June 13, 2017 On the Shelf Prog Rock Will Not Save Your Soul, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The gatefold cover of King Crimson’s LP In the Court of the Crimson King. Why prog? Of all the varieties of music that can or could exist, what made progressive rock come slithering out of the human mind and into the historical record? These questions haunt everyone but certain British and American men, who regard prog as their birthright: in the glittering virtuosity and nonsense mythology of bands like King Crimson and Yes, they hear the drumbeat of some distant utopia. Critics have tried and tried again to figure out why certain white men enjoy prog while the rest of us back away slowly from it. Reviewing David Weigel’s new book on prog, The Show That Never Ends, Kelefa Sanneh samples a few compelling explanations: “In 1997, a musician and scholar named Edward Macan published Rocking the Classics … Noting that this artsy music seemed to attract ‘a greater proportion of blue-collar listeners’ in the U.S. than it had in Britain, he proposed that the genre’s Britishness ‘provided a kind of surrogate ethnic identity to its young white audience’: white music for white people, at a time of growing white anxiety. [The philosophy professor] Bill Martin, the quasi-Marxist, found Macan’s argument ‘troubling.’ In his view, the kids in the bleachers were revolutionaries, drawn to the music because its sensibility, based on ‘radical spiritual traditions,’ offered an alternative to ‘Western politics, economics, religion, and culture.’ ” Here’s some cocktail-party humiliation that’s sure to land with a splash. Ask a fellow partygoer, Which Cyril Connolly book have you been reading? If they answer at all, they very probably will not say The Unquiet Grave—and when they fail to say it, you can laugh at them mercilessly and then cite this Brian Dillon piece, which argues for The Unquiet Grave as an interesting flop: “If his friends are to be believed, Cyril Connolly was a monster of sloth and self-regard. And yet, what an endearing figure he cuts—if that’s the verb, with Connolly—through their letters and memoirs: maundering over failed affairs of heart or wallet, brimming with excuses for his books unwritten, ever ready to start afresh with the bubbles when the night wore on. Connolly’s narrow reputation now rests largely on the mixture of memoir and high literary journalism in Enemies of Promise (1938), and not on his single novel The Rock Pool (1936), or the several collections of reviews he later packaged in lieu of proper books. Fewer still today are references to The Unquiet Grave: the odd, fragmentary ‘word cycle’ he published under the pen name Palinurus in the autumn of 1944. But this is the book—an essay, an anthology, a complaint—in which the contradictions in Connolly’s talent and personality fail to resolve with the strangest, most seductive results. Here he anatomizes his worst traits: laziness, nostalgia, gluttony, hypochondria, some essential frivolity of mind that means his writing will always be summed up as ‘brilliant—that is, not worth doing.’ ” Read More
June 12, 2017 First Person Proud, Prouder, Proudest By Bryan Washington New Orleans during Pride Week, 2016. Photo: Tony Webster It was Pride Week in New Orleans. The parade had just ended. I spent the evening getting blitzed under a balcony, stepping through polyrhythms in tandem with seventy thousand other men and women. Afterward, the audience broke off, in various stages of undress, to porches and curbsides throughout the French Quarter, until the road was strewn with beads and condoms and go-cups. It happens every year. New Orleans has a ton of queer households on the census. It’s a pretty colorful city. And inevitably, those colors deepen in June, when Pride Week comes around: the clubs host parties funded by globalized sex apps, tiny drunken congregations bloom all over the Quarter, and the week climaxes with a march the final evening. And then brunch, or, depending on your persuasion, maybe a little more. But even if the city moonlights as a Babylon of the South, it can also be a dangerous place to go out. Loads of murders go unsolved annually in New Orleans. At least two this year have involved transgender women of color. Assaults in the loop of gay bars by Bourbon Street are hardly unheard of, and the city isn’t at all removed from the South’s virulent thread of hatred. But when the parade turned the corner of Conti Street, those facts hardly diminished its tremors; and, in a town that isn’t terribly diverse, you were suddenly as likely to find yourself grinding on some Canadian kid as a flock of Iranian bears. Read More
June 12, 2017 Look Fun with Textiles By Dan Piepenbring “Inside-Out,” an exhibition of woven paintings by Samantha Bittman, is at Morgan Lehman Gallery through June 17. Bittman uses a loom to make complexly patterned textiles, which she then overlays with acrylic paint. Her practice derives from a fascination with the timelessness of weaving: “the basics of the over and under warp and weft interlacements has remained unchanged,” she said in an interview with New American Paintings: “I feel like it is evolutionarily locked in our brains somewhere … I am more engaged with the aspects of weaving that are rooted in mathematics and numbers, as well as the accumulative nature of the weaving process … My work typically has an underlying invented logic, either apparent or slightly hidden.” Samantha Bittman, Untitled, 2016, acrylic on handwoven textile, 24″ x 20″. Read More
