July 20, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Laughing Cows, Lo-Fi Bangers, and Convulsing Balls of Snakes By The Paris Review The devil truly is in the details when it comes to Thomas Bayrle, whose first solo survey in New York, “Playtime,” opened in June at the New Museum. His paintings are hypnotic. Large images are made up of tinier and tinier versions of the same image, demonstrating a Pointillism all his own. The first floor of the survey is saturated with color and pattern (even on the walls and floors), an initially delightful effect that quickly becomes creepily unreal. My companion and I sat transfixed, eyes wide and mouths slightly agape, in a theater where the screen played the image of a digitally rendered face, zooming in to reveal that the likeness in fact comprised thousands of screaming mouths, and then zooming back out again. Face after face appeared on the screen, each revealing itself as a honeycomb of horror. Not all of Bayrle’s work is so overtly dark—a lot of it presents itself as playful, as the exhibition’s name suggests. The motif of the Laughing Cow logo is plastered everywhere, but even that eventually becomes warped, the way a word does when you’ve read it too many times. Bayrle demonstrates foresight in his concepts but also in his technique—he used computers to do work long before such methods were taught in art schools the world over. The second floor shows his more recent work, much larger in scale, bereft of color, and focused on the humming spiritual nature of modern engineering and technology. The repeated motions of windshield wipers and pistons are presented as devotional, and as we watched, again transfixed, the arms of a mechanical deity moved to a looping measure from Liszt. —Lauren Kane Read More
July 20, 2018 Arts & Culture The Melancholy of the Hedgehog By Aysegul Savas On the sweet sadness of Turkish gatherings and Soviet cartoons. Still from Hedgehog in the Fog. When I was eight and my brother nine years old, we moved from Ankara to London where we awaited clearance for our father’s work in Copenhagen. Our parents were both thirty-three, without income, and endlessly creative about our finances. It was a year of free museums, of shuffling through metro gates with a single ticket, of boxes of sweaters sent to us by our grandparents. When we were bored of the few toys we’d brought from Turkey, my brother and I made puppets from newspaper sheets, sticking their limbs together with glue. It was a strange year, in our house with a fake fireplace, situated at the edge of a cemetery. Our parents made friends with a group of young Turks—students, doctors, a ticket-booth worker at the cinema—and met up with them for nights of fasıl. Someone played the oud, and the others sang along with the help of a small black book called Ah, Those Beautiful Songs. Read More
July 20, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Leonora Carrington By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. To capture the weird factor in Carrington’s work, I used a molecular-gastronomy technique to make balsamic gel beads. Surrealism today is mostly a chapter in art history, so it’s difficult to appreciate the wildness and power it once had, or to imagine (or fear) that it might rise up from the pages of a book and possess a cook and her kitchen. But it felt like that’s what happened when I essayed to cook from the works of the English-born surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). Carrington’s works are full of animal familiars, animate vegetables, and impossible foods like “pomegranates and melons stuffed with larks.” In one story, there’s “a plump, fat chicken with stuffing made of brains and the livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve with a few drops of some divine liquor. This chicken, which had been marinated—plucked but alive—for three days, had in the end been suffocated in vapours of boiling patchouli: its flesh was as creamy and tender as a fresh mushroom.” Well then! As one might imagine, cooking that dish, or anything from what one introduction calls the “writhing, dense thicket” of “Carrington’s version of Jung’s collective unconscious,” was intimidating, and I was concerned that anything edible would be too ordinary. I didn’t have access to larks or live chickens. I had no giantess tart pan, and I don’t quite have the stomach to make truffled brains or suffocate anyone in patchouli fumes or marinate her alive. To my surprise, though, the spirit of the book seemed to rise up within me, and the mostly invented recipes were better than I knew I could dream up, brighter and more sour, weirder and more delicious. I thought they looked right and tasted even better. Read More
July 19, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: I Loved My Friend By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever and ever no longer feels the same way? Or perhaps never even did? Is it just time to move on? What do you when you’ve promised yourself, and her, that you would love her forever and ever, no matter what? Was that a ridiculous promise? Thank you, Lost Dear Lost, I’m sorry that you’re experiencing this heartbreak. It is both an exquisiteness and a challenge that friendship is not governed by the regulation of other relationships. Friendship is not afforded the same social (or legal) recognition as blood ties or romantic partnerships. How we love our friends has few rules, and that means we get to be gorgeously creative with that love. It also means that how we work through conflict—how and if and when friendships end—has few models. In my experience, this confusion has made the end of close friendships all the more painful. For you, “Poem” by Langston Hughes, which cuts through the haze to say it plain: I loved my friend. He went away from me. There’s nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began— I loved my friend. Read More
July 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Saddest Children’s Book in the World By Yevgeniya Traps What could be simpler than a bubble, a thin little floating membrane, the symbol of an innocent, trouble-free childhood? But it is said that one cannot live in a bubble—it’s right there in the definition: “a good or fortunate situation that is isolated from reality or unlikely to last.” In this jagged world, bubbles burst. A Bubble, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée’s posthumously published last work, is, in essence, a children’s board book. It begins with the caption “Maman lives in a bubble,” above a drawing of a little blond child in cat-face knee socks gazing at her mother, who floats in the titular sphere. “I love you very much,” the mother says, her freckled face anxious, her choppy hair concealed under a beanie hat. She may be unwell, sick. Indeed, the next page confirms it, the mother has been ill for some time: “It has been a while now. I no longer remember the time when she didn’t live in the bubble, I was too little.” The mother works on projects in her bubble: embroidery, reading, crafting, drawing. She gets sicker and sicker, her illness progresses, her hair thins, she starts wearing a cannula, she is connected to a tank. She cannot leave her bubble, but sometimes the little girl joins her in it. They eat breakfast together (“She doesn’t mind if I make crumbs with my toast”), nap (“a special time for Maman and me”), make art (“I draw with her, it brings her great joy”). When she goes on excursions with Papa, the little girl makes sure to tell Maman about her adventures. The bubble separates them but cannot keep them apart. One day, the bubble ruptures, Maman washes out, disoriented at first, but overwhelmingly happy, and she kisses her little girl a thousand times, invites her for an ice cream cone. “I say yes!” the child reports contentedly, and the two walk off together, holding hands, free of the bubble at last, absorbed in each other. Read More
July 19, 2018 On Technology The Radical Notion of a Smartphone-Free Campus By Christopher Schaberg There’s a scene in Don DeLillo’s story “Midnight in Dostoevsky” that reflects on the current omnipresence of digital media and the relative oasis that the college classroom can be. Here we are in a laughably self-serious logic seminar, where the wizardly professor, Ilgauskas, utters one-line axioms before the small group of anxious, if intrigued, students: “The atomic fact,” he said. Then he elaborated for ten minutes while we listened, glanced, made notes, riffled the textbook to find refuge in print, some semblance of meaning that might be roughly equivalent to what he was saying. There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. We sat and listened or sat and waited. We wrote with pens or pencils. Our notebooks had pages made of flexible sheets of paper. I don’t want to wax nostalgic for an earlier era when college students dutifully shunned digital technology or didn’t have it to begin with. I do want, as my university often encourages me, to meet my students “where they are.” But sometimes the imperative to digital mediation overwhelms me and makes me wonder about the threshold of these different ways of being: analog and digital. But of course, it’s never that simple, never a clear-cut binary. Read More