February 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 5: Sky Glow By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. Chip Simone, Universe, 2005. Courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art. Anyone who’s been here will tell you all about the light: its force, its starkness, how shadows seem to cut everything in two. I gather it’s a cowboy thing, the way hard light fosters fantasies of the desert as a place where all existence struggles against an unforgiving sun. Light here doesn’t just light, it judges. A pamphlet from the EPA says roughly 171 Arizonans die of melanoma each year. Only about twice as many go by homicide. But the real remarkable thing about this place isn’t the light, it’s the darkness. In some neighborhoods, you can walk three blocks between streetlights, losing sight of even your hands. Those short on material could build some rudimentary stand-up: I heard Tucson is so dark that … This is, they will tell you, for the benefit of astronomy, something Arizona excels in, but also for us other people, who buy into the idea of being that much closer to the stars in a romantic, chamber-of-commerce way. Read More
February 16, 2017 On the Shelf Hey, Is That Proust? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Quite possibly Proust. Photo via the Guardian. All those years of watching old wedding footage and searching for dead authors has really paid off: they’ve found Proust! In what’s believed to be his only appearance on film, Marcel races down the stairs, celebrating the 1904 nuptials of Élaine Greffulhe. He’s dapper. He’s alone. He’s Proust: “The black-and-white footage of a wedding cortège filmed in 1904 shows a brief glimpse of a man in his thirties with a neat moustache, wearing a bowler hat and pearl-grey formal suit, descending a flight of stairs on his own. Most of the other guests are in couples … ‘Because we know every detail of Proust’s life, we know from several sources that during those years he wore a bowler hat and pearl grey suit … It’s moving to say to ourselves that we are the first to see Proust since his contemporaries … even if it would be better if he was descending the steps a little less quickly! It’ll be fine when we have slowed the film down.’ ” People say late-night TV is improving in the age of Trump. Man, Colbert really brought it last night, they’ll say; or, Seth Meyers is on fire lately; or, Gee whiz, that Saturday Night Live program sure gave the administration what-for! But make no mistake: the late-night variety show is a pale and desiccated husk of what it once was. For a counterexample, Joan Walsh revisited the one-week stand Harry Belafonte had on the Tonight Show, where he filled in for Johnny Carson in February 1968: “The week featured Belafonte’s searing, in-depth interviews with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., just months before both were assassinated … A few days later, King kibitzed with comedian Nipsey Russell, the blacklisted African-American singer Leon Bibb, and actor Paul Newman, who played his trombone. Another episode featured basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and actor Zero Mostel, who stood on the couch to shake the giant NBA player’s hand. Other guests included singers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, and Robert Goulet; comedians Tom and Dick Smothers; actor Sidney Poitier (Belafonte’s close friend); American poet laureate Marianne Moore; water-skier Ken White; and Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. Fifteen of the twenty-five guests that week were African-American. Only Belafonte could have pulled that off, says TV producer Norman Lear almost fifty years later. ‘He was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him. It is rare to this day.’ ” Read More
February 15, 2017 Look Rhythmical Lines By Sarah Cowan Working in isolation, Wacław Szpakowski made mazelike drawings from single, continuous lines. Wacław Szpakowski, B9, 1926, ink on tracing paper, 13 3/4″ x 15 3/4″. When he was eighty-five, Wacław Szpakowski wrote a treatise for a lifetime project that no one had known about. Titled “Rhythmical Lines,” it describes a series of labyrinthine geometrical abstractions, each one produced from a single continuous line. He’d begun these drawings around 1900, when he was just seventeen—what started as sketches he then formalized, compiled, and made ever more intricate over the course of his life. His essay is written from the contrived vantage of the third person, betraying an anxiety about his own artistic validity. The drawings, he explains, “were experiments with the straight line conducted not in research laboratories but produced spontaneously at various places and random moments since all that was needed to make them was a piece of paper and a pencil.” Though the kernels of his ideas came from informal notebooks, the imposing virtuosity and opaqueness of Szpakowski’s final drawings are anything but spontaneous or random. His enigmatic process—how he could draw with such supreme evenhandedness, could make his designs so pristine and yet so intricate—is hinted at only in his few visible erasure marks. One drawing reveals two lines bordering the thick final one, a possible clue that Szpakowski may have gone over each design’s path three separate times. These works did not reach an audience until 1978, five years after Szpakowki’s death; today they’re still obscure and easily misunderstood. They’ve crept into exhibitions over the years, but mostly in the artist’s native Poland—there’s a rare opportunity now at New York’s Miguel Abreu Gallery, currently hosting the largest display of Szpakowski’s work ever mounted in the U.S. Read More
