April 14, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Conduits, Cockroaches, Colored Paper By The Paris Review From Ben Gijsemans’s debut graphic novel, Hubert. It seems silly to ask, but did you know that there were loads of women making art in the postwar era, before the advent of the feminist movement, women who were central to the development of various abstract idioms but who were largely marginalized in male-dominated conversations about abstraction? Surprising, but not surprising, right? MoMA’s new show, “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,” which opens tomorrow, seeks to rectify this omission by gathering some fifty artists and more than a hundred paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, and fiber works made between the end of World War II and the late sixties. One of my favorite paintings is there: Lee Krasner’s Gaea, a large canvas on which pink and white ovoid shapes burst out of a dark purple background. I discovered Eleanore Mikus’s gluey white canvas, from which indistinct shapes begin to surface, like forms from a block of marble; Anne Ryan’s small, profound collages made from colored paper, sandpaper, cloth, string; Magdalena Abakanowicz’s imposing, animate yellow-orange woven sisal wall piece; and so many more—room after room of stunning, brilliant work. —Nicole Rudick Constance DeJong’s novel Modern Love turns thirty this year, and it’s out in a striking new facsimile edition from Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse. The book comes kicking and screaming from a vortex of polyphony. Its two hundred pages wander from the downtown New York of the seventies to India to Oregon to Spain in the time of the Armada; it declaims on everything from Elizabethan fashion to the joys of cohabiting with cockroaches, with a long passage that’s straight-up science fiction. All of this should induce vertigo, or at the very least whiplash; instead the novel enshrouds the reader in a kind of patchwork quilt, comfortable even as it frays at the edges. Seemingly frenetic, Modern Love is ordered with great care; beneath its constant digression it settles into a ruminative, almost stately pace, encouraging capacious feeling on anxiety, sex, death, and work, often all at once. “I’m fanatical about sequence,” DeJong told Bomb recently, “and how sense and meaning can be made from a system of order that isn’t recognizable as alphabetical, chronological—one that has a different mechanism to the structure. That has always been fuel for my writing, and it has never gone away.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
April 14, 2017 The Lives of Others Otto the Strange By Edward White Otto Peltzer—gay, androgynous, intellectual, and modern—represented a new model of male perfection in Weimar Germany. Otto Peltzer training at Georgetown University, while on a visit to the United States, 1927. Courtesy Library of Congress. From the start of the Enlightenment to the end of World War II, there was hardly a strand of German culture that didn’t look to Ancient Greece for guidance and inspiration. Winckelmann, Goethe, and Wagner were all enchanted by the spell of Hellenism; Hitler contended that Greek civilization had actually been built by a band of wandering Germans back in the mystical depths of Iron Age prehistory. What else, ran his illogic, other than Germanic heritage could have been responsible for the Spartans’ pioneering eugenics, the majesty of golden-age Athens, and Alexander’s epic feats of conquest? To gather proof, he established archaeological digs in Crete, Corinth, Argos, Athens, and several other locations. Unsurprisingly, the excavations turned up little, but the Nazis had other ways of spelling out the Führer’s theory—chief among which were the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Ever since Baron de Coubertin had launched the modern Olympics in 1896, German participation had been highly controversial. Many abroad deemed the nation’s militarism and nationalism contrary to the spirit of the movement, and plenty of Germans considered the Olympics an internationalist carnival of wet liberalism, a corruption of an admirable Greek tradition rather than its resuscitation. Hitler described the Los Angeles games of ’32 as a “plot of Freemasons and Jews.” Four years later, though, he’d recognized the Olympics’ potential as a propaganda tool. Preceded by a torch relay that stretched from Olympia to Berlin, the ’36 games provided an emphatic symbolic message about the supposed genetic thread that connected the original Olympians with the people of the Third Reich. Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary of the event communicated that the Greek veneration of strength, discipline, and physical beauty was inherently Germanic, and vice versa. When Discobolus comes to life as a young German, toned, muscular, and vigorous, Riefenstahl is telling us that her compatriots had beaten the competition before the starting pistol had been fired: the Germans alone were the inheritors of the minds and bodies that had allowed Greece to soar. Read More
April 14, 2017 On the Shelf Talking Is Overrated, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Talking has never done much for people. A speech act is a lot of hooey, if you ask me. Singing—that’s where the action is. It’s got all the expressiveness of language, without all that language. In her interview with Ben Lerner, the artist Steffani Jemison discusses—among other things—her interest in musical systems as a potential form of communication, especially among marginalized cultures: “It began with my interest in the work of a nineteenth-century composer named François Sudre who developed Solresol, an artificial universal language designed at a time when individual nation-states were consolidating in Europe. Sudre envisioned ‘speaking’ through the seven pitches of the diatonic scale, or the syllables assigned to those pitches in the solfège singing system, or really any system with seven units … A pre-Esperanto musical Esperanto. Every word is a combination of pitches. So a word might be (sings) do-re, which means ‘you.’ Or it might be [she sings] do-mi-sol-re, which means ‘power.’ Each melody indicates a different word. The symmetrical reversal of the melody has the opposite meaning. So re-sol-mi-do means ‘the opposite of power,’ however one might understand that. Of course, artificial languages don’t work, but I’m interested in why they recur at two extremes: first, in utopian visions of logical, frictionless communication (like Solresol); second, in completely opaque private languages like the kind I invented to write in my diary when I was a kid. Black Americans have a long history of creating and sustaining private and culturally specific languages and codes.” It’s important to sample the cuisines of other nations, especially when those cuisines are mass-produced and cheaply imported as part of the inexorable march of global capital. To that end, Talia Lavin has some great news: Russia’s best fast-food chain has arrived in America. She writes, “Teremok, a low-key purveyor of Russian staples, is almost comically ubiquitous in Moscow; a map of its locations shows a city Dalmatian-spotted with kiosks and restaurants, all boasting the company’s signature red nesting-doll logo … The two New York branches—in Union Square and Chelsea—are the chain’s first forays outside Russia, and are the result of a process years in the making. Why America? In an interview with the Russian magazine Forum Daily, the chain’s founder, Mikhail Goncharov, had a simple answer: ‘It’s the motherland of fast food’ … Buckwheat groats—known in Russia, where they are omnipresent, as grechnevaya kasha—have been repackaged as a ‘superfood’; the familiar Russian beet is touted for its vitamins.” Read More
