April 26, 2017 First Person Losing By Brian Cullman They questioned some of the scholarship kids first, boys with cheap-cut shirts and shabby jackets—the ones who tied their neckties as if they meant it, not with the shrug of boys who’d been born with a tailor in the next room. This was at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, high on a hill overlooking a factory town where shoes were sold with metal tips, so if you dropped your hammer you wouldn’t break your toes. Next they questioned the rougher kids, the ones who’d give the gym coach the finger while he was watching, ones who laughed in chapel and smirked during grace. Read More
April 26, 2017 Our Correspondents Survivor By Jane Stern A hypochondriac’s guide to rare diseases. I recently made a wrong turn out of the parking lot of the Danbury Fair Mall, where I’d indulged in a bag of Auntie Anne’s pretzel nuggets and a pair of cheap earrings at Claire’s. Bemoaning my love for this soulless crap—and not paying attention to my route—I found myself at the entrance to NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders. Read More
April 26, 2017 On the Shelf Washingtonian Wiener, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Canova’s nude Washington. Go on, take a peek at my search history. You’ll see a lot of this: “Nude presidents.” “Nude dead presidents.” “George Washington naked.” “Presidential peen.” “Free naked U.S. American founding fathers pixxx.” “Portrait of signing of Declaration of Independence where all signers are nude.” It has been a long road for me. I am not often delighted by what Google brings to me. But now Antonio Canova’s nineteenth-century sculpture of a totally nude George Washington—presidente numero uno, a hundred percent in the raw, not even any powdered wig—is coming to the Frick. It’s a big deal, a time to rejoice, for, as James Barron writes, we are not accustomed to exposed presidential flesh: “The first president had been dead for seventeen years by the time Canova went to work. Canova had done a nude Napoleon as the god Mars about 10 years earlier. But when it came to Washington, clothes made the man—and the statue—because his appearance mattered. ‘John Marshall, his first serious biographer, even entitled the chapter on Washington’s arrival in the world “The Birth of Mr. Washington,” ’ the historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote, ‘suggesting that he was born fully clothed and ready to assume the presidency.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne seemed to echo Marshall’s notion after posing a provocative question: ‘Did anybody ever see Washington naked?’ ‘It is inconceivable,’ Hawthorne wrote. ‘He had no nakedness, but, I imagine, was born with clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.’ ” When Virginia and Leonard Woolf started the Hogarth Press, it was all fun and games, just like running an indie press should be. But then, as Rafia Zakaria writes, Virginia got bored: “Those first afternoons, when Leonard and Virginia sat covered in ink in the drawing room of Hogarth House, learning by trial and error just how hard it was to set type and center it on the page, were charmed ones. The experience was a simulacrum of the creative process: the beloved final product did not always reflect the pains of its production. But the labors of printing always delivered the satisfaction of a real and tangible object … If Leonard’s involvement was steady, Virginia’s was mercurial, waxing and waning through her depressive and creative spells. As early as March 1924, as they got ready to publish her novel Jacob’s Room, she declared in a letter that ‘publishing one’s own books is very nervous work.’ By October 1933, when Hogarth Press turned sixteen, Virginia declared herself tired of the ‘drudgery and sweating’ and the ‘altered travel plans’ that running the publisher required. She demanded that an ‘intelligent youth’ be found to take over its day-to-day operations.” Read More
April 25, 2017 Our Correspondents Shells and Skulls By Anelise Chen Delighting in the mollusks of art history. Photo: Angela Chen. Typical of her species, the clam deactivated all of her social-media accounts on her thirtieth birthday and headed to the sea, not wanting anyone to wish her well. She was unable to explain this urge to hide on what most considered a momentous transition—thirty!