May 19, 2017 On the Shelf Your Car Will Look Cooler in Forty Years, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Langdon Clay, via Hyperallergic I have car in New York now. The alternate-side parking, the potholes, the increasingly dimpled bumpers: it’s all worth it, because my car could be a celebrity in this town. It’s a 2003 Camry, so the odds are against it, I know, but if I could show you how I beam with pride, seeing it sit there on the street, all covered in bird shit and pollen—it just seems like a place where a car is meant to be. And even as it depreciates, its value as an aesthetic object will only rise with age. In the seventies, the photographer Langdon Clay roamed the city by night, taking photos of cars all by their lonesome. Today, his photographs seem like evidence of some lost civilization. “It was photography of the street itself. One car. One background. So simple. Night became its own color,” Clay writes in an essay introducing a new collection of the pictures, Cars: New York City, 1974–1976. Luc Sante adds, “They rule the night, those Pintos and Chargers and Gremlins and Checkers and Galaxie 500s and Fairlanes and Sables and Rivieras and LeSabres and Eldorados … They unashamedly flaunt their dents, their rust spots, their mismatched doors, their liberal applications of Bondo, their repairs effected with masking tape—but then some of them revel in Butch Wax jobs like you don’t see anymore, gleaming like the twilight’s last sigh.” Jason Horowitz is on the scene in Naples, where a frantic casting call for children in underway. The potential gig: HBO’s adaptation of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: “Producers are looking for amateur child actors—two sets of girls in eight- and fifteen-year-old iterations, and then a large Annie-esque supporting cast of hard-knock lifers. The result is an open casting call that has already drawn five thousand children, the vast majority of whom have never heard of Elena Ferrante, and injected a mix of hysteria and hope into parts of Naples that are poor in resources but rich in real characters. Enzo Valinotti—a fifty-seven-year-old shoemaker who reminisced about the days, nearly a century ago, when Totò, one of Italy’s most iconic actors, lived in the neighborhood—leaned out his ground-floor window and said of the children flooding the street, ‘They are all so happy.’ … ‘Look at my son. He is so beautiful,’ said Anna Arrivolo, forty-three, who grabbed her child’s pudgy face and stroked his gelled hair. ‘He didn’t want to do it. I wanted him to.’ ” Read More
May 18, 2017 Arts & Culture The Library of Books and Bombs By Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Andrew Moore, County Archive, 2012. © Andrew Moore, Courtesy of the Artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery Last summer, I moved into a flat on the edge of London’s Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. I chose it only because it was where my significant human made his home. It was my first time moving in with someone. As I clattered up from the Tube, I found myself in a swell of schoolchildren on Jack the Ripper tours, Bangladeshi immigrant families, and men with tortoiseshell glasses and Scandinavian backpacks. The local cafe offers beetroot lattes and vegan croissants. The local supermarket has an aisle devoted to halal food. This was a beautiful place to live, but I was a mess. My first novel was about to come out, and I jittered and jangled around the flat, failing to read or write. Finally, I did what I’ve always done when nervous. I looked for a library. My father told me once that he always has to know the location of the door of any room he’s in. I need to know the nearest bookshop and library. The theory is the same: we need an escape. Read More
May 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Mary McCarthy at the 92nd Street Y By Chris Kraus Mary McCarthy “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Chris Kraus reflects on Mary McCarthy’s reading, in November 1963, from her novel The Group. Mary McCarthy took the stage of the 92nd Street Y to thunderous applause on a brisk Sunday in November 1963. She was fifty-one and wearing an elegant white dress. “One thing that gave me the courage to go on with this book, which I was working on since 1952, was reading the first chapter of it out loud here,” she said before she began. “And the audience liked it. And I took it up again after this reading I gave that night, for good or ill. So. Uh … I’m assuming that, uh, most people here have read this book, and I don’t have to explain who the characters are, or what happened before. Is that true? No?” The audience laughs. “Is somebody kidding?” Read More
May 18, 2017 On the Shelf Visit Me in My Fake Tree, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Artificial tree-trunk, open,” from Richard Kearton’s Wild Life at Home, 1898. Image via Public Domain Review On a sunny spring weekend, I like to go to the park and hide in a false tree trunk I’ve built. There I stand, whiling away the hours and waiting for the birds to come around. I didn’t invent this hobby. Don’t give me that look. There are thousands of people like me. The whole thing started with Richard and Cherry Kearton, turn-of-the-century British nature photographers who went to ingenious lengths to capture their subjects up close. Artifice was their greatest ally, and they weren’t afraid to waste many hours hoping for something to happen. John Bevis writes, “It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labeled ‘the Machiavelli of bird photography.’ But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell’arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into ‘Birdland’ to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretenses; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation … In 1898 came the ‘Artificial tree-trunk,’ anticipating by nearly twenty years the observation trees, made of angle-iron and camouflaged with bark, that were used by the British and French on the Western Front. The Kearton tree was a pantomime prop-like contraption whose wigwam frame of bamboo uprights was dressed with mesh, and covered with fabric camouflaged with paint, moss, and lichen. The photographer stood to attention inside, pressed against his camera, whose tripod legs could be only partially spread. It may have lacked versatility, but when it came to photographing a bird perched six feet above ground level, in woodland, the dummy tree trunk was hard to beat.” The Jewish Museum has dedicated an exhibition to Florine Stettheimer, a Jazz Age painter who remains, in Christopher Benfey’s view, far too often unsung: “Through her closely observant work, we are granted entrée to exclusive birthday celebrations (with her pals Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz recognizably in attendance), Fourth of July fireworks over Manhattan, and a frenzied spring sale at Bendel’s, though it might as well be Bruegel’s. Her signature filigrees of paint, especially red (associated at the time with the Ballets-Russes, for which Stettheimer dreamed of designing costumes, as well as with the Russian Revolution) and layer-cake-icing white, add a frothy dynamism to the festivities. Despite the apparent frivolity of her subjects, Stettheimer … was an ambitious, deadly serious artist who has never gotten the attention she deserves. Her varied, probing self-portraits—palette in hand and red shoes on her feet, accompanied by a Nijinsky-ish faun; or floating in space on a magical red cape, like some exotic deity; or reclining in the nude, à la Olympia—convey a sophisticated self-awareness of the confining assumptions facing a hardworking woman artist between the wars.” Read More
May 17, 2017 Our Correspondents Five Limericks By Anthony Madrid Just a few words about the rhymes and pictures below. The limericks date from 2013. I wrote more than three hundred that year, and might have continued indefinitely except I was made to stop. At first, they were a form of self-medication. In the aftermath of turning in my Ph.D. thesis and finally graduating (June 2012), I was completely numb. Only Edward Lear’s limericks did me any good, so I wound up studying them. And then I just wanted there to be more of him … Naturally, all good things have to be taken too far and made monstrous. Some days I made four or five limericks, or four or five versions of the same limerick, texting every one of ’em to the people in my life who, in my judgment, did not then and do not now deserve God’s mercy. Everyone was fed up. So I promised to knock it off come Christmas 2013. Which promise was faithfully observed. The pictures, meanwhile, are newborns, less than six weeks old. These five specimens together, and buckets more just like them, are slated to appear in book form in 2018. Prelude Books has graciously agreed to, et cetera. Of these items, “Minsk” is the most authentic (where authentic is defined as “closely approximating the verbal manner of Edward Lear”). Elsewhere, the rhyme {Bensonhurst | mention first} will be judged satisfactory by persons who think all rhymes should be like that. “Bozeman,” Montana is where my life partner, Nadya, is from. The image depicts the two of us very accurately. In closing, it’s vital that everyone understand that the pictures were not done by me, but by my friend Mark Fletcher, who also designed the covers of both my books. I said for years that I had never heard this man’s voice. It’s still true to this day. All we ever do is email. We were put in touch, seven or eight years ago, by our mutual friend Michael Robbins, who, incidentally, headed the movement to annihilate the limericks juggernaut. Anyhow, I want to underscore that Mark Fletcher alone is responsible for the gorillas, the blankets, the verisimilitude of the Louvre exterior, and for ninety-six percent of any actual value attaching to this whole enterprise. Read More
May 17, 2017 At Work The House of Song: An Interview with Michael Robbins By Daniel Johnson The Overlook Mountain House—near Woodstock, New York—features prominently in “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday.” After his first two collections, Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex, Michael Robbins drew comparisons to poets like Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon. In those poems—with titles like “My New Asshole” and “Pissing in One Hand”—Robbins is concerned for the fate of the whales, and he’s unafraid to spit vitriol about banks, oil pipelines, Xbox, Jesus, Jay Z. He writes about the modern world with such referential range, and such sharpness, that you can almost miss his superhuman command of verse and rhyme, which Dwight Garner has called “dizzying.” Those poems are anchored by constant allusions and tributes to the music Robbins loves. Most memorably, in Alien vs. Predator’s “I Did This to My Vocabulary,” he exclaims the names of heavy-metal bands as Santa Claus roll calls his reindeer in “The Night Before Christmas”: “On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom! / On Motorhead, and Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem!” Two poems published in The Paris Review over the past year, “Walkman” and “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday,” are more autobiographical and ruminative; they seem to follow in the tradition of the New York School. “Schuyler was too tender / for me then,” Robbins writes in “Walkman,” “but now / he is just tender / enough.” It’s this pivot toward tenderness—rich with memories, “beautiful experiences,” secrets, breakups, apologies, Schuyler-esque wishes—that might best characterize the departure from his earlier work. You can hear a little Taylor Swift (Robbins is a fan) in the last lines of “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday”: “Wherever / you are, I hope you stand / still now and then / and let the prayers / wash over you like the breakers / at Fort Tilden that day / the huge gray gothic / clouds massed and threatened to drop / a storm on our heads / but didn’t.” I met Robbins at a café in Brooklyn, where we talked about Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, his book of essays forthcoming in July, and the stylistic shift between his collections and his poems in the Review. INTERVIEWER The two poems in the Review recently—“Walkman” and “You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday”—are a radical departure from those in your books. ROBBINS After The Second Sex, I didn’t want to write any more poems in the vein of my two collections. I just didn’t want to be one of those poets who write the same book over and over again. I knew that I wanted to write a different kind of poem. So the first thing I decided, before I knew what I was going to write, was that I wasn’t going to rhyme, and I wasn’t going to worry about meter. Read More