October 24, 2024 On Painting A Painter Is Being Beaten: Freud and Kantarovsky By Jamieson Webster Saya Kantarovsky, Removal, 2018, oil and watercolor on linen, 55 ¼ x 40 ¼ in. Copyright and courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Adam Reich. “A Child Is Being Beaten” is the strange title of Freud’s 1919 paper on sexual fantasy. This sentence, one of sadomasochistic, masturbatory enjoyment and announced from an unspecified source, indicates the phantasmatic scene admitted to by several of his patients. What are these beating fantasies? Freud says it is “not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet the stuff from which both will later come.” Read More
October 23, 2024 Diaries Pull-Up Diary By Mitchell Morgan Johnson Photograph courtesy of Mitchell Johnson. July 14, 2024 I went to the neighborhood gym for the first time today. Until now I was driving, sporadically, to the university gym where I get in for free, but only sporadically. So I paid forty-five dollars for a month of entry to this one. I’m trying to get stronger. Bigger, too. It sounds boring because it is. I am a twenty-seven-year-old gay man who has started going to the gym. I have all the standard gym desires: strength, size, beauty, health. The trouble is that these are poorly defined, with few benchmarks. So I have come up with a more specific goal, too: I would like to do a pull-up. Overhand, unassisted. Right now I can kind of do one if I start with a little jump, but when I try a true pull-up, the best I can do is retract my shoulders and bend my elbows a little before my strength gives out. The neighborhood gym is run by a Ukrainian family. The daughter, no older than fifteen, signed me up. It’s small and not very nice; the dingy locker room reminds me of my middle school’s. Mercifully, though, it’s uncrowded. Today I’m starting with assisted pull-ups on the assisted pull-up machine, which has a pad for your knees and a counterweight to help lift your body up. I tried it with forty pounds of assistance, then fifty, and then finally, at sixty, I could complete five. Then I did the rest of my workout, with various machines and weights and benches, and walked home. Read More
October 22, 2024 First Person Arachnids By Daniel Poppick Colored engraving of a large scorpion, Buthus granulatus. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London, and Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 4.0. 1. In the weeks before I left for Mexico, the flies showed up. My apartment became overrun with them, the size of small red grapes, five to ten ripe orbs at a time buzzing around in any given room. A fly or two had never bothered me, so I was able to balance my pacifist instincts with a more rigorous approach to housekeeping; I took the trash out every other day, and if I saw an errant roach in the bathroom I would kill it, the way you wash a glass in the sink without thinking twice. The flies radicalized me. They wheeled through the apartment, attacking every cubic foot of open space, refusing to be ignored. It sent me into a fugue state of bloodlust. I wondered if there was a corpse they were drawn to that I couldn’t see. Maybe I was the corpse. I became obsessed with stalking and killing every last one of them, fantasizing that if I could annihilate them all before the sun went down, the problem would be solved. But it never worked. I slaughtered twenty-five at a time—my windows, ceiling, and rolled-up copies of The New Yorker splattered with gore. I’d wipe down nearly every wall and window in my apartment to keep other flies from coming back for the blood and guts. But they always returned. Read More
October 18, 2024 The Review’s Review Do Dogs Know What Art Is? By Laura van den Berg Photograph courtesy of Laura van den Berg. Do dogs know what art is? Oscar is a big, “free-spirited” Lab mix. My husband and I adopted him when he was just a few months old. We’ve lived together as a little family for over a decade. When Oscar was a puppy, I did a one-semester residency at Bard College. I used to walk Oscar off-leash on campus, and one afternoon he bounded up to what looked like, from a distance, a small pond. He got into the water—which seemed, in hindsight, a little shallow for a pond—and started splashing around. Within minutes, a furious campus security officer was running in our direction, waving his arms. Turns out the “pond” was actually an installation called Parliament of Reality by the renowned Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, though I will forever think of it as the first place I ever saw Oscar swim. How different our experiences with art must be. My initial response is usually cerebral—a judgment, an idea, an association—but when something really moves me I feel it in my body. Once, at a Korakrit Arunanondchai installation in Paris, I fell briefly asleep on a giant beanbag wedged deep inside the light and noise of the exhibit and woke up sobbing. It took me hours to return to earth, and when I did I felt a lightness, as though something had been exorcised. Dogs, meanwhile, are creatures of sound and smell. Oscar moves with his snout to the grass, pausing for deep, forensic sniffs. His impressions are peopled by the smells of everyone who’s made contact with this same patch of earth. Canine perception is collaborative. Dogs are pack animals; they are always among. Read More
October 17, 2024 Eat Your Words Baking Gingerbread Cake with Laurie Colwin By Valerie Stivers Photograph by Erica Maclean. In the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness, a mother and daughter get on the telephone to discuss the menu for an upcoming family dinner—either a roast leg of lamb or roast beef, with potatoes and, the mother says, “those lovely cold string beans of yours for a second vegetable.” Colwin writes: “On both sides of the line, mother and daughter settled down for the conversation they enjoyed most: what to serve with what for dinner.” The two agree to decorate the table with quince branches and have apple pie for dessert. The scene is quintessentially Colwin: it’s relatable, but glamorous too. It paints a picture of a kind of idealized family life that few people actually experience. I’m especially struck by the phrase “second vegetable” and all that it implies about a particular culinary tradition: Some people think two vegetables at dinner is de rigueur, but I’ve encountered those people only in books. Read More
October 16, 2024 Letters John and Yves Berger on Painting By John and Yves Berger Detail from Rogier van der Weyden, Annunciation Triptych, c. 1440. Public domain. In the Rogier van der Weyden, Mary is reading about her future life in the Bible. Van Gogh paints the Bible as a still life. Read More