May 2, 2017 On the Shelf I See You in Your Car, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Mike Mandel, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. What’s your most embarrassing hobby? Me, I like to take tens of thousands of dollars of photography equipment to a nice, busy intersection—Times Square at rush hour, say—and take intimate close-ups of people in their cars. I know it sounds creepy now, but it didn’t used to be, I promise. The photographer Mike Mandel, for instance, used to do it all the time. But he was nineteen, and he grew up in simpler times, when not everyone with a camera was presumed to be a pervert. In the Los Angeles of the seventies, as he explained to Hattie Crisell, people were more inclined to mug for the camera, though some of them were spooked by it, too: “He saw the automobile as an American icon and a home in itself, where people would spend hours of their time. Walking to an intersection half a block from his house, he began to take candid photographs of drivers. He used a wide-angle lens, which required him to stand close to the cars. ‘It wasn’t like I was looking at them from a distance—I wanted them to respond to me in some way,’ he explains. And respond they did: the images show couples grinning at him, children scowling, and one lady flipping a manicured finger. ‘I think today there might have been a lot more paranoia about being surveilled or something, but in those days it was maybe a more naïve time. For the most part, people thought it was kind of funny, and responded in a jovial way, and I had a lot of fun doing it.’ ” Quick, name one thing that Louise Erdrich will never, ever write about. I bet you said Long Range Acoustic Devices, as any sane person would. But wouldn’t you know it—sign of the times—that’s exactly the topic she’s chosen for a new essay: “The LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, was first used in 2009 to control protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Since then, it has been purchased by more than sixty countries to disperse demonstrators. Originally developed to deter pirates at sea, it has been notoriously used by Japanese whaling fleets against Sea Shepherd Conservation boats and helicopters. The military-grade device can project voice messages and eardrum rupturing ‘alarm tones’ over a distance of two miles or more via a thirty- to sixty-degree beam … LRAD’s effect on people is devastating. But in a moving act of cultural transformation, the art collective Postcommodity is using LRAD in a radically different manner. The innocuous-looking gray LRAD speakers are installed in Athens, Greece, and the more softly pitched acoustical beam is directed at the archeological site of Aristotle’s Lyceum. Here, LRAD is used to speak to the origins of Western civilization, not in weaponized tones, but in the language of the human spirit … People who have been subjected to LRAD report its haunting effect. Sounds traveling via the directed beam create phantom speakers. A voice, for instance, seems to emerge from an invisible person right in front of you. The LRAD sound beam ‘gets in your head.’ For one hundred days in Aristotle’s Lyceum, ghosts are speaking to ghosts. Restless contemporary spirits are interrogating the dead. Instead of broadcasting military orders, the art installation’s LRAD broadcasts questions.” Read More
May 1, 2017 In Memoriam Jean Stein, 1934–2017 By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Brigitte LaCombe We were heartbroken to learn that Jean Stein, the writer and editor who chronicled the venal underside of celebrity, has died at eighty-three. Stein led a storied life. When she was still a teenager, she interviewed William Faulkner, an exchange that appeared in this magazine in 1956. By the time she was in her early twenties, she’d earned a spot on The Paris Review’s masthead as an editor; not long after, she worked with Clay Felker, of Esquire. With George Plimpton, she edited Edie: American Girl, an oral history of Edie Sedgwick; an excerpt appeared in the Review’s Summer 1980 issue. The pair also edited American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy. Read More
May 1, 2017 From the Archive The First of May (with a Daffodildo) By Jeffery Gleaves Daffodils—or daffodildos? May Swenson’s “Daffodildo,” from our Summer 1993 issue, is an erotic-nature-poem-cum-tribute to Emily Dickinson, whom she intimately refers to as “Emily.” The poem, conveniently set on May 1, finds the narrator touring Dickinson’s home and visiting her grave. It takes a hard look at the distance between a person and a persona, while subtly teasing out a latent eroticism in Dickinson and the objects she’s left behind. In an elegiac homage of sorts, Swenson channels her best Dickinsonian slant rhyme and cadences, as evidenced in the first few lines: Read More
May 1, 2017 Look Twisted and Hidden By Dan Piepenbring “Twisted & Hidden,” an exhibition of new work by the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, is at James Cohan Gallery through June 17. Combing through the trash heaps and open-air markets of Addis Ababa, Sime stockpiles and repurposes electronic detritus (“e-waste”), including cell-phone headsets, Soviet-era transistors, motherboards, electrical wires, and keyboards. The works in “Twisted & Hidden” are a continuation of his “Tightrope” series, which dramatizes the balancing act between tradition and tech. Elias Sime, Tightrope: Evolution 2, 2017, reclaimed electrical wires on panel, 91″ x 94″. Read More
