April 9, 2018 Arts & Culture It Was or It Was Not: Femininity in Arabic Folktales By Inea Bushnaq The folktales in Pearls on a Branch, oral survivors from a preliterate era, resemble a quilt made with the fabrics of well-loved clothes. Just as patches of cloth in a quilt are arranged in different combinations to form a design, traditional folk motifs appear and reappear in a variety of settings and plots to shape the stories. One prince falls in love with the grocer’s daughter next door, another can’t take his eyes off the Bedouin girl he sees on his way to the hunt, all to the horror of the royal mothers. Here a golden anklet, and there a voice heard out of an open window, inspire obsessive love for their unknown owners. A songbird with green feathers reveals one crime and a speaking nightingale another. In the stories, love conquers all, but inevitably there are obstacles on the way to the happy ending. These are tales told by women to women so, not surprisingly, the main characters often are young women with remarkable courage, wit, and endurance. Whatever their unfortunate circumstances at the beginning, whether poverty or oppression, they are the heroines in the end. The thirty texts gathered in Pearls on a Branch have been chosen from a hundred tales, recorded and transcribed by Najla Jraissaty Khoury and published in Beirut in 2014. Captured on tape, these are verbatim renderings of the storytellers speaking. The translation, like the transcriptions, adheres word for word to the Arabic original. The aim is to allow the English reader to listen in as the storytellers, older women living in Lebanon in the last quarter of the twentieth century, pass on the stories they had heard in childhood. Only in the verses that ornament many of the stories does the English sometimes need a few added words to be comprehensible. Read More
April 9, 2018 On Writing On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness By Nafissa Thompson-Spires Google “stock images of women with excruciating menstrual cramps,” “women having nervous breakdowns,” “women on hospital gurneys.” Make several of the women black even though your Google search will not produce these results. String them together on a chic laundry line with clothespins and hang it on your mantle, or maybe paste them into a photo collage, digital or print. Splatter the collage with blood. Untwist the women’s ovaries and take them away. Sew up their vaginal openings so their private parts look like the deformed hermetic triangles of Barbie dolls. You now have a visual rendering of life with endometriosis. It is a poor approximation. Throw the collage in the trash. Maybe it is too ugly after all. In and out of invasive procedures to misdiagnose and then finally diagnose my symptoms—a colonoscopy, two upper endoscopies, a gastric emptying scan, an MRI, a vulvar biopsy, a dozen transvaginal ultrasounds, two mammograms before I was thirty-four, a laparoscopy, a laparotomy, a mosquito, a libido—I wrote a book. Several of its central characters are women suffering from chronic invisible illnesses, the kind of women in your collage. It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out. A chronic illness is a multilayered cruelty, especially when it is invisible. There are trips to the emergency room, to convenient care—which never ends up being as convenient as one might think—there is a lot of waiting around, and after all that waiting, there is a lot of “you’ll have to talk to your primary care physician during regular hours.” The emergency room is kept mausoleum cold. Read More
April 9, 2018 On Books The Strange Magic of Libraries By Stuart Kells Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm (detail), 1850. Our era is a digital one, to be sure, but libraries of physical books are still holding on defiantly, even triumphantly. According to the Library Map of the World, there are over two million public and school libraries on planet Earth. Of these, 103,325 are in the U.S. and 12,570 in my native Australia. Globally, the number of private libraries is much larger still—because who’s to say that even a humble shelf of Penguin or Pocket paperbacks doesn’t qualify as a private library? The census of American libraries spans a wonderful diversity of institutions, from modest municipal book rooms and mobile libraries to the grand collections of such hallowed places as the Morgan, the Folger, the Huntington, and the Smithsonian. Surveys of library users reveal a passionate attachment to these institutions, one that is voiced in very human terms. The word love is an emotion often expressed toward libraries, and not just for National Library Week. Libraries are places in which people are born—as authors, readers, scholars, and activists. (Think Eudora Welty, Zadie Smith, John Updike, and Ian Rankin.) Read More
