September 11, 2018 At Work Becoming Kathy Acker: An Interview with Olivia Laing By Chris Kraus Left: Olivia Laing. Right: Kathy Acker. When Olivia Laing’s third book, The Lonely City, appeared in 2016, she was hailed as one of the leading contemporary nonfiction writers in the U.S. and the UK. After a breakup in her midthirties, she’d moved from London to New York. Adrift in a strange place and afraid of being alone for the rest of her life, she used her loneliness as a conduit to understanding the work of visual artists like David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Zoe Leonard, the reality-media pioneer Josh Harris, and many others. Loneliness, for Laing, became a new means of perception, a secret channel. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lonely City was named a best book of the year by various publications. Laing never expected that her next work would be a novel. In fact, she was laboring over a new nonfiction book when Crudo erupted. Triggered by her readings of the American writer Kathy Acker, Crudo was composed over seven weeks. Writing in a bracing and racy picaresque style, Laing adopts the third-person character “Kathy” that Acker herself often uses. The result is a hilarious mash-up between Acker’s emotional realism and taste for transgression, and the events of Laing’s very twenty-first-century life as she vacations in Italy, updates social media, and plans her small wedding. The book begins breathlessly, with one of the best openings in recent memory. “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married,” Laing writes. “Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York.” Slipping in and out of her Kathy Acker persona while closely following the events of Laing’s life and the media feed of the summer of 2017, Crudo is at once boldly experimental and highly pleasurable. Writing in real time about Jared and Ivanka, Brexit, the flooding of Houston, Trump’s tweets, and Grenfell, Laing captures the psychic effect of living in the perpetual state of remote emergency that defines the present. “There were several photographs of a care home in which several residents in wheelchairs, elderly black women were up to their chests in dirty brown water,” she writes. “The President was on it, he was using a full arsenal of exclamation marks.” As she astutely concludes, “Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about.” Olivia and I met for the first time two years ago, when we did a conversation in London for the program 5×15. Here, we continue over email. Read More
September 11, 2018 Arts & Culture The Post-9/11 Generation By Daniel Torday Lights at the 9/11 memorial. I’ve been teaching college students for the past decade or so, and every year, I pose the same question to my freshmen: Where were you on September 11, 2001? My first year of teaching a freshman writing seminar, the question led to a disarming conversation about how their eighth-grade teachers handled the news. Students from Manhattan and Brooklyn had parents who’d worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. They recounted with visceral detail how it felt not to know until late that day if their parents were okay. The eternity of waiting. Five years later, the discussion was different. Now freshmen described a glimpse of a memory of a third-grade teacher attempting to figure out how to talk as events unfolded. If pushed, they had to admit they didn’t know if they remembered watching news footage of the attacks that day or if their memory was of seeing that footage over and over years later. One student was certain her third-grade teacher made a point of not showing them the smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center towers. “I was sure I saw it that day,” another student said, “but now that we’re talking about it, I honestly don’t know.” When I recounted my own story of watching the events unfold from Brooklyn and then Manhattan that day, as I found myself doing each fall, they listened more intently than past students had. I was recounting a history they didn’t wholly remember. Last year, when I asked the question, I found myself a bit in shock at the response. I hadn’t prepared myself for the answer. Last year’s freshmen were not yet a year old on September 11, 2001. They knew of it only as a number or from reading about it. To them, it was history. Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Writers’ Cribs By Jane Mount Roald Dahl When Roald Dahl and his family were living in Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, UK, he realized his kids were so noisy that he needed his own writing space. After seeing Dylan Thomas’s shed in Wales, he built a shed of his own in his garden. Dahl wrote all his major works here, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. Dahl collected lots of photos, objects, and memorabilia, including part of his own hip bone. Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction By Amanda DeMarco Beijing. “I’m so tired of the future.” It was late in the day at the Tsinghua University Art Museum, and I was getting whiny. My boyfriend and an acquaintance thumbed through some catalogues near the exit and managed to ignore me. We had reached the end of an exhibition of architectural models from the firm Foster + Partners: London’s Gherkin, a cruise-ship terminal, sundry airports. I’m a Berliner, and the most dizzying display was a table of alternate models for the Reichstag dome, a dozen potential realities in balsa and cardboard. In the final room, an animated video envisioned some sort of building project in space—on Mars, maybe?