November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture The Case for Seasonal Sentimentality By Mary Laura Philpott All original illustrations © Mary Laura Philpott. There’s a line in Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn: “Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.” I reread it recently and thought, wait a second—I cry sometimes when the leaves fall. Although I’ve always wished I’d had a chance to meet the late Ephron, maybe it’s better that I never had to admit to her my sentimentality, which apparently was as uncool then as it is now. I’ve also been known to get a little teary when I find a craggy pebble that looks like a frowning face. I sniffle when I see a skunk in my yard who looks lonely, like it’s dawning on him that all his skunk friends went on an adventure without him. I laugh, too, when I see a twig that looks like it’s giving me the finger. I chuckle when I see an ant trying to carry a half a Froot Loop. As a cartoonist, I draw talking birds, smiling flowers, and chickens wearing socks, and very often these creatures feel as real to me—and as filled with inner narratives—as people. Read More
November 9, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Is a Period By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. © Tom Toro How do you read a sentence by Gertrude Stein aloud? What she puts between periods is often fragmentary and repetitive, unhelpfully underpunctuated, reliant on a series of appositions and flat ands to hold it together. There is a decision to make. You could read it with a take-it-as-it-comes evenness of tone, as though the point were to reject the sentimental habits of the speaking voice. Or you could read it as though you understood it, or even as though you were trying to convince someone that what it says is true. As though you were delivering an oration: In the practice of orations and the relief of fears, in the practice of orations and the relief of fears, in the practice of orations and in the relief of fears, he we and they, they and we and he, he and they and we and in the practice of orations and in the relief of fears may we accept that which when sent is not only acceptable but in a way need not be regarded as a surprise. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art By Cody Delistraty Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius,” she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. “He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.” After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself. Read More
November 9, 2017 Arts & Culture Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School By Chris Kraus From the anniversary edition cover of Blood and Guts in High School Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while Blood and Guts propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed Blood and Guts in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old and living with the composer Peter Gordon in Solana Beach in 1973. Solana Beach was a sleepy California beach town fourteen miles north of UC San Diego in La Jolla. She’d fled New York for California after meeting Gordon on a cross-country ride-share road trip in the summer of 1972. It was there, while happily ensconced in Gordon’s two-bedroom upstairs bungalow apartment near the beach, that she composed the dream maps placed among the fairy tales in the chapter titled “How spring came to the land of snow and icicles.” The fairy tales themselves were written three years later, while she and Gordon were living on East Fifth Street in New York. Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. And also: Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matter. She’d known, since beginning her long, self-willed apprenticeship as a writer when she was twenty-three years old, that dreams, and their disorder, would be central to her writing process. Working on her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Solana Beach in 1973, she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself toward a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs. The dream maps, which weren’t published in that book, record her dreamtime forays across regions with names like the Plains, the Village, and the Childhood Land, where she discovers lions, wolves, trees, huts, and streets. “My mom,” Gordon recalls, “was a psychologist, and found them fascinating. Kathy gave her a large drawing that my mom had framed. Later, Kathy took the maps back, to include in Blood and Guts.” Blood and Guts opens with a hilarious, hyperbolized transcription of the tormented break-up conversations between the protagonist Janey Smith and a father who she regards as her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father.” These pages—the last to be composed—were written in the wake of her and Gordon’s separation in September 1978: “Mr. Smith was trying to get rid of Janey so he could spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one year old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him.” By then, Gordon and Acker had long been living separate lives. “Kathy had her own life and I had my own life, with Kathy in it,” Gordon recalls. “The relationship was not going to change, and I was now marked as a married man. I realized I had to get out.” Read More
