June 27, 2017 First Person From the Foreword to Debths By Susan Howe From the cover of Debths. The below is excerpted from the foreword to Debths, Susan Howe’s latest collection, out today from New Directions. Going back! Going back! “Little Sir Echo, how do you do? / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Little Sir Echo, we’ll answer you / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!)/ Won’t you come over and play? (and play)/ You’re a nice little fellow / I know by your voice/ But you’re always so far away (away).” —Bing Crosby and the Music Maids (1939) When I was eight my parents packed me off to Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls on Lake Armington in the foothills of New Hampshire cofounded and owned by Mary Hoisington and Margaret Conoboy ten years earlier. Apparently the women chose the name because of an echo that bounces off the surrounding White Mountains. An actual child may or may not fit parental fantasies. I hated the place. Most of all I dreaded riding classes and spent many nights praying I would be assigned the tired elderly horse with a creaking stomach for the next day’s obligatory ride around the ring. On the one visiting day allowed per summer we rowed across the lake and picnicked on a secluded beach at the edge of a pine forest. I begged them to ransom me. But no. Around four P.M. they left for Boston, leaving me alone with my dread of being lost in the past; absent. Read More
June 27, 2017 On the Shelf Pour One Out for Branwell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Give the guy a little love. Poor Branwell Brontë. He had three brilliant, literary sisters. He had a way of courting misfortune. And, worst of all, he had a first name that sounds like an off-brand cereal from the health-food store. But now that Branwell’s siblings have ascended into the highest reaches of the canon, Emma Butcher argues that we’ve failed to give him his due: “We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of thirty-one from the long-term effects of substance abuse … Life threw repeated punches at Branwell, but within this series of unfortunate events there was happiness and worth. We must not forget that the Brontë brother grew up in the same literature-charged environment as his three siblings … Although his influence was not always positive, Branwell remained a primary muse for his sisters, and we should remember him as a major cog in the Brontë writing machine—even if his own work was always ‘minor.’ And the story of a young, talented fantasist failing to make his way in the world resonates with our experiences of hardship and lost dreams.” Are you an unconventional male artist who intends to go to the grave with many illegitimate children just waiting to come out of the woodwork? Boy, do I have an idea for you: on your deathbed, make a big show out of preserving some of your DNA as your final artwork. Send it to a museum or something, I don’t know. Not only will this earn you plaudits for your striking comment on the artist’s body as the ultimate artwork—it will save your descendants a little trouble down the road. As Raphael Minder reports, a Spanish court has ordered the exhumation of Salvador Dalí’s corpse for DNA testing; a young woman claims to be his daughter. If he’d just taken the time to put a little of his DNA aside for safekeeping, they wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble, but … “Pilar Abel, a Tarot card reader, wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a ‘clandestine love affair’ that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house … Dalí died in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship, which included Gala’s moving to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and only granting Dalí the right to visit her there by written invitation. In his will, Dalí left paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Spanish state.” Read More
June 26, 2017 Look Eight Views of Paradise Interrupted By Dan Piepenbring “Eight Views of Paradise Interrupted,” an exhibition of paintings by Jennifer Wen Ma, is at Sandra Gering Gallery through July 28. Ma, who splits her time between New York and Beijing, paints with ink on translucent acrylic glass, giving her landscapes a sumptuous, shadowy dimension in which women emanate a golden light. The works here were designed to supplement an opera that Ma debuted at last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, inspired by Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In an interview, she noted that the word paradise is derived from the concept of a walled garden: “a wall, a border, has been with the idea of paradise from the beginning, to keep certain things in, to keep certain things out.” Jennifer Wen Ma, Evening Bell at Misty Pavilion, 2017, Chinese ink and paint on acrylic glass, 48″ x 48″. Read More
