February 6, 2018 Arts & Culture The Art of Madness By Cody Delistraty Aloïse Corbaz, Le ricochet solaire. On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had organized the trip with the hopes that the men would return to Paris with a new view of Switzerland. Paul Baudry, the cultural ambassador of French-Swiss tourism, had organized for them to eat at the top restaurants, take in the rolling hills and meadows, and go to the Matterhorn. But Dubuffet had little interest in all that. “He ran around the asylums,” Paulhan later wrote, collecting “different drawings and gouaches.” In Paris, Dubuffet had already begun purchasing art made by people who had been deemed mentally ill, but it was in Switzerland, across roughly half a dozen institutions, where he gathered the bulk of what would become his collection. Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture “What the Foucault?” and Other After-Dinner Musings By Marshall Sahlins Michel Foucault Twenty-five years ago, Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Chicago, devised some bons mots to deliver after a dinner at the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain. They were soon collected and published in a book called What the Foucault?, now out in its updated fifth edition. A selection of entries appears below: Some Laws of Civilization First law of civilization: all airports are under construction. Second law of civilization: I’m in the wrong line. Third law of civilization: snacks sealed in plastic bags cannot be opened, even using your teeth. Fourth law of civilization: the human gene whose discovery is announced in the New York Times—there’s one every day, a gene du jour—is for some bad trait, like schizophrenia, kleptomania, or pneumonia. We have no good genes. Fifth law of civilization: failing corporate executives and politicians always resign to spend more time with their families. Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture A DACA Poet Speaks Out By Tara Wanda Merrigan Marcello Hernandez Castillo On any given day, the county jail in Marysville, California, holds about 170 immigrant detainees awaiting hearings. Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have an office nearby, the inmates will be shown via Televideo to one of the three judges of San Francisco’s immigration court. After their hearings, 90 percent of those inmates will be put on a green bus and taken to an ICE detention center for deportation. The Marysville jail is just one of the nearly two hundred jails where ICE held contracts last year. It also happens to be just a few blocks away from the home of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, a DACA recipient and poet who recently moved back to Marysville to be near his mother. Castillo’s debut poetry collection, Cenzontle, will be published in April. It has been nearly four years since Castillo became a legal resident, after marrying his longtime girlfriend. But when the Department of Homeland Security bus rolls up to the jail on Friday mornings, Castillo feels a familiar paranoia. “Some people think the border just exists along the southern part of the United States, but it’s like a panopticon,” Castillo says. “Their omnipresence—that ICE can be anywhere—is what most attacks the psyche of undocumented people.” Read More
February 5, 2018 Arts & Culture Death and Feminism in a Nutshell By Nicole Cooley Frances Lee Glessner, Kitchen (room from afar). From The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Photo by Corinne May Botz. (Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery and Monacelli Press.) Homicide. Suicide by hanging. A great deal of drinking, mainly of whiskey, mainly by men. Blood pooled on the floor. Chairs overturned. Many weapons: guns and knives and ropes. Burned Cabin, where a burned skeleton is barely visible, Dark Bathroom, which contains a dead woman in a bathtub beside an empty liquor bottle, and Unpapered Bedroom, in a boarding house where an unknown woman has been found dead. In Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, the world is harsh and dark and dangerous to women. “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” her series of nineteen models from the fifties, are all crime scenes. Glessner Lee built the dioramas, she said, “to convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.” Read More
February 2, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Phillips, February, and Fake News By The Paris Review A banner depicting Joice Heth, by the artist Mark Copeland. When a review copy of Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News landed on my desk, I turned to Nadja and said, This book is going to win the Pulitzer Prize. Bunk is a barefisted reckoning with American culture, an extension of sorts of Young’s whip-smart book-length essay The Grey Album that coils, swerves, and diverts out at right angles from itself. It begins with a seemingly benign look at Joice Heth, a black woman whom P. T. Barnum added to his sideshow and claimed to be the 161-year-old nursing maid of George Washington. The question is, Was Heth in on it? Was she paid for this? And even if she was, was Barnum’s humbug—something designed to deceive and mislead—essentially a co-opting of black pain and suffering? How does that change when we discover that Barnum actually bought her from another showman? Young’s inquiry spins out from there and looks at the outrageous headlines of nineteenth-century penny papers, fake memoirs, false reporting, and the unmistakable Americanness of the hoax—which is essentially a performance, one the viewer willfully participates in, as disingenuous as it is. Young is a pure essayist in the vein of Emerson and Montaigne. Reading Young, you feel like you’re making connections along with him, and it’s exciting, at times flabbergasting, to peel back the layers of the American psyche together. Bunk was long-listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. I stand by my prediction of Young’s Pulitzer, and am taking bets. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
February 2, 2018 On Sports Don DeLillo’s Nuclear Football By Daniel Roberts American football had a violent year in 2017. The refusal by all thirty-two National Football League teams to sign free agent Colin Kaepernick, a black quarterback who had started kneeling during each game’s national anthem in the summer of 2016 as a form of protest against police brutality, ignited a national political debate that often devolved into ugly racial vitriol. After additional players began kneeling to take up Kaepernick’s cause in his absence, President Donald Trump made the NFL a target of repeated angry tweets, railing that the protesting players were disrespecting the whole country and condemning NFL team owners for not punishing the players. The sad apotheosis of all this noise came when Trump, in his first State of the Union address, appeared to make reference to Kaepernick and other kneeling players when he said that a twelve-year-old boy’s organized effort to lay flags at the graves of veterans “reminds us … why we proudly stand for the national anthem.” As the violent rhetoric spread on social media throughout the season, the NFL saw its prime-time television ratings drop precipitously. It’s unclear how much of the problem was political; people who say they watched less football in 2017 cited a whole host of additional complaints: too many games, bad games, unfair games, too many ways to watch a game on something other than television, too many things to watch besides football. Read More