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
February 24, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gunpowder, Gay Saints, Game Wardens By The Paris Review From Escaped Alone. In the February issue of Harper’s, the gospel historian Anthony Heilbut writes about gays in the black church, past and present: “Even when they haven’t been the preachers—and they sometimes are—they have constituted the pastors’ inner circle and praetorian guard. Music dominates the traditional black church; the minister is as much cantor as village explainer. In particular, a good ‘Mississippi whoop,’ or melodic growl, has been the making of many a preacher. And when the minister growled, the gay organist would accent his every moan, while the gay choir members made their joyous noise, and the gay saints (i.e., members of the flock) jumped to their feet, clapping and dancing in the spirit. The whole experience was orchestrated and annotated by gays and lesbians. This is one reason why many straight men have shunned the church—why, for example, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was ashamed to tell his mother that he had joined a choir.” —Lorin Stein Caryl Churchill’s new play Escaped Alone is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for one more weekend. Go see it—it’s not even an hour long. Four British women, getting on in years, sit in the backyard and wonder where the time goes. They bicker, they ruminate, they joke about Tesco; in a manic outburst of nostalgia, they break into a skillful rendition of “Da Doo Ron Ron.” But there’s a nameless unease in the air—it might just be the apocalypse! Occasionally the stage goes dark and one of the women steps into a frame of terrifying red LED lights, where she recounts what I can only describe as fun facts about the end of the world. (“Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking.”) If Pinter had lived to see—and sniff at—Black Mirror, he might’ve fused it to Kitchen Sink Drama like this, but it would’ve wanted for Churchill’s warmth. Not to say she’s a softy: the tension, in the play’s best moments, breaks its neighborliness, and a dark, Beckettian ooze seeps out. One of its many fine monologues goes like this: “Terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 24, 2017 Books Lamplight and Shadow By Alice Kaplan Patrick Modiano’s novels gaze through “the glass wall of our consciousness of history.” Patrick Modiano In a French TV show from 1990, the forty-five-year-old Patrick Modiano wanders around a supermarket on the rue de Sèvres in Paris. He speaks to himself and to the cameraman as he moves through the aisles of food, then pauses in front of a dairy case. He’s looking for traces of the Pax movie theater that once stood in the same spot, trying to recall where the screen was. But nothing he remembers is quite right, and his sentences break up in midcourse, leaving only verbal gestures at a past no longer visible. His attempt to locate the screen amounts to a fool’s errand. Like the writer in this video, the characters in Modiano’s fiction fail in their search for a lost past. His heroes are elusive, disappearing into the crowd, more comfortable listening than speaking their mind, and always aware of the futility of the hunt: their prey is forever receding. In The Black Notebook, translated with perfect pitch by Mark Polizzotti, a writer named Jean tries to fathom the life of a former girlfriend, Dannie, a woman with multiple pseudonyms and a mysterious bond with gangsters who lived in the Unic Hôtel, in the shadows of the Montparnasse train station. During their affair, the police question him about the criminal activities of the group, but he has no information to give them. In a quintessential scene, Jean stands on the sidewalk of his imagination and stares at the men through the glass window of their hotel lobby. He gazes into an impenetrable story, not for its decor or its nostalgic atmosphere, but for the pull history exerts on the present: “Perhaps the glass was opaque from inside, like a one-way mirror. Or else, very simply, dozens and dozens of years stood between us; they remained frozen in the past, in the middle of that hotel lobby, and we no longer lived, they and I, in the same space and time.” Modiano’s books are full of moments like this; they transmit something deep and essential we’re forced to reckon with, the glass wall of our consciousness of history. Read More
February 24, 2017 On the Shelf Readability, Schmeadability, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring James Aumonier, Where the Water Lilies Grow, 1870. I’m a man of simple tastes: I take my food edible, my water potable, my words legible. But people can be awfully choosy. Ben Roth has inveighed against the rise of “readable” books—“readability” being an increasingly prevalent form of critical shorthand, a way of telling us which novels go down easy. Roth is advancing the latest variant on an ancient argument about whether lit’rit’cher should be fun, or work, or work that tricks you into thinking it’s fun: He writes, “Readable books are full of familiar characters, familiar plots, and most especially familiar sentences. They are built up out of constituent commonplaces and clichés that one only has to skim in order to process. Nothing slows you down, gives you pause, forces you to think or savor. Not too much description, or abstraction, or style. A little bit literary, perhaps, but not too. To praise a book as readable is really just to say that you won’t have to add it to your shelf with the bookmark having migrated only halfway through its leaves … To praise readability is to embrace the vicious feedback loop that our culture now finds itself in. Short on concentration, we give ourselves over to streams of content that further atrophy our reserves of attention.” But Sarah Perry is having none of it. In Roth’s “entertaining little polemic,” she sees aimless fulminating, and she stands up for readability, because someone had to. (Stay tuned for my think piece, “In Praise [But Gentle, Delicate Praise] of Books That Are Just Readable Enough [While Also Providing a Neat, Salubrious Challenge]).” As Perry notes, very Britishly, “Prose which is ‘readable’ is prose which is skilled. It is quite useless to argue that there is no objective standard for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ where writing is concerned; one need read hardly more than a dozen books before discovering that a bar is set. Readable prose is, generally speaking, diligent in its sentence construction, erring from received rules of grammar only deliberately and to a clear effect. Its figurative language functions so that the reader is not left puzzling over a metaphor which creaks like a well-oiled door (you see, I hope, what I did there); its characterization bears some resemblance to people as you and I know them; it is what one might call ‘ontologically sound,’ creating a world entire from which it does not willfully depart. Yet all these principles the skillful, ‘readable’ book may wickedly flout, and still remain skillful and ‘readable.’ ” Read More
February 23, 2017 Sleep Aid The Decline and Fall of Whist By Dan Piepenbring It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from The Decline and Fall of Whist, an 1884 book by John Petch Hewby. Though Mathews (circa A.D. 1800) in two short sentences laid down the true and only principle of discarding: “If weak in trumps, keep guard on your adversaries’ suits; if strong, throw away from them,” fifty years afterwards it was discovered by the “little school” that “the old system of discarding was just this—when not able to follow suit, let your first discard be from your weakest suit.” Rough on poor Mathews! but the absent are always wrong. However, by a process of evolution, to the first step of which no exception can be taken, we are next told—(a) “When you see from the fall of the cards that there is no probability of bringing in your own or your partner’s long suit discard originally from your best protected suit.” “You must play a defensive game.”—Cavendish. Read More