February 1, 2017 Notes from a Biographer The Making of a Comics Biography, Part 3 By Joe Ollmann Read More
February 1, 2017 On the Shelf Is It Luck? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Albert Guillaume, Au Bac, 1898. Americans are a lottery-playing people, a day-trading people, a people who in the summer of 2013 sent a song called “Get Lucky” soaring to the top of the charts. And yet we’re famously predisposed to underestimate the role of luck in our lives—as anyone who recalls Obama’s “you didn’t build that” brouhaha will know. We walk around in a dumb haze of self-determinism. In a new interview, the economist Robert H. Frank offers a useful corrective to those who would argue that success is merely the result of hard work: “I prefer just to look at how people naturally construct their life histories. We assemble narratives about ourselves routinely and the elements that go into those are the things that we can retrieve most comfortably from memory … When you’re riding a bike into a headwind you’re keenly aware of that. Every 100 yards you travel, you wish that wind would go away. You’re battling against it, it’s at the front of your mind. Then the course changes direction; you’ve got the wind at your back. What a great feeling that is for about twenty seconds, and then it’s completely out of your mind. You’re not even aware that the wind is at your back. You’re not having to battle any enemies in that sense and so it’s out of your mind. So when you think back to your career, what do you remember? You remember the headwinds you faced. You don’t remember all the tailwinds that were pushing you along. So there’s just these natural asymmetries that lead people to either ignore the role of luck entirely or overstate it to a considerable degree.” In a new book, the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner argues that Hieronymus Bosch was really painting from life—it’s just that “everyday life was bound inextricably to what seems its polar opposite: an art of the bizarre, the monstrous, the uncanny.” Reviewing Koerner’s argument, Alexandra Harris writes: “To make us feel the overwhelming fertility of the world, holding us on the vertiginous brink of mesmerized attraction and repulsion, Bosch has to paint the ‘enemy territory’ that is everyday life … Koerner leads us carefully towards The Garden of Earthly Delights, intent both on preparing us for the horror and on deepening our experience of it. In their closed state, the grisaille shutters bear the translucent sphere of a half-made universe, quiet and yet brewing, heavy with giant husks and seedpods, ‘at once fecund and already decaying.’ The doors of the world part to reveal what Koerner calls ‘psychology in painted form.’ There in the middle is the eye of the owl, one of Bosch’s figures for himself, an emblem of the devil, yet all-seeing, like the eye of God.” Read More
January 31, 2017 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Ishmael Reed and J. H. Prynne By The Paris Review Ishmael Reed, 2015. The two Writers at Work interviews from our Fall 2016 issue are now online, in full, free to read for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Poetry No. 100, Ishmael Reed is interviewed by Chris Jackson; Reed discusses growing up in Buffalo, the search for “new mythologies” that led him to write Mumbo Jumbo, and his concerns for young writers of color: Combative writing has always been our tradition, even when we try to avoid it. I recently saw an article in the New York Times about Cave Canem, the group of black poets, and one of them described the trend in black literature as a “shift out of the ‘I’m a black man in America and it’s hard’ mode into the idea of ‘you are who you are, so that’s always going to be part of the poem.’ ” As if the tradition of writing about black suffering—I’ve been ’buked and scorned and all that—was dead. But why can’t you write about the hardships that black men and women face in everyday life? It was certainly hard for Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland. Read More
January 31, 2017 On Sports The Idea of Order By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Nadal and Federer at the Australian Open final. Federer and Nadal shake hands after the blistering final match of this year’s Australian Open. Every possible end to this year’s Australian Open would’ve made a story for the ages. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and pick one. Venus Williams at thirty-six, winning her first major in nine years. Serena Williams at thirty-five, returning to top form, winning her record twenty-third major title and reclaiming the number-one ranking. Roger Federer at thirty-five, winning an improbable eighteenth major title after a sixth-month hiatus, and against his one true rival. Rafa Nadal, at thirty—having seemed, in recent seasons, gnawed on by Father Time, with all the guilty, wide-eyed ravenousness of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son—unexpectedly capturing his fifteenth major title and making his strongest claim yet to being the greatest player the men’s tour has ever seen. Every possible outcome would’ve hit some sweet spot. The Australian Open was a chance to cheer the younger, all-conquering versions of Venus, Roger, Serena, and Rafa—an opportunity to remember how quickly these moments we have to define ourselves can pass us by, and how thin the margins can be. Watching tennis like this appeals to that part of you that flutters and pinwheels: the nostalgia of the cynic, the romance buried in the hard-hearted. It felt like Pluto was the ninth planet again, singing sweeter in the music of the spheres than ever before. Read More
