January 5, 2018 The Lives of Others Arthur Cravan, the Original Troll By Edward White Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet-boxer, was neither a good poet nor a good boxer, but he was a legendary provocateur. Hemingway, Mailer, and Scorsese: much great American art has been inspired by boxing. George Bellows’s may be the best. Between 1907 and 1909, Bellows created three paintings—Club Night, Stag at Sharkey’s, Both Members of This Club—that captured boxing’s glories and indignities. The sport provided a powerfully visceral metaphor for the American experience of the twentieth century. But boxing also transfixed artists beyond American shores. Around the time Bellows created his triptych, a tranche of Europeans created sublime, radical work inspired by the sport. One of them was the Swiss enigma Arthur Cravan. Described by one critic as “a world tramp … a traverser of borders and resister of orders,” Cravan traveled the globe in the early 1900s by forging documents and assuming false identities, preening, harassing, and haranguing, as he went. He was hailed by André Breton as a pivotal precursor of Dadaism, and belonged to that category of floating prewar avant-gardists whose legacy resides more in their mode of living than their artistic creations. Indeed, he declared himself anti-art and avowed boxing to be the ultimate creative expression of the modern, American-tinged age. He’s often referred to as a “poet-boxer,” though he wasn’t especially accomplished as either; his real talent appears to have been making a spectacle of himself, in every sense. Read More
January 4, 2018 In Memoriam Aharon Appelfeld: You Cannot Be a Writer of Death By The Paris Review Aharon Appelfeld. You know, God is everywhere. He is in the human heart. He is in the plants. He is in the animals. Everywhere. You have to be very careful when you speak to human beings because the man who is standing in front of you has something divine in himself. Trees, they have something divine in them. Animals of course. And even objects, they have something of the divine. —Aharon Appelfeld, The Art of Fiction No. 224 Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel’s foremost contemporary writers, died today at the age of eighty-five. Appelfeld was the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, many of which derived their inspiration and force from his childhood in war-torn Europe. He was born in Romania, where he was apprehended by Nazi-allied forces at the age of nine. His mother and grandmother were shot, and he and his father were eventually sent to the Transnistria concentration camps. Appelfeld described his internment there as a kind of transformation: “I became a small animal. It was the wish for life, the wish to survive.” In 1942, he managed to escape; he spent two years in hiding. At one point, he lived in the forest among a band of thieves, and, later, in the home of a Ukrainian prostitute. He joined the Soviet army, spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy, and finally immigrated to Palestine in 1946, at age fifteen. Nearly a decade later, after spotting his father’s name on a list of survivors, they were reunited in Israel. Read More
January 4, 2018 Our Correspondents The Age of Graffiti By Jane Stern An abandoned pier in Philadelphia. In Danbury, Connecticut, off Interstate 84, there is an overpass festooned with graffiti scribbles. They have been there for three decades. No one has thought to erase them and, as far as I can tell, no one has added to them. The graffiti is of the basest kind. There is little attempt at artwork, design, or display. It is simply the names of yesterday’s rock-and-roll bands spray painted in black in adolescent calligraphy: the Who, Kiss, Commander Cody, Mountain. I drive under this overpass at least once a week. This is the route to all the big-box stores, supermarkets, and a dozen places that sell cheap cell-phone plans. Exit 7 is not the autumn-leaf splashed Connecticut seen on calendars. It is where you go to load up on paper towels and laundry detergent. Decades ago, when I first pondered these scrawled names, the graffiti made me mad: here was more ugliness defacing an already sad stretch of road. Read More
January 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Reader Over Your Shoulder By Patricia T. O'Conner Robert Graves’s desk in his home in Majorca, where he lived from 1929 until his death. Photo: © Emily Benet An extraordinary book written in extraordinary times, The Reader Over Your Shoulder was begun in the summer of 1940, just after the fall of France and the evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk. Europe was now overrun by demagogues. Robert Graves, the celebrated English poet, novelist, and man of letters, had already fled his home in Majorca, ahead of Franco’s troops, and returned to England, a country that now feared for its life. Graves and Alan Hodge, his researcher and collaborator, had just finished writing The Long Week-End, a social