February 28, 2017 First Person Letter from Kiev By M. G. Zimeta Ukraine’s ultranationalist uprising has brought together two disparate groups: neo-Nazis and ethnic minorities. Kiev in January 2015. Photo: Sergey Galyonkin The crisis in Ukraine turns three this month. From its outset, I was struck by how clichéd the news reports of the war were, in structure and in tone; European journalists seemed to be reporting on Ukraine as if it were an African country, and, mortifyingly, as if Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa” had never happened. I wondered what would happen if the roles were reversed—if I, an Ethiopian woman, covered this European war. The conflict was said to have unleashed ultranationalist violence: as part of my preparation I hung out on Stormfront, the white-supremacist Internet forum, where I seemed to be welcome because they couldn’t tell that I’m a black intellectual. I decided that the safest way to report on these men would be to try and pass as one of them: to go in disguise as a neo-Nazi fighter. I acquired a kind of camouflage—a big coat to conceal the shape of my body, the fullest balaclava I could buy, and a wide woolly scarf to hide any skin still visible. As disguises go, it wouldn’t pass much scrutiny, but I calculated that the strength of my cover was the situation itself: they wouldn’t be expecting me. Its simplicity was its strength, and its strength was its simplicity. I set off for Ukraine in the run-up to Minsk II, when the fighting in the east was at its worst. It was late January 2015, a couple of weeks before the doomed ceasefire deal was agreed. There had been reports of neo-Nazi battalions from the front at Donbass holding rallies in city centers. Some of these gatherings were to mark the January birthday of Stepan Bandera, a controversial World War II–era hero who’d led Ukraine’s nationalist independence movement in the 1930s, and who had spent time as a Nazi prisoner of war before being released to fight against Russia under the banner of the SS. “Be careful of any protests,” a regional security analyst had advised me, “especially if they have a right-wing slant.” Be careful. Read More
February 28, 2017 Inside the Issue Through My Eyes: An Interview with Christine Lincoln By Caitlin Youngquist Christine Lincoln (left) and Christine Dickler at our Winter launch party. Christine Lincoln’s story in our Winter issue, “What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story,” comprises no more than fifteen hundred words, but its length belies its breadth. Braiding enchantment with sorrow and hope, it begins inside a dream, with a man carrying a small woman in his mouth—“a grown woman not much bigger than a bullet”—running from a dark-skinned girl thought to be coming after them. From there, it unfurls into an agonizing, tender portrait of the nameless dreamer, once an abusive partner, who spends the rest of the story musing over the love he ruined years ago. Lincoln, born in the sixties, hails from Baltimore; having endured a period of addiction that briefly left her suicidal, she turned to fiction, which was, she told me, what she needed to save herself. She went on to pursue an M.F.A. and currently lives in York, Pennsylvania, where she is poet laureate emeritus. I spoke with Lincoln over the phone, her voice gentle and heartening, about “What’s Necessary”; about her debut collection of short stories, Sap Rising; and about her thoughts on race and literature in America, both today and as it was for her growing up one of the only black children in her school. Every so often, she’d pause midsentence—near tears, she’d say, because she hadn’t shared this with anyone before. Read More
February 28, 2017 On the Shelf America Needs Lunar Cocktails, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An artist’s rendering of the Lunar Hilton lounge. Image via the Outline. The future looks so shitty now. Sure, maybe in fifteen, twenty years we’ll be able to get through airport security without taking our shoes off, or we could watch streaming high-definition video while we get an MRI. But we’ve lost sight of the one advance that would really help us: building a luxury hotel on the moon. In 1967, Barron Hilton, of those Hiltons, had his eye on the prize: at a conference for the American Astronautical Society, he shared his vision. Daniel Oberhaus explains, “The crown jewel of the Lunar Hilton would, of course, be its Galaxy Lounge. ‘If you think we are not going to have a cocktail lounge, you don’t know Hilton—or travelers,’ Hilton quipped. In the Galaxy Lounge, lunar tourists would be able to ‘enjoy a martini and see the stars!’ Although the lounge would be underground, the guests would enjoy a view of Earth and outer space through ‘thermopane windows.’ All cocktails would be prepared by a robotic wait staff, which would only need to drop a tablet into a glass of pure ethyl alcohol and water and voila: an instant martini, Manhattan, or gin … He was, by all accounts, very serious about trying to make them a reality. ‘I firmly believe that we are going to have Hiltons in outer space.’ ” Writing cultural criticism, Jo Livingstone is determined to avoid the Trump trap—is there really no way, she wonders, to look at art now without thinking of the executive branch? “Painting, music, television, the visual culture of the internet, poetry: These art forms and their consumers and critics represent an aesthetic space whose boundaries are not defined by the president. Unless we believe in and nurture this space, the critic is stuck forever explaining how this or that book is crucial reading ‘in Trump’s America.’ But this type of reviewing hobbles thought, because it reduces all art to the structure of satire. It is as if Trump is a spider in the middle of a web, and every review that tethers the meaning of a pop song to his regime strengthens it. I am guilty of this type of criticism, in very recent weeks. But I know that I write such things as an emotional defense of my own place in the culture. Nobody wants to feel useless.” Read More
