January 30, 2017 Our Correspondents Crisis in Cosmetology By Jane Stern I’ve started to realize how homely I’ve become. I look like crap. I need a total makeover. When I was a teenager, and then into my twenties, I would never have let this happen. Back then, I was mad for makeup. I read Glamour and Seventeen with the intensity of a Talmud scholar. It was the pre-hippie days, and no one wanted to look natural. Being a young woman meant knowing about eyelash curlers, and the right hairdo for your face shape (there were only three choices: round, triangle, or square), and how to cover acne pustules with thick sheets of foundation. I worshipped at the altar of every department-store cosmetic counter. With the right mascara, lipstick, and face powder, my life had limitless possibilities. Read More
January 30, 2017 Look Aubrey, Illustrated By Lucas Adams Last November, New York Review Books published Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. Aubrey, who died in 1697, is remembered for his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographies with a candor and color that enlarged the possibilities of the genre. Scurr has assembled an “autobiography” for Aubrey from remnants of his letters, manuscripts, and books, setting his sensitivities against the turmoil of Restoration-era England. He emerges as an empathetic, surprisingly modern figure. Below, Lucas Adams illustrates some of his favorite entries from My Own Life. Read More
January 30, 2017 On the Shelf The Raging Flood and the Peaceful Pond, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Smithson, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill. Chris Ware has been reading a lot of Krazy Kat, as we all should in these trying times. In the Kat and his creator, George Harriman, Ware sees a tacit African American tradition: “Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a ‘surrealistic’ poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip … I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman’s lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African American. Krazy’s patois, social status, stereotypical ‘happy-go-lucky despite it all’ disposition all funnel into a rather pointed African American identity.” Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is classic land art: it’s dirt and sand and raw geology, and it’s all fun and games until someone decides to sell it. Phyllis Tuchman visited the work in the Netherlands, musing on its history and the difficulty its owner faces in passing it on: “At 6-foot-3 and often dressed all in black like a character in the B-movies he watched on West 42nd Street, Smithson cut a striking figure. His prescription aviator glasses, slicked-back brown hair, blue-gray eyes and pockmarked skin completed the persona he projected … Unlike his colleagues, Smithson accompanied his earthworks with films, which made them accessible to people who couldn’t travel to see them. But his death at age thirty-five in a plane crash in 1973 prevented the completion of the film of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill until 2011. In it, we learn how Smithson’s artwork relates to both the prehistoric past as well as more recent times … ‘Between violence and calm is lucid understanding and perception,’ Smithson also said in Arts magazine in 1971. ‘What goes on between the raging flood and the peaceful pond? I hope to make that an aspect of the film on Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.’ ” Read More
January 27, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Concentric Circles, Carpenters, Coffee House By The Paris Review From the cover of Alma Thomas, by Ian Berry. “Vincent is a waiter at Coffee House. It’s called just that—Coffee House. The name hasn’t changed in a hundred years, even if the business has.” From its opening lines, Ghachar Ghochar—Vivek Shanbhag’s novella about the secrets of a nouveau riche family in present-day Bangalore—exudes such a sly, ironic charm that it’s easy to forget you’re reading a translation. Ghachar Ghochar introduces us to a master. I can’t wait for his translator, Srinath Perur, to show us more. —Lorin Stein Among the many, many, many reasons to miss the Obamas is their smart and wide-ranging taste in art. They chose three Alma Thomas paintings for the White House, one of which, Resurrection, was placed in the Old Family Dining Room, making it the first work by an African American woman to hang in a public area of the White House. Thomas made Resurrection in 1968, only eight years after retiring, at age sixty-eight, from teaching junior-high art in Washington, D.C., and devoting herself to painting. Resurrection consists of concentric circles of paint daubs, her signature “Alma Stripes,” radiating outward in rainbow colors that are electric with possibility. All of her early works are of a piece—brightly hued and joyous, like oversize pointillist versions of Sister Corita Kent posters. The Studio Museum in Harlem gave Thomas a show last year, which I missed, but a gorgeous catalogue is now available (which makes me doubly sad I missed the show). Alongside NASA’s Apollo missions, Thomas made her Space series, which, though formally similar to the earlier work, seems tempered in mood. Snoopy Sees Sunrise on Earth, from 1971, depicts a globe of color stripes floating on a pale blue-green field: I sense her awe of the cosmic scene, but also perhaps its fragility. “I began to think about what I would see if I were in an airplane,” she explained of the series. “You look down on things. You streak through the clouds so fast you don’t know whether the flower below is a violet or what. You see only streaks of color.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 27, 2017 On Sports Are You Experienced? By Rowan Ricardo Phillips On the 2017 Australian Open. Nadal defeated Dimitrov this morning in Melbourne. It’s slightly past dawn and I’m up. The sky is a dull, file-cabinet gray, the thick cold scouring down on the thin morning light. A few people hurry by under umbrellas, a few others loiter on corners up and down the street, bareheaded, waiting for a car or a bus, newspapers tucked under their arms. Listen closely and you can hear Manhattan’s equivalent to cricket song: the floating sound of traffic when there’s no traffic in sight. It’s that time of year when winter is stretched so thin it becomes sheer, translucent, you can almost see through it. It’s January and already 2017 is weird and tragic and beautiful. The book 1984 is flying off shelves, real and virtual. American politics has taken the form of prime-time programming, trolling for clicks, vituperative heat checks on Twitter … And here I am, groggy as hell, keeping up with news about tennis from sixteen hours in the future. Read More
January 27, 2017 On the Shelf A Sip of This Cream, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Frognall Dibdin. Nonalternative fact: our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, is also an accomplished translator. In a new interview with Jessie Chaffee, he offers some of his favorite metaphors for translation: “A translator with only one metaphor is lost—he or she needs three, four, dozens! One of the great things about Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’—a thrillingly unfathomable essay for me—is the number of metaphors he gives us for translation, without settling on any one of them. He says translation is like a royal robe that amply enfolds the original; or else it is a series of vessel fragments which one pieces together with those of the original; or else it is like a tangent line that touches the sense of the original fleetingly at one point (which makes all the difference). He also says it’s like a transparency that lets the light of pure language shine upon the original. All of these analogies have appealed to me at one time or another and I don’t feel compelled to decide between them. Translation is most fun when it is ad hoc. I use whatever I have to hand. Sometimes a royal robe, sometimes a transparency.” Looking for the roots of bibliophilia—a tragic condition wherein otherwise sane people start to say shit like “I just love the smell of old books!”—Lorraine Berry looks back to Thomas Frognall Dibdin, a nineteenth-century English cleric who “was obsessed with the physical aspects of books, and in his descriptions paid an intense attention to the details of their bindings and printings (rather than the content) that betrayed his own love … Men who collected books were often portrayed as effeminate. In 1834, the British literary magazine the Athenaeum published an anonymous attack implying that one of the prominent members of Dibdin’s club was homosexual. Dibdin’s language, which has been noted for its sensuality, is full of double entendres and descriptions of book collecting in sexualised language; from his Bibliographical Decameron, some characteristic dialogue: ‘Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream?’ ‘Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it.’ ” Read More