February 13, 2017 Bulletin This Wednesday: Morgan Parker at BAM By The Paris Review Morgan Parker. This Wednesday, February 15, Morgan Parker will appear at BAM to launch her new poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé. (One may be tempted to object, after Beyoncé’s stunningly baroque performance at the Grammys last night.) Parker will join the Brooklyn Museum’s Rujeko Hockley to discuss black American womanhood, politics, art, and pop culture. Tickets are available here. Parker’s poem “Hottentot Venus” appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. (“I wish my pussy could live / in a different shape and get / some goddamn respect,” it begins.) Last summer, she told the Daily, One thing that interests me about Beyoncé is who her predecessors are, and how she’s a kind of symbol for all the different ways that black women are revered but also surveilled in a really intense way, put on display. That happens to me just walking down the street. It happens in another way for black women who are celebrities. The whole legacy of Hottentot Venus is one of dehumanization and display. I was interested in that line between awe or reverence—and also exploitation. Where is that line? What does it mean to be at once upheld and at the same time continually made to feel less than? All these questions belonged in the manuscript, which I think of as kind of a tome of black womanhood.
February 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Dance of Steel By Simon Morrison In Soviet Russia, getting a ballet off the ground was no mean feat, as Sergei Prokofiev learned the hard way. Léonide Massine wields a large hammer over the head of Alexandra Danilova during a production of Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier in London. In Russia, during the Soviet era, government control made the challenge of getting a ballet onto the stage no less onerous than being admitted into the ballet schools of Moscow or Leningrad. The daunting auditions of Soviet legend—teachers scrutinizing preadolescents for the slightest physical imperfection—found an ideological parallel in the required inspections by censorship boards at the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky–Kirov theaters. First, the subject of a prospective ballet was adjudicated in terms of its fulfillment of the demands for people-mindedness; the music and the dance would be likewise assessed. There would follow a provisional closed-door run-through to decide if the completed ballet could be presented to the public, after which it would either be scrapped or sent back to the creative workshop for repairs. Dress rehearsals were subsequently assessed by administrators, cognoscenti, politicians, representatives from agricultural and industrial unions, and relatives of the performers. Even then, after all of the technical kinks had been worked out, an ideological defect could lead to the sudden collapse of the entire project. Bodies as well as plots were changed by politics. The traditional emploi that defined danseurs noble and demi-caractère endured, but emphasis was placed on bigger builds and altogether less softness in the curves. In sculpture, “Soviet man” became like a Greek or Roman demigod, the muscles stronger than steel. So, too, he became in ballet. Read More
February 13, 2017 On the Shelf Buy Yourself Some Old Seeds, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A vintage ad for a seed catalog. All writers are spies, but some of them, not unreasonably, want to do it full-time: it’s generally more lucrative than the “authorship” game, and it gets you out of the house, often armed. Few would be totally surprised, then, to learn that Ernest Hemingway had a yen to practice espionage. Nicholas Reynolds, a military historian, alleges in his book Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (see what he did there?) that Papa was a double agent, snooping around on behalf of the Commies and Uncle Sam: another lost soul in that vast miasma we call the twentieth century. Andrew O’Hagan writes of the new book: “Reynolds looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before, a man out of control and out of focus, a man in bits … What is Hemingway alleged to have done as a spy? We know that, in 1937, at another hotel in Madrid, he had a drink—vodka and Spanish brandy—with that ‘representative of the diabolical Russia’, the NKVD chief Alexander Orlov. (Politics didn’t come up but they talked about their shared interest in guns.) Other evidence? That during the Second World War he set up a counterintelligence bureau in Havana. The American diplomat Robert Joyce told Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker that Hemingway was willing to pay for it himself. It is further alleged that he set up the Crook Factory, to keep an eye on enemy aliens in Cuba, and put his beloved, thirty-eight-foot fishing vessel Pilar out to sea as a scout for German U-boats. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway wrote that he aimed to be ‘a secret agent of my government’ but when it comes to the Soviets, there’s a lot of ‘reaching out’ and alleged meetings, but facts about him actually engaging in operations are thin on the ground.” The author is just a single person, and you know how single people are: writhing with subconscious prejudices, pacing this earth with ever-larger blind spots, accumulating more ignorance by the day. The most well-intentioned writers, especially of fiction for young people, have begun to concede that their work can’t be done alone if it’s to be done properly; hence the rise of the “sensitivity reader,” a kind of paid shoulder angel, poring over your manuscript to disabuse you of your tone-deafness. Katy Waldman writes, “Hired by individual authors or by publishing houses, sensitivity readers are members of a minority group tasked specifically with examining manuscripts for hurtful, inaccurate, or inappropriate depictions of that group … Some sensitivity readers draw distinctions between offensive descriptions and offensive descriptions that appear to enjoy the blessing of the author … Still, it’s a messy project for one reader to suss out authorial intent. While sensitivity remains a positive value in most literature, and perhaps one of the greatest priorities for young adult literature, enforcing it at the expense of other merits, including invention, humor, or shock, might come at a cost. Cultural sensitivities fluctuate over time. What will the readers of the future make of ours?” Read More
