June 7, 2017 On the Shelf Show a Little Respect for Milk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Dairy Queen ad from the fifties. The dairy is the locus of the sublime. Whatever it is you want from this world, whatever unnamable thing beyond the stratum of rational thought, you will find it in milk. Imagine water, but with more emotion—that’s milk. Beer for the soul—it’s milk! A liquid that’s also a medium and a metaphor—milk. Should you doubt its sway over human affairs, ask yourself this: If the land of milk and honey were merely the land of honey, would you still regard it as paradise? Embarking on what they call a “journey of lactic abstraction,” Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie have written a penetrating meditation on all things milky in the new issue of Cabinet. The news isn’t all good; humans have not been good to milk of late. Part of it goes like this: “The McFlurry, Mr. Whippy, Dairy Queen Blizzard, Cheese String, Dreaming Cow, Laughing Cow, Skinny Cow, Happy Cow, Crusha, Marvel—these dairy icons perform health and the abuse of health; an array of high-calorie, high-fat, low-calorie, low-fat, high-sugar, sugar-free, highly processed glimmer, with techno-scientific, multicolor, hedonistic, and eroticized appeal. These are the products of aggressive marketing, of low-margin, highly complex modes of manufacture. Dairy turns airy in ice creams that swell up with nothingness injected … Milk’s propensity for animation, for shape-shifting and transformation, teams it commercially with a bestiary of cartoon avatars and a dazzling spectrum of synthetic colors. Milk is frozen into colorful crystals with personality for a teeming frozen-treats market whose products bear ever less tangible relations to milk. In this format, milk adopts any and every shape, that of superheroes or cartoon villains, baroque architectonics or body parts. The cow, used frequently as a metaphor for the passive, dumb, and exploited, is replaced by wily, smart-talking animals and apocryphal consumers of its milk—cats, rabbits, mice—leaving only a vestigial hint of the originating animality.” Vauhini Vara has spent some quality time at spelling bees and wonders about the increasing prominence of Indian Americans as brilliant spellers: “For the past decade, Indian Americans have dominated the Scripps National Spelling Bee—among last year’s top ten were seven Indian spellers … Even the most well-meaning attempts to understand the dominance of Indian-American spellers can be reductive. Shalini Shankar, an anthropologist at Northwestern University who is writing a book about spelling culture, told me that people ask her all the time if there is something inherent in the Indian brain that makes it well suited to this sort of competition—maybe a spelling gene? It’s legitimate, of course, to wonder why kids of Indian origin keep conquering Scripps, despite making up a relatively small proportion of the population. When I put this question to Paige Kimble, the director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, she said, ‘It seems to me that more and more South Asians have integrated, and as they do so, they do what immigrant populations do, and that is to work very hard to be successful in their new country. I think that’s absolutely the dynamic in place that impacts the Bee.’ ” Read More
June 6, 2017 From the Archive O Majestic Poet By Dan Piepenbring Hölderin, as painted by Franz Karl Hiemer. Look at that fresh-faced man. That’s Friedrich Hölderlin, baby. Poet, idealist, quintessential German romantic. Suffering from schizophrenia, he spent thirty-six years—about half his life—living in a carpenter’s tower on the river in Tübingen. People would stop in to visit him, hear him read a few poems or play a brief tune on the piano, maybe collect his autograph. Scholars have come to call this his “Tower Period.” Every poet should have one. Hölderlin died on June 7, 1843. You may not have carved out any time to mourn the 174th anniversary of his passing—you may think you have more important affairs to attend to. He did write, after all, that “he who has thought most deeply loves what is most alive,” which would seem to preclude loving a long-dead man. Still. If you’d like to pause and remember the great poet, Rilke will help. Read More
June 6, 2017 At Work Game of Second-Guessing: An Interview with Gabe Habash By Jonathan Lee Photo: Nina Subin Sometimes an epigraph offers you a serving of Plato, some Ecclesiastes, or perhaps a few fine lines from an obscure Eastern European poet. To welcome readers into Stephen Florida, his first novel, Gabe Habash has picked these five words from Arnold Schwarzenegger: “The mind is the limit.” Sitting alone on a page, floating in negative space, they feel like a frightening prophecy. Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season. It is written as if the ghost of Laurence Sterne watched a lot of ESPN before returning to his desk. Stephen’s voice draws momentum from his attempts to leave a mark on the world. Like the voice in Tristram Shandy, it obsessively digresses from that central aim into ideas of human failure and misreading. We learn that even his name has its foundation in a mistake: Stephen Florida was supposed to be called Steven Forster. An unfortunate clerical error occurred. Habash has a great eye for the ways in which our public identities and private insecurities are shaped by happenstance. Stephen Florida is full of vim and invention, good jokes and built-up bodies, unexpected sentences. He and I discussed his love of Barry Hannah and Roberto Bolaño, the common pitfalls of books about sport, and how frustrations with writing may have fed into his narrator’s preoccupation with completion. INTERVIEWER What was it that drew you to write about wrestling in Stephen Florida, and held your interest? Are you a sports obsessive? HABASH I really only love basketball. LeBron James is the greatest human being on the planet. But what drew me to wrestling was how demanding and unforgiving it is. It seems to exist in an adjacent world that not even other sports inhabit. Like other sports, wrestling can give you so much, but it seems to take more, to ask more of its participants. It was necessary for Stephen’s pursuit of a championship to exist in the periphery. He’s in the lowest division of college wrestling at a school in the middle of nowhere. I wanted readers to feel like they were watching something happen that no one else was paying attention to. Read More
June 6, 2017 Arts & Culture Three Movements By Amelia Gray Reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography. Isadora Duncan, 1905. There’s a story of Isadora Duncan and the press that has stuck with me since I read it years ago: “I’m going to Egypt to lay flowers at the feet of the Sphinx,” she told reporters in Boston. “At its paws, I should say. I’m going out on the desert … Remember that I said this mysteriously.” The story of your life arrives in three parts: your self, your image, and the product of the two. When I started writing about Isadora, I knew only the product: her body of work, classical figures draped in silks. I knew that she was considered a spontaneous dancer, despite the methodical repetition, the hours of work behind that effortless flow. Only by reading her autobiography, My Life, did I begin to understand the distance between her life and her image. Read More
June 6, 2017 On the Shelf How to Commune with a Filmmaker, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, 1983. Let’s get this straight: many books are good. Movies? Also good. Is the best movie inherently less valuable than the best book, just because it’s a motion picture forcing its images down your gullet? No. Film has been around for a century now, but its loftiest critics still sometimes regard it as literature’s kid brother: a nascent medium doing its best to shrug off the demotic appeal that marked it as, you know, dumb. Martin Scorsese thought that Adam Mars-Jones’s review of his new film, Silence, made a few undue assumptions about the nature of movies compared to literature—the hoarier and oftentimes more boring art form, and thus the more important one. So Scorsese has mounted a defense of filmmaking: “I’ve grown used to seeing the cinema dismissed as an art form for a whole range of reasons: it’s tainted by commercial considerations; it can’t possibly be an art because there are too many people involved in its creation; it’s inferior to other art forms because it ‘leaves nothing to the imagination’ and simply casts a temporary spell over the viewer (the same is never said of theatre or dance or opera, each of which require the viewer to experience the work within a given span of time). Oddly enough, I’ve found myself in many situations where these beliefs are taken for granted, and where it’s assumed that even I, in my heart of hearts, must agree … The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer. They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but, I think, to engage with them on as intimate a level as possible. The viewer also ‘collaborates’ with the filmmaker, or the painter.” Anthony Burgess once tried to write a book of slang—he proceeded alphabetically and only through the letter c before he decided it was a waste of time. Now, Dalya Alberge reports, his abortive efforts have been discovered: “Entries include abdabs (‘fit of nerves, attack of delirium tremens, or other uncontrollable emotional crisis’) and abortion (‘anything ugly, ill-shapen, or generally detestable’) … The [Burgess] Foundation is working with the slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, who said even in its limited state, Burgess’s dictionary is ‘fascinating both for his many fans and for specialist lexicographers … Slang is a very slippery customer … I get the feeling that Burgess thought it was much easier than it actually is … Smart as he was, with an understanding of linguistics and language, I don’t think he could have allowed himself to do a second-rate [dictionary]. If he didn’t stop everything else, that’s what he would have turned out with … Terms like writer’s block are not slang. Proper names like the Beatles are not slang. Meanwhile, one cannot, as in arse, begin a definition with the statement I need not define. Nor throw in personal assessments (“Arse is a noble word; ass is a vulgarism”).’ ” Read More
June 5, 2017 Look Happy Dark By Dan Piepenbring Images have been removed from this article for rights reasons. “Happy Dark,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Maren Karlson, is at Brooklyn’s Interstate Projects through June 18. Karlson, who lives and works in Berlin, populates her drawings with demonic cartoons, lurid, sinuous lines, and distended patterns—as if the elemental figures of some netherworld have started to skew and melt under the pressure of their occult lifestyle. Her exhibition takes its title from some lines by Clarice Lispector: “Only the mercy of god could yank me out of that terrible indifferent joy in which I was bathing, complete. For I was exulting. I was coming to know the violence of the happy dark—I was happy as a demon, hell is my maximum.” Read More