June 26, 2017 First Person Beyond This Point You May Encounter Nude Sunbathers By Christopher Bollen Paul Signac, Cassis, Cap Lombard, Opus 196, 1889. In August 2004, my friend Joseph and I organized a trip to Dubrovnik before chartering a boat on the Adriatic Sea. A Croatian friend advised me of a tiny nearby island called Lokrum. It was popular with nudists, he said, and had perfect swimming coves. I told Joseph about the island when we met up in the Dubrovnik airport, and the next morning, anxious for the sea and sun, our skin the color of too much office work, we rode the ferry toward Lokrum. Only then did I mention that it was a nudist beach. “I don’t mind,” Joseph assured me. “Me neither,” I replied. “I just hope some of them are attractive.” Joseph turned to me with a smirk. “No,” he said. “I mean, I don’t mind being naked.” I hadn’t seen much of Joseph in the past year. Now I was going to see too much of him—every inner-thigh freckle, scrotal wrinkle, and circumcision mark. Read More
June 26, 2017 On the Shelf The Prince’s Perfect Poo, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François. Every era has its fads and fashions. When the dust settles, will cultural historians look kindly on 2017, in which the citizens of Western metropolises roam the streets looking like we could go camping at any moment? I cannot say. But I think we should give ourselves some credit—even the most lamentable style of the past ten years, the red #MAGA baseball cap, looks sensible in comparison to the sins of the past. During Marie Antoinette’s time, for instance, there was a brief craze for caca-dauphin, a shade of brown that resembled the color of the new prince Louis-Joseph’s soiled diapers. In the most fashionable circles, people dressed to celebrate the royal bowel movements. As Michael Taube writes in a review of Carolyn Purnell’s new book The Sensational Past, this was but one example of eccentric Enlightenment-era trends: “This awakening of our senses led to some astonishing results, from sensible to senseless … The citronella-based drink Water of Carmes, which supposedly ‘stimulated memory and got rid of unpleasant fantasies,’ was popular for a time … A few relatively harmless drinks aside, the senses of the Enlightenment occasionally ventured into some strange territory. Take the brief rise of ‘prince poo.’ During the time of Marie Antoinette in France, wealthy individuals ‘spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars to wear the clothing the color of baby poop.’ This grotesque fashion choice was done ‘as a way to show their support for the monarchy and to demonstrate how fashionable they could be.’ There was also the cat piano. As the story goes, King Philip II of Spain brought his father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, a ridiculous contraption in 1549 ‘with twenty rather narrow boxes, each of which contained a cat’ that would produce a ‘lamentable meowing’ when a key was pressed.” Corporations love to infantilize consumers, and they’re always looking for new and novel ways to do so. Take the new Kmart shopping bag, for instance—Vinson Cunningham has seen it, and he is afraid: “The bag, pristinely white, its surface marked by forgiving wrinkles, is set against a subtle gradient-blue background that looks like the sky. It might have been tossed away and carried upward by the wind. ‘Life is ridiculously awesome,’ it says, in two bubbly, bright-red fonts: a juicy cursive and a blocky, all-caps sans serif … Kmart adopted this slogan just last March, after several years of market share lost to Walmart, in order to attract a rising generation of millennial shoppers. The hope was to convince them (or, I guess, remind them) that consumption, retail-style, could, in the corporation’s words, be ‘fun,’ even ‘awesome’ … The hint of self-consciously campy nostalgia in its new ‘look and feel’ seems connected to the steady decay of the shopping experience that once helped to define, and to bolster, a wide swath of working- and lower-middle-class life in America.” Saeed Kamali Dehghan on the profusions and confusions of the Iranian publishing industry, whose cavalier approach to copyright makes for an abundance of shoddy translations: “If J. D. Salinger could see what was on the shelves in Iranian bookshops, he would turn in his grave. The Inverted Forest, a 1947 novella that he refused to republish in the U.S. for more than half a century, is widely available in Farsi in most Iranian bookshops … just one example of Iran’s messy, complicated, yet fascinating translation scene, which has long been undermined by the country’s failure to join the Berne convention on copyright … The popularity of foreign fiction and the difficulties of obtaining permission have exacerbated the problem of multiple translations of the same book popping up, with some translators exploiting the copyright vacuum—particularly so for bestsellers. Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, for instance, has been translated into Persian by at least sixteen different people … In 2008, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee asked me to pass on a statement to the Iranian news agencies, one that reflected his belief that copyright protection was not just about money. ‘It does upset writers, justifiably, when their books are taken over without permission, translated by amateurs and sold without their knowledge,’ he wrote.” The English invented English, but Americans have perfected it. Or so we might assume, to judge by the number of Americanisms and loanwords that have infiltrated the once-impenetrable walls of British English. And the Brits are pissed about this—many of them would prefer their tongues unsullied by such American poisons as “no-brainer” and “elevator.” Reviewing Matthew Engel’s That’s the Way It Crumbles, John Sutherland writes, “We talk, think and probably dream American. It’s semantic colonialism … One of the charms of this book is Engel hunting down his prey like a linguistic witchfinder-general. He is especially vexed by the barbarous locution ‘wake-up call.’ The first use he finds is ‘in an ice hockey report in the New York Times in 1975’ … Another bee in Engel’s bonnet is the compound ‘from the get-go.’ He tracks it down to a 1958 Hank Mobley tune called ‘Git-Go Blues.’ And where is that putrid locution now? Michael Gove, then Britain’s education secretary, used it in a 2010 interview on Radio 4. Unclean! Unclean! … Britain in 2017 is, to borrow an Americanism, ‘brainwashed,’ and doesn’t know it or, worse, doesn’t care. How was American slavery enforced? Not only with the whip and chain but by taking away the slaves’ native language. It works.” In an interview with Ann Friedman, Chris Kraus explains how her novel I Love Dick emerged from an antipathy toward the relentless you-go-girl positivity that characterized the feminism of the nineties: “I never bought into any of the sort of positivity. I was of an era where New Age came along, and I found that so deeply repugnant, and I wrote about it. When I wrote I Love Dick, it’s not as if—I mean, I’ve never put myself forward as any kind of political leader or cultural critic or even cultural theorist. I was just writing a book … I felt like my goal was to put everything on the table that was transacted under the table. There’s this kind of gender romantic comedy on the surface of it, but really it’s about power. And not even personal dynamic power; more like economic power and cultural-politics power, and how things are transacted. I think the book asks literally in the middle, ‘Who gets to speak and why is the only question.’ ”
June 23, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Banquets, Bootleggers, Bumbling Entrepreneurs By The Paris Review Ray Johnson, Untitled (Jasper Johns, James Dean with Coca-Cola), 1993, collage on board, 8 1/2″ x 18″. Image via Matthew Marks Gallery “For more than thirty years Garland Bunting has been engaged in capturing and prosecuting men and women in North Carolina who make and sell liquor illegally.” Such is the modest first sentence of Alec Wilkinson’s Moonshine, a book-length portrait of a backwoods law-enforcement genius. First published in 1985, this is old-fashioned New Yorker reporting at its best: funny, low-key, sneakily poignant—the kind of book that makes you want to read it aloud. In Garland, Wilkinson found a complex hero. He also found out a lot about the production and sale of moonshine, very little of it romantic, all of it intensely interesting. Somebody bring Moonshine back into print! —Lorin Stein This week, I caught the end of Matthew Marks Gallery’s Ray Johnson show, which closes Saturday. I’ve never seen so much of Johnson’s work in person—there are more than thirty collages on view, made from 1966 to 1994, the year before his death. He spent some three years at Black Mountain College in the mid forties and studied there with Lyonel Feininger, Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, Alvin Lustig, and Paul Rand. His education in painting, advertising art, and graphic design comes through in spades in these collages, which deal in an appealing combination of repeating forms—both abstract and figurative—that run counter to one another but are never at war, never unharmonious. Johnson mixes imagery from celebrity and popular culture, art history, and his own symbology in a proto-Pop, proto-conceptual style that is funny, bold, and demure all at the same time. That said, my favorite piece is punk rock meets avant-garde: a pair of black-and-white saddle shoes, from 1977, with JOHN and CAGE stenciled on the toes. —Nicole Rudick Read More