June 12, 2017 Literary Architecture Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. This is the final installment of a series dedicated to his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. We’re used to seeing skyscrapers towering over cities. We’re used to imagining the fabric of a city as the footprint of solids over voids. The protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights is, as he himself tells us, a dreamer. A lonely man, with no friends or acquaintances, who only knows the look and soul of the physical places around his city, Saint Petersburg. Hiding from the sunlight, he wanders the city at nighttime, animating each street corner with character—filling its voids. Read More
June 12, 2017 On the Shelf Paper Does the Impossible, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Craig Kaplan, via Nautilus. It’s always nice to discover a new use for paper. Sometimes it seems as if all the good ones have been taken. Writing on it, wrapping fragile objects in it, wiping with it—these are old news. But, as Evelyn Lamb writes, mathematicians have fairly recently begun to use it to make impossible objects. Paper’s “wiggle room” affords it a kind of impossible latitude: “Using stiff paper and transparent tape, Craig Kaplan assembles a beautiful roundish shape that looks like a Buckminster Fuller creation or a fancy new kind of soccer ball. It consists of four regular dodecagons (twelve-sided polygons with all angles and sides the same) and twelve decagons (ten-sided), with twenty-eight little gaps in the shape of equilateral triangles. There’s just one problem. This figure should be impossible. That set of polygons won’t meet at the vertices. The shape can’t close up. Kaplan’s model works only because of the wiggle room you get when you assemble it with paper. The sides can warp a little bit, almost imperceptibly … It is a new example of an unexpected class of mathematical objects that the American mathematician Norman Johnson stumbled upon in the 1960s … Not only does this niggling near-perfection draw the interest of Kaplan and other math enthusiasts today, it is part of a large class of near-miss mathematics.” Andrew Sean Greer has your occasional reminder that the literary-prize racket is an ego parade with no value whatsoever to writing and reading: “There’s a great book by James English, The Economy of Prestige, in which he examines literary prizes and what they are about. Basically: an exchange of prestige for either money or another kind of prestige. Prizes evolve to serve themselves. They have nothing to do with actual writing … It’s like wanting a wedding—that’s not something to want. A wedding? Then what? You want a good relationship. A prize? Then what? You want to write something you’re proud of. Like, today, on the page. It’s easy to forget that’s the only real pleasure that writers have. And yet all the writers I know seethe when they aren’t acknowledged … But what if you knew a masterpiece had been written that year? And was ignored?” Read More
June 9, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Society Wives, Siege Poems, Strippers By The Paris Review From the first edition of Two Serious Ladies. The other day in conversation, a friend compared Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories to the work of Jane Bowles, so out of curiosity I picked up Sadie’s old copy of Two Serious Ladies—and, for the first time, from the first page, felt utterly at home with Jane Bowles. Why had her fiction seemed so strange before? A phobic society wife gets dragged by her husband to Panama and ditches him for life in the red-light district; meanwhile, another rich eccentric drags her hangers-on to a crummy house on Staten Island, and starts haunting the docks … Maybe Moshfegh has opened my mind. Maybe we all go strange sooner or later. For whatever reason, a reason I can’t explain, it all makes perfect sense to me now. —Lorin Stein Late last year, Ugly Duckling Presse published Written in the Dark, a small volume of startling poetry, the first of its kind: a collection of verse written by five men from within the Siege of Leningrad, an event that can be counted among the great horrors of war. “My soul, / to defend itself, pretended / to be wooden. There was no light,” writes Dmitry Maksimov in the epigraph to one of his poems. These “Seige poems” were, with small exception, unknown and unpublished in their authors’ lifetimes: the imagery of “frozen mummies,” of “lying and living, / In the grave with my dead wife,” of eating “Rebecca the girl full of laughter” ran counter to the official history of patriotism, stoicism, and Soviet might. The book’s editor, the poet Polina Barskova, links the poets’ works to those of the OBERIU, to which some of the authors are directly connected. Their trauma verse becomes a modernist salvo, not poems “after or about the Siege,” writes the scholar Ilya Kukulin in his afterword, but “poems through the Siege.” —Nicole Rudick Read More