May 1, 2017 On the Shelf Fiction Without Emotion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Leslie Caron reads—coolly. As those who’ve taken my expensive, profoundly eye-opening advanced writers’ seminar know, fiction is all about feelings. (I write this on the chalkboard at the start of every lesson—it’s my trademark.) If your short story lacks a rich, gooey emotional center, if it doesn’t ooze verisimilitude and nuance, why, it’s no more effective than the copy on the side of the orange-juice carton, says I. Your professors would like you to believe that this is self-evident, that it’s always been so. But fiction has a secret: it’s only a Johnny-come-lately to the world of emotional depth. A few hundred years ago, literature was a far less psychological enterprise, and people still liked it well enough. No one is quite sure why the medium reoriented itself. Julie Sedivy explains the evolution: “As noted by literary scholar Monika Fludernik, medieval authors represented characters’ mental states mainly through their direct speech and gestures, which were used to convey intense emotions in a stereotypical way—lots of hand-wringing and tearing of hair, but few subtle gestures … This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700, when it became common for characters to pause in the middle of the action, launching into monologues as they struggled with conflicting desires, contemplated the motives of others, or lost themselves in fantasy—as is familiar to anyone who’s studied the psychologically rich soliloquies of Shakespeare’s plays. Hart suggests that these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, rereading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts.” We all text dead people sometimes. It’s easier than texting living people, and it’s the only way our smartphones can help us grieve—a kind of virtual grave-site visitation. It’s probably more effective than anyone cares to admit, except when, as Amelia Tait writes, the dead seem to come back to life: “Using technology to talk to the dead is a behavior we rarely—if ever—hear anything about. If the words ‘texting the dead’ make it into the media, they are usually followed by a far more sensationalist ‘and then they text back!!!!’ Yet although messaging the deceased is popularly seen as the stuff of horror movies and trashy headlines, in reality it is simply a new, modern way to grieve … Quite frequently, however, this reply does come. After a few months—but sometimes in as little as thirty days—phone companies will reallocate a deceased person’s phone number. If someone is texting this number to ‘talk’ to their dead loved one, this can be difficult for everyone involved … Behind the sensationalist tabloid headlines of ‘texting back’ is a more mundane—and cruel—reality of pranksters pretending to be the dead relatives come back to life.” Read More
April 28, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bikes, Bogs, Bolshies By The Paris Review From You & a Bike & a Road. I’m kind of in awe of Eleanor Davis’s drawings. Her color work creates whole new worlds, but her black-and-white art is really eye-popping. In a comic last year, she made a remarkable drawing of two intertwined figures that breeds Japanese shunga with Aubrey Beardsley’s switchblade Art Nouveau. In her new book, You & a Bike & a Road, she leaves many of the drawings uninked. The comic logs her solo trip, by bike, from Phoenix to Athens, Georgia, over the course of fifty-eight days; the bare pencils accentuate the spontaneity of her adventure and her recording of it and reveal the impressive underpinning of her art. The array of forms that are so vivid in her color work come through here as layers of patterns or as gentle, articulate outlines. Her characteristic hulking but weightless figures are drawn with a fluidity that begins to approximate Saul Steinberg’s uncannily descriptive line: the quick tiny marks indicating a man’s underarm hair, the ethereal contour of enormous clouds hovering over a broad landscape, the symphonic chaos of a city scene. There is sometimes the sense that as she travels, the road and landscape exist only just ahead of her front tire, as they do for Harold and his crayon, and that making discoveries is only a matter of pushing forward, even when you don’t know if you can and even when you don’t know what lies down the road. —Nicole Rudick To mention the lost generation these days is to summon a miasma of Left Bank clichés and nostalgia for expat glamour. None of that works its way into Julia L. Mickenberg’s American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, which focuses on an entirely different sort of lostness. Forget “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”: this is “Bernice Becomes a Bolshie.” At the heart of the book is Ruth Epperson Kennell, who in 1922 left San Francisco for Siberia, where she and other like-minded Americans founded a communist colony. Kennell and her cohort valorized the working life. “We are building here,” she wrote in The Nation, “not a new Atlantis, but a new Pennsylvania.” As that decidedly unglamorous description suggests, life in the colony was full of drudgery, and the equality Kennell sought was not always in evidence. But with time she came to feel liberated in Siberia, especially when communism helped her shrug off bourgeois morality: in short order she dumped her husband, swam nude, and found love. “I seemed to move in a dream world,” she wrote, “constructed of desires I had never hoped could be realized.” Mickenberg tells Kennell’s story—and those of many other women who traded domestic servitude for Das Kapital—with flair and aplomb. And there’s not a flapper in sight. —Dan Piepenbring Read More