May 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Canine Cremains By Jane Stern Photo: Kippelboy Because I have owned many dogs, I have many containers of what remains of them. Without meaning to, I’ve become a hoarder of canine cremains. When one of my dogs dies, the vet will ask me how I wish to dispose of the deceased. I am at that moment of two minds. One is abject and hysterical grief. The other is: I want to get home as fast as I can, cry, and drink a lot of bourbon. So I pretty much say yes to any options the vet offers, and then I run out the door. If I lived on a farm in a rural area, I could dig a hole in the ground and bury the dog, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less. Living in suburbia, the options are more limited. I can have the dog cremated with a bunch of other dead dogs or have the dog cremated separately, after which the facility sweeps its ashes into a pretty urn or wooden box. It arrives a few weeks later with a heartfelt note and a sentimental poem. Read More
May 16, 2017 Look Thirty-One from Oaxaca By Dan Piepenbring “31,” an exhibition of works on paper by Domenico Zindato, is at Andrew Edlin Gallery through June 4. Zindato, who was born in Italy, began the project after stopping by a small shop in Mexico City, where he stumbled on an album with thirty-one sheets of handcrafted paper from Oaxaca, made with regional plants. He decided to make a “visual poem” with its contents, cutting out the sheets and painting them in vibrant colors with fine-haired brushes and nib pens. Domenico Zindato, Into the Water’s Music, 2015, ink and pastel on paper, 10″ x 16″. Read More
May 16, 2017 On the Shelf The More Ink, the Better, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A 2010 illustration by Karl Lagerfeld celebrating Gerhard Steidl. If I had me a printing press, here’s what I’d do: I’d stand by the machines all day as they spat out inky paper, and I’d close my eyes and huff the paper, fanning the wet air toward me with a flowery gesture. And from the scent alone I would render a verdict on the quality of the print job. “No, no, this smells all wrong. Do it over.” Or: “This … is my masterpiece.” There lives among us one man, Gerhard Steidl, who does something like this for a living—his printing is an art form, his fastidiousness is renowned, and he takes enormous pride in mastering every minute detail of the bookmaking process. Profiling the legendary Steidl for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes, “Among photographers and photography aficionados, Steidl’s name recognition equals that of Johannes Gutenberg: he is widely regarded as the best printer in the world. His name appears on the spine of more than two hundred photography books a year, and he oversees the production of all of them personally. Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer … Steidl seeks out the best inks, and pioneers new techniques for achieving exquisite reproductions. ‘He is so much better than anyone,’ William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of The Democratic Forest, the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. ‘Feel the pages of the books,’ he said. ‘The ink is in relief. It is that thick.’ ” Yesterday in this space, I linked to an essay by Samuel R. Delany about his experiences at a gay sex party for older men. In an interview with Junot Díaz, Delany explains that he later saw a documentary about that same sex party (it happens once a month) and that it furthered his concept of sexual radicalism: “I went to the party first … The documentary was made three months before I went to the party. But that just made it seem I was involved in the same process. And I had had sex with maybe half a dozen of the guys I subsequently saw on the screen. That was certainly a first for me … Sitting in a movie theater and looking at the screen and thinking, Yes, I’ve actually had sex with him, as you are watching him have sex with someone else (or pretend to), has got to be an experience pretty limited to the community of movie actors—perhaps the community of porn film actors. But when those communities shift radically, it means something—and not just approaching mortality. Not all explicit sex is pornographic. It can be educational, and I expect that a room full of forty- to eighty-year-olds having sex and discussing their lives would be just that: educational.” Read More
May 15, 2017 On Poetry Wax Poetic By Carson Vaughan Fonograf Editions brings poets to vinyl. To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who’s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl—the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls—is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator. “The name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,” Myles told me. “The notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.” We were discussing Aloha/irish trees, a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press Fonograf Editions—a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. In true iconoclastic fashion, they refused to edit the album, to submit it to the glossy production process that marks most professional recordings. In fact, they had already recorded the poems in a studio at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before Fonograf approached them; they didn’t know they were cutting an album at all. “It was like having your picture taken when you weren’t posing,” Myles says. Reading their poem “Sorry” on the first track, they trip on the line “let me hold your shoulders back so you look arrogant and beautiful”—restart, trip again, sigh, and mumble, “Fuck, this is so hard.” They finish, but not well. “I think I’m just gonna read that one again.” Read More
May 15, 2017 Literary Architecture Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, The Key By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. In Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s The Key, a man writes in his diary about the sexual fantasies he has been having about his wife. Hoping she’ll read it, he locks it in a drawer and leaves the key on the floor. As soon as his wife sees the key, she understands her husband’s intentions and begins, in turn, to keep her own diary. Knowing that he, too, will read it, she writes to deliberately mislead him, claiming that she hasn’t read—will never read—his diary. A perfect dovetail. The two spouses’ souls, sharing both a space and a life, never meet nor try to know each other. They intersect without ever touching. The diaries are only apparently filled with secrets and truths, as each word is carefully chosen, keeping in mind the spying partner. The reader has access only to the diaries—everything is presented to us clearly and chronologically, starting with the entry in which, on New Year’s Day, the husband writes: “This year I intend to begin writing freely about a topic which, in the past, I have hesitated even to mention here.” Read More
May 15, 2017 On the Shelf Speak, Prairie Dog, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sup, dog. People think they’re so special, with their tools and their language and their consciousness. “There’s nothing like us in the universe,” people say. “We’re people!” It’s enough to make you sick. How grand, then, to see the pillars of anthropocentrism begin to fall. Con Slobodchikoff, a biology professor, has been studying the sounds of prairie dogs for three decades, and it’s his belief that they have a distinct language. They know what’s up. Whenever intruders approach their little prairie-dog towns, they can sound very precise alarms. Slobodchikoff told Ferris Jabr that he prefers the term language to communication: “Calling it communication sets up that us-versus-them divide … I don’t think there is a gap. I think it all integrates in there. You can go to Barnes & Noble and pick up book after book that says humans are the only ones with language. That cheats our understanding of animal abilities and inhibits the breadth of our investigation. I would like to see people give animals more credence, and I think it’s happening now, slowly. But I would like to push it along a little faster.” Masha Gessen with a quick reminder that the best words are the most precise words, for in them we know where we stand: “A Russian poet named Sergei Gandlevsky once said that in the late Soviet period he became obsessed with hardware-store nomenclature. He loved the word secateurs, for example. Garden shears, that is. Secateurs is a great word. It has a shape. It has weight. It has a function. It is not ambiguous. It is also not a hammer, a rake, or a plow. It is not even scissors. In a world where words were constantly used to mean their opposite, being able to call secateurs secateurs—and nothing else—was freedom.” Read More