November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture What Is the Political Responsibility of the Artist? By Taylor Plimpton Armed women in one of the main squares in Tehran at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. Perhaps no modern writer has experienced as much political turmoil and upheaval as the great Polish storyteller Ryszard Kapuscinski. Take, for instance, his claim that during his time serving as a reporter and war correspondent, he witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. One might expect Kapuscinski to have a particularly informed response to the question that seems to be on so many people’s minds these days: What, if any, is the social or political responsibility of the artist? Or, to put it another way: Should writers be writing for a cause? Penned thirty-five years ago, Shah of Shahs is Kapuscinski’s retelling of the most notorious revolution that he ever experienced firsthand—the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The book is a brilliant, nuanced portrait of a country and its corrupt leader in the tumultuous days leading up to and following his removal from power. Yet, upon close examination of the text, it seems that the author’s allegiance isn’t to any political party or ideology or cause—he is as harsh a critic of the powers that toppled the Shah as he is of the Shah himself. Instead, his allegiance is simply to art, and to the truth. Read More
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture “Girl Poisoner Moron,” or Why Was Everyone So Bad at Murder? By Anne Diebel Women from Essipoff’s list: Mary Baker Eddy, Florence Elizabeth Maybrick, and Ma Barker. In 1938, Marie Armstrong Essipoff, a journalist, editor, and memoirist, was helping Theodore Dreiser research murders committed by women. She had been collecting newspaper clippings on “misspent lives,” and she sent a letter to Dreiser highlighting a few she pulled from her files in a “hasty survey” she’d done that morning after being woken at the “crack of dawn,” meaning ten thirty A.M. “Skeletons, gobs of flesh, knives, etc. etc. furnished on request,” she added. Essipoff concluded the letter by inviting Dreiser out to Great Neck, New York, where she lived with her husband, Dmitry—“who is, after ten years, still the most delightful man I know.” Six years earlier, Essipoff had published a memoir about her ten-year marriage to the writer Ben Hecht, brilliantly titled My First Husband, by His First Wife. Their union involved many literary parties, some shocking theater productions, and an experiment in nonmonogamy. (Essipoff granted Hecht two nights a week with his mistress, who didn’t “believe in marriage” yet soon became his second wife.) After their divorce, Essipoff became the first editor of the Chicagoan, a short-lived literary magazine modeled on The New Yorker, before moving to New York. Essipoff told Dreiser she was planning “off and on” to write these cases “into mysteries myself someday,” though she noted that this did not preclude his using them. If the fifteen murderesses Essipoff listed are any indication, average people used to be pretty bad at premeditated murder: overly reliant on poison and sloppy about hiding their tracks. And Essipoff delighted in their macabre ineptitude. Read More
November 21, 2017 Arts & Culture Wants to Forget By László Krasznahorkai René Magritte, The Empire of Light, II, 1950. We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not too illustrious children of a not too illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing within it, after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history, will have finally attained the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion. This age wants to forget it has gambled away everything on its own, without outside help, and that it cannot blame alien powers, or fate, or some remote baleful influence; we did this ourselves: we have made away with gods and with ideals. We want to forget, for we cannot even muster the dignity to accept our bitter defeat, for infernal smoke and infernal alcohol have gnawed away whatever character we had, in fact smoke and cheap spirits were all that remained of the erstwhile metaphysical traveler’s yearning for angelic realms—the noxious smoke left by longing, and the nauseating spirits left over from the maddening potion of fanatical obsession. Read More
November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture The Life and Afterlife of Vivian Maier By Pamela Bannos Vivian Maier, 1958. (Image from the Ron Slattery negative collection.) The following is an excerpt from Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, which was published last month. There are many ways to get the wrong picture about Vivian Maier. Call her a nanny, as if that was her identity, instead of a photographer. Call her just a Chicagoan or just a Frenchwoman, instead of a born Manhattanite and self- styled European. Call her Vivian, as if you know her well. Call her a mystery or an enigma, as if no one ever knew her, or ever could. To get the right picture, look at her squarely, as she would look at you: on her own terms, from her own evidence of who she was and what she did. Only then can we begin to see Vivian Maier, woman and photographer, and begin to enter her world. Read More
November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? By Claire Dederer Still from Woody Allen’s Manhattan Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector. They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them. We’ve all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does. I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man. He’s the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public’s mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner’s Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner’s work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass? And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker’s transgressions—how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it’s technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence? And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend’s house? Read More
November 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Playing for Ralph Ellison’s Little Man at Chehaw Station By Mychal Denzel Smith Ralph Ellison For the agnostics and atheists among us, there is no divine force dictating our paths. We are only that which we decide, individually and collectively, and can achieve with our own intellect. The human body has natural limitations. And coincidence is merely coincidence. But every so often, I’m confronted with seemingly unconnected factoids that give some credence to cosmic intervention. For instance, the fact that Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994, only three days before the release of Nas’s classic debut album, Illmatic, on April 19, 1994. Ellison, of course, is best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, a work now heralded as one of the greatest American novels. Drawing from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground both thematically and narratively, Ellison artfully constructs the psychic terror of a black man living in a society of political and social hierarchies that render him, this unnamed narrator/protagonist, invisible, at least insofar as anyone can be bothered to understand his basic humanity. Ellison’s time had come: he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the no-longer-young age of eighty-one. But there is some poetry to be found in the passing of one of the most influential black writers in American letters only days before the release of the most influential hip-hop album of all time. Illmatic, like Invisible Man, is a document of black male life, this time from the vantage point of a post–Civil Rights, post-Reaganomics urban landscape. Nas captures the paranoid sensibility of a black man highly aware of his own mortality, attempting to survive in a world that offers him little more than drugs, police, guns, and prison. Read More