November 8, 2017 Novemberance The Dark Feels Different in November By Nina MacLaughlin This is the second installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. Godfried Schalcken, Young Girl with a Candle (detail), 1670–1675. “I’m in the November of my life,” said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes and dark wavy hair and a laugh that came from deep in her gut. Two years ago, she was told she had two-and-a-half years to live. “This was my relationship with death before,” she said, holding her arms apart at full wingspan. “Knew it would happen. Never thought about it.” Then she brought her index fingers together so they touched in front of her chest. “This was the diagnosis.” Death was on top of her. The stamp of an expiration date on her forehead annihilated all other thought. In time, and with titanic mental effort, the initial all-consuming horror gave way. “In November, you’re winding down,” she said. “It means incorporating less sharp edges, more smoke.” Which is maybe to say more mystery, more potential. The sharp edges of fact give way to the blur of the question mark, the uncertainty, the quiet. “The space of nothingness is where one finds his or her own self and life’s richness,” writes the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. “This is a wonderful time of my life,” Francesca said. Francesca talked of her career as a curator, and the importance of “the space of nothingness,” how the gap between the works of art was as important to her as the works themselves. “Every inch mattered,” she said. She spoke of the sweet spot, a placement wherein two objects are in tension, in conversation, put at a distance that allows one to see the most of both at once. “There’s a perfect distance where empty space allows both to be alive in a different way,” she said. “Do you know the Japanese concept of ma?” Read More
November 8, 2017 At Work Our Town: An Interview with Adam Gopnik By Lesley M.M. Blume Adam Gopnik and Martha Parker, 1985. Earlier this fall, I got an amusing call from the writer Adam Gopnik. He’d come to Los Angeles as part of the tour for his new book, At the Strangers’ Gate, and was making his way down the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. I was stunned: first of all, it was high noon on a hundred-degree day—the town was absolutely baking—and second of all, he was walking, a rare activity among Angelenos. Luckily, he happened across Greenblatt’s, an old-fashioned deli on Sunset, and sought solace in some chicken soup and a corned-beef sandwich. All of these activities seemed to me evidence that Gopnik was a quintessential, incurable Manhattanite, far away from his natural habitat and relying on his New Yorker instincts for survival. Gopnik is a virtuosic writer; since joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1986, he has written nine books and covered a myriad of topics for the magazine, from the emigration of the European Roma to the complicated legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald to gun control in America. For many readers, he is synonymous with the pleasures of Paris: he was the magazine’s correspondent there between 1995 and 2000 and wrote the best seller Paris to the Moon, about his young family’s triumphs and travails as modern American expats. (The French Republic even bestowed upon him the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.) Yet New York City—where he lives with his filmmaker wife, Martha, and their two children—has been an endless source of fascination and material for him. When he first started at The New Yorker, he dispatched himself all over the city, covering table-hockey tournaments in Flatbush, slack-rope walkers who dwelled in boats on the Hudson River, and a community of rivalrous fresco painters. In Strangers’ Gate, a blend of memoir and social observation in which Gopnik specializes, he revisits his arrival in New York from Canada in the early 1980s. The book is a love letter to that vanished town, then an eccentric metropolis of all-powerful magazine editors, landlines, Kodak film, artists’ lofts in SoHo, and bookstores on every block. At the Strangers’ Gate also seems, at first glance, a whimsical counterpoint to Gopnik’s recent writings about America’s fraught political landscape. Although he once told me that he had never wanted to be any sort of pundit, he was an early whistleblower in the pages of The New Yorker about the threat to democracy posited by Trump, and has been unrelenting in his criticism since. “I feel a sense of emergency every morning,” he says. “We have to bear witness, even if we can’t change minds.” (He is already working on his next book, a political essay defending liberalism). Yet, he maintains, the seeds of today’s landscape had already been planted by the era he documents in the book; the eighties were “the first domino in a line of dominos that have fallen,” he says, leading to the post-9/11, post–financial collapse, Internet-and-social-media-driven realm in which we dwell today. Gopnik and I spoke about the New York of his salad days, the attributes that make the city uniquely (and peculiarly) alluring, and how New Yorkers seem innately equipped to handle these unstable times. INTERVIEWER Why did you feel that this was the moment you wanted to revisit and document 1980s New York? GOPNIK Two reasons, I think. There’s that beautiful opening line of a novel—what is it? The Go-Between. “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” And for the first time, the eighties seemed like another place—remote enough that you could write and talk about how differently things were done without it seeming too minute to matter. The idea that I could now explain the decade where I came of age to the youngsters who were now coming of age—that was one motive. Also, romantic comedies about young couples in cities are an evergreen form, and I realized that I was remote enough from my own experience to write one about myself, or at least with someone not completely unlike myself, and my wife, at the center. Read More