February 7, 2017 On the Shelf The Man Who Gave Brontë Eyes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A caricature of John Ruskin from Vanity Fair, 1872. Let’s say you had to choose one genre, just one, in which you’d prefer your politicians to write with rigor and fluency. Political theory, you might say. Or biography. Probably not even those of us with a bona-fide death wish for the republic (anarchists, accelerationists, the Joker) would say “Civil War alternate history.” But that’s exactly what we have in Bannon and Gingrich—connoisseurs of the uniquely depraved world of ahistorical warmongering. Paul Mason writes, “Bannon, the White House chief of staff and Donald Trump’s closest aide, believes the next phase of American history should be as catastrophic and traumatic as the conflict of 1861–65 … [Gingrich] took time out from impeaching Bill Clinton to co-author three excruciatingly dire alt-history novels about the Civil War. In Never Call Retreat, the final in the trilogy, written by Gingrich with William Forstchen and Albert Hanser, the Union side wins the war but, by implication, the South wins the peace. With Sherman’s Union army poised to destroy Atlanta, the Confederate commander, Robert E Lee, persuades the South to surrender. ‘The patience of our opponents is at an end,’ this fictional Lee tells the Confederate government. ‘We shall reap a terrible whirlwind that will scar our nation for generations to come.’ ” Anna Aslanyan writes on the exasperating indifference with which the court system treats its interpreters, who are only responsible for, you know, 100 percent of the communication between the state and the accused: “Translation is like rubbish collection: no one notices it until something goes wrong … Much of court interpreting is simultaneous: you sit next to a defendant and whisper in their ear as you listen to the proceedings. You have to be familiar with legal procedures and fluent in legalese as there is no time to decode ‘ABH’ or invent a term for ‘corporate manslaughter’. You also need to be able to temper your language depending on who you are interpreting for: a drug addict going through withdrawal, a graduate with some knowledge of legal arguments, or an emotionally unstable person with a patchy understanding of the situation. These skills require constant practice … As qualified interpreters stop working for the courts, standards keep slipping—yet more evidence, if it were needed, that outsourcing doesn’t improve services.” Read More
February 6, 2017 Look I’m Glad We Had This Conversation By Dan Piepenbring “I’m Glad We Had This Conversation,” an exhibition of paintings by David Humphrey, is at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery through February 25. “I like the patched-together quality,” he told Hyperallergic in 2014. “That is what it’s like to be a person in the world. We evolve out of dependencies and contexts. We are, in some ways, patch jobs: fragments that constitute a whole with some effort. There is an echo of that theme in the painting language, the means. I am always trying to pulverize the image. I like the idea that the painting is at risk of falling apart.” David Humphrey, Woodsman, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 80″ x 96″. Read More
February 6, 2017 Arts & Culture A Walk Around the Left Bank By Lauren Elkin Talking about the history of Shakespeare and Company on a stroll through Paris. From left to right: Sylvia Whitman, Lauren Elkin, and Krista Halverson. Photo: Mathew McWilliams It was the first of the really cold days when I went for a walk around the Left Bank with Sylvia Whitman, the owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and Krista Halverson, the editor of a new book on its history, Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. Published last November on the shop’s sixty-fifth anniversary, the book is full of stories and documents from interviews, letters, diaries, news articles. It reproduces autobiographies from generations of Tumbleweeds, as the staff calls the young people who live there in exchange for helping out around the shop and the promise to read a book a day. There are amazing photographs (including one of an ill-fated combustible wishing well), and handwritten notes posted on the community bulletin board in the 1950s: EXECUTIVE TYPE WISHES TO LEARN INFORMALITY AND RELAXATION FROM BOHEMIAN FRIENDS; FOR THE LADY IN THE BOIS DE BOLOGNA WHO LOST HER SMILE FROM THE GENTLEMAN WHO FOUND IT. I’d recently published a quasi-memoir of my own, Flâneuse, about my love of walking in cities, and Paris specifically, and the many women who’ve lived and walked in those cities before me. The chapter on Jean Rhys begins in Shakespeare and Company, where I first discovered her novels as a student in 1999. Excited about the overlaps in our books, Sylvia and Krista invited me on a walk to dish about the shop and all the literary women who’ve been associated with it, making their names in the shadows of more famous men. We walked from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the Place Saint-Sulpice and then back to the shop across the river from Notre Dame, talking of Sylvia Beach, who founded the original Shakespeare and Company on the nearby rue de l’Odéon, in 1919; her partner, Adrienne Monnier, who ran her own French-language bookshop across the street from Sylvia’s; and Sylvia Whitman’s dad, George, who is said to have received Sylvia Beach’s blessing to carry on the Shakespeare and Company name after the war. (He named his daughter after her, too.) We began in the Café de Tournon near the Jardin de Luxembourg, where some of the friends of the shop used to gather and drink, including a group of young bohemians who founded the avant-garde literary journal Merlin out of the shop in 1952. Read More
