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
June 5, 2017 On Politics A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately By David Sedaris One. It’s early September of 2015 and I’m on the island of Santorini for a literary festival. After the short reading, which takes place outdoors on a patio, the Greek audience asks questions, the first of which is, “What do you think of Donald Trump?” Since announcing his candidacy, the reality-show star has been all over the news. Every outrageous thing he says is repeated and analyzed—like he’s a real politician. I answer that I first became aware of Donald Trump in the late 1980s. That was when Alma, a Lithuanian woman I was working for, bought his book The Art of the Deal and decided he was wonderful. Shortly afterward, I saw him on Oprah, and ever since then he’s always been in the background, this ridiculous blowhard, part showman and part cartoon character. I see his presidential bid as just another commercial for himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to name the Hamburglar as his running mate. So I say that on stage and then have to explain who the Hamburglar is. Read More
June 5, 2017 On the Shelf Paging Dr. Videovich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from a Jaime Davidovich “show.” Once upon a time, it was hard to be on TV. Believe me, I tried. You couldn’t just mouth off in an ill-fitting suit and expect to get your own reality show, no, sir. You couldn’t upload a video of yourself saying wacky shit while the anesthesia wore off after your wisdom-tooth operation. You had to be clever. Jaime Davidovich, who died last August, was a pioneering television artist—as his friend Rebecca Cleman writes, he recognized that “it was more radical to put art in the context of television than to bring popular culture into the museum.” By arranging to display his art in public places—most notably a Midtown bar, which agreed to show his video of floorboards instead of live sports—Davidovich used the demotic medium of his time to proselytize for art. (And for the benefits of being a weirdo.) Cleman writes, “After living in New York for most of the sixties, part of it working as a designer for Alfred A. Knopf on Madison Avenue, Jaime settled in Ohio for a while, enjoying what he considered to be a relatively typical suburban life with a two-car garage. It was there that he began experimenting with video, introduced not via a gallerist or a Sony sponsorship (as was the case for some artists), but by way of an Argentine surgeon at a Cleveland hospital. A technician gave Jaime access to the hospital’s video equipment after hours, making the operating room his de facto television laboratory. At this time, some public broadcast stations like WNET were sponsoring artistic experimentation with their high-end video equipment, a situation that tended to showcase the visual effects of gadgetry. In the setting of the hospital, Jaime’s use of video was more clearly distinct from such aesthetics, in keeping with his use, already, of non-art materials like adhesive tape to create spatial interventions … His alter ego, ‘Dr. Videovich,’ the Argentine psychoanalyst turned TV host, emerged as a satirical counterpoint to the art world’s move toward commercialization and professionalism in the 1980s.” Edwin Heathcote has been spending a lot of time in luxury show homes, where everything is gray and visitors can live out an elaborate simulation of a meaningful life. Just try to look at the books, for instance: “Just as the kitchens in these super-luxury show homes are for people who don’t really cook, the books on display are for people who don’t really read. There is an entire branch of the publishing industry devoted to the kinds of books that you see in show homes. They are the big arty books on a few specific subjects: travel, New York, cooking, watches, classic cars, fashion and so on. They are slightly too heavy to lift, so cannot actually be read … You see these same books in hotel lobbies and in their odd ‘libraries’ that are a hybrid space between hotel, club and home, a room designed around books no one is ever expected to read … The show-home library is a hint at the top-end man cave, the clubby, comfortable image of a cultivated space without the effort of needing to go through actual cultivation. Its pretense to culture stops it being objectionable to the spouse. The books are a sign; a symbol of, if not exactly culture, then at least the aspiration to culture. Their presence is plenty, they do not demand to be opened.” Read More