—but I couldn’t really muster the energy to watch it. It’s been said that the past is a foreign country, and I’ve come to believe that the future is too. I’d just never been so immersed in it before. In Beijing this summer, I read about two thousand pages of work by Cixin Liu, possibly the world’s most important living science-fiction author and certainly among humanity’s most imaginative prognosticators. (A recent London Review of Books piece called his Three-Body trilogy, published in English in 2016, “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”) Like life in Beijing, the experience was magnificent and exhausting and thrilling and flawed. Science fiction might be the genre best suited to Chinese society today; the breakneck pace of change becomes a constant, and to live in the present is to anticipate what is to come. When we told our acquaintance that we’d like to return next summer, she responded as many of our Chinese friends did: “You might not recognize it here.” Living at this pace requires flexibility and ingenuity; you are making up the story of the future as you go along. Everything, the first time we do it, is a fiction. The surety of truth comes only with repetition and belongs to things we know from the past. But the past also becomes rapidly unfamiliar once we’re not repeating its methods—another friend, when we told him that we didn’t have Chinese bank accounts and therefore couldn’t use our phones to pay for purchases or order takeout, looked at us with fascinated pity, murmuring, “It’s like you’re living some sort of social experiment!” Read More
September 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: Ugly Design By Katy Kelleher This is the second of a three-part series on the aesthetics of ugliness. You can read the first installment, on ugly art, here. Photos: Ugly Design. I covet a piece of technology that never existed and likely never will. I can’t stop thinking about it. I covet the seashell e-reader from the 2014 film It Follows. The movie is one of my all-time favorites because it so fluidly combines three of my main interests: awkward sex, sudden death, and timeless design. Typically, when someone calls a car or a handbag or a piece of furnishing “timeless,” they mean it will look just as classic and classy in a few decades as it does today. This is not what I mean about It Follows. Here, the overall look is timeless in that it is outside time. The cars are ugly and retro—low-riding, boxy boats that patrol the middle-class suburbs, emitting low, guttural growls. The houses are ugly, too, with brick lower levels topped by vinyl-sided second stories with a smattering of carelessly placed rectangular windows. This is intentional, according to the film’s director, David Robert Mitchell. In an interview with Paste magazine, he says it was “very much part of the plan” to “make the film exist outside of time in a way that it resembles a dream or a nightmare.” This includes introducing “anachronistic production design elements,” including things from various eras and “things that don’t quite exist” but could, somewhere, in some alternate universe or timeline. Read More
September 7, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dubbing and Pill Popping By The Paris Review While watching Dario Argento’s engrossingly decadent, nonsensical, phantasmagoric ballet-school horror film Suspiria at the IFC Center, the scales fell from my eyes. I had previously come to accept as an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that the great Italian films produced in the forty years after the Second World War—films by Rossellini, Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, De Sica, and Argento—had all their dialogue dubbed in post-production, with no concern for fidelity to the acoustical environment or the movement of the actors’ mouths. Whispers are deafening; sentences careen blithely on after an actor’s face has gone still; an actor’s mouth plainly repeats the same word over and over as the soundtrack magically produces the most varied eloquence. I assumed it a national quirk, like the French and their reverence for Jerry Lewis, and the price of admission to these masterpieces—to their sensuousness, their mixture of pitiless realism and old Hollywood glamour, their feel for the physicality of actors. Then, with Suspiria—in which these qualities are raised to the nth degree, in which pure style is predominant over any narrative coherence—I realized the atrocious dubbing, the flagrant lack of concern for dialogue, is inextricable from the very things that make these movies uniquely great. In essence, the Italians continued to make silent films deep into the sound era, with all the lost qualities inherent to silent film. The decoupling of dialogue from filming seemed to unchain the camera of the Italian filmmakers, free to roam at will, free to hold and hold on faces, waiting for the slightest barometric shift. In Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, far more information is conveyed by the choreography of two characters following each other through an apartment than by dialogue. The Italian film stars of the era—Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren, etc.— are so vivid in memory precisely because their voices are indistinct. Compare them to a star like Humphrey Bogart, whose voice is so famous, and whose iconic moments—“Here’s looking at you, kid”—are so often bound up with dialogue. The aura of the Italian stars is visual, a silent luminosity adhering to them like the saintly halos in an icon. As the faded silent film star Norma Desmond says, contemptuously, in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue—we had faces!” —Matt Levin Read More