July 10, 2018 Arts & Culture When Your Muse Is Also a Demonic Dominatrix By Nina-Sophia Miralles On Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala. When Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala, died in 1982, the first person outside of his household to hear the news was Juan Carlos, the king of Spain. Dalí telephoned the reigning monarch himself, and for once, this was not an act of posturing or presumption on his behalf. By then, the once-destitute artist had become a surrealist superstar, a multimillionaire, a man whose supreme genius landed him the nickname el maestro, the title of marquess, endless fawning fans, and an equally endless litany of clingers-on, copycats, and sycophants. Dalí had met Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, when he was the tender age of twenty-four (and, the story goes, still a virgin). She was ten years his senior, and they lived together for the next fifty-three years, until her death. How would he fare without her? Not well. Following her funeral, Dalí locked himself away in his surrealist tower in Púbol, Spain, drew the curtains, and refused to eat or drink. He denied entry to his friends and aides and forbade anyone to speak Gala’s name. As he writes in The Unspeakable Confessions in 1973, the castle itself was a testament to his love: Everything celebrates the cult of Gala, even the round room, with its perfect echo that crowns the building as a whole and which is like a dome of this Galactic cathedral. When I walk around this house I look at myself and I see my concentricity. I like its moorish rigour. I needed to offer Gala a case more solemnly worthy of our love. That is why I gave her a mansion built on the remains of a 12th century castle: the old castle of Púbol in La Bisbal, where she would reign like an absolute sovereign, right up to the point that I could visit her only by hand-written invitation from her. I limited myself to the pleasure of decorating her ceilings so that when she raised her eyes, she would always find me in her sky. In 1984, two years after her death, a fire broke out in his bedroom under suspicious circumstances, and Dalí was horribly burned. In the hospital, they discovered he was suffering from severe malnutrition, and his staff was accused of negligence. But the truth, as Gala’s biographer Tim McGirk writes in Wicked Lady, is that “after Gala’s death, Dalí lost his will to paint or even live.” Read More
July 10, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Ottessa Moshfegh By Ottessa Moshfegh In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Do you see that half-eaten can of tuna on the top shelf? That was a mistake. Most of the food in my fridge is inedible. It would be inedible even if the stink of tuna hadn’t penetrated through it all, because it’s old. I’m almost never at home in Los Angeles, where this fridge lives. I travel a lot, and when I’m in California, I go to Luke’s house, two hours away. Luke’s fridge is a lot like Luke: exploding with deliciousness. Who could be luckier than me? Luke opens his mouth and whole chocolate cakes fall out. He snaps his fingers and voilà—chicken cacciatore. One time he rolled over in bed and left in his wake an entire patch of strawberries. I don’t know how to explain it. He’s the most wonderful man in the world. I’m always well-fed when Luke is around. Then I come home, alone, to this—rotten lettuce. I just tried pouring that Soleil carbonated water over ice, and even the ice smelled like fish. Read More
July 9, 2018 On Film On Agnès Varda’s Vagabond By Andrea Kleine Still from Vagabond, by Agnès Varda. As a teenager, my view of the world was bleak. I was the only one of my small group of misfit friends to leave home and go away to college. Not long before I did, I saw Agnès Varda’s film Vagabond. I can’t remember if I saw it at the local art-house cinema (which went out of business the same year) or if I pulled it off the rack at the neighborhood video-rental store or if I happened upon it on Cinemax, which in the late eighties was known for showing the HBO leftovers: foreign films and soft porn. I’m fairly certain I saw Vagabond alone. There were few female heroines that made sense to me growing up in the eighties, an era whose filmic representations were overwhelmed by John Hughes and his bubblegum suburbia, where misunderstood girls were eventually sexualized and therefore welcomed to the ranks of fitting in. That kind of conformist resolution was unsettling to me. Agnès Varda finally gave me a female protagonist who didn’t compromise. Read More
