August 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Vanishing of Reality By Michiko Kakutani Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. —Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant” Surreal and chaos have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, when artificial-intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN. Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the sixties, when society began fragmenting and official narratives—purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites—started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth writes of American reality: “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complains, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise … ” Read More
July 31, 2018 Redux Redux: On Trial By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Janet Malcolm’s 2011 Writers at Work interview, Dante Troisi’s short story “Diary of a Judge,” and Devin Johnston’s poem “Means of Escape.” Read More
July 31, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: In Defense of Ugly Paintings By Katy Kelleher Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Czardas dancers, 1908. Inside an old brick building in Somerville’s Davis Square, below the gilded stage and the red velvet seats, there is an unusual museum. Hidden in the basement of the 1914 Art Deco building is a collection of hideous paintings and disturbing drawings otherwise known as the Museum of Bad Art. “You won’t ever see this stuff in the Museum of Fine Arts,” the curator Michael Frank says. Frank is the kind of guy who can’t pass a yard sale or a flea market without stopping to browse. He loves ugly things, but for him, ugly is a problematic word. “When I read your email, I thought, Uh-oh,” he admits. “Calling something ugly is like calling something beautiful. The minute you say it, you’re in a difficult spot, trying to define what that really means.” Frank prefers to think of these paintings as “badart,” one word, no hyphen. Badart is not the inverse of “good art”; it’s the inverse of “important art.” Some might call these pieces outsider art, and in the past, many of them could have been termed primitive or art brut. I prefer to think of them as ugly. Charming—like the dancing dog wearing a tutu or the nineties eyebrows on one particularly serene Virgin Mary—but ugly nonetheless. However, I understand where Frank is coming from. For Frank, ugly is a word that suffocates, depriving his favorite paintings of their rightful playful air. Ugly is also a word that carries hard moral implications; for centuries, ugliness has been associated not only with sickness and deformity but also dishonesty, violence, aggression, and bigotry. Consider the term ugly American or the repeated critique of Trump’s “ugly” acts. The word itself comes from the equally discordant-sounding ugga and uggligr, two Old Norse adjectives that mean “dreadful, fearful, aggressive.” (Other words that bloomed from the “dreadful” root include loath and loathsome.) The meaning changed only in the fourteenth century, when uglike stopped meaning “terrifying” and began to mean “unpleasant to look at.” Even though the word ugly is now primarily used to describe the unaesthetic aspect of things rather than their deep moral fiber, it retains elements of its original meaning. Using it can shift a well-meaning aesthetic critique into the realm of moral judgment. This is unfortunate for those of us who genuinely enjoy, and celebrate, ugly things. If you, too, want to appreciate ugliness, the first thing you have to do is stop assuming that it is the inverse of beauty. We tend to talk about aesthetics as though the categories are locked in a battle: good versus evil, light versus dark. But opposites are a crutch. Beauty and ugliness do not negate each other. Read More
July 31, 2018 First Person Like You Know Your Own Bones By Crystal Hana Kim On memory, inherited trauma, and my grandmother. Crystal Hana Kim and her grandmother. When I was almost two years old, my grandmother flew from Hongcheon, South Korea, to Flushing, Queens, to take care of me. For a few years, while my parents worked, I spent my hours with Halmuni. I do not remember how we colored our days, but I press my thumb onto the photographs of that time. I smudge their borders and try to return to a forgotten past. In one glossy, blurry photograph, I am paper-crowned with a waxy yellow Burger King wrapper laid out before me, a rounded bun raised to my open mouth. Halmuni does not eat; instead, the camera catches her watching me. A tender, unsmiling gaze. When I examine this picture, I am convinced I remember. That crown, I think. Yes. I remember the thick gold paper with the Burger King logo, the jewels on the rounded arches. But the crown in the photograph is blue, and that unexpected color unbalances me. My confidence slips. Perhaps I am remembering a different day. Perhaps I am remembering the last time I looked at this photograph. Memory warps and stretches and shifts to fit the strictures of your life. As my mother and I share a bottle of wine, she recalls my first years. She tells me that I had no understanding of mother-daughter love when I was young, that my world revolved around Halmuni. I wanted to sleep in her room. I wanted my mother to return “our” chopsticks when she used them in the kitchen. The edges of my mind seem to prickle with recognition. A white linoleum floor, my hand on Halmuni’s knee as I demand my mother leave us alone. Read More
July 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Nico: Beyond the Icon By Michael LaPointe Still from Nico, 1988. Nico believed in fate, and she was fated to be an icon. In her youth, she was the femme fatale of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the spectral singer of the Velvet Underground. Later in life, she became an allegory of rock ’n’ roll’s excess, the moon goddess felled by heroin. In the thirty years since her death, she has variously served as a feminist symbol—the Judith Shakespeare to her canonical male peers—and a stand-in for European trauma, an exile wandering the world in the aftermath of war. But for Nico, being an icon was a problem. When she sang “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1966, she wasn’t asking to become a permanent surface for our collective reflections. Even through her many permutations, Nico’s artistic achievement remains out of focus. As in the case of her favorite poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, critics tend to misunderstand her work as unfinished, as if severed before its full flowering. While contemporaries such as Joni Mitchell occupy the very center of pop history, Nico remains apart. Today she is best known for the songs she came to loathe. Of course, they’re also her catchiest, but I wonder if her artistic mission—a mission of destruction—is simply incompatible with any of the images we’ve made of her. We construct icons, but Nico was an iconoclast. Read More
July 30, 2018 Literary Cities Literary Citizen of the Andes: Gabriela Alemán and Quito By Dick Cluster Cotopaxi, in Quito. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, is an Andean city ninety-three hundred feet above sea level, squeezed into a narrow valley fifteen miles south of the equator. On the west side, you can take the teleférico up to the shoulder of the Pichincha volcano and step out of your gondola onto an alpine landscape at an elevation of more than thirteen thousand feet. Looking down at the urban area from above the tree line reminds me of cities closer to the poles than to the equator—Bergen, Cape Town, or even Anchorage. But unlike those other locations, Quito is not a port, and its cityscape is not set against a background of bright blue. Rather, the city spreads like an elongated flow of white and beige concrete poured between green ridges that hem it in. It’s a low-slung city—the tallest spire is still the steeple of the cathedral built at the turn of the twentieth century. It all looks diminutive from above. Across the valley rises Parque Metropolitano, the city’s green forested lung. If the clouds permit, you can also see a series of snowcapped, conical volcanoes in the distance. Those cones remind you that you are standing on an active volcano. In 1660, the last major eruption of Pichincha spewed a massive column of ash into the air, plunging Quito—which was founded in the previous century by Spanish conquistadors on an earlier Inca site—into darkness and blanketing it with more than a foot of debris. After centuries of dormancy, Pichincha stirred again in 1981 and again in 1999, both times raining ash on the capital. So, too, to a lesser degree, did a 2015 eruption of Cotopaxi, a volcano fifty miles distant, one of the peaks visible from the top of the teleférico. “One hundred miles from the snows of Cotopaxi” is where H. G. Wells set his 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind,” the tale of a pristine, fertile valley sealed off from the rest of Ecuador by a huge fictional eruption, “the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days.” Read More