January 25, 2017 On the Shelf Stay Humble, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hans Memling, Vanité (detail), ca. 1490. Our contributor Ben Nugent appears on Selected Shorts’ “Too Hot for Radio” podcast this week to discuss his short story “God,” which appeared in our Fall 2013 issue. Here’s how it all started, he says: “One of my best creative-writing students, Megan Kidder, a well mannered girl from rural Maine with dyed black hair, a silver nose ring, and a studded belt dropped by my office and informed me, I wrote a poem about how this one guy prematurely ejaculated … ” Here’s Carina Chocano to remind you that you’re probably misusing the word humbled, you misinformed braggart, you duplicitous self-promoter, you smarmy pretender to humility: “To be humbled is to be brought low or somehow diminished in standing or stature. Sometimes we’re humbled by humiliation or failure or some other calamity. And sometimes we’re humbled by encountering something so grand, meaningful or sublime that our own small selves are thrown into stark contrast—things like history, or the cosmos, or the divine … To be humbled is to find yourself in the embarrassing position of having to shimmy awkwardly off your pedestal, or your high horse—or some other elevated place that would not have seemed so elevated had you not been so lowly to begin with—muttering apologies and cringing, with your skirt riding up past your granny pants.” Read More
January 24, 2017 Look The Fiestas Are Over By Dan Piepenbring An exhibition of Beatrice Mandelman’s sixties-era work is showing through April 1 at Rosenberg & Co., in New York. Mandelman, who died in 1998, was among the modernists of Taos, New Mexico, who moved to the city in the forties to found the Taos Valley Art School. Mandelman favored what she called the “calm” of geometry as a reaction to the tumult of the sixties. “The work IS hard edged because the world is hard edged now,” she said. “It’s not a soft feminine period. The fiestas are over. The celebrants have gone home. It is time to face reality.” Beatrice Mandelman, Collage No. 9, 1960s, mixed-media collage on mat board, 15.63″ x 19.63″. Untitled, c. 1960s, acrylic and collage on paper, 24.88″ x 38″. The Man, c. 1965, collage with acrylic on canvas, 19.74″ x 13.75″. Untitled, c. 1960s, acrylic and collage on paper, 25.5″ x 19.63″. Sea Shapes (#2), 1960s, oil on fiberboard, 60″ x 48″. Untitled (Freaks), c. 1960s, mixed-media collage on paper, 19.44″ x 12.19″. Beatrice Mandelman at a swimming pool in Llano, date unknown.
January 24, 2017 Our Correspondents Sending Springer Home By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Springer the Orca. Design by Kristen Radtke. Shit, it’s A-73! —The biologist Graeme Ellis Her calls were so loud they practically blew our earphones off. —Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard, Vancouver Aquarium And now, months later, after forming all these groups to help fund this—working with NMFS and DFO, which has not always been easy, and people on both sides of the border—it’s like delivering a baby, and we’re about ready to pass out cigars. —Michael Harris, the Orca Conservancy Name: Springer Species: Orcinus Orca Years Active: 2000–present Distinguishing Features: An “open” white saddle mark; several faint scratches, perhaps from propellers, on dorsal fin Skills: Resilience, a northern accent, an ability to disarm various mammalian species Habitat: Puget Sound, Washington; Telegraph Cove, British Columbia; the open water Additional Notes: The ferry worker called her Boo. Shortly before Christmas 2001, a Department of Transportation employee noticed a very young orca hanging around the docks of Vashon Island, a residential swath of land in Puget Sound between Tacoma and Seattle. Every day as the Evergreen State ferry floated in its slip, the orca would swim beside its bow, disappearing only when the engines started. While orcas in the waters of the Pacific Northwest aren’t unusual, a solo baby orphaned orca was a reason to call the authorities. It turned out that Boo already had a name. Two, actually. Her official catalogue moniker was A73—“A” for the matrilineal pod with which she should be traveling, and “73” because she was the seventy-third birth in A-pod since humans started tracking them. Unlike the transient pods that swim up and down the Pacific coast all year, the orcas in A-pod are resident orcas, and they spend the summer-salmon runs near the shores of Washington and British Columbia. They have their own practices, bonds, and even dialects. A northern resident A-clan orca produces calls never made by, for instance, a southern resident from J-pod. Read More
