October 24, 2017 On Books Anita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen By Emma Garman Anita Brookner. Photo: Rex Features The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. Over the course of several decades and an astonishing twenty-four novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Hotel du Lac, the prevailing myth held that Brookner wrote conservative, middlebrow stories about dull and repressed women. The novelist Tessa Hadley admitted in the Guardian that before reading her, “I’d expected something ladylike, lavender-scented, prissy and precious; I knew as soon as I opened my eyes to her words that this writing was everything opposite to that.” On a recent episode of the Backlisted podcast, the literary critic and Brookner convert Lucy Scholes said, “For many years, I labored under that rather stupid impression that she wrote novels about spinsters in the worst possible shape and form a spinster can take.” It didn’t help that Publishers Weekly, in 1990, described Brookner as “a latter-day Jane Austen,” a label oft repeated despite its almost comical inaccuracy. If Austen popularized the marriage plot, Brookner upended it, immersing us in the emotionally clandestine lives of mistresses and other romantic misfits. Literature from the point of view of “the other woman” is rare, and she is the genre’s subversive maestro. Cheated-on wives, in her portrayal, are too self-centered, ruthless, and confident to warrant our compassion. In any case, their marriages and invariably privileged lives are never in jeopardy. Read More
October 23, 2017 At Work Reappearing Women: A Conversation Between Marie Darrieussecq and Kate Zambreno By The Paris Review Paula Modersohn-Becker, Liegende Mutter mit Kind II (Reclining Mother with Child II), 1906, oil on canvas, 32 1/2 in. × 49 1/10 in. The novelist Marie Darrieussecq’s slim, enigmatic biography of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, opens with the author’s visit to the house in which Paula lived with her husband, Otto. “She was here,” Darrieussecq writes. “On Earth and in her house.” It is a statement of fact that conjures Modersohn-Becker, who died in 1907 at age thirty-one, into being once more. That opening sentence sits in counterpoint to the book’s epigraph, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Being here is wondrous.” Rilke’s claim arrives with easy certitude; Darrieussecq’s with authorial entreaty. In Being Here, Darrieussecq has drawn a complete, if elliptical, portrait of Modersohn-Becker’s short life—her close friendship with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and with Rilke, her marriage to the painter Otto Modersohn, her lifelong insistence on the ability to paint and to have a corner of solitude in which to do it. “I try to see where her strength resides,” Darrieussecq thinks while looking at a photograph of Paula. “She is staring into space. Open and thoughtful. It is the photograph of a woman who paints, alone, whose paintings are not seen.” In reconstituting Modersohn-Becker’s life, Darrieussecq also illuminates a broader problem for women artists. Later in the book, she visits the Museum Folkwang, in Essen, Germany, to see Modersohn-Becker’s self-portrait and is taken to a “temporary display” in the museum’s basement. “Upstairs,” she recalls, “well lit: Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee. Downstairs, in the shadows: a mess of statues from antiquity mixed up with contemporary videos. Goddesses, mother-and-child paintings, queens: the only connecting thread is that these works are by women or represent women.” The neat separation of modernist masters from the full historical sweep of women’s art—a literal high and low—encapsulates centuries of thwarted ambition. Being Here was published in France last year and was released last month in an English translation by Penny Hueston. Darrieussecq spoke with the writer Kate Zambreno over the phone earlier this fall. Zambreno recently published Book of Mutter, a meditation on writing, grief, and motherhood. She also became a mother some nine months ago; her baby’s cries punctuated their conversation about the process of reviving Modersohn-Becker’s reputation, motherhood and art, and women’s friendships. —Nicole Rudick ZAMBRENO What was your first encounter with Paula? DARRIEUSSECQ It was on the Internet, actually. I received a spam email for a colloquium about psychoanalysis and motherhood. There was a stamp-size painting of a woman nursing but lying on her side. That was the best position—for me, at least—to nurse, but I never had seen that position in a painting. I discovered that it was by Paula Modersohn-Becker, and I wondered why she is so unknown. ZAMBRENO I encountered her through Adrienne Rich’s poem about the friendship between Paula and Clara Westhoff, Rich’s answer to Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend.” DARRIEUSSECQ And Rilke dedicated his “Requiem” to Paula. ZAMBRENO But she’s unnamed in it. Read More
October 23, 2017 On Film Life After Empathy: On Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner 2049 By Paul Youngquist Still from Blade Runner 2049. Driving cross-country some years ago, I pulled off Interstate 76, among the arroyos and tumbleweed at Fort Morgan, Colorado. Philip K. Dick lay buried somewhere in the cemetery there. But where? At the public library, a sweet old lady volunteer flipped the pages of a bound burial record until she found the grave’s location. I wrote it down, thanked her, and wandered around until I found a double tombstone, about a foot high, bearing the names Philip and Jane, Dick’s twin sister, dead in infancy. (Before he died in 1982, Dick purchased the plot next to hers.) Standing only a few feet above his moldering corpse gave me the willies. His books produce in me a sort of psychotic break with everyday reality, revealing a hidden life behind it, ominous and possibly sacred. On top of the low tombstone, an earlier pilgrim had placed an array of small plastic sheep. An offering! I sensed something sacred about them, so I stole one. Returning to my car, I stuck it into the heater grid on the dash. To this day, it guides my travels, a holy relic reminding me to dream of electric sheep. When bioengineering produces androids indistinguishable from humans (probably soon), will they share the sanctity of human life? That’s a typically weird Philip K. Dick question, played out in his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The two movies it has inspired, Blade Runner (1982, directed by Ridley Scott) and now its sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve), take up that question, too, but avoid Dick’s fateful claim that what makes human life sacred is a quality androids don’t have and never will: empathy. Read More