April 6, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bardi, Baseball, and LSD By The Paris Review Though David Hockney’s major retrospectives at the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Met last year cemented his status as one of the greatest artists of our time, the breathtaking innovation on display at his new exhibit, “Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]” is evidence that at the spry age of eighty, the man is only just getting started. The show includes eighteen new paintings on hexagonal canvases as well as two new works of computer-manipulated photography that each span a full gallery wall. As Hockney describes it, he once drove through a long tunnel under the Alps. There were no other cars, and the constancy of the road narrowing into the pinprick of light ahead, the tyranny of the one-point perspective, created an unbearable atmosphere of tension. Then the car emerged, and there were the mountains, there was the sky, there was the world, wild and unbound and everywhere around them. One painting in the show describes this with stark simplicity: the narrowing road below, the vista of mountains above. The rest capture the dizzying feeling of awe by playing with “reverse perspective,” Hockney’s technique in which the space bends, the edges fold in, and the viewer is granted the gift of peering around impossible corners and hovering over floors that reach upward. The notches on either side of each canvas are the inverse of the nose that generally interrupts our vision, a breaking open of the way we see. The show will be on view at the Pace Gallery until May 12. The colors, the sumptuous aquamarines of a Los Angeles swimming pool, the burnt sienna and iridescent yellow of the Grand Canyon, provide the perfect escape from this unrelenting New York winter. —Nadja Spiegelman Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images North America Dorothea Lasky’s latest collection, Milk, often feels like an optical illusion: simplicity in black-and-white, arranged so that it reveals something disorienting and complex in a way you can’t quite articulate. Each line is vibrant in itself, popping short and quick in sharply skipping staccato, individually crafted and yet still somehow seamlessly woven into the full piece. Lasky demonstrates her virtuosity time and again; like any artist truly confident in their medium, she doesn’t need much material to create a deeply stirring piece. If you’re still not sold on Lasky’s minimalist brilliance, you can take a test drive with the Review’s Spring issue, which features “A Hospital Room,” a poem from the collection. —Lauren Kane Read More
April 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The End Is Here! By Lawrence Weschler Gustave Courbet, L’origine du monde, 1866. The great artists see it coming. Back in their native Soviet Union, in the 1960s, collaborative artists Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar fashioned a body of work that deployed socialist realist tropes in comically magic realist and even downright Warholian terms, anticipating, by a good half century, this year’s film“Death of Stalin” (and for that matter the persistence of Putin). Following their arrival in America in 1978, they continued in much the same vein, though they broke up as a collaborative almost 15 years ago. In February 2016, Melamid, for his part, flush off the success of his great urinal show (an extended revisioning of Duchamp’s epochal Fountain, on its 100th anniversary), decided to honor the 150th anniversary of Courbet’s scandalous Origin of the World (L’origine du Monde) with his own End of the World (Le But du Monde), a quite shocking portrayal of some guy’s (actually his own) naked rear end, cheeks spread, anus exposed and rampant. Talk about dialectical materialism: if his two ass-cheeks represented thesis and antithesis, where did that put the rest of us, his painting’s viewers? With this work, he anticipated, well, everything that was to follow through the rest of that year and, frankly, up till the present. Read More
April 6, 2018 Studio Visit Inside Dawn Clements’s Studio By Eileen Townsend Dawn Clements, Peonies, 2014. Photo: S. Alzner On a cold and rainy Sunday last autumn, I visited Dawn Clements’s studio in Greenpoint. Before it was converted into art studios, the building was a fabric factory; the windows are big, the wood floors have deep brown pockmarks spread across them. Her studio tables were cluttered with a chandelier, paper ephemera, and other trinkets, like a deconstructed carousel of baubles. “I make my drawings by sort of crawling across the page,” said Clements, as we looked at a series of recent oversized watercolors she’d pinned up to the studio wall. “What I draw depends on what I find or what I have.” Clements has round eyes and pale gray hair cropped close to her head a result of chemotherapy. She holds herself still and seems serious but not somber. She chooses her words carefully. In college in New England, she studied film theory and semiotics. Many of Clements’s drawings are drawn frame by frame from classic film melodramas. She reconstructs the rooms in which the characters live, leaving blank spaces where the actors obscured the set on the screen. These drawings have quotes from the films and time signatures noted in the corner (“3:06” or “2:53” or “wish I was there”). “These aren’t real rooms,” said Clements about her reconstructions. “I can only draw what they give me.” In one drawing, a train dining compartment is rendered around ghostly blank spaces where actors briefly stood. In another, the cushions of a plush sofa, rendered faintly in ballpoint pen, fade into the white of the page. The room appears to be without boundaries. The blank moments in the drawing don’t signify disinterest with humanity, they make it feel too bright to capture. Clements said, “I think it’s interesting how in real life, everyone has these strong feelings but we rarely express them.” It’s as if, overwhelmed with emotion, we’ve had to study the drapes and the floorboards. Read More