history of Britain between the wars. It was an overview of life in the twenties and thirties, and might be summarized as “how the British let their hair down in peacetime.” The authors now felt that a similar laxity had crept into writing, which even at the highest levels had become “loose, confused and ungraceful.” With a new war to be won, the kingdom couldn’t afford careless, sloppy English. Good communication was critical, but Graves and Hodge were afraid that English prose in its current state was not up to the task: “We regard the present crisis as acute enough to excuse this book.” Their proposal, put simply, is that writers should anticipate readers’ questions, then answer them clearly, logically, and with a minimum of fuss. Some assembly is required, but instructions are included. Read More
January 4, 2018 Arts & Culture The Breakdown of Human Communication By Morgan Parker and Adam Valen Levinson Two writers discuss false binaries, litmus tests for dating, and a lack of nuance on the Internet. Adam Valen Levinson and Morgan Parker met many years ago—more than five, almost certainly less than eleven—as undergraduates at Columbia University; neither recalls precisely how they met. Now, as published authors, the two often banter and joke and argue and lament from their respective homes in Harlem and Hollywood. These conversations are imperfect, but rigorously in search of some shared understanding (hope?) for the human capacity to love, to care for, to accept, to amend, to create beauty. These are admittedly risky beliefs for a black American woman and an American Jew to hold. These conversations don’t hold all the answers, but they exist and continue to exist, which seems to be better than everyone just giving up on the messy stuff of the world. Parker’s work deals with ideas of multiplicity—of beliefs, of identity, of histories, of possibilities. Valen Levinson’s work, fueled by his propensity to poke other people and beat up on himself, addresses questions of the heart with a reporter’s commitment to facts. The following interview, conducted over Skype, is the second recorded conversation between Parker and Valen Levinson; the first attempt was lost to a dead cell phone. VALEN LEVINSON I’ve found the switch to texting, and then the many different evolutions and generations that texting has gone through on different platforms, so tough because it’s taken what you can do with bodies and most of what you can do with faces all the way out of it. PARKER Yeah, I mean, you can’t really text well with someone that you don’t know that well. You can relay information, but— VALEN LEVINSON And yet the new generation is meeting their spouses and dog walkers and doctors and therapists that way. PARKER I know. I mean, I feel like it’s a different skill, right? Like, it’s a skill to be able—and I’m saying this as a poet—to communicate your personality and intonation in a text. Most people can’t do that. VALEN LEVINSON Really, though, I think that it’s impossible to do. It’s impossible to ever communicate in a way where there’s no chance of it being taken as entirely the opposite of what you’re saying. Full-body communication is way harder to misinterpret because it taps into biological and social things that go back millions of years. Even orangutans smile at each other. So when you tell somebody, Hey, shut the fuck up, and you’re smiling, our brains are like, Cool, dude, I’m on board, I get what you’re doing there. It takes so much longer to establish trust over text, and I feel like we think we’re just establishing all this trust and communicating, but we’re not. There’s such a narrow range of expressions in text. Read More
January 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Elders of the Island By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. All images © Molly Crabapple. Puerto Rico is an elderly island. A quarter of its population is over sixty-five. This is due to the last of a series of great migrations. Poverty, gifted to the island by Spain and then exacerbated by American colonization, sent able bodies abroad. First, in the early twentieth century, they went to roll cigars in Ybor City, Florida, and to till plantations in Hawaii, then they went to basic training (Puerto Ricans fought and died in both world wars), then, in the fifties, they went to sew garments and get cancer in the factories of New York. These workers kept the island close. Many returned, after decades of labor, to buy their parcela, a bit of land on which to resurrect a half-fictitious childhood on the green and generous earth, but this time with American modernity and the conveniences that was meant to imply. They looked with shame at the outhouse, the well, the mosquito net. In the early twenty-first century, the pattern continued. The island’s bankruptcy, unemployment, and the savage budget cuts imposed by the U.S. financial-control board—la junta—again forced working-age adults to leave the island, and their elderly parents, behind. Read More