March 10, 2017 On the Shelf Ride Your Sky Horse, Peasant, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Fantasy, 1925. Image via New York Review of Books. I’ve written in this space before about my affection for Billy Joel. I think he has catchy tunes. But in the interest of fairness, it must be said: some people think that Billy Joel is an agent of Lucifer, his baritone a cancer metastasizing across radios worldwide to poison all that is gay and true in popular song. Liel Leibovitz is in the latter camp, and that’s her right. Joel, she says, “is so nefarious precisely because [he] was given great gifts—his songs, as Bruce Springsteen correctly noted, are masterworks of musical construction—and yet chose to squander them in the service of nothing but his own lust, vanity, and insecurity. You can tell just by looking at him: While Dylan’s face is still a mask protecting him from having to deal with emotions, and Young’s face is a topographical map of misfortune, Billy Joel, bald and glistening, looks like a big, smooth stone, as if the years and the sorrows, like so much water, simply polished its surface but failed to penetrate its core.” An exhibition at the Royal Academy pays tribute to a famous 1932 Soviet art show, “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic”—the last gasp of the avant-garde before the state tightened its grip and forced its artists to churn out only propaganda. Jenny Uglow writes of the new show, “This is a big, dynamic, disturbing exhibition, a blaze of artistic hope undermined by suffering, death, and despair. It is all about power and its perils … At first painters, composers, and poets thrilled to the Revolution, which seemed to offer untold freedoms, a chance to use bold new forms—Cubism, abstraction, street art, film, jazz, satire, fantasy—and to share in the making of a new nation. The mystical Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, and the Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Lyubov Popova, responded with equal euphoric intensity … Yet there is a sense of terror, as well as hope, in these blazing, color-filled canvases. As cosmic spheres hurtle forward in spear-like shards of light in Konstantin Yuon’s apocalyptic New Planet (1921), the dwarfed crowds seem to cower as much as to rejoice … Even the distinctive figurative paintings of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin … feel full of a yearning nostalgia. In his huge canvas, Fantasy (1925) the peasant riding the leaping red horse of revolution does not look forward, but back, to a vanished world.” Read More
March 9, 2017 Arts & Culture At the New York Antiquarian Book Fair By Sarah Funke Butler A swatch of midcentury wallpaper inspired by Romeo and Juliet, available at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair (Booth E17: Honey and Wax, New York; $250). The Park Avenue Armory is a vast preserve of space and air on a cramped island. I can imagine no better place for the Fifty-Seventh New York Antiquarian Book Fair of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). Open tonight and through the weekend, it boasts more than two hundred dealers, tens of thousands of items, and combined hundreds of years of experience and scholarship. More important, it offers oxygen to a reading public choking on alternative facts—among the most insidious of which, often repeated in print, is that print is dead. This year’s fair illuminates a shift toward literary properties that live and breathe—manuscripts, letters, and original material, much of it defined by context. This is the stuff through which authors speak to us as they did to their publics and to one another; today their words sting in much the same way and in many of the same places. Imagine rare-book dealers as hunter-gatherers of primary source material, heading out with spears and sacks, returning with troves that speak to our present political moment as much as they do to the past. Book collecting has grown from a traditional quest for bibliographic completeness—such that one collection could be more or less the same as another—into a hybrid of subjective, curated material contributing to larger questions: What was happening in the life Sylvia Plath while she wrote the Ariel poems? Why did Hemingway answer a call to social justice when he had seemingly sold out to Esquire? How real is Moby-Dick? When Duke Ellington wrote Black, Brown, and Beige, was he making a patriotic statement? Below, some highlights from the fair. Read More
March 9, 2017 Our Correspondents Dog’s Dinner By Jane Stern John Charles Dollman, Table d’Hote at a Dogs’ Home, 1879. I eat dinner around six, and so do my dogs. I’d prefer to eat a bit later, but Cecil, my French bulldog, and Ivy, my shelter mutt, have invisible dinner bells installed in their brains, and at six the pacing and meaningful glances start. When I was married, I made multicourse dinners and ate at the table. Alone, I make what’s easy, and I often eat in front of the TV. I’ve noticed that Cecil and Ivy seem much more excited about dinner than I do. I began to see why when, a few weeks ago, I jotted down what they ate and what I ate: Friday Me: frozen Stouffer’s Welsh rarebit on toast Dogs: Cesar Chicken and Cheddar Cheese Soufflé Saturday Me: two slices of leftover pepperoni pizza Dogs: Chef’s Choice Bistro Home-style Meatballs and Pasta with Real Beef in Tomato Sauce Sunday Me: a hamburger and a baked potato Dogs: Blue Wilderness Northwest Skillet with Salmon and Vegetables Monday Me: An apple and some Brie with crackers Dogs: Holistic Brand Grilled New York Strip Steak with Redskin Potatoes and Summer Vegetables in Sauce Read More
March 9, 2017 On the Shelf Pointillism: The Prequel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from a Seurat painting. Has this ever happened to you: you invent a whole new kind of painting, and you’re feeling really proud of yourself and super accomplished, and then you discover that some prehistoric people actually beat you to it by thirty-eight thousand years? Okay, well, Georges Seurat is dead, but he may be exasperated in the afterlife: scientists at Abri Cellier, a cave site in the Vézère Valley of France, have discovered early evidence of Pointillism there, evidence that far predates Seurat, of course. As JoAnna Klein writes, “They found sixteen limestone tablets left behind by a previous excavation. Images of what appear to be animals, including a woolly mammoth, were formed by a series of punctured dots and, in some cases, carved connecting lines. Combined with previous images from nearby caves in France and Spain, the tablets suggest an early form of pointillism, and a very early point on art history’s timeline. ‘Imagine the first time a human convinced someone else that a line, or a group of lines is an animal,’ said Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University who led the excavation … It is impossible to say that this was a magical moment when humans invented art. But in these tablets, he thinks he and his team may have gotten close.” In which Alice Spawls recounts a great anecdote about Cy Twombly and paper: “The photographer Sally Mann tells a story about being at a dinner party with Cy Twombly—the two were friends from their hometown of Lexington, Virginia. ‘He was writing directions for somebody—how to get to the antique mall or something—and he wrote them and the guy said, “Oh yes, I know where that is,” and they left them on the table, and I swear to god—like Wagnerian harpies out of the rafters these people came swooping down on this little scrap of paper!’ The rapacious guests might have done the same for any famous artist (despite early obscurity, by the end of his life Twombly was being called ‘the most important living artist’) but the idea of a Twombly napkin has a sort of genius to it: so many of his surfaces, painted white or bare material, are repositories of scribbles, dribbles and smears, scrawled with lists and doodles and diagrams, written on then crossed out or rubbed out leaving only messy traces. After spending some time in front of Twombly’s work, you begin to look at your own bits and pieces differently. Post-it notes appear enigmatic, rarefied; full of teasing suggestiveness.” Read More
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