury as kids, but not this one. A couple weeks later, when my friend Mike texted to say he had almost finished it, I texted back “No spoilers.” He responded with a semispoiler: “It’s … good for this book club.” I opened it up and read the first page: Read More
April 22, 2019 Postcards Easter in Sri Lanka: Today Is Loss That Isn’t Loss By Vyshali Manivannan Vyshali Manivannan has written extensively about the decades-long ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, her parents’ home country. Having spread her father’s ashes a year ago to the day, Sunday’s bombings came as a reminder that the cycle of violence continues, along with the trauma it leaves in its wake. Sun setting over Kandalama Lake, Sri Lanka (photo: Steve Weaver) Today is loss that isn’t loss. It’s loss that’s become as acceptable as the parallelogram of skin on my ankle that I perennially shave off. I didn’t even notice the first time, stepped out in my towel tracking rivers of blood, Amma pronounced, all over the clean floor. We’ve known this floor since 1983, which is to say there never was a time I didn’t know it, right up to the end of the war, which retrofitted the foundation of what a war story could be, it seemed, across the Tamil diaspora. The story of how we learned of it, if we weren’t there. Nearly ten years ago, I fled my apartment for a friend’s downtown, then abandoned their air mattress for higher ground, crouching on the back of their sofa with a laptop balanced across my knees. No one had yet taught me it doesn’t matter that the floor isn’t lava, the earth needs no heat to swallow you whole. How many times must I relearn? I found out the war ended by the way I was labeled with vicarious trauma: two people, out of everyone I knew in proximity, were willing to engage, while others politely checked their empathy larders for an I’m so sorry, you and yours are in my thoughts. Every simpering thank you I performed restocking their shelves. Read More
April 22, 2019 The Big Picture The Unknowable Artist: Stéphane Mandelbaum By Cody Delistraty Where is the line between genius and madness? The Belgian artist, poet, and art thief Stéphane Mandelbaum’s attempt to create a lasting mythology of himself led to a macabre, untimely death. Stéphane Mandelbaum, Arthur Rimbaud. 1980 To understand the Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, it is best to begin at the end of his life. Few agree on how he lived, but most agree on how he died. It was garish and violent. He was shot in Namur, in central Belgium. Acid was splashed on his face to make his body harder to identify. His corpse was thrown into a landfill. He was twenty-five years old. His bright, brief life and his art-brut style are often compared to those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, but whereas Basquiat found his way to the center of the art world, Mandelbaum was always an outsider. His life was a mixture of realities and self-imposed fictions that were so potent that even he forgot who he was. At the crucial moment of his death, Mandelbaum thought he was a hardened criminal when, in truth, he was closer to a doughy artist, a controversial but ultimately bashful poet of the visual. His death came in December 1986 when he had attempted to steal a painting by Amedeo Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo from an elderly woman’s home in Ixelles, a tony suburb of Brussels, along an avenue studded with art deco buildings. He had been promised money for the painting from friends who had connections to the black market. Having made almost no money from selling his own art, which was largely deemed too perverse and risqué, he desperately needed the funds. The problem was that there is no such painting by Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo. What he stole was entirely fake. It is impossible to know whether Mandelbaum was aware of this or not—or whether or not the woman who owned it knew—but, when he turned it over, his buyers realized the truth and murdered him. That is, at least, the most agreed upon story. Almost nothing about Mandelbaum is certain. Read More
April 22, 2019 Look Look, It’s Earth Day By The Paris Review Happy Earth Day! When the oceans have boiled over and the birds have died out, when the coasts have receded and the scorched vegetation ceased smoking, at least we’ll still have the work of the sixteenth-century miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel by which to remember the natural world. A new book, Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt, examines how Hoefnagel became infatuated with nature. It contains eighty color facsimiles of his masterwork, Four Elements, in which he depicts all manner of flora and fauna in stunningly detailed watercolors. A selection of these pages appears below. Joris Hoefnagel, Animalia Qvadrvpedia et Reptilia (Terra): Plate LXI, ca. 1575/1580, watercolor and gouache, with oval border in gold, on vellum. Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. Read More
April 22, 2019 Arts & Culture A Walk with Fame By Aysegul Savas Inside the church at Tepoztlán One winter in January, I stood with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in front of a glass coffin, in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán. Inside, a figure lay under a purple cloth. “Is that a saint of some kind?” Muldoon asked. “Do you think that’s real?” I said I doubted it. “That’s disappointing. Where I come from in Ireland, in the cathedral in Armagh, is the head of blessed Oliver Plunkett. A church without a head is really no church at all,” he said, with the bare trace of a smile. “When your expectations are as high as mine, almost everything is going to be disappointing.” We had walked to the church together from town, retracing the poet Hart Crane’s footsteps around Tepoztlán. Muldoon walked slowly, his tweed jacket flapping, his brows knit together behind his thick frames. I was nervous and enthusiastic, wanting to make a good impression. I was standing next to a real writer; someone I’d read and admired. We were in Tepoztlán as part of a writing program—Muldoon was leading a poetry class, I was participating in a cultural journalism workshop. I’d traveled there from Paris, where my husband and I had recently moved for my husband’s work. I’d never been published, despite many dozens of story submissions. I kept a blog, which was read by my mother and three friends. I worked odd, exhausting jobs, determined not to commit myself to any serious work that might get in the way of writing, but was rapidly losing faith in my own potential. Read More
April 19, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sapphics, Scandals, and Skies By The Paris Review Richardson Bay as seen from Ring Mountain, Tiburon, California. Photo: Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). In the May issue of Harper’s, Joe Kloc tells a story about a community of people called anchor-outs, who live “on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels” in California’s Richardson Bay, “doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.” The story is compelling, the prose unfussy and clear—and the photographs, by Therese Jahnson, are the perfect complement—but there is more going on here. The real miracle is how the article resists, gracefully yet firmly, the temptations of this kind of reporting, the very real traps it could have fallen into. It would be easy for an outsider to impose a straitjacket of meaning on this community, as writers have done for generations, or to see himself as a savior patronizing them with the boon of his voice, as more than one writer has seen himself; Kloc does neither. Gently, he suggests another way of looking at our world, maybe scarier but more honest, and another way of looking at those with whom we share it. —Hasan Altaf Read More