February 10, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Like Art, Like Death, Like … By The Paris Review I’ve been losing myself on the train this week in Gabrielle Bell’s new comic, Everything Is Flammable. It doesn’t come out until April, so I’m jumping the gun here, but once I read it I couldn’t not write about it—it’s that good. Bell writes and draws stories with deep humanity, and, impressively, that humanity—painful, awkward, and uncertain—is her own. This new book spans a year and follows Bell as she travels to and from her mother’s home in rural Northern California, navigating the guilt she feels as an absent daughter and the anxiety she feels in trying to care for her independent mother. Bell’s self-awareness and observations never result in tidy epiphanies; the book’s strips open out into one another, accumulating without resolution. She is also always funny, and her distinct blocky hatching style gives warmth to every panel. The ineffable quality is that she makes all this look easy. —Nicole Rudick Having spent hours puzzling over dumb subway ads (worst recent offender: HelloFresh, whose come-hither copy begs, LET’S MAKE SWEET, SWEET POTATOES TOGETHER) I’m having a ball with Glenn O’Brien’s Like Art—a collection of his columns on advertising, which ran in Artforum from 1985 to 1990. As the title suggests, O’Brien treats ads as art objects, which is to say he understands that most of them are meaningless, even if their effects on us aren’t. Though he offers withering pronouncements (“You can’t run a jingle over emaciated faces and bloated bellies,” he says of an AT&T ad about using your long-distance plan to call Ethiopia) and even occasional praise, really his columns amount to a kind of advertisee’s diary, recording the idle chatter that passes through us as we process hundreds, maybe thousands of ads every week. Here he is on cigarettes: “In London recently there were billions of billboards everywhere with the image of scissors cut out of purple fabric. Near one corner was the British version of The Warning: ‘Cigarettes can seriously damage your health.’ But I couldn’t figure out if this was a cigarette ad or an antismoking ad. It was the most abstract ad I’d ever seen. I wanted to stop people on the street and ask them what it meant, but I didn’t. I still don’t know.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 10, 2017 Revisited Alexander Is Lowered into the Sea By Kanishk Tharoor Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Kanishk Tharoor remembers an Islamic miniature painting. Attributed to Mukunda, Alexander Is Lowered into the Sea (detail), 1597–98, ink, watercolor, gold on paper, gold on dyed paper. A turbaned king sits in what looks like a large jar as it is dropped into the sea. His attendants crowd about him in boats, straining at the tethers, peering down at the churning water, while an astrologer holds an astrolabe up to the sky. Some of these figures are styled as Europeans with their black hats, ruffed collars, and clean-shaven faces. Others resemble Muslim sages. A world of cities and cowherds recedes in the background. The king wears a stiff expression, at once stoic and wary as he sinks below the waters. This single image contains enormous geographic and cultural scope. Here is a miniature painting composed in the late sixteenth century by a Hindu artist in India for a Turkic Muslim ruler with strong ties to Central Asia. The impassive king going for a deep dive is Alexander the Great, a Macedonian warlord recast through the prism of Persian poetry. He is surrounded by many courtiers dressed in the clothes of Renaissance Europe, set against the writhing, rocky landscape of Chinese art. In our era of globalization, it’s easy to forget that the pluralism we cosmopolitans take for granted isn’t just a modern confection but has been with us for a long time. Read More
February 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Our Gilded Coonskin By Mike Pepi To fight Trump, look to the vulgar style that’s long ruled American art. George Bellows, Men of the Docks, 1912, oil on canvas, 45″ x 63.5″. In 2014, the National Gallery in London acquired their first American picture, George Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912), in which hulking workers loiter in the dead of winter. White horses join the dockworkers just as the scene cracks with the faintest suggestion of activity. The ship and the city are an imposing frame for an otherwise bleak, bathetic subject. The work, when it comes, will be toil. But it’s better than the idle cold. This little drama never ends, really. Bellows leaves the men trapped somewhere between hope and despondence. It’s a vulgar scene. If the Ohio-born Bellows walked through the National Gallery today, he might recoil at the gauntlet of gentility that lay before him. The Gallery doesn’t have an American wing. Instead, Men of the Docks hangs chronologically alongside the Gallery’s Impressionist and Modern masterpieces, standing out like a sore thumb alongside the l’art pour l’art of Cézanne and Van Gogh. It’s an even ruder departure from the National Gallery’s standard fare, where scarcely a room passes without a meditation on Ovid, a Madonna and Child, or a court-commissioned history painting. To an American of a certain persuasion, this all seems like a powder keg of Whig history. Bellows’s is the first and only painting whose figures appear unfazed by that history’s watchful eye. Read More