—a day that’s usually reserved for last-hurrah debauchery. Instead, she Googled cabin rentals in Sag Harbor, where she and her husband would be unlikely to run into anyone they knew. On the drive out, a misty rain cloaked the empty highway. It rained all night, so they stayed in, drank bourbon, and watched The Shining in bed. The next morning, when she went out for a jog along the shore, the liminal space between sea and sky looked fuzzy, indistinct. She searched for something to latch on to. In the city, she tended to look up, searching for scalloped edges and glimpses of figures in lit windows, but by the sea, she looked at the sand. Whatever she picked up she put back down, knowing from experience that these objects would never be as beautiful as they were at first glance, half submerged and luminous in the frayed light. * She couldn’t explain it then, the urge to hide on one’s birthday, but recently she read a passage in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost about the molting behavior of hermit crabs that explained it perfectly. Hermit crabs have soft, vulnerable bodies, so they scavenge for shells left behind by mollusks. Aside from shedding their exoskeletons, this shell-search is the riskiest part of a crab’s life. Between scurrying out of a too-small shell to a better-fitted one, any number of things can happen: she could get eaten, lose her old shell to an opportunist crab, or get dragged off by a male crab for mating. At the cusp of the molt, the last thing she wants to do is call attention to herself, so she buries herself in the sand or waits underneath a rock. Read More
April 25, 2017 Arts & Culture Rosamond Lehmann, Literary Star By Emma Garman In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann’s first novel, Dusty Answer, they had modest hopes of its success. Young authors and tales of youthful experience dominated the market at the time, a craze sparked by Alec Waugh’s autobiographical best seller The Loom of Youth, published in 1917, when he was nineteen. And twenty-six-year-old Lehmann had written a book “of decided quality,” thought Chatto director Harold Raymond, who nevertheless told her that they didn’t expect to make any money. The novel received a few reviews following its publication at the end of April 1927. “This is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time,” said The Spectator. “But the story is too sad for popular taste.” Such an assessment was, it seemed, borne out by the less-than-brisk sales. Then a week later, the Sunday Times ran a review by the poet and critic Alfred Noyes, who was an old friend of Lehmann’s father’s, and whose praise was the stuff of debut novelists’ dreams: It is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation … The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art. The world took notice, and an overnight literary phenomenon was born. During the summer of 1927, a whirlwind of publicity enveloped Lehmann, to her amazement and mild chagrin. “It’s rather terrifying somehow,” she confided to Raymond, “when a thing you have made yourself, very privately, becomes so very public.” Read More
April 25, 2017 On the Shelf Strong Words About Dead Artists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Rauschenberg, Collection, 1954–55. There’s a massive Robert Rauschenberg retrospective coming to the MoMA next month, which means we can expect a host of Serious Opinions on the Significant Artist™ to appear in lofty periodicals everywhere. Look to the horizon and you can see the storm clouds gathering, as the assessors assess and the critics criticize. Jed Perl, whose lacerating take on Jeff Koons can still warm my heart on cold nights, has already rendered his verdict on Rauschenberg, and it goes mainly like this: he sucks. Perl writes, “Rauschenberg became adept at keeping admirers and detractors alike on their toes with his swaggering insouciance and Delphic-Dadaist remarks … It was in 1959, for the catalog of the exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art, that Rauschenberg dreamed up what has become his most famous statement. ‘Painting,’ he announced, ‘relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)’ It’s difficult to conceive of a more gnomic twenty-one-word declaration of principles. What on earth is Rauschenberg talking about? What does it mean to say that art can’t be ‘made’? And what is that ‘gap’ between ‘art and life’ aside from the sweet spot where Rauschenberg established his reputation? … What Rauschenberg provides his interpreters is a nearly endless succession of whims, gambits, riffs, and diversions. Many of his effects amount to little more than lessons everybody ought to have learned in Modern Art 101.” Not dissimilarly, Stephen Akey has lodged his complaints with the Emily Dickinson scholars of the world, who persist, he writes, in a laborious effort to make her poems even harder to read: “The online Emily Dickinson Archive, which reproduces the manuscripts with all their wayward calligraphy and unresolved word choices, is a necessary and laudable enterprise, but the last thing it does is make her poetry more accessible. You thought it was hard reading Emily Dickinson before? It just got harder … Maybe the chief difference between a Dickinson scholar and a Dickinson amateur (like me) is that the scholar is in love with and can justify every last dash, whereas the amateur, desperate for the guidance provided by rational punctuation, mentally supplies the missing commas, colons, semicolons, and periods not to be found in the poems themselves … Can anyone truly read these poems without editing them in her head, supplying the punctuation necessary for many of them to make a modicum of sense?” Read More