December 6, 2016 Arts & Culture From Writings By Donald Judd Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street, second floor. Judd Foundation, New York, 1985. Photograph by Doris Lehni Quarella © Antonio Monaci. Reproduced from Donald Judd: Writings. Donald Judd Writings, a new collection of Donald Judd’s essays, criticism, and ephemera, was published last month by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. Spanning 1958 to 1993, the book includes expansive, previously unpublished excerpts from Judd’s notes, integral to his creative process—they find him wrestling with the role of art and criticism in the culture. “Don’s writings were a parallel activity to his art, architecture, and design,” Flavin Judd, Donald’s son and the book’s coeditor, writes in an introduction. “The goal should be to find something within the writings that is useful, something that can be a tool for future use. We hope that Don’s thoughts, ideas, and complaints can be used by others to create.” Below, Flavin has selected some of his favorite excerpts from his father’s work. Read More
December 6, 2016 On the Shelf Kafka Feared the Clap, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just an average Kafka. There’s nothing wrong with Kafka. You don’t have to look at him like that. He’s just an average Joe, our Kafka, dreaming of erotic love but reacting with complete terror when presented with the act itself. For decades, Kafka scholars have struggled to explain his aversion to sex, especially in light of his evident fondness for women—was he gay? Did he have some kind of body issue? No, his biographer Reiner Stach says: he was just petrified of venereal disease, as were many men in his era. “I read a lot of books on sexuality published in the 1900s, books usually intended for young girls and men. They are just focused on risks, never about sexuality as a source of happiness. It is not about morality or religion—just medical risks … But look at the historical and psychological context—men and women were really separated at the time … They were educated in completely different ways. So when they met for the first time, often in their early twenties, this was often very embarrassing and very frightening … [Kafka was] unable to integrate his own sexuality into his self-image because he regarded it as something both physically and ethically impure, and therefore incapable of developing human intimacy with women who actively drew him into this filth—this anti-sensual and misogynist syndrome was shared by millions of middle-class men, whose upbringing simply did not allow for erotic happiness.” For Edmund Wilson and Nabokov, on the other hand, sex was the rare topic they could agree on—so much so that you wonder why they didn’t just get it over with and sleep together. Their famous feuds, as Alex Beam writes, could be broken only by a little X-rated titillation: “Sex was a subject the two men could talk and joke about. Wilson wrote a clever little limerick about Vladimir ‘stroking a butterfly’s femur,’ and he often brought Nabokov erotic books as house presents. In 1957, for instance, he took the French novel, Histoire d’O along on a visit to the Nabokovs in Ithaca, New York, where the novelist was teaching at Cornell. ‘[Nabokov] agreed with me,’ Wilson recorded in his journal, ‘that, trashy though it is, it exercises a certain hypnotic effect.’ Vera Nabokova frowned on the two men’s tittering enjoyment of nyeprilichnaya literatura (indecent literature) and made sure that Wilson took the book with him when he left: ‘She does not like my bringing him pornographic books,’ Wilson remembered. ‘She said with disgust that we had been giggling like schoolboys.’ ” Read More
December 5, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Krushing on Krampus By Laren Stover He wasn’t handsome or well-dressed. In fact, he wasn’t dressed. He was the size of an elf, made of fuzzy red chenille. But most striking—considering he arrived in a box of gifts from Vienna in December—was that he had a devilish head with horns and clutched, not a gift, but a bundle of ominous twigs. Why was my Austrian friend Susanne sending me a pipe-cleaner devil? “That’s the Krampus,” she told me when we spoke. “Before Christmas, on December 5, the Krampus shows up at houses where children have misbehaved.” “Why is he holding sticks?” “Birch switches to beat the bad children.” Whoa. And then she told me the Krampus drags the really bad ones down to the underworld! It was love. Read More
December 5, 2016 Bulletin Our Winter Issue: Rankine, Gray, Murray, and More By Dan Piepenbring The interviews in our new Winter issue feature three writers who have defied received wisdom—writers who have expanded art’s role in the national conversation. The first is one of the most politically engaged poets of our time; the second is a novelist whose experimental forms have made him a hero in his native Scotland, though he remains underread in the U.S.; and the third is with a critic who devoted his career to asserting and celebrating the centrality of the black experience to American culture. First, there’s Claudia Rankine on the art of poetry, finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces, and reaching as wide an American audience as possible: Read More
December 5, 2016 Arts & Culture Little Books, Big Books By Cynthia Payne A glimpse of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia. Charlotte Brontë, Lycidas, watercolor drawing, March 4, 1835. Copied from a print after painting by Henry Fuseli. Brontë Parsonage Museum. To attempt to pry into the juvenilia—or “hidden works,” as the biographer Claire Harman terms them—of Charlotte Brontë is to encounter a gentle but undeniable refusal. The current exhibition devoted to Brontë’s life and work at the Morgan Library & Museum, drawn largely from its own collections and that of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, allows a few tantalizing glimpses of Brontë’s early writing. Most touching and accessible is her very first extant work, a small book made for her youngest sister “Ane,” who was motherless by her second year and motherless again at age five after the deaths of the family’s two eldest daughters. Open to a page illustrated by a beguiling tiny watercolor of a sailing ship, the book makes clear how early Brontë, then age twelve or so, understood the power of imaginary travel. That travel was very soon denied to adults, for the books that followed are, even when examined with a magnifying glass, virtually unreadable, despite their careful script and wonderfully exact illustrations; they’re simply too tiny for the middle-aged eye, and perhaps for any eye other than that of a Brontë sibling. The four surviving Brontë children—three sisters and a brother—all wrote, but their intent was never to have their manuscripts read by others, most especially perhaps their father and aunt. Charlotte once promised a boarding-school friend a glimpse and then reneged. It seems that Monsieur Heger, her teacher, muse, maître, and great unrequited love, was the first to be entrusted with a few of her most cherished early works. Read More
December 5, 2016 On the Shelf Only You Can Justify the Humanities, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Reading, 1892. In 2013, two social scientists from the New School announced that reading literary fiction seemed to make people more empathetic, according to their research. The literary community, more desperate than ever for the imprimatur of the sciences, latched on to their study like a thirsty deer tick: here, at last, was proof of our value. But it was not meant to be, friends. New researchers have failed to replicate the results of the original study, leaving the humanities to wander alone again in this cold, dark, fiercely utilitarian nightmare we call “life.” Joseph Frankel writes, “It’s still an open question why psychologists, the media, and laypeople alike are so interested in the possible benefits of reading fiction … Those both in and outside of the humanities have ascribed moral benefits to literature and art as ‘a rescue operation’ for these disciplines at a time when their worth is under scrutiny. It’s hard not to see arguments that literature might make people more empathetic, more moral, or more socially adept as a corrective to the perceived lack of ‘return of investment’ when it comes to the arts. ‘I don’t hope or believe that social psychology is needed to justify the humanities,’ [the social scientist] Kidd told me. But in a culture where science is sometimes treated with more gravity than the humanities, this research can be used to do exactly that.” Linguists, on the other hand, are looking like world-historical heroes right now. I mean, haven’t you seen Arrival? A linguist saves the fucking planet. And Ben Zimmer (a linguist) is pretty excited about that message: “Academic linguists like myself should be overjoyed for this confirmation of what I’ve long suspected: we are absolutely crucial to the survival of humanity … This is the first science-fiction film I have seen that puts a great effort into representing a detailed scientific approach to an alien encounter. With a few caveats, linguists and linguistics were portrayed in a very true to life manner.” Read More