March 8, 2017 Bulletin Our Spring Issue: Walter Mosley, Elias Khoury, Janet Malcolm, and More By The Paris Review Our new Spring issue features an interview with Walter Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins crime series, who talks about detective fiction, black male heroes, and the literary fixation on legacy: At one point, there were very few writers—now there are so many of them. Those earlier writers were thinking about the future, and some of them even survived into the future, like Faulkner. But so what? It’s not like you’re a better writer than someone who is forgotten. Melville was completely forgotten, and then rediscovered in the twenties. What difference did that make to Melville? That idea, of trying to set yourself up for importance and legacy, to say, I’m the voice that speaks for this generation—who cares? Read More
March 8, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 6: Fissure By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. Courtesy the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The other day, I drove out to a vast expanse of desert just south of Eloy, Arizona, where geologists recently observed a fresh, large crack in the middle of the earth. The crack is one of dozens in the region, caused by pumping for water at rates faster than the aquifer can recharge. A 1949 news item from the Arizona Republic shows a Mrs. Vince Taylor of Eloy in a nearby spot, staring uncomprehendingly into a lighting-bolt-shaped hole. The report notes that at the time, the cause of the fissure was unknown. Now, people debate whether or not real-estate agents should be bound to disclose the possibility of someone’s yard splitting open, which they occasionally do. I had gotten a map to the crack from a local scientist, having lied about going out there with company. I pulled off the highway and took, as one often does in the desert, a series of progressively narrowing, informal roads, until I was driving on tracks that only a couple of other cars had driven on before. I followed my odometer carefully to the point and parked. Contrary to an image I know many visiting friends have carried in their heads, Southern Arizona is not a biblical desert, not a desert of swirling dunes shaped like soft serve, but scrubby and lush, with strange, skeletal trees, little patches of orange and yellow wildflowers, spiny grass that cracks under your shoe and plants a green so pale and yet so vibrant they look fluorescent. Read More
March 8, 2017 Arts & Culture Women Hold Up Half the Sky By Nicole Rudick See Red Women’s Workshop, Women’s Day March (detail), 1975. A calendar for 1977 by the British art collective See Red Women’s Workshop shows the month of February as a chutes-and-ladders-type “game for working women.” Wealthy daddies and husbands can help the player swiftly advance, but the game’s hazards are many: “Careers officer suggests domestic science,” “Trouble finding nursery—needs part-time work,” “Shopping in lunch hour, housework in evening—exhausted.” Even the end of the game is booby-trapped: “Over 40, promotion given to younger man.” The other months in the calendar spin out the game’s thematic pitfalls: racism, sexual orientation, housework drudgery, social-service cuts. August exhorts women of different ethnicities to unite and organize against the National Front. November excoriates the discomfort inherent in beauty regimens—girdles, waxing, heels. September revises a child’s primer so that Jane thinks, “Stuff this! It’s about time I got myself out these sexist books and started giving girls an example of all the other things we can do!” Jane’s purposeful finger to the patriarchy embodies the aim of See Red. In 1974, a group of women answered an ad calling for those in the visual arts to gather to help promote the women’s liberation movement and counter the prevailing negative images of women in advertising and the media. Like many women at the time, the members of See Red were disillusioned with the Left; the story they relate is an old one: “We found ourselves marginalized within these campaigns and were expected to stay in the background, keep quiet and make the tea.” The members worked collectively and non-hierarchically: from idea to concept to design to production, decisions and process were undertaken as a group. Notably, the new book See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974–1990 lists no authors in the front matter, and the essay detailing the group’s history is written in the first-person plural. Read More
March 8, 2017 On the Shelf Now Mend My Silks, Boy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Les Modes magazine, 1910. Happy International Women’s Day. A century ago, in Paris, as the Great War raged, women were putting on pairs of coveralls and taking to the factories, trying to balance gender norms with the demands of wartime; men, flummoxed to find women at work, behaved generally like oafs, as is their wont. An exhibition in Paris, “Mode et Femmes, 14/18,” explores the upheaval surrounding women’s fashions at the time, and its deeper causes. Rebecca Appel writes, “If the war accelerated modernization already underway, fashion also reflected profound anxiety about women’s liberation … As men were called up, women took traditionally male jobs (driving trams, delivering mail, working in factories), and their clothes reflected both the cultural ambivalence about this shift, and its temporary nature. Nurses excepted, most women wore their own dresses on the job, denoting official roles with homemade insignia … the government eventually mandated that factories provide protective workwear for women, but images of female industrial workers in men’s gear generated biting criticism in the press. One 1917 magazine caricature in the exhibition shows a bar scene, with a woman in coveralls talking to a male factory worker. ‘What’s your husband doing?’ he asks. ‘He’s at home mending my silks,’ the woman responds.” Not nearly enough has changed in the intervening century. Eliza Starbuck Little, writing on Chris Kraus’s concept of the “Serious Young Woman,” says, “One of the first times I TAed a philosophy class, the professor I was working with remarked on what a great choice I was for the position … I was a woman of color, and it was good for students to see someone who looked like me at the front of the classroom in a field that struggled with diversity. I was crushed; my work in philosophy stood at the center of my self-understanding in a way that my appearance never had. But he wasn’t wrong. Teaching is the academic counterpart of artistic performance. Standing in front of a classroom full of students, you are forced to appear before a group of human beings who are old enough to have a complete set of acculturated stereotypes but who have, for the most part, only just begun reflecting on them. A colleague of mine noted offhandedly that as women, we have only two pedagogical archetypes to work with—mother and lover, each authoritative in her way but neither one admired for her philosophical genius. When my anger subsided, I realized for the first time that I had no vision of what success looked like in my field for me as me.” Read More
March 7, 2017 Look Cows, Clouds, and Apple Trees By Dan Piepenbring Lois Dodd’s early paintings (1958–66) are showing at Alexandre Gallery through March 18. Dodd, who is eighty-nine, helped to found New York’s artist-run Tanager Gallery in the fifties, when it was one of a series of downtown spaces redefining how work was shown and sold. She said of her paintings in 2012, “They could be much more descriptive, but I don’t want to do that. In that sense, one always puts the blame on the abstract painters. That’s what I looked at and loved. I don’t want to get too descriptive. You can go so far and stop. I can just feel when to stop.” Lois Dodd, Cows and Clouds, 1961, oil on linen, 33 1/2″ x 39 1/2″. Read More
March 7, 2017 Arts & Culture Your Own Private Party By Larissa Pham How reading Eve Babitz got me through the depths of winter. Eve Babitz. The winter after I finished art school and moved to New York, I started telling people I was thinking of having “a California period.” These conversations happened at parties, mostly, in high-ceilinged apartments in Crown Heights stuffy with heat, shoes melting in a salty pile outside the front door; we’d crowd around someone’s open window, smoking and ashing into the succulents, cold air rushing in as quickly as we could exhale. I envisioned a place far away from all this, far from the snowbanks that turned to dirty gray slush and the gloom that pervaded the city at dusk. I wanted Hollywood; I wanted David Hockney. I wanted pools and pool paintings, sparkles and spangled reflections under that hazy golden California light; I wanted to make abstract canvases covered in pink glitter while next to me some turquoise sky stretched off into an Umberto Eco–esque hyperreal. Read More