January 24, 2017 On Film You Can Stop Believing in It, But It Doesn’t Go Away By J. D. Daniels The anality of Event Horizon. Still from Event Horizon. Oh, God. Do I have to watch Event Horizon again? I’d rather rip my eyes out. It’s a children’s movie. Let’s get that straight right away. Most movies are children’s movies. Event Horizon (1997) is the story of a spaceship that has gone beyond our solar system. The ship aimed to get around the laws of physics and travel faster than light using an invention called a gravity drive, which folds two points together in collapsed space-time by means of a miniature black hole. It would no longer take seventeen hours to fly from Boston to New Delhi if Boston and New Delhi were, briefly, the same place. Here is the problem: when the gravity drive was activated, the ship simply disappeared. As the film begins, it is the year 2047 and the ship, called the Event Horizon, has reappeared. It is being approached by the Lewis & Clark, a salvage-and-rescue ship. On its surface, Event Horizon is a haunted-house film in outer space. The ghost ship has returned from its mysterious journey both emptied and populated. “This place is a tomb,” says the captain of the rescue ship, exploring the emptied body of the Event Horizon; then, later, “Are you telling me this ship is alive?” Read More
January 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Majesty of the Potato, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Charles Jones, Potato Majestic, nineteenth century. Image via the Clark Institute Oh, to own one of the first cameras—to approach photography without any preconception of what a photograph could or should do. To take the first portrait, the first landscape, the first dick pic—what a rollicking time that would be. Louis Menand, writing on the Clark Art Institute’s new exhibition “Photography and Discovery,” conjures the bumptious energy of the medium’s earliest days—and the unlikely corners into which the first cameras looked: “The albumen print, the collotype, the cyanotype, the daguerreotype, the Woodburytype, gelatin silver prints, gum dichromate prints, platinum prints, salt prints, halftones, photogravure: all these reproductive technologies are represented in the show, and each yields a different visual texture. The effects can be stunning … My favorite in the show is a picture of potatoes. The label explains that the photographer, Charles Jones, was a gardener who worked on major estates in nineteenth-century Britain, and who had a practice of making photographs of things he grew, arranged as still lifes. His photographs were discovered in 1981 in a suitcase in an antiques market. And there they are, six potatoes on a plate—nature’s most plebeian foodstuff looking as pleased with itself as any duke. And the best thing about the piece, in case you miss the point, is the title, Potato Majestic.” Jorie Graham, talking to Sarah Howe, elaborates on the difficulty of facing the blank page in times like these: “Increasingly now, it’s a matter of using poetry to try to find a way to keep the proportions right, to not be overwhelmed by grief, horror, fear, shame, rage; to use this precious medium I trust to guide me to find at least a way to ask the right questions, a way to hold ‘reality and justice in one thought’—as Yeats admonished me to do when I was a young poet … Our enemies are despicably small, but their actions are capable of destroying the earth now, not just civilization. So, like every poet writing today, what I ask of my poetic tools now feels more urgent than ever, what I ask of the blank page. Not just urgent, but baffling. I have never written so slowly—each poem an attempt both to try to understand how to reenter the current of existence with some understanding of what will suffice—what will permit one to go on as if there were a purpose—and to try to understand what poetry is for under these conditions.” Read More
January 23, 2017 In Memoriam Remembering Willa Kim By Stephen Hiltner Anyone who wades into The Paris Review’s files—particularly material from the early days in Paris, in the 1950s—enters a kind of historical haze. It’s difficult to separate the fact from the fiction, the magazine’s real history from its lore. Reliable records are hard to come by. Certain documents, contracts in particular, are nonexistent. The first time I met Willa Kim, she rescued me from such a haze. Read More