May 12, 2017 On the Shelf You, Too, Can Be T. S. Eliot’s Child, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “She said she was what now?” Things would be easier if you were the descendant of a famous writer. Doors would open. Carpets would be laid at your feet. I know what you’re thinking: you’re not born of literary royalty, and nothing will ever change that. Except: Did you ever consider lying about it? This is a more effective practice than you might expect. Take Alison Reynolds, for example. Until recently, she was claiming to be T. S. Eliot’s twin daughters, at the same time—even though Eliot had no children. For her troubles, she was rewarded with a few cushy theater gigs and a handsome tax break. And sure, she’s on her way to jail, but maybe it was worth it. Robert Mendick reports, “Alison Reynolds pretended to be both Claire and Chess Eliot, who she claimed were the twin daughters of the poet. In fact, Eliot never had any children. Reynolds, who is remanded in custody and facing a jail sentence, used wigs, stage makeup and a variety of costumes to portray herself as at least eleven different aliases over the course of a decade. Using the fake identities, she posed as a theatre producer and director and falsely claimed VAT credits in the name of bogus dramatic companies. In 2003, she moved to Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire … setting up the Journeyman Theatre Company and writing a play, Desperately Seeking Jake Roverton, to make her scam more compelling … The ruse was rumbled after theatre staff became suspicious that they had never seen Claire and Chess in the same room.” Book clubs are a great way to foster friendships. If you’d prefer to make enemies, they’re good for that, too. Judith Newman has stories of readers’ flaring tempers: “Elizabeth St. Clair, a lawyer … had her Waterloo in a previous club over Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. The group consisted of several couples, including Ms. St. Clair and her boyfriend at the time. In one scene, she explains, ‘the main character is staying in a bunkhouse, and over the course of several nights a gorgeous strange woman comes to his bed and has sex with him. The men in the group thought this was the most romantic thing ever—dark, anonymous sex with no consequences. The women, on the other hand, were guffawing. When they pointed out that this was entirely a male fantasy, that few women would relish the prospect of anonymous sex with a possibly unattractive stranger in a bunk bed, the men felt insulted. Tensions were already high and everything kind of escalated … People walked out.’ ” Read More
May 11, 2017 Look Very Special Gladnesses By Dan Piepenbring Endre Tót is one of thirty artists whose work appears in “With the Eyes of Others: Hungarian Artists of the Sixties and Seventies,” a group exhibition devoted to the Hungarian avant-garde, showing at Elizabeth Dee Gallery through August 12. Tót, born in 1937, was loosely affiliated with the Fluxus movement and is known especially for his pioneering mail art: postcards, stamps, and typographical oddities that he used to correspond with other conceptual artists. His work is characterized by its focus on nothingness—in 1970, he abandoned painting, having declared “a state of zero”—through which, in his perspective, one can reach pure joy; in one postcard he writes, “I am glad if I can type zer0s.” Read More
May 11, 2017 At Work Fantasy Life: An Interview with Tabitha Soren By Louisa Thomas Tabitha Soren, Modesto Nuts bull pen, California, 2014. In 2003, Tabitha Soren went to the Oakland A’s spring training in Phoenix with her husband, Michael Lewis, who had just finished writing a book about the Oakland A’s front office, Moneyball, which would be published later that year. Soren brought her camera; she wasn’t a baseball fan, and she thought she would be bored. “I thought it was going to be a pretty place to shoot,” she told me when we spoke over the phone. She didn’t expect that project she began there would take her fourteen years. Back then, Soren had only just begun her career as a fine-arts photographer. She first made her name on the other side of the camera, as the face of MTV News’s politics coverage in the 1990s, then as a reporter at ABC and NBC News. Since she left journalism to become a fine-arts photographer, her photographs have been widely collected and shown. Her latest project, Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream, chronicles the trajectories of twenty-one baseball players who began their professional careers at that spring training in 2003. Ten of them are featured in the book, which also includes a series of linked short stories by Dave Eggers; the larger show will be up at San Francisco’s City Hall from July 20 to January 6. Read More
