November 13, 2017 Arts & Culture The Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google By Alfie Bown Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault, and even Derrida abound as potential solutions to the social, cultural, and economic problems plaguing the planet, Barthes rarely pops his head outside of the undergraduate classroom. As a serious political conversation piece, love, too, has gone out of fashion. While the hippie movement of Barthes’s own generation united love with countercultural politics, today such attempts seem disengaged and out of touch. A data-pull from Google Scholar articles shows that academic work on love has halved in the past five years. The more pressing our political struggles become, the more love recedes into the background. Read More
November 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Eternal Friendship: An Unlikely Cold War Connection By Anouk Durand Excerpt from Anouck Durand: Eternal Friendship (Siglio Press, 2017). All rights reserved. French artist-writer Anouk Durand’s photo-novel, Eternal Friendship, is collaged from photographic archives, personal letters and propaganda magazines interspersed with text. It tells the true story of a friendship between two photographers forged in the crucible of war. It begins in Albania during World War II, stops in China during the Cold War, and ends in Israel as Communism is crumbling. Below, we have reprinted Eliot Weinberger’s introduction, followed by a short excerpt from the book. The Albanian language has a tense for surprise. That is, the verb-ending changes if one says “You speak Albanian” or “You speak Albanian!” The physical landscape of the country is punctuated with periods: 200,000 tiny dome-shaped concrete bunkers, scattered everywhere, meant to hold one or two snipers each, and built by Enver Hoxha in the delusion that it would repel an imagined Soviet invasion. But, even more, the psychic landscape is a forest of exclamation marks entangled with question marks: surprise and bewilderment. Albanian did not have its own written language until the 20th century, and 95% of the women couldn’t read it. Fishermen on the coast, farmers in the hills, shepherds in the mountains, the blood feuds of continually warring clans: Albania was always an agricultural colony or the backwater of an empire or occupied territory on the way to somewhere else for the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Italo-Normans, the Serbs, the Venetians, the Bulgarians, the Ottomans, the Italian Fascists, the Nazis. In its first years after World War II, the new People’s Republic of Albania under Hoxha—who was prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister, and the commander-in-chief of the army—became a client state of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Breaking with Yugoslavia, it became a client state of Stalin’s Soviet Union, copying the Stalinist economic system of state enterprise and collectivized farming and the Stalinist political system of mass imprisonments and executions. The penalization of “enemies of the people” extended to their grandchildren. Read More
November 13, 2017 Dream Diaries The Insomniac’s Dream Diary: Part One By Vladimir Nabokov Copyright © Ellis Rosen This week, we’ll be running a series of dreams from the forthcoming Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time. For nearly three months in 1964, Nabokov recorded his dreams upon waking, as a way of testing J. W. Dunne’s theory that dreams offered not only “fragments of past impressions,” but also “a proleptic view of an event to come.” In other words, that dreams were a sort of reverse déjà vu, a way of subconsciously working through not only the past but the future. In this first installment, Nabokov dreams about eating rare soil samples. Three days later, the soil samples appear in a documentary he’s watching on TV. 17 Oct. 1964—8.30 am (see Oct. 20) 4. Sitting at round table in the office of the director of a small provincial museum. He (a stranger, a colorless administrator, neutral features, crewcut) is explaining something about the collections. I suddenly realize that all the while he was speaking I was absent-mindedly eating exhibits on the table—bricks of crumbly stuff which I had apparently taken for some kind of dusty insipid pastry but which were actually samples of rare soils in the compartments (of which most are now empty) of a tray-like wooden affair in which <verso> geological specimens are kept. Although he had pointed at the tray while speaking, the director has not noticed yet anything wrong. I am now wondering not so much about the effects upon me of those (very slightly sugary) samples of soils but about the method of restoring them and what exactly they were—perhaps very precious, hard to procure, long kept in the museum (the labels on the empty compartments are reproachful but dim). The director is called to the telephone and <new card> [17 Oct. cont.] abruptly leaves the room. I am now talking to his assistant (German, wears glasses, youngish) who is very hard on the doctor who had been looking after me before I came to this clinic (ex-museum). In fact, that doctor’s treatment (rather than the exhibits I have just consumed—which surely must aggravate my condition) has resulted in the possibility of an “iron-infection”. He says I will be threatened by it at least during a whole year, will “live under the menace.” <verso> He mispronounces this word as “mans” and turns apologetically and questioningly to the director of the clinic (who has now returned to his place at the table). The director whose native language is English nods and says “yes, there will be a mans.” I correct him: menace, and am aware I have offended him. (Quite recently—the day before yesterday—I had read of edible mushrooms, dry samples of which were offered, to be handled and sniffed at, to the visitors[1] to an exhibition. And last year we had been highly critical of one of D’s doctors).[2] Read More