October 22, 2017 At Work With a Bang: An Interview with Eleanor Antin By Erik Morse Eleanor Antin as the King, 1972. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. Eleanor Antin began her career as a stage actress and painter-cum-assemblagist in the late 1950s. She was inspired by the techniques of Yiddish theater and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as those of Marcel Duchamp and Fluxus. Her versatile art practice was conceptual by design, though leavened by black humor and pageantry. Antin’s relocation to the purlieus of San Diego in 1968 contributed to her particularly Californian blend of theater and autofiction, while the native New York she left behind remained dominated by the more politicized tenets of minimalism. Since then, her stylistic DNA has imprinted itself on a cross section of literati and literary artists, from Kathy Acker to Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle, fortifying her status as not only an archetypal feminist artist but an innovative writer as well. This autumn’s Richard Saltoun exhibition “Romans & Kings” together with Frieze Masters’ “Spotlight” presented the first major London showcase of Antin’s oeuvre, including seminal series like “100 Boots” (1971–1973)—often considered the defining entry of the mail-art genre—“The Last Days of Pompeii” (2001), and “Helen’s Odyssey” (2007), part of her larger tableaux vivants collection, “Historical Takes,” as well as a reading from her ten-year cycle of performances, films, photos, and writings as the fictitious Ballets Russes ballerina Eleanora Antinova, which was collected in a book titled An Artist’s Life last year. Following her appearance at the Serpentine Pavilion on the eve of Frieze Masters, Antin spoke to me via email about the significance of narrative in her artwork, an ominous adventure to the West Coast, and the literary world’s importunate conservatism. INTERVIEWER I want to begin by asking you about some of the unifying themes behind the autumn exhibitions in London. Part of what becomes clear in looking through all of these very different works in photography, performance, writing and set design is your recurring attention to the highly gestural, the whimsical and the “literary.” Such interests seem to be at odds with the ultra-politicized performance of artists like Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, and Vito Acconci during the height of the post-’68 period. How were these ideas received when you began working in earnest? ANTIN I only worked on what interested me, no matter how alien it may have seemed to everybody else at the time. Vito and Chris were very dramatic artists. Sure, Acconci’s scenarios—at least the earlier ones—sound simple. Like, choose somebody at random and follow him or her until she goes inside. But the possibilities of this life/art piece are various, potentially dangerous, funny, boring, whatever. My Carving: A Traditional Sculpture has what looks like a minimal system, it does. But its potential for complex personal and psychological meanings are there, especially for women. The times weren’t so minimalist, after all. Read More
October 20, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Foxes, Unicorns, and Ghostworms By The Paris Review Yrsa Daley-Ward’s new collection, bone, opens with a small explosion, a two-line poem called “Intro”: “I am the tall dark stranger / those warnings prepared you for.” The poems that follow pick up the dual meaning here—of threat and of erotic desire. Often, the two are intertwined, as when she writes of an affair, “Remember on the right night and / under the right light / any idea can seem like a good one.” Daley-Ward, who was raised by her religious grandparents in a small town in Northern England, self-published bone in 2014; it sold more than twenty thousand copies, a staggering figure for a self-published book, let alone of poetry. Penguin reissued an expanded edition, with forty additional pages, last month. The excellent long autobiographical “It Is What It Is” describes her brother’s heated reaction to their father’s funeral, and the breathlessness as she narrates their swift escape along the highway, thinking of their separation as children, propels the poem to its painful close. “Today is the first day of the rest of it,” she writes in the last poem, resigned but also dogged, “Of course there will be other first / days / but none exactly like this.” —Nicole Rudick Assigned reading can be either tedious or life changing. Pastoralia, the second story collection from the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders, falls into the latter category for me. A little more than four years ago, I was a junior in college, a shy journalism student who didn’t especially identify with any of the newshounds surrounding me. I enrolled in a fiction workshop, and when that went well, I enrolled in another. The critiques, the meat of the class, were valuable, but what I long for now are those undergrad creative-writing syllabi, packed as they were with revelations: the full-moon beauty and madness of Kelly Link; the plinky, playful fables of Italo Calvino; the lyrical precision and tightly knotted emotions of Alice Munro. Those first encounters with the writers on those lists shaped the way I think about fiction. The author who struck me most, though, was Saunders, in whose work I found everything I’d ever wanted from writing but never known how to express. His stories full of arresting images and incredible heart, tales that were bitingly funny and dark without descending into cynicism. I fell under the spell of short fiction and began writing my own. And now I’m here—probably as the result of a number of factors, but I can’t discount the impact of stumbling across Saunders at the right time. I hope he wins every prize there is. —Brian Ransom Read More
October 20, 2017 Department of Sex Ed Racy Public Art Exposes Paris’s Invisible Borders By Chris Newens Joep van Lieshout at the unveiling of Domesticator at the Centre Pompidou. Photo: Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt for Carpenters Workshop Gallery This week, after a social-media barrage declared it obscene, officials refused to install a sculpture called Domestikator in the Tuileries Gardens near the Louvre. The same piece was then accepted by, and set up outside, the Pompidou, a contemporary-art museum less than a mile down the road. The piece in question, by the Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, is of a forty-foot-tall humanoid apparently copulating with a four-legged creature. A staircase leading to a doorway in the humanoid’s hip invites the public inside. The piece is apparently intended to pay tribute to “the ingenuity, the creativity, the sophistication, and the persistence of humans to change the world into a better place.” But what interested me was why the artwork had been deemed appropriate for one part of the city and not another. Read More