May 11, 2017 On the Shelf Make Something Up About Agatha Christie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of A Talent for Murder. In 1926, Agatha Christie went missing—she turned up at a hotel ten days later with a case of amnesia. Her disappearance has never been properly explained, and you know how people are about explanations: they’ve gotta have ’em. In the absence of facts, they’ll just as soon make something up. And so it went with Christie—as Andrew Wilson writes, all sorts of wacky theories about her were aired as “news,” and even today people continue to postulate: “Newspapers were fascinated by the idea that her husband Archie Christie might have killed the author so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele. But those ten days in 1926 were in effect a news vacuum. Despite an extensive search of the Surrey Downs and the dredging of nearby pools, the police discovered precious few clues, let alone a body—so journalists began to manufacture news of their own. The Daily Sketch claimed that it had employed the services of a medium, whose spirit guide was Maisie, a ‘twelve-year-old African girl, tribe unknown.’ ‘As soon as the medium went into a trance Maisie took command,’ the paper reported. ‘Sensational claims were made by the medium, who afterwards described Mrs Christie’s fate as a tragedy almost too terrible to speak about.’ ” Christian Lorentzen weighs in on “Formentera Storyline,” the photo-novella in our Spring issue: “Journals like The Paris Review and NOON have risked their pages on unlisted unknowns (who prove that publicity isn’t the oxygen that keeps fiction alive). It was in one of those magazines that, to my mind, the knockout discovery of 2017 appeared: ‘Formentera Storyline,’ by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva, a ‘photo-novella’ in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, about a Spanish-island group vacation that devolves across 150 pages—most of which feature a banal photo from a Mediterranean villa (e.g., the washing machine) and a deadpan sentence or two—from Pilates and talk therapy into druggy chaos and bad Instagram behavior. All told, a party where everybody stays too long. It’s funny, sly, and very much of the Fyre Festival moment.” Read More
May 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Some Sort of Grace By Moira Donegan Two films about queer love frame grief as both intimate and political. Kris Kovick, in a photo distributed with Silas Howard’s What I Love About Dying. When the photographer Peter Hujar died, in November 1987, David Wojnarowicz filmed his dead body lying in the hospital bed. Hujar had grown thin from AIDS: his broad, boyish cheekbones were sunken and covered in an ashy beard, and his clavicle pressed against the limp fabric of the hospital gown. Wojnarowicz panned his camera over the body only seconds after Hujar died, and in the footage, his face still bears the traces of life: his eyes are half closed, but his mouth hangs open, as if it’s about to groan. There’s a fragility to the images of Hujar’s body. The hand resting on the sheet seems strangely narrow; the skin is papery and impossibly brittle, like half-melted ice. Wojnarowicz, a multimedia artist whose autobiographical, intensely intimate work aroused admiration and provoked right-wing censorship during his lifetime, had known he wanted to make a film about Hujar’s death. But he didn’t work on the movie at all before the event; the Super 8 camera only came out after the curtain was drawn back around Hujar’s body in the bed. In another five years, Wojnarowicz himself would die of AIDS, but not before creating some of his most arresting work, much of it conceived in response to the loss of Hujar. Even so, his film was never completed. What survives is a four-minute black-and-white reel, the footage of Hujar’s body intercut with swimming beluga whales at the Coney Island Aquarium—an unexpected juxtaposition, but one that Wojnarowicz felt was fated. In the days after Hujar’s death, he was obsessed with capturing the whales, finally managing to sneak in his Super 8. Grief has a way of provoking strange impulses. In his diaries, Wojnarowicz said that the light of the whales’ twirling white hides against the darkness of the water was one of the most beautiful images he could imagine. Read More
May 10, 2017 Revisited The Blue Jay’s Dance By Sarah Menkedick Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Sarah Menkedick revisits Louise Erdrich’s memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance. From the first edition of The Blue Jay’s Dance. Nine weeks into my pregnancy, in the middle of an Ohio woods lit gold with fall, I sat in a small, dark cabin and wept. I had no idea how to proceed and I also understood with a wrenching clarity that I could not turn back. I had no model for pregnancy beyond the asexual lady on the cover of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, clad in neutral sweater and slacks, plain-faced in her rocking chair, an emblem of the dull, docile femininity demanded of American mothers. I was terrified of her blandness and of my own obsequiousness to that book, my careful noting of the iron content in dried fruit and my newfound pedantry about pasteurization. After a decade spent trying to prove my exceptionality, I found myself, in October of 2013, flailing in my newly discovered ordinariness. I felt my life, my identity, my future like shattered glass at my feet. I took a shower to calm myself and then, hair wet and sick at the smell of shampoo, I ran the five hundred feet from the cabin down to my parents’ house, where I sat on the couch with my stepmother and let loose with frightened sobs. She knew not to attempt rescue, to soothe me with platitudes or plead a strong case for the valor of motherhood. Instead, she sat quietly with my terrible uncertainty on a sunny fall morning and did not turn away. And then she recommended Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance. She had read and loved that book when my brother and I were little. I believe she understood that seeing motherhood through the eyes of a writer would validate and ground it for me in a way that nothing else could. Read More