February 27, 2017 First Person Like Art By Glenn O’Brien Working in advertising gave me the resources to do what I thought was art—with a logo. From the cover of Like Art. Art school is the place you go to learn how to be a creative director, even if you don’t know that yet. You start out wanting to be a painter, a sculptor, an installation artist (an installer?) or performance artist (nonentertaining performer), and so you start out learning to be an artist—drawing, painting, and reading theory—and then one day you find yourself drawing storyboards for a hipster beer. It’s just a temporary thing, or so you tell yourself. You could drive a taxi or wait tables and make art in your spare time, but of course that is exhausting and dispiriting if not demeaning, compared to the big-time artists whose lives you read about. Where’s the loft? Who’s your dealer? Where’s your summerhouse? Somehow, you may find you don’t feel like painting in a room with a bathtub in it after a day sucking carbon monoxide as a bike messenger or taxi driver. Read More
February 27, 2017 Arts & Culture In a Word By Albert Mobilio An exhibition of drawings by Jackson Mac Low surveys his restless reinvention of the line. Jackson Mac Low, Hi, n.d., ink on paper, 9 1/4″ x 12″. At the poetry readings I attended around New York City in the eighties and nineties, a familiar figure often occupied the front row: an elfin gentleman with dramatic eyebrows and a great wave of hair to match. At my very first events, he drew notice because he sat with pen in hand, writing throughout the reading, as if he were taking dictation. I recall wondering if he was a journalist or another poet cribbing lines from his fellows. I soon learned that he was the legendary composer, performer, and poet Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) and that in all likelihood he was culling words and phrases to deploy in the many recombination schemes he used to create his texts. With roots in the Fluxus movement and an early association with John Cage in the fifties, Mac Low emerged as one the most rigorously adventurous American poets in the decades that followed. Not the least part of his unconventional profile was his energetic work across genres and art forms: writing poems and prose in diverse modes, composing and performing music, collaborating with theater and dance companies, and creating a body of visual art that might be said to incorporate something of each of these multifarious pursuits. A sampling of that work—mostly done with pen or crayon on paper—is currently on view at the Drawing Center in a show titled “Lines–Letters–Words.” The title is literally accurate in that it describes the pieces on display, which, indeed, depict lines, letters, and words. But the sequence of the terms makes the title especially apt, as it gets at the heart of Mac Low’s enterprise as a poet and artist: understanding the construction of communication; that is, how mere lines are bent to configure something called letters and these letters are assembled to create that improbable result, a word. The sequence is equally relevant when read backward; for Mac Low, disaggregating meaning from sound, sound from words and letters, and ultimately from the random marks on a page achieved the same end: revealing the relation between meaning and its constitute parts. Read More
February 27, 2017 On the Shelf Walden: The Video Game, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Finally, a chance to experience the magic of Walden firsthand! I like Walden as much as the next guy. My problem with it—my problem with all books—is that it’s just such a passive experience for the reader. Thoreau does all the talking; I’m just supposed to listen. Thoreau does all the fishing; I’m just supposed to watch. Thoreau plants all the beans; he never asks, Hey, reader, would you like to come out here and give me a hand with the beans sometime? But all that’s about to change with Walden, a Game, the new video-game adaptation of Thoreau’s treatise on solitude that puts you in control of your spiritual self-discovery. Its designers, Robin Pogrebin writes, hope to fuse the thrills of gaming to the joys of quiet contemplation: “The new video game, based on Thoreau’s nineteenth-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal—all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author’s meditations … Should you not leave sufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, the game cautions: ‘Your inspiration has become low, but can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human’ … The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance.” Nell Zink, who tends to greet realist novels with a very formidable eye roll, writes in praise of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which gave her “some rigorous realist fiction to love”: “ ‘Realistic’ novels … generally don’t even try. They want to ‘work,’ to be ‘good reads,’ by manipulating emblems of meaning smoothly in a framework of familiar myth. Many work contemptibly, steering sentimental nodules of canned subjectivity into the cheesiest myths imaginable. Authors hope to inhibit readers’ critical urges entirely for as long as a given book lasts; in essays, interviews, and formats like ‘My Writing Day,’ we hint at the tricks we use to facilitate total audience immersion in our shared dream. Where we do intend readers to exercise critical faculties, those should be directed at something other than the work. They want a trance state, and we want to give it to them. But in that transaction, something vital is lost. That could be the reason so many admirable people read nonfiction instead: You can’t communicate with people you’re trying to hypnotize!” Read More