February 9, 2017 Arts & Culture Parting Shot By Angela Chen “Famous last words” and Japanese death poems offer two strikingly different approaches to mortality. Edvard Munch, By The Deathbed (Fever) I, 1915. I was born in the middle of March in a small town in China. My parents didn’t give me a name; they simply never got around to choosing one. On April 7, I nearly died after choking—and they saddled me with that date as a moniker, a sort of inescapable memento mori. When I came to the United States, at age five, my mother told me I was to be named Angela, after a coworker of hers. Was this coworker particularly kind or smart or pretty? I asked. By all accounts, no. It seemed to be an entirely arbitrary decision. Fittingly, I’ve long been fascinated by the traditions surrounding the words that bookend a life. There’s a split, I’ve found, between the East and the West: the latter favors spontaneous last words that serve as a final confirmation of your personal brand, whereas the East has a custom of premeditated death poems, jisei, that offer a rare chance to break with convention. These differing traditions offer a glimpse into the clash of individualism versus collectivism, spontaneity versus control—forces I’ve tried to balance in my own life, living between Asian and American culture. Read More
February 9, 2017 On the Shelf Touch Someone with a Camera, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ed van der Elsken, Vali Myers dancing at La Scala, Paris, 1950. Photo via The New Yorker/Nederlands Fotomuseum So there’s this guy, Zoltan Istvan? He ran for president as a kind of single-issue candidate: he wanted to make America live forever. Literally. Steering his coffin-shaped “Immortality Bus” around the States, he laid out a transhumanist platform advocating for the abolition of death. He attracted a small but plucky band of volunteers, one of whom, Roen Horn, turned out to be especially fervent. Mark O’Connell talked to Horn about the promises of eternal life on Earth: “ ‘You know one really cool thing about being alive in the future?’ [Horn] asked. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Sexbots … You know, like A.I. robots that are built for having sex with.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard of sexbots. It’s a nice-enough idea. You really think that’s going to happen, though?’ ‘For sure,’ Horn said, closing his eyes and nodding beatifically, in momentary reflection upon some distant exaltation. ‘It’s something I’m very much looking forward to.’ ” Nan Goldin remembers discovering Ed van der Elsken’s photography when she was nineteen: “When I first saw Ed van der Elsken’s book Love on the Left Bank, I realized I had just met my predecessor. My real predecessor … In my own life, I have been obsessed with photographing the people who were my lovers, had been my lovers, or whom I wanted as lovers. Like Ed, I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically. It is this notion—of being obsessed with someone, and, through photographs, making that person iconic—that resonated with me in his work.” Read More
February 8, 2017 Arts & Culture I Found This Wastebasket for You By Dan Piepenbring Jules Bouy, Wastebasket, ca. 1930. This week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art released some 375,000 images into the public domain, granting unprecedented digital access to a wide swath of its collection. This is a boon. “Wikipedia’s hundreds of millions of users from around the globe will now be able to experience the Met’s greatest treasures,” said Wikimedia’s Katherine Mahler, “no matter where they live.” And there are treasures. Fourteen kinds of Tiffany glass are there. This Paul Klee drawing of a chicken and a pig—it’s so there. You can search acres of immaculate Pre-Raphaelite tresses. There is also, I’ve found, this iron wastebasket by Jules Bouy. It is the only wastebasket in the Met’s collection. Read More
February 8, 2017 Our Correspondents An Elegy for Stringbean By Jane Stern Stringbean Akeman. I never saw the Grand Ole Opry, though I did stay one night at Nashville’s Opryland Hotel, where housekeeping left a Goo Goo Cluster candy bar on my pillow. For people who lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the Grand Ole Opry was what the Ed Sullivan show was to us Easterners: a big vaudeville hodgepodge of comedy skits, pretty gals, and hot musical acts. Read More
February 8, 2017 Correspondence Infinite Mischief By Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop was born on this day in 1911. In the early seventies, her friend Robert Lowell sent her the poems that would form his collection The Dolphin—in which, without permission, he’d quoted the distraught letters his partner Elizabeth Hardwick had sent him after he left her. (“your clowning makes us want to vomit,” one poem goes: “you bore / bore, bore the friends who … wished to save your image / from this genteel, disgraceful hospital.”) Bishop, shocked to read the new work, sent him the impassioned rebuke excerpted below. The Dolphin, when it was eventually published, won a Pulitzer Prize. Read more of Bishop and Lowell’s letters in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008), edited Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Read More
February 8, 2017 On the Shelf I Hate My Valentine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Oh look at me I’m so cool with the piano”: a Vinegar Valentine. Irwin Corey, the soi-disant “World’s Foremost Authority” who spent much of the twentieth century declaiming on this and that with an inexhaustible reserve of faux pomp, has died at 102, thus bringing an end to one of the greatest fusions of comedy and performance art. T. Rees Shapiro’s obituary recalls Corey’s brightest literary moment—when he served as a stand-in for Thomas Pynchon. “His career reached its peak of absurdity in 1974 when he was called upon to accept the National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon for the novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Corey gave a wandering acceptance speech on behalf of Pynchon, offering thanks to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—whom Corey called the ‘acting president of the United States’—and author Truman Capote. Since Pynchon had never made a public appearance, many in the audience assumed the prattling Corey to be the mysterious author. (Corey did not, in fact, know Pynchon, but they had mutual friends who arranged the comedian’s book-award talk.)” Some traditions are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them. I think the American people should thrust greatness upon vinegar valentines, a once-prospering Victorian tradition in which people sent anonymous, hateful little poems to their enemies on Valentine’s Day. With the country more divided than ever, it falls to us to resurrect this pungent convention—and to bombard those we hate, especially in seats of power, with more vinegar valentines than our fragile postal service can handle. AbeBooks has a primer on them: “Gluttons, drinkers, hen-pecked husbands, braggarts, windbags, spinsters, sharp-tongued wives, unfaithful lovers, cowards, lazy colleagues, uncaring bosses, ugly people, fat and thin people, vain people, and stupid people—they were all fair game to folks who posted vinegar valentines. They could be delivered to enemies, or people who had treated you badly, or someone you thought needed to be brought down a notch or two. The tone of verse ranged from gentle to downright vicious and abusive.” Read More