July 9, 2018 Arts & Culture I’m Not Supposed to Talk About Dubus By Nina MacLaughlin On revisiting Dubus’s female characters. The man, who I will not name, had started his fifties but looked older, paunchy, with thinning curls. We overlapped for two weeks at a writing residency in another country. He was the head of the department of creative writing at a large university and was the type of cliché that was amusing at first—the defeated, world-weary writing professor, the sad, self-involved blowhard, mourning his youth and his lost early promise. He was a faded, aging never-quite-was who name-dropped the famous poets at his wedding, and he both did and did not want you to know about his unfolding divorce. (“Let’s just say there’s been a disturbance in the marriage.” “Let’s just say I’m not feeling particularly fond of Geminis these days.” “Let’s just say I don’t have a lot of sympathy for adulterous poets right now.”) The type of cliché who is amusing at first but, in short time, devolves into despicable. He was loathsome. He lectured about writers—not in a formal sense but in the sense that to engage in conversation with him was to feel oneself being lectured—and at one point landed on the work of Andre Dubus, the short-story writer who was born in Louisiana in 1936 and died in 1999, who spent much of his life writing and teaching in Massachusetts, had three wives, and was the father of the writer Andre Dubus III (as well as five other children). “I’m not supposed to talk about Dubus,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “I’ve been told he’s not PC. That’s what my students have said. My female students. That the way he writes women … ” Here, he made a vague gesture with his hand and pursed his lips. “I can’t really comment,” he said. This was two months before the ignition of #MeToo. I wanted to tell him he was wrong or that the “female students” who told him were. I am better able than you to say how well he writes women, I thought. And at that point, I would’ve argued Dubus writes women very well. Read More
July 9, 2018 Arts & Culture The Legend of Joaquín Murieta: A History of Racialized Violence By Hsuan L. Hsu Like its elusive hero, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) is difficult to pin down. It has the distinction of being the first novel published in California, the first novel published by a Native American, and the first American novel to feature a Mexican protagonist. Its story draws together transformational events in the history of three nations, connecting the California gold rush with the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Mexican-American War. It blends elements of epic, folktale, revenge tragedy, and romance—yet historians have often treated it as a factual record. It has been repurposed, and sometimes plagiarized, throughout the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Latin America; in publications ranging from the California Police Gazette to the popular Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta), a play by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; and the 1998 Hollywood film The Mask of Zorro (in which Joaquín’s brother, played by Antonio Banderas, takes up the mask of Zorro). While few Americans today would recognize the name of Joaquín Murieta, most are familiar with figures such as Zorro and Batman, whose creators were inspired by this sensational account of vigilante justice and righteous violence. Paradoxically, John Rollin Ridge’s book (published under his Cherokee name, Yellow Bird) has become both one of the most influential and one of the most invisible novels in the history of American literature. Read More
July 6, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bandits, Revenge, and Decapitated Animals By The Paris Review Mona Chalabi is the data editor for the Guardian’s U.S. branch. Her beautiful Instagram account is a mixture of data, visual art, and, taken together, a kind of self-portrait in infographics, illustrating Chalabi’s preoccupations, curiosity, neuroses, politics, and sense of humor. You’ll find a chart on the “Probability of a White Christmas” (at least one inch of snow) from Michigan to South Carolina, and another of an outstretched leg, illustrating the downward slope in pantyhose sales in Japan. The caffeine content of various beverages is represented by stretched-open bloodshot eyeballs. Another chart, of penises, represents the “Average Time to Ejaculate During Vaginal Penetration”: “Median = 5.4 minutes”—though her caption notes, “This data comes from 500 heterosexual men in monogamous relationships for at least 6 months. So, not exactly representative. And it was collected by asking them to use a stopwatch which you’d think would kill the mood at least a bit. But still, interesting, no?” Yes. Also interesting: the spike in people googling “Will I Die Alone” around Valentine’s Day; the number of decapitated animals found in New York parks (with chickens and pigeons in the lead, ahead of goats and cats); the degree to which Trump campaign contributors profit from his policy of detaining immigrants; and the current disparity in earnings between black and white Americans. Some aren’t charts at all, just facts and drawings, like the one of two hands being pulled apart—one big, one small—posted alongside the fact that 1,995 children were separated from 1,940 adults at the United States–Mexico border between April 19 and May 31 of this year. Some artists are perfectly suited to the visual medium of Instagram. Others provide you with information that may broaden your perspective or at least redeem your procrastination. If these two types are in a Venn diagram, with varying amounts of overlap, then Mona Chalabi is a total eclipse. —Brent Katz Read More