April 13, 2017 Our Correspondents Clam Down By Anelise Chen Anelise Chen is the Daily’s newest correspondent. Her column will explore the scientific phylum Mollusca. This week, a clam has an identity crisis. James M. Sommerville, Ocean Life. She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened. Last fall, after a rib-bruising bike crash caused by momentary inattentiveness and conditions of reduced visibility (sobbing while cycling) the mollusk had briefly succumbed to an episode of hysteria, during which her mother kept texting her to “clam down.” Clam down, she demanded in that sober, no-nonsense way. At first, the clam looked all around her, like, Who, me? Until she realized that her mother was addressing her. * It made sense. Since the clam’s separation from her partner, she had been consuming a lot of calcium carbonate. This is what clams and other shell-building animals use to make their shells. She kept rolls of them in her bag, and they got whittled down throughout the day with alarming speed. On her desk, beside her usual writing implements—pen, notepad—was a flip-top container that was more fun to feed off of; it rattled percussively when she shook the tabs out into her palm. These tabs were tropically flavored, in delicate pastel colors. Humans were not supposed to ingest more than ten per day, but clams could eat them as needed. Both species possessed a stomach, and hers hurt most of the time. Read More
April 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Salinger’s Nightmare By Bill Barich An unemployed actor tracked down Salinger to get his permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye. J. D. Salinger on November 20, 1952. Photo: San Diego Historical Society In 1953, J. D. Salinger fled Manhattan for rural Cornish, New Hampshire, hoping to protect his privacy and find the solitude he needed for his work. The Catcher in the Rye, which spent thirty weeks on the New York Times’ best-seller list, had generated immeasurable publicity and adulation for Salinger, who wanted none of it. Among his new suitors were such Hollywood bigwigs as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, both vying for the screen rights to Catcher. They failed to secure Salinger’s approval, as did many others, in turn—but that didn’t stop Bill Mahan, an unemployed former child star and devoted fan from Los Angeles, from giving it a shot. In the early sixties, he resolved to claim the film rights himself, even if it meant disturbing Salinger at home. Mahan’s account of his unlikely adventure can be found in his papers at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. On December 1, 1961, he wrote to Salinger by registered mail to share his vision for turning Catcher into an independent feature, with the author retaining “artistic control.” At the age of thirty-one, Mahan had no credits as a producer or a director, and very little money, so he proposed to shoot the film “art-house” style, without changing a word of dialogue. Given the shoestring budget, Salinger would, of course, have to grant him the rights for free. In hopes of sealing the deal, Mahan wrote that he would arrive in Cornish on December 13, whether he’d heard from Salinger or not. Read More
April 13, 2017 On the Shelf If You Must Spy, Do It Silkily, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Emily Hahn. Rarely does a piece of writing combine my two all-time favorite interests: midcentury cryptography and secret silk squares. Today there’s such a piece. It’s about Emily Hahn, who was once, as Taras Grescoe writes, “one of America’s most widely read, and notorious, literary adventurers.” Hahn had an affair with a Chinese aristocrat; she picked up an opium habit, because why not; she held role-playing parties in her apartment and could often be found puffing cigars. And, as Grescoe reveals, the U.S. government once suspected she was a spy: “In a file in Hahn’s papers at the Lilly Library, in Bloomington, Indiana, I’d found a square of white silk, covered from edge to edge with typewritten names, cryptic messages, and several lines of Japanese poetry. The file also contained letters, on F.B.I. stationery, indicating that customs agents had discovered the silk square sewn into a sleeve of her daughter’s dress. Hahn, suspected of spying for the Japanese, was detained and interrogated for several hours. The silk cloth was sent to Washington to be examined for coded messages. In the files, I found a letter from the Treasury Department, sent four months later, acknowledging its return. But I couldn’t be certain what, if anything, the cryptographers had discovered. I was hoping [Hahn’s daughter Carola] Vecchio could explain at least some of the messages to me.” Our editor, Lorin Stein, interviews Richard Price about the role Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn played in his genesis as a writer. Price first read the novel when he was seventeen, on an interminable bus ride to Ithaca: “I’ve always been attracted to what I guess would be loosely called social realism. Sort of urban oriented, cement and working-class and squalling babies … I always found it a little grim. It felt not so much like a novel to take you away but a novel to convince you of a certain point of view about social justice. And I always found that a little leaden. But I liked the subjects. And when I had read Last Exit to Brooklyn as a kid, and specifically the first chapter, ‘Another Day Another Dollar,’ it was like he found a way to write about the same things but in almost incantatory bebop way. He was part of that scene in the late fifties, early sixties where jazz influenced a lot of writers. He had a lyricism to the work … I just felt like, If I’m gonna write about this, if this is the subject that draws me, I wanna have rhythm. I wanna have a little Selby bebop in the way I write.” Read More