February 6, 2017 First Person Different Sanctuaries By Bryan Washington Jane Brewster, Houses on the Bayou, 2008. Just about every Tuesday, I play soccer in City Park. Our pickup matches are in the back, behind the New Orleans Museum of Art. My first few weeks in the city, I only joined the ones out front, which were mostly made up of oil-and-gas types, or parents, or younger white dudes. One day, during a halfway decent set, a couple of Honduran guys settled on the grass to watch. Afterward, they asked what the fuck I was doing. Was I up for a real game? They told me they needed forwards. Maybe they could use me for a set, they said. Their English was a little slow, and eventually I switched to Spanish, and that’s when their eyes almost popped out of their heads. Being black and speaking anything but English in this country can do that. After living in Houston, I’d picked up pieces of Spanish, mostly to talk to boys, but also because it fuels the city, one that’s nearly half Latino and just about seven hours from the border. Mexico’s culture is virtually inextricable from Houston—the further east you drive, you’ll hit taquerias and cantinas ad infinitum. I started spending most of my time out that way, but never once was I treated like an outsider, or el pinche gringo negro. Everyone treated me like I was home. Read More
February 6, 2017 On the Shelf Celebrating the Everyday, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from an 1870s photograph in the Loewentheil Collection. In June 1941, Stefan Zweig, having fled Austria for England and then New York, sat down to elaborate on the circumstances of Hitler’s rise—a story he feared would be lost to history if it weren’t told often and in great detail. George Prochnik explains, “Zweig set to furious work on his autobiography—laboring like ‘seven devils without a single walk,’ as he put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks. His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote, ‘that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.’ For the benefit of subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings.” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities sprang from a brilliant, contentious speech she gave in 1956—one that defied the doctrines of urban planning before an audience who’d staked their careers on those doctrines. It was also, as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes, a tightrope walk between conservatism and liberalism: “Jacobs was celebrating commerce and condemning government overreach in the form of public housing, and thereby showing some sympathy with the values of the right. Yet she was doing so on behalf of low-income people who, she believed, had been ill served. Like any good leftist, she was defending the underdogs: the mom-and-pop stores as well as the residents of these projects, many of whom hated their bleak housing as much as she did.” Read More
February 3, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Witches, Wolves, Warlords By The Paris Review From the cover of The Witches by Stacy Schiff. For a brief second, some fifty pages in to The Witches, Stacy Schiff’s history of the Salem witch trials, I almost started to wonder whether any of the accused were guilty. Like, of witchcraft. I spent the rest of the book waiting for Stoughton, Hathorne, Cotton Mather, and the other investigators to come to their senses and call the whole thing off. Of course I know better, but her retelling of the trials is so vivid, and resonates so deeply with current events, that the nightmare seems to unfold in real time, its causes obscure, its conclusion impossible to foresee, like a terrifying story you’ve never heard before. —Lorin Stein “One cannot reason anymore with the President. One life for the life of thousands. Lies lies lies airplanes. Warlords profit false idols prophet.” Reading Kate Zambreno’s first novel, O Fallen Angel, is like getting a dose of electroshock therapy—a galvanizing current of electricity straight into the brain. Written in 2007, in the aftermath of September 11 and in the midst of the second Bush’s presidency, O Fallen Angel was published by Lidia Yuknavitch’s small press Chiasmus the following year; it was fittingly reissued last month, a few days before Trump’s inauguration. The novel is related through three characters’ streams of consciousness: the Valium-popping housewife Mommy, one of literature’s great monsters; her daughter, Maggie, a drug addict who pursues a physical and psychological drive toward death; and Malachi, a street prophet, who seems to foresee, among other events, burning towers. O Fallen Angel is blackly funny and brutal, a radical and clear-sighted antidote for banality and complacency. —Nicole Rudick Read More