January 31, 2017 On Film The Reluctant Enthusiast: Orson Welles on Casablanca By Noah Isenberg Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In anticipation of Casablanca’s seventy-fifth anniversary this year, I’ve made a sustained attempt to reappraise the significance of the film and its illustrious afterlife—in particular how the film, which involved so many European-refugee actors and studio professionals, resonates in the current political climate, with the increasing turn to the right, toward protectionism and isolationism, and a global refugee crisis of a similar scale. But in searching out some of the lesser-known, and least likely, voices on the subject, I’ve been reminded of another critical reappraisal of the film, one that dates back several decades and that hasn’t really received much attention. Tucked away in My Lunches with Orson, those delicious recorded snatches of midday schmoozing between directors Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (edited by Peter Biskind and published in 2013), is a late chapter titled “Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl!” in which Welles admits, among other things, his hidden affection for Casablanca. The recordings took place at Wolfgang Puck’s Ma Maison, in West Hollywood, in the early 1980s, by which time the once-towering American auteur was approaching his final years; after a string of box-office disappointments and financial hardships, he was notoriously crotchety about all things Hollywood. At different points in his conversations with Jaglom, he skewers the producer Irving Thalberg, snubs Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, throws shade at everyone from Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, and Joan Fontaine to Woody Allen and Marlon Brando, and expresses untrammeled contempt for Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Ford’s The Searchers, and Polanski’s Chinatown. All of which makes his fondness for Casablanca, the seeming apogee of classical Hollywood and “the most decisive exception to the auteur theory,” as Andrew Sarris once called it, that much more surprising. Read More
January 31, 2017 On the Shelf The Talking Heads of Yesteryear, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Heinecken, TV Newswomen (Faith Daniels and Barbara Walters) (detail), 1986; image via Aperture Get a load of this, people—it’s the story so unbelievable, so astonishingly perverse, that George Eliot’s family doesn’t want you to know about it! I’m talking about the size of her hands—or of one of her hands, anyway. Kathryn Hughes has the hot scoop: “One day in the 1840s a young woman in her midtwenties was talking to her neighbor in a genteel villa on the outskirts of Coventry. At some point in the conversation Mary Ann Evans stretched out her right hand ‘with some pride’ to demonstrate how much bigger it was than her left. It was the legacy, she explained, of having spent her teenage years making butter and cheese on her family’s farm, eight miles outside the city … Over the next fifty years George Eliot’s increasingly genteel descendants periodically issued stern denials about the great novelist’s labors in the dairy. There was, they maintained, nothing remotely odd about her right hand: it had done nothing more taxing than practicing the piano and taking tea.” In times of deep suffering and anguish, solace can take unusual forms. Sleeping pills, for one. Or a long talk with an old pal. Or maybe just an enormous grid of old televisions reminding you that things have always been shitty. The Getty Center, opting for the latter, has opened an exhibition called “Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media,” which will console you with the terrors of administrations past—most of them perpetrated before the advent of social media, when the news was still fake, just in a different way. Travis Diehl writes, “One of the Television Political Mosaics (1968–9) by Donald R. Blumberg, like televisions splayed out on a contact sheet, includes row after row of vintage talking heads from the vetting of Richard Nixon’s own unlovable cronies. Others in the series superimpose a faltering transmission of then-candidate Nixon’s profile into a black and gray miasma. Further Zen might come from Blumberg’s Television Abstractions (1968–9), a picture of a grid of sixteen TVs, all tuned to static. The white noise has never been worse, yet this exhibition offers critical insight for those who would turn today’s cameras on today’s screens.” Read More