February 27, 2018 Arts & Culture Willa Cather, Pioneer By Jane Smiley Willa Cather was not a flashy stylist, and though she was ambitious in her work, she did not attach it to a publicity-worthy life like some of her contemporaries, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cather’s first book of poetry came out in 1903, when she was twenty-nine; her first book of stories followed a couple years later, when she was thirty-one. Her last novel appeared in 1940, and a volume of three more stories was published in 1948, shortly after she died. Forty-five years is a long career for a novelist, but she possessed an intensity of observation and a curiosity about human psychology, especially as it relates to nature, that never waned. My Ántonia is one of her best-loved books, and it displays all the characteristics that make Cather both elusive and fascinating even as it depicts a world that vanished almost as soon as the novel was published. Willa Cather was born in an interesting spot in the mountains of Virginia, near Winchester, on the banks of a tributary of the Potomac, Back Creek. The family properties (one owned by her grandfather, another given to her father by her grandfather) were about ninety miles from Washington, D.C., and fifty miles from prosperous plantation regions like Loudon County. But—perhaps especially after the Civil War—it was difficult to make a living in the mountains and dangerous because of tuberculosis outbreaks, so Cather’s father and mother, Charles and Mary Virginia, took Willa and the other children (eventually there were seven in all) to rural Nebraska. After their first winter in the country, they settled in Red Cloud, a new town six miles north of the Kansas border and about halfway between the northwestern corner of Missouri and the northeastern corner of Colorado. Willa was about to turn ten. In Nebraska, the Cathers, immigrants from Virginia, immediately encountered a huge population of other immigrants from more distant and perhaps more romantic—to Willa—places: Norway, Sweden, France, Bohemia, Mexico. A sense of the world that compelled Cather for the rest of her life began to develop, a sense of the world that is deeply American, simultaneously local and exploratory, rustic and cosmopolitan. Read More
February 26, 2018 On History Napoleon’s Chamber Pot: Propaganda and Fake News By Nina Martyris Charles Steuben, Napoleon’s Return from Elba, 1818. A few weeks ago, shortly after the news broke that the curator of the Guggenheim Museum had offered President Donald Trump a gold toilet as an artwork-commode for his private quarters in the White House, I found myself in Montreal, examining a toilet meant for another powerful rump. The cream-colored chamber pot had been custom made for the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte when he was a prisoner of the British on the island of Saint Helena after his 1815 defeat at Waterloo. The English furniture maker commissioned to design the former emperor’s household furnishings had come up with this elegant Grecian chamber pot. But it turned out to have a fatal flaw: a neoclassical laurel wreath encircled its rim. Out of the question, said the scandalized British authorities when they laid eyes on it. Fearing their hostile prisoner would misinterpret the laurel as a symbolic nod to his long-gone imperial status, the pot was, so to speak, never pressed into service. Read More
February 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun By Sarah McColl 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
February 23, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Hooks, Twizzles, and Symphonies By The Paris Review bell hooks. In a compelling and widely read New York Times editorial published Thursday, “The Boys Are Not All Right,” Michael Ian Black argues that the blame for our society’s gun-violence epidemic lies, at least in part, with our broken standards of masculinity. While feminism has expanded the definition of womanhood, he writes, no commensurate movement has helped boys to reimagine what it might mean to become men: “I think we [men] would benefit from the same conversations girls and women have been having for these past 50 years.” Black is correct that masculinity has failed to evolve, but conversations about that failure have in fact been happening for some time. One person who has consistently tried to break the silence is bell hooks. In her 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks, like Black, criticizes what she interprets as an intellectual and cultural silence on the subject of men. “Feminist theory has offered us brilliant critiques of patriarchy,” she writes, “and very few insightful ideas about alternative masculinity, especially in relation to boys.” In personal, approachable prose, she examines how both women and men perpetuate a patriarchal model of masculinity—albeit to disparate reward—and explores “what the alternative to patriarchal masculinity might be.” Fourteen years later, it strikes me that the continued paucity of such alternatives stems less from a lack of answers than from an unwillingness to ask the question. —Spencer Bokat-Lindell Read More
February 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Portrait of a Friendship By Simon Akam Portrait of Simon Akam, by Moussa David Saleh. When we had to make things right, we went to the French House. The pub stands on Dean Street, in Soho, in central London, near the Algerian Coffee Stores, where the windows are stocked with Hazer Baba Turkish delight, and the sex shop whose window flashes LEATHER RUBBER NEOPRENE. Inside the pub, there are framed cartoons by Michael Heath. They served cidre long before international booze conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev ventured into that spelling. That was where, in 2016, I met my friend David for crisis talks. The matter at hand was a painting. The canvas lay four miles to the northeast, unfinished, in a studio in Dalston. Despite its distance, the painting lay between us that night, the crux of our disagreement. Read More
February 23, 2018 Department of Tomfoolery 💀 Vanitas 💀 By Elif Batuman Simon Renard de Saint-André, Vanitas, c. 1660. Read More