May 5, 2017 The Lives of Others Unspeakable Affections By Edward White Brilliant Chang and the Sinophobia that birthed a moral panic in early twentieth-century London. Brilliant Chang Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Four years after The Birth of a Nation, his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, D. W. Griffith created what’s probably American cinema’s first-ever depiction of an interracial love affair. His 1919 movie Broken Blossoms centers on the relationship between a white woman and a Chinese man, a virtuous, loving couple driven apart by injustice, intolerance, and enervating poverty. The film was set in Limehouse, the notorious slum on the docks of the River Thames that was home to London’s Chinatown, and a synonym across the English-speaking world for the so-called Yellow Peril. Griffith’s portrayal of Chinese London was more positive than most. From the late nineteenth century, Limehouse attracted Britain’s most famous authors, usually on the subject of opium dens and criminal intrigue. Dickens was one of the first with Edwin Drood; twenty years later Oscar Wilde used it as a backdrop to Dorian Gray’s debauchery, and Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes there to infiltrate the capital’s underworld. But the writers most responsible for cementing Limehouse’s infamy were Thomas Burke, a British author inspired by Jack London’s take on the incipient danger of Chinese immigrants, and the pulp novelist Sax Rohmer. The latter created Fu Manchu, the evil Chinese genius bent on destroying white civilization, who became one of the most enduring literary characters of the twentieth century, inspiring a thousand and one inscrutable, amoral, and fiendishly brilliant Chinese baddies, including Dr. No and Ming the Merciless. Ridiculous caricature though he was, Fu Manchu tapped into genuine fears that white people on both sides of the Atlantic had about globalization and the Chinese diaspora. In 1922, less than a decade after the publication of the first Fu Manchu novel, Londoners were horrified to discover that a real-life Chinese supervillain lived among them in the form of Brilliant Chang, a dealer of opium and cocaine, who briefly acquired a reputation as the biggest threat to the empire since Kaiser Bill. At the time, one of the reasons Chang terrified the British public was that—in keeping with the racist stereotypes—he seemed so mysterious; nobody quite knew who he was or where he came from, though in a sense London had spent the past two hundred years inventing him. Read More
May 5, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Not Really Porn Until There’s Modern Furniture in It, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here. Last week, it came to light that the Eames lounge chair, that sleek mainstay of midcentury design, is for sale at select Costco locations. I was all set to force my way, stark raving mad, through doorbuster-style hordes of Eames fanatics. Then I saw the price tag: $3,900—apparently a handsome discount, but still too dear for me. So I had to settle instead for We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here, a photo book featuring a different, but equally iconic, chaise longue, the venerable Le Corbusier LC4. But this book, compiled by Augustine and Josephine Rockebrune, doesn’t just have pictures of furniture. That would be boring. Instead, as Claire Voon explains, it features stills from adult films in which people are fucking on the LC4: “Designed in 1928 and now attributed to Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, the LC4 champions relaxation, with a frame capable of reclining at any angle. This, perhaps, is what may make it a popular prop for sex, along with the fact that you can customize an order in buttery full-grain leather, seductive pony or cow skin, or luscious beige canvas upholstery … [The book] is over 200 pages of twenty-first-century nude or scantily clad women kneeling on the chaise in black pleather stilettos, chained and roped to it, or bent over its innovative, chromed tubular steel frame. At times, no one’s on the chair at all; it is but a humble emblem of refinement lurking in a corner amidst the wild, hold-no-bars action unfolding around its approximately $4,000 frame. But set in this context—where it’s difficult to ignore for its bold, undulating form—it embodies the power dynamics between men and women, and it stands as an enduring reminder of Le Corbusier’s privilege and gendered dismissal of a mind stirring with as much creativity as his own.” While we’re looking at porn, here’s Frederick McKindra on his desire for white guys—which may or may not be, he writes, a viable form of protest against whiteness. Porn bears him out on this: “I just went and sulked by looking at Rogan Hardy videos on HarlemHooksup.net. Hardy is the undisputed King of Race-Baiting Black Bottoms; when his white tops call him ‘nigger,’ he just grins through his glazed lips. Videos like these shored up what I knew: that my own sexual desire for white men was born of a drive to destabilize power. I hoped my willing submission as a black man would challenge what white lovers thought they knew about me, and undermine the assumptions they had about black men’s innate aggression. Processing what it meant to abdicate to power, to survive it, to transfigure it, was useful to me. I’ve never had a relationship with a white person, friendship or otherwise, innocent of this dynamic. I feel affirmed, sometimes haughty, at how adroitly I look at whiteness. The complaints from white guys in my life—that I shouldn’t racialize things all the time, that they never look at themselves this way—only compounds my glee.” Read More
