July 18, 2017 Arts & Culture How to Read a Squiggle By Polly Dickson William Henry Bunbury’s print The Siege of Namur, published in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Stern. Text is composed of lines both literal—the ink on the page—and conceptual—the story line or plotline that, like thread unwinding from a spool, guides us through the turns of a narrative. When we depict someone reading, we tend to signify text with a continuous wiggly line on the pages or the cover of a book. This kind of squiggle, hovering somewhere between text and image, conveys the singular shape of a narrative text. It’s a figure for the act of reading. One of the most recognizable literary lines of the eighteenth century is precisely such a squiggle. It occurs in the ninth chapter of the fourth volume of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, during a conversation between Tristram’s Uncle Toby and his faithful manservant, Corporal Trim, about bachelorhood and celibacy. The corporal, a character usually prone to long, sentimental speeches, declares, “Whilst a man is free—,” and gives “a flourish with his stick thus—” Read More
July 18, 2017 Humor Great Moments in Literacy: Reading Aloud By Sara Lautman Look for a new cartoon by Sara each morning this week.Sara Lautman is a cartoonist who lives in Baltimore. Her sketchbooks are on Instagram and her most recent collection is Ghost Sex.
July 17, 2017 On Television Creek Theses By Justin Taylor New notes on Dawson’s Creek. Will it be yes or will it be sorry? Cold Open Because the dream of the nineties is still on life support in Portland (seriously, check our real-estate listings), yesterday I walked over to the independently owned brick-and-mortar music-and-video emporium near my house to buy a used copy of the Dawson’s Creek season 6 box set for $6. They had a second copy going for $8.50, which I assume meant it was in slightly better condition, but I’d decided beforehand that $6 was my price point. In fact, I’d come to this store a few times before and almost bought this particular box set, each time thinking, Am I really going to do this? And each time the answer had been no. It’s not no anymore. Dawson’s Creek premiered in January 1998, and if you want more establishing detail than that, I suggest you Google it. I was fifteen at the time, halfway through tenth grade, and so not only part of the show’s prime demographic but the same age as its main characters. Granted, I lived in semi-suburban North Miami Beach, and they lived in small-town (would it be unreasonable to say semirural? It always felt that way to me) coastal Massachusetts, though the show was filmed in North Carolina, which is sometimes more and sometimes less obvious when you’re watching, but I don’t think any of this matters, at least in the context I’m planning to discuss the show today. Read More
July 17, 2017 Revisited Say Goodbye, Catullus By Catherine Lacey Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Catherine Lacey remembers her first visit to Houston’s Cy Twombly Gallery. Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (installation view), 1994, oil, acrylic, oil stick, crayon, and graphite on three canvases 157 1/2″ × 624″. Courtesy the Menil Collection, Houston. If one accepts that love is at least one part disaster—if one accepts that love cannot be effectively diagnosed or measured—if one accepts that a person cannot predict or control when such a feeling might take root—if one accepts that a person in love frequently behaves in a manner that others see as irrational—and if one accepts that it is difficult, if not altogether impossible, to explain those feelings—then it may be possible for a woman of twenty-two to be in love, however briefly, with an entire building and all of its contents. Once, I was an art student living in post-Katrina New Orleans—lonely, malnourished, diligent, and not such a nice person to be around. Approximately four people could tolerate me, and all four were in love with other people, actual people. They all held hands beneath the table during our elaborate potlucks as I worked on deepening early frown lines. The city was still absent of locals and filled with transients—students, migrant workers, real-estate developers, and demolition teams who’d come to salvage the wreck. Women were in scarce supply, and I was regularly asked out by men twice my age who were passing through town. I must have looked a little like a woman, a little like a flooded house. Read More
July 17, 2017 Humor Great Moments in Literacy: Movable Type By Sara Lautman Look for a new cartoon by Sara each morning this week. Sara Lautman is a cartoonist who lives in Baltimore. Her sketchbooks are on Instagram and her most recent collection is Ghost Sex.
July 14, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Detritus, Dreamin’, Dinos By The Paris Review From Paleoart. First published in 1966, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan, is still the standard biography of our most enduringly funny writer—or, at least, the earliest writer who makes me actually laugh. I avoided it till now because I knew Twain’s life got pretty dark. He outlived his wife and all of his children; he lost a fortune through crazy investments; as a writer, he lost his sense of humor. But what he achieved is incredible. On Kaplan’s telling, it’s not so much the individual books as the tone of voice—almost a new way of writing based on the spoken word. Like David Sedaris today, Twain polished his essays by performing them onstage. He spent much of his life on tour and sold his books by subscription, direct to consumers, largely bypassing the critical establishment. In fact, it wasn’t until Twain went to England—and was seriously praised by authors like Browning and Tennyson—that Americans started to grasp his originality. Details like these make the pleasure of Kaplan’s biography worth the pain. —Lorin Stein There really ought to be some kind of survey of artists’ and writers’ filing strategies. The writing spaces of Luc Sante and Marianne Fritz both have meticulously arranged shelves and file boxes, for instance. Who else? The artist Dieter Roth for one. A show of his book practice at Hauser and Wirth, which I saw this week, includes six hundred binders, each of which contains accumulations of everyday detritus (he called the project Flacher Abdall, or “Flat Waste”). The best part of the show is the installation of his actual studio from Basel, Switzerland, which he shared with his son. As one would expect, art supplies abound—a deeply pleasurable assortment of colors and brushes in jars and plastic buckets—but the studio, complete with tiny kitchen, also contains items that show the artists on temporary leave from the work at hand: a pair of Groucho glasses, a bottle-cap collection, slices of pie on pie-shaped rollerskates, models horses in a homemade cardboard stable. A long wooden table served as an informal canvas and displays scribbled lines like “yes or no or well I don’t know” and doodles of the sort you’d make while talking absentmindedly on the phone. The space is reminiscent, as my colleague Julia pointed out, of Donald Judd’s Spring Street building: a live/work space in which the most compelling details are the human ones. —Nicole Rudick Read More