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
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