May 4, 2017 First Person It Is Known By Rajeev Balasubramanyam From a 1952 Air France poster advertising flights to Corsica. As France flirts with political Armageddon, my mind returns to the gentleman with whom I shared a flight in 1996. I was returning from India on an Air France flight bound for Paris. He was sitting to my right, an unshaven, tousle-haired man in his thirties who smoked incessantly and refused all food, drinking only coffee. I asked him where he was from and he said Corsica. The Corsicans, he explained, were “the most dangerous people in the world,” and he showed me the tiny knives tattooed on his shoulder. I can’t be sure, but I believe each represented someone he had killed. I asked him if he had enjoyed his time in India and he said, “I hate it.” He was “too sensitive,” he explained: the poverty hurt his feelings. I asked if he had liked the food, at least, and he replied, “French food is the best in the world.” When I suggested this was a matter of opinion, he banged his fist on the pullout tray and said: “NO. IT IS KNOWN.” Read More
May 4, 2017 Arts & Culture To Have and Have Not By Robert K. Elder New letters shed light on Hemingway’s unrequited love and early life. Letters from 1918 written to Frances Coates, for whom Hemingway carried a torch. Next to the letters is Hemingway’s high school graduation photo, which Coates kept in her dressing room for years. On a recent afternoon in Boston, Betsy Fermano walked through an exhibition titled “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars” at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Among the artifacts—vintage photos, paintings, and handwritten stories from Hemingway—she spotted a family name in a manuscript on display: Coates. Frances Elizabeth Coates was Fermano’s grandmother and Hemingway’s high-school classmate. He used a version of her name—“Liz Coates”—in his sexually charged 1923 story “Up in Michigan,” and her name resurfaces elsewhere in his work. That’s because Hemingway was infatuated with her. The two briefly dated, though almost no one, until now, knew of their history. For Fermano, sixty-seven, a retired development executive, it wasn’t a surprise: she has ninety-nine-year-old letters from Hemingway that no one outside the family knows about. “This is a really fascinating find,” says Sandra Spanier, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. “To find early letters like that—that’s extremely rare. It’s a fresh view of him. It would be of great interest to a future biographer.” Read More
May 4, 2017 On the Shelf You Lost Your Glove, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I took the photo above outside The Paris Review’s offices in December 2014. I still think about it sometimes, mainly when I’m listening to Prince’s Batman soundtrack or zip-lining between New York rooftops in my vulcanized rubber Batman costume, but also in lonelier, more solemn moments. It turns out there’s a whole subculture devoted to photos of lost gloves. Genevieve Walker, a kind of lost-glove pioneer, has given plenty of thought to the preponderance of these gloves, and of those who pause to photograph them. She writes, “I collect single, lost gloves. Photos of them—taken by me, and exceedingly by friends and strangers. Lost gloves have been found to grow proportionally with the local human population, in all climates—it is a symbiotic relationship, like with pigeons, stray cats, or certain viruses. Ubiquitous as they are, once one makes a habit of cataloging lost gloves in their natural habitat, one’s eye becomes keener, and even the most peculiar, unknown subspecies reveal themselves … What I’m interested in is the way gloves are like birds, having migratory paths, genus and family; how they carry identifying marks like a butterfly’s wing. I am interested in the gloves’ situational patterns, their socioeconomic indicators bright as labels. But most of all, I marvel that you, now, continue to send them to me, snapshots of the lost gloves of your life … ” While we’re in this innocent, childlike frame of mind, here’s Hattie Crisell on Eleanor Macnair, who reinterprets classic photographs entirely in Play-Doh: “Macnair’s colorful, three-dimensional homages are a labor of love: building one takes up to seven hours. The human figures are modeled as nudes first, then covered with clothes to give them a lifelike shape. ‘It’s a bit like when you’re a child and you have the cutout dressing-up dolls,’ Macnair says. She creates the Play-Doh image late at night, then leaves it under a cloth while she sleeps. With the morning light, she begins to photograph. ‘I’m totally working against the clock. The edges start to crack and dry, even within three or four hours, and the colors start to fade.’ Once she has what she needs, she immediately dismantles it, saving as much clay as possible to be used again. The project, she says, is partly about making art feel less rarefied and more democratic.” Read More
May 3, 2017 Our Correspondents H.D. Notebook By Anthony Madrid H.D. Last year, having been invited to participate in a public discussion of the poet H.D., I decided to explore H.D.’s fictional works, virtually none of which appeared during her lifetime. Many of these, even just ten years ago, were available only to scholars willing to visit the Beinecke at Yale, where most of her manuscripts and papers are housed. But almost everything’s in print now. Though I admire H.D.’s poems, I did not expect my prose project to be pleasurable, and it wasn’t. I don’t know how many of her novels and novellas I read, but I found all of them (with one exception, dealt with below) annoying. Mainly they are exactly what people mean by “self-indulgent.” The reader is exposed to the spectacle of the writer hunting around for a style worthy of her personal melodrama. Inefficiency and joyless obscurity abound. Even the one I liked is not a great book or anything. But none of this matters. I say I didn’t find the project pleasurable, but I did find it engrossing. I became very invested in coming to some kind of reckoning with H.D.’s personality, mainly because I saw that over the years I’ve known and been friends with quite a few H.D.s—at least four. The key difference being that the H.D.s in my life could never have written any of H.D.’s mature poetry. But all of them could have written her novels. Except for Bid Me to Live. Read More