February 15, 2017 Our Correspondents I Must Enter Again the Round Zion of the Water Bead By Anthony Madrid An illustration from Struwwelpeter. It is not my habitual practice to go toe-to-toe with Mark Twain. I revere him, have made lengthy extracts from his works, have read aloud many times from Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. I find Twain much funnier than [insert the name of your favorite humorist here]. But. In 1891, stranded in Berlin, Twain set about translating the most famous children’s book ever written in German: Struwwelpeter. It is not a lengthy work. The whole thing is just ten medium-size poems, mostly in rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets. The German is hardly esoteric; it was originally composed (1844) for the benefit of the author’s three-year-old son. Twain, too, had the benefit of a young audience for his translation: his three daughters, Jean, Clara, and Susie (ages eleven, seventeen, and nineteen, respectively) were with him at the time, suffering in Berlin. There are several narratives here, all worth the telling, regarding Twain’s deal with the German language, the Germans’ deal with Struwwelpeter, Twain’s surprising his family by unveiling and performing his translation of the poems on Christmas morning, und so weiter. But we have a great deal of more essential ground to cover. Read More
February 15, 2017 On the Shelf The Stench of Orwell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Bernd Pohlenz If I had to lodge one complaint against the bulk of literary fiction, I’d say this: not enough smells. Too many writers neglect the olfactory. The fact is this world reeks, and I want to know about it in vivid detail. John Sutherland’s new book Orwell’s Nose makes it clear that the author of 1984—so on trend right now—was always writing with his nostrils. As David Trotter, reviewing the book, explains, “Odor is front and center in Orwell’s work, and Sutherland has provided some helpful ‘smell narratives’ that enable us to follow an oblique path through some of the best-known texts (fiction and documentary) from one hotspot of rankling secretions to another. Unsurprisingly, given the genres Orwell favored, bad smells predominate: ‘sour’ sweat and ‘sweetish’ (or ‘sickly’) excrement top the bill, but there’s an honorable mention, too, for machine-age effluvia such as petroleum vapor. Still, we’re not to suppose that extreme olfaction only ends in nausea. It’s crucial, for example, to the Orientalism of Burmese Days, animating as few other sensations could the embrace in which John Flory wraps his ‘house concubine’, Ma Hla May. ‘A mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil and the jasmine in her hair floated from her. It was a scent that always made his teeth tingle.’ Sutherland devotes considerable attention to the aphrodisiac effect on Orwell of sweet-smelling open spaces. Edenic lovemaking in a ‘golden countryside’ embellished with wild peppermint is George Bowling’s dream in Coming Up for Air; and Winston Smith’s, too, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Singapore reads, but it doesn’t read, you know what I mean? (I mean it has a literacy rate of 98 percent but only 40 percent of its citizens picked up a literary book last year.) Now Singaporean panjandrums hope to persuade more people to read by making tiny books. This will work. People love tiny things. I myself started flossing only when floss was produced in miniscule packages; I started voting only when the ballot shrank and I had to read it through a tiny municipal magnifying glass, which I thought was just the cutest thing. Amanda Erickson writes of Singapore, “Starting this month, public-transportation riders will be able to buy pocket-size tomes for about $10. The ‘ticket books’ are part of a broader campaign to get people reading again. Their launch will coincide with a weekend of book fairs, author meet-and-greets and literature seminars across the city-state … [Reading] will be a hard habit to instill … Student Ang Beng Heng, twenty-four, told Straits Times that he’d rather check his news apps and Facebook feeds in his free time. ‘Current affairs are more often used as a conversation topic,’ he said. ‘It is also more important and related to work and career.’ ” Read More
February 14, 2017 On History The Red of Painters By Michel Pastoureau Recipe books from the Middle Ages reveal the extreme methods with which artists achieved their reds. Boris Grigoriev, Entrez!, 1913. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. ©FineArtImages/Leemage. For the most part, painters have always loved red, from the Paleolithic period to the most contemporary. Very early on, red’s palette came to offer a variety of shades and to favor more diverse and subtle chromatic play than any other color. In red, artists found a means to construct pictorial space, distinguish areas and planes, create accents, produce effects of rhythm and movement, and highlight one figure or another. On walls, canvas, wood, or parchment, the música of reds was always more pregnant, more cadenced, and more resonant than others. Moreover, painting treatises and manuals are not mistaken; it is always with regard to red that they are most long-winded and offer the greatest number of recipes. For a long time, it was also the chapter on reds that began the exposition on pigments useful to painters. That was already the case in Pliny’s Natural History, which had more to say on red than on any other color. And the same is true for the collections of the medieval recipes intended for illuminators and in the treatises on painting printed in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until the century of the Enlightenment that in certain works—most often written by art theoreticians and not painters themselves—the chapter on blues would precede the one on reds and offer a greater number of suggestions. Read More