November 29, 2017 Arts & Culture White Man on a Pedestal By Toniann Fernandez Kenya (Robinson), If I Were King, 2017. The fourth statue of J. Marion Sims was erected at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on November 10. The other three monuments to Sims—which live in New York’s Central Park; in Montgomery, Alabama; and in Columbia, South Carolina—celebrate the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” the man who developed the surgical technique for the repair of the vesicovaginal fistula, an injury often encountered during childbirth. This recently erected statue, however, is dedicated to the atrocities Sims committed: to the black women he tortured through bloody, nonconsensual, and nontherapeutic surgeries without anesthetics. His new plinth reads PONEROS, Greek for “Evil One.” To his right, is a gang of ten thousand five-inch-tall, plastic white men (cumulatively, they are eighteen feet tall) referred to by their maker as “Daves.” Both are part of Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson)’s exhibition“White Man on a Pedestal (WMOAP),” which seeks to amend history without erasing it. It’s a clarion call for reorienting our perspective. The exhibition asks viewers to consider white privilege as a plastic toy and to evaluate their own complicity in its proliferation. Read More
November 28, 2017 Redux Redux: James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Dorothea Lasky By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you our 1984 interview with James Baldwin, Raymond Carver’s story “Why Don’t You Dance?,” and Dorothea Lasky’s poem “I Had a Man.” You can also listen to all three in the third episode of our new podcast, featuring guest readers LeVar Burton and Dakota Johnson. Read More
November 28, 2017 On Language Solving Riddles, Reading Poems By Geoffrey Hilsabeck “I saw two wonderful and weird creatures / out in the open unashamedly / fall a-coupling,” wrote a monk in Old English a thousand years ago, either composing or transcribing a riddle about a rooster and a hen. This riddle and a hundred others—as well as elegies, proverbs, and dreams—were written into one big book, which was bequeathed to Exeter Cathedral by its bishop and subsequently used by the monks as a cutting board and a beer coaster and left vulnerable to bats and bookworms. Still, ninety-four riddles survived. A thousand years later, I found two dozen of these riddles, translated into modern English and collected in a slim volume called The Earliest English Poems, and a few years after that—now, to be precise—I have published a book of my own riddles and elegies and proverbs. Riddles aren’t confined to English. There are riddles etched into clay tablets from ancient Babylon, and Sanskrit riddles in the Rig Veda (1700–1100 B.C.E.). Samson posed a riddle to the Philistines at a wedding, as did Queen Sheba when she visited the court of King Solomon. The ability to solve a riddle is a sign of wisdom or folly, the business of prophets or fools. The Hebrew prophet Daniel could unwind spells, interpret dreams, and explain riddles. But so could Oedipus. He solved the riddle of the sphinx: What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? A lot of good that did him. For the Greeks, riddles demonstrated the limits of knowledge. “All men are deceived by the appearances of things,” wrote Heraclitus, illustrating his point with an apocryphal story about Homer, who was said to have once been embarrassed by some boys when he failed to solve their riddle about lice. Read More
November 28, 2017 Arts & Culture Mark Twain’s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls By Linda Simon Photo courtesy Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs division). In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.” Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started, when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: “I am very glad I can go up and speak to you now … as I think we know each other.” Describing herself as his “obedient child,” she ended her note, “I am the little girl who loves you.” He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude’s “oldest & latest conquest.” Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his “little witch”; she called him “darling.” He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of “a bewitching little scamp” named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. “I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,” he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him “made out of thunderstorms and sunshine“: “how impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious … how innocently bad, how natively good,” he exclaimed. “May I be your little ‘Marjorie’?” Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called “blots,” or kisses—until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. “I am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!—then there’s no impropriety.” Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls. Read More
November 27, 2017 Document Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter By Rainer Maria Rilke Balthus, The Cat of La Méditerranée, 1949. Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter is a surprising companion to his earlier and far more famous Letters to a Young Poet. In eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke encourages the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Written toward the end of Rilke’s life, between 1920 and 1926, these letters paint a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, looked back on his life, and continued to embrace his openness toward other creative individuals. We have excerpted one of the letters below. Château Muzot-sur-Sierre, Valais (Switzerland) February 23, 1923 Dear Balthus, In a few days you will once again celebrate the outward absence of your rare and discreet birthday. Many happy returns, my friend: let this year of your life about to commence be a happy and prosperous one—despite everything, I have to add, since it seems we have fallen back into the worst of the political turmoil that has already ruined so many years and that little by little deprives those of my generation of any reasonable future. It’s different for you, you will see the dawn to come after this night engulfing our world; you need to see it and call it and prepare for it with all your strength. Read More
November 27, 2017 Conversation Starter Eileen Myles and Jeremy Sigler Go to an Exhibition By The Paris Review Jeremy Sigler and Eileen Myles at “(Re)Appropriations,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Photo: Andrew Arnot Not long ago, I found myself reading Jeremy Sigler’s 2009 interview with Eileen Myles in The Brooklyn Rail. The occasion was a new book by Myles, but the conversation opens with banter about clothing—“I’m pretty critical of the J. Crew catalogue, which I have to confess I love looking through”—as though the pair had met for a drink instead of an interview. And then, toward the end of their time together, Sigler mentions Larry Rivers’s famous nude portrait of Frank O’Hara: “I think this is my idealization of the poet,” he says; Myles calls it “collaborated outrageousness.” Earlier this fall, Tibor de Nagy Gallery opened a small survey of Rivers’s work, including the O’Hara painting—an opportunity, in other words, for Myles and Sigler to continue their conversation, wherever it may lead. (With gratitude to Andrew Arnot, owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery.) —Nicole Rudick MYLES: I guess we maybe want to start with the famous one. SIGLER: Yeah. I’ve never seen this painting in person, actually. Have you? MYLES: I feel like I have, but that may or may not be true. SIGLER: I’ve seen the drawing that was on the cover of one of O’Hara’s books. MYLES: Right. SIGLER: Which Andrew said is missing—the drawing is actually gone, he said. MYLES: Who said? SIGLER: Andrew. MYLES: Really? SIGLER: Yeah. MYLES: Gone from where it was? Where was it? SIGLER: A collector who owned it said it was stolen. MYLES: From where? From their house? SIGLER: Yeah, something like that. But this is … this is really something else. MYLES: Yeah. I think it’s kind of a good painting. SIGLER: Yeah. I mean, look at that cinder block. MYLES: I know, I had the same feeling. The hair on his chest, too. And, of course, Frank’s dick. Read More