December 27, 2018 Best of 2018 Selika, Mystery of the Belle Epoque By Susanna Forrest We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Selika Lazevski exists in six black-and-white photographs and nowhere else. I first saw her when those six studio portraits appeared on Tumblr in 2012. They quickly spread around the Internet as readers asked, Who is she? But although I’ve searched for years, every pin I place to try to map the real woman snaps and slides out of place, multiplying new leads that take me nowhere. I wrote a blog post about her name, guessed the wrong photographer, and saw my error replicate around the Internet, too, even turning up in the publicity materials for a short film about Selika. This much I do know: she was a black amazone in Belle Epoque Paris, a city where black “Amazons” were shown in a human zoo; she was a celebrity who left no other trace than these six tokens of her celebrity; she was a horsewoman without a horse, a power hinted at but not granted. Read more >>
December 27, 2018 Best of 2018 Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag By Varlam Shalamov We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Official NKVD photo from Varlam Shalamov’s 1937 arrest. For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more. 1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings. 2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there. 3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face). 4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent. 5. I realized that Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent—an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days. Read more >>
December 27, 2018 Best of 2018 Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun By Sarah McColl We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Josephine Nivison Hopper Chez Hopper oil on canvas In a 1906 portrait of Josephine Nivison, painted while she was a twenty-two-year-old student at the New York School of Art, her artist’s smock slips from her shoulder like the falling strap of Madame X’s gown. This is teacher Robert Henri’s portrait of the artist as a young woman; one suggestive detail, sure, along with aspects of Jo’s character he can’t help but capture: her steady gaze of steely resolve, the way she holds her brushes like a divining rod. This is when Jo Nivison meets Edward Hopper, though they do not make much of their first meeting, or even their second. When they graduate, Jo keeps herself in cigarettes by selling drawings to places like the New York Tribune, the Evening Post, the Chicago Herald Examiner. In the 1920 New York City Directory, Jo lists herself as an artist, and she is no slouch. She shows her paintings alongside work by Picasso and Man Ray. In that same directory, Edward Hopper calls himself an illustrator. Read more >>
December 26, 2018 Best of 2018 Thomas Bernhard, Karl Kraus, and Other Vienna-Hating Viennese By Matt Levin We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was unaccommodating and gruff in a manner that seemed, at the time, a piece of old-world charm. Across the street, washed hospital white, the Secession Building, house of Gustav Klimt’s luminous Beethoven Frieze, was wrapped in a mesh tarp and looked like the depression of a pulled tooth covered in gauze. Read more >>
December 26, 2018 Best of 2018 A Darker Canvas: Tattoos and the Black Body By Bryan Washington We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! One time in New Orleans, during an annual music festival organized by Essence magazine, a lady flagged me down from her car. I was walking through the French Quarter. The air was sufficiently drenched. In a neighborhood that has been steadily losing black folks, the block was suddenly full of us—glowing in bright clothes, and laughing entirely too loud. But this woman was pretty pissed. When I reached her window, she gave me another nod. She squinted at my tattoos, and asked where the nearest parlor was. “But one for us,” she said. “I’ve already been to four today.” I pointed her to a guy I knew, up the road and around the corner. When she asked if he was black, I winced, because he was not. “He’s good though,” I said. “I mean it. He’s done me twice.” The lady looked deeply skeptical. But then she said, “Okay.” “Listen,” she continued. “I don’t know about that. But I’m going to trust you.” Read more >>
December 26, 2018 Best of 2018 The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed By Meghan O’Gieblyn We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they’re exasperating or impossible or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. They feel less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found vary between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claims he gave a copy of the twelve-hundred-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he writes. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaims it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.” Read more >>