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
April 28, 2017 From the Archive Straight from the Horse’s Mouth By Dan Piepenbring Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, wood, ramp, and speaker, 2.5′ x 22′ x 30′. Photo: Ealan Wingate and Bernadette Mayer The artist and poet Vito Acconci has died at seventy-seven. Acconci is best known for his performance pieces, which shocked audiences in the early seventies—especially Seedbed, which a New York Times profile last summer described with admirable concision: “he constructed an angled false floor at the Sonnebend Gallery in SoHo and hid himself beneath it with a microphone, speaking luridly to the people who walked above him, masturbating as he spoke.” Before he became an artist, Acconci was a writer, and in this line, too, he excelled at provocation. The Paris Review published a pair of eyebrow-raising poems by him in our Summer 1968 issue. At that time, Acconci would’ve been fresh out of his M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa, where, as the Times tells it, one of his short stories “provoked a minor riot.” It featured a dismembered man who became a living sculpture, and it started like this: Read More
April 28, 2017 On the Shelf Same Ol’ Shit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A sample of Basquiat’s work with the tag SAMO©. I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo, but all the good ones are taken. Part of the genome sequence of a polar bear? Taken. Abraham Lincoln holding a boom box over his head like John Cusack in Say Anything? Taken. Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the Chevy logo? Taken. And now the poet Morgan Parker, whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, has just claimed the mother of all tats. Amanda Petrusich went with her to get it: “Parker had saved a photo on her phone of the tattoo she wanted to get, a graffiti tag that read ‘samo.’ In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the tag was ubiquitous on the walls and in the stairwells of downtown New York City, often painted by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his collaborator, Al Diaz. The word is a phonetic shortening of the phrase ‘same ol’ shit’ and thus implies a certain kind of psychic exhaustion … It took about fifteen minutes before the tattoo artist wiped the last streaks of blood from Parker’s skin. She admired his work. ‘It’s me reminding myself that I’ve always been this person,’ she said later, looking at it. ‘It becomes this kind of affirmation, and I like the idea of taking something that’s in the vernacular, and yet it’s hard to define. It’s a word that’s written on the soul. It’s a thing that we know deeply.’ ” Yo Zushi on Leonora Carrington, the artist and novelist who left behind a privileged life in England to pursue the creative life—and, oh, while she was at it, she eluded the grasp of the Nazis, too: “Her life was an extended refutation of convention … In this centenary year of her birth, Carrington, who died in 2011, is at last receiving the attention she deserves. Her shorter fiction, compiled in The Debutante and Other Stories, reveals an imagination that could transfigure horror into enchantment, and the human into the bestial. Yet her most significant achievement is her paintings. In Self-Portrait (1937–38), a wild-haired Carrington sits on a chair in front of a rocking horse, communing with a hyena. We see in the window behind her a real white horse, running free; our eyes are drawn to it by the room’s outlines. Surrealism prided itself in defying logic, but there is a logic here—one of emotional sense, if not literal meaning. Her life was made of multiple escapes. With that galloping horse, how vividly she evokes a longing for freedom.” Read More