November 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cats, Combat, Conversationalists By The Paris Review Notebook pages from Éric Chevillard’s autofiction. The other night, sprawled on the floor of my apartment, I opened the newest issue of Music & Literature and found myself quickly smitten with one of its featured artists: the French writer Éric Chevillard. This is neither the first nor the second occasion M&L has introduced me to work that has left me in awe of its author—it’s happened before, with the fiction writer Ann Quin and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik. But this time felt different. Why? To start, Chevillard has accomplished what few writers, in my readings of them, have: he got me to laugh … aloud. The pages devoted to him flaunt his impeccable range—there’s Chevillard the critic, the novelist—but my favorite bits are those doused in humor, the short snippets of prose that take as their subjects such peculiar things as Hegel’s cap (“it’s a must-see … a thing to behold”) and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (where its audience “ends up definitively and permanently associating the instruments with the characters they arbitrarily play in the story”). Then of course there’s Chevillard’s piece “Autofiction,” in which he subs the word ejaculating in for writing: “To be honest, what I ejaculated back then was worthless. Inconsistent. Peanuts. Flan. Eggnog.” Chevillard’s prose brims with outrageous wit, sophistication, and fun, the likes of which I’ve never read before. —Caitlin Youngquist Julia pressed the most recent issue (for American readers) of the London Review of Books into my hands, demanding I read a short piece titled “Cat-Brushing,” by Jane Campbell. Julia and I talk about cats regularly, and why wouldn’t I read an article about cat brushing. But feline grooming is only a metaphor and jumping-off point: the story (I later discovered it was fiction) is a reverie by an older woman of her past lovers, of deeply pleasurable sex, of growing old and losing all of it. She calls aging “a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed … Once, when I arched my back and let out little miaows of pleasure my lovers thrilled with the knowledge of their potency. Now, I offer a few inches of knitting to my son. It is a terrible loss.” I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story in which an older woman’s loss of sexuality and independence was written so preeningly and with such elegant mourning. “I was loved and feared in return,” she recalls of her catlike fierceness. “It was a good place to be.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
November 10, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Zora Neale Hurston By Valerie Stivers This is the fourth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel on black Southern womanhood by Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), people eat soda crackers with cheese, drink lemonade or sweeten their water with ribbon cane syrup, and serve whole barbecued hogs with sweet-potato pone. A man on a spree offers fried chicken and macaroni for all, and Janie, the heroine, leaves her first husband after frying him a hoe-cake to go with his coffee. “She dumped the dough on the skillet and smoothed it over with her hand. She wasn’t even angry,” Hurston writes. Instead of a loveless marriage, Janie insists on having the sweet things in life. Her second husband buys her “the best things the butcher had, like apples and a glass lantern full of candies.” And her great love is a handsome man 15 years her junior whom everyone calls “Tea Cake.” (A tea cake is a classic of Southern cooking that’s actually a simple round of sugar dough with a crisp bottom and chewy texture, something between biscuit and cookie.) Hurston’s belief that the pursuit of happiness and sensuality was a worthy life goal, especially for a black woman, was radical when the book was published. She was criticized for being “pseudo-primitive,” too female, too personal, not promoting black causes in the right way. Hurston died in obscurity and was only rediscovered in the 1970s thanks to the efforts of Alice Walker, who was teaching at Wellesley at the time. Read More
November 10, 2017 At Work Daring as a Woman: An Interview with Lorna Simpson By Heidi Zuckerman The following is excerpted from Conversations with Artists, a collection of conversations by Heidi Zuckerman with thirty-four contemporary artists. INTERVIEWER Your work is extensive and takes many different forms. How do you respond when people ask you what you do? SIMPSON It gives me pause when people ask me what I do, because there are so many different avenues that my work has gone down. Photography being one avenue, film and video another, more recently—over the past five years—drawing, using inks, and collage. Although I’m trained in different areas, I gravitate more toward the photographic arts. I’ve always left it open as to how I work in different mediums and try not to put too many boundaries on what I do. It’s more about experimenting or the process of making that matters. INTERVIEWER Do you consider your works to be narrative based? SIMPSON Many, yes. My earlier works from the eighties and midnineties are very narrative based. But even more recently, the work has an undercurrent of the narrative of the archive, of found photographs, implied narratives, and fictions. Read More