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
May 3, 2017 Look A History of the Evidence By Sandra S. Phillips In 1977, two young artists living in the San Francisco Bay Area, both recently out of art school, published a book of photographs they had found in the files of local corporations, government agencies, and research institutions. Somehow, through a combination of innocence and bravado, the two persuaded the guardians of those files, who were perhaps, in retrospect, even more innocent, to let the visitors in and not only see what was there but take some of it away with them—often for free. In many cases, these keepers of publicity shots and librarians of research files were persuaded not only by the seriousness of the two men, but by a letter on government stationery stating that they had received government funds to pursue a research project and would be granted an exhibition at an honorable museum where the materials they found would be displayed. They called this book and its accompanying show Evidence. Today we are more accustomed to seeing pictures plucked from their original context and put on the wall of a museum or published as objects of artistic value, all without identifying or instructional text. At the time Evidence was published, however, such a decontextualized presentation of photography, especially photographs made for the purpose of record, was a new phenomenon and directed toward a still relatively tiny audience—those interested in photography as a kind of art. Yet the book proved to be a modest bombshell. It was elusive and poetic, it needed the viewer’s active thought and engagement, it was not strictly speaking political, in those most political of times, and it was a challenge to those who thought they knew what art photographs looked like. Thanks to a renewed interest in conceptualism, and now also a regard for photography’s central role in contemporary art, this modest book now seems premonitory rather than dated or quaint. Its republication is a tribute to the continued resonance of these pictures. Read More
May 3, 2017 On the Shelf Could I Please Steal Your Movie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Satyajit Ray. As is by now well known, Hollywood—real, old-timey, cigar-chomping, tush-squeezing, cocktails-in-the-back-of-the-limousine Hollywood—was and is a loathsome place. Imagine an elaborate machine designed to suck the marrow out of an art form and turn it into money—you got it, buddy! And if you were a talented, eagle-eyed filmmaker from the subcontinent, well, forget about it, they’d eat your soul. Or try to, anyway. In 1967, Satyajit Ray, who’d directed the Apu trilogy in India, visited Hollywood in hopes of realizing his latest film, The Alien, which Columbia Pictures had agreed to bankroll. Roy expected a degree of autonomy; instead he confronted “the hum of machinery in my ears” as he was chauffeured around Los Angeles and asked to sign away the rights to his own screenplay. The movie was never made—but later, after Ray’s screenplay had been circulating in California for decades, traces of it showed up in films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty writes, “Where Ray wrote his own screenplays, preferred to operate the camera as often as possible, composed his own music, designed publicity posters and fonts, the studios of the West Coast were known for the scale of their operations and compartmentalized efficiency, so that by the time a film went to the floors its appeal for different audiences would have been sorted out, and everyone in the cast and crew—from the director to the actors to the set workers and sound technicians, all protected by their respective unions—everyone worked in fixed roles to advance that appeal. What has worked once will work again, the Hollywood credo went; prior success was desirable because it could be endlessly replicated. Hollywood, like every longstanding establishment, had a house-style guide.” You’d think the culture wars were over, given that the Christian right united behind a presidential candidate who bragged about sexually assaulting women. You are wrong, though. We live in a time when enterprising Jesus-smooching types are still trying to launch Christian magazines for teen girls. Witness Brio, whose cover lines include “Do You Love Stuff More Than God?” and “Is It OK to Pray for a Boyfriend?” Liam Stack writes: “While Teen Vogue recently published a guide to gifts you can buy a friend after an abortion, Brio has featured reader testimonials on how to avoid the temptations of premarital sex (‘I began struggling to keep my thoughts godly when Satan tried to draw me out of my purity,’ wrote Leah, age sixteen, in 2009.) Sorcha Brophy, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who grew up reading Brio, said the magazine aims to ‘normalize being a Christian teen’ by telling readers it can be cool to go to church and shun drugs and partying. But she said its emphasis on moral uprightness can also create a lot of pressure. As an example, Ms. Brophy pointed to a feature she encountered during her research: a pop culture quiz that deducted points from a reader’s score for correctly answered questions about mainstream music videos and celebrity gossip.” Read More