December 16, 2016 Look Mythologies By Dan Piepenbring “Mythologies,” an exhibition of work by the French painter Hervé Heuzé, is on display at Galerie Richard in New York through January 28, 2017. Hervé Heuzé, Natacha, 2013, oil on canvas, 28 3/4″ x 36 1/4″. Read More
December 16, 2016 Literary Architecture Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. “My problem is … finding my proper place with respect to your story. … I thought I could … remain objective. But objectivity, in such an undertaking, is a delusion.” In The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère tells us the unbelievable yet true story of Jean-Claude Romand, a man who, in 1993, tried to commit suicide after brutally killing his wife, his two children, and his parents. The investigation reveals that Romand, an impeccable family man with a degree in medicine and a researcher at the World Health Organization, well-off and well-liked by everyone, in reality was an impostor. Every aspect of his life is a lie—a giant and unsustainable scaffolding created to support his fabrication. Read More
December 16, 2016 Our Correspondents The Long and Pretty Good-bye By Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew Bergman’s column is about naturalism. This week, she discusses the role of modern elegiac writing in an era of extinction. Michelle Blade, Entrance, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 60″ x 46″. It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth, to no longer practice customs barely acquired, not to give a meaning of human futurity to roses, and other expressly promising things —Rilke, “The First Elegy” Last week, my daughters and I were talking about the extinction of the northern white rhino, looking at a photograph I took last November through a fence at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. “He’s the last of his kind,” I said, pointing to the hulking animal in sagging, dusty-white skin. “And one day soon, no northern white rhinos will exist.” “Why?” they wanted to know. Detailing the horrors of poaching and civil war in the Congo and Sudan seems harsh, and I’m still learning how to talk to my girls about the human hand in death and change. When a neighbor died, the answer was still safely that “death is the natural course of things,” but the answers become more complex when we talk about war, extinction, or place. How do we acknowledge human complicity, the way resource consumption impacts the habitat and survival of other species? Read More
December 16, 2016 On the Shelf Show Me the Money (Over and Over), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s Jerry Maguire Man! It’s Friday! Let’s watch a movie. How about Jerry Maguire? I love Jerry Maguire. I could watch it every day for the rest of my life and I’d be happy as a clam. Oh please can we please watch Jerry Maguire? I have the videocassette. I have dozens, hundreds of copies of the videocassette. Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, a modern classic, please can we please … my walls are lined with copies of the videocassette. And now: “A Los Angeles art gallery will play host early next year to an exhibit in the form of a videotape rental store with nothing but thousands of VHS copies of the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire. ‘Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste and existence as a whole,’ the collective said in a statement. ‘The Jerrys are a beautiful thing’ … The event is merely a precursor to a planned Jerry Maguire pyramid that the collective hopes to build ‘in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.’ ” Reading Samuel Beckett’s last letters, Robert Fay is heartened by the vision of him as a doddering old man, his health failing but his spirit strong: “‘Might have damaged myself beyond repair last night in the bathroom,’ Beckett writes at the age of sixty-nine to his life-long mistress Barbara Bray in 1975. ‘Had got out of the bath & was drying myself with my back to it when my feet slipped & I fell in backward.’ Two years later he writes, ‘I slipped & fell in the street yesterday, but could pick myself up & go on cursing God & man’ … In 1988 Beckett’s life took its most severe turn when he entered a nursing home in Paris. He understood this was his final home. He writes, ‘Still here with the old crocks [Beckett’s slang for old people], it sometimes feels for keeps.’ A year later, during his final year, his letters become shorter, terser, more like e-mails than epistles. In one of the more touching lines, he ends a letter to his friend Rick Cluchey by writing: ‘Silence is my cloister.’ ” Read More
December 15, 2016 Sleep Aid The Art of Bread Making By Dan Piepenbring It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from The Bread and Biscuit Baker’s and Sugar-Boiler’s Assistant, an 1890 book by Robert Wells. When we reflect upon the present conditions under which the bread-making industry is carried on in most of the large cities and towns of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and remember the importance of that industry to mankind, we cannot but be impressed by the little progress that has been made in the art of bread-making. Whilst other industries have been marked by important improvements, we find bread being made in much the same manner as it was five hundred years ago. The mystery is how—by accident, it would seem—we get such well-made bread as we do. There are very few even now who have the slightest conception of what yeast really is, and fewer still who know how or why it makes bread light. But it will surprise me if the trade does not undergo, in the course of the next ten years, a complete and beneficial change. Read More
December 15, 2016 Arts & Culture One Devil Too Many By Ed Simon Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at four hundred. The Devil and Dr. Faustus Meet, ca. 1825. Via Wellcome Images. Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus premiered in 1594. Nearly forty years later, people were still talking about those earliest performances. The Puritan pamphleteer and ideologue William Prynne, in his massive 1633 antitheatrical tome Histriomastix, recounted diabolical legends surrounding this most infernal of plays. The spectators and actors “prophanely playing” in that first production, he reported, had a “visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage.” The good Puritan—soon to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he would have his ears cropped for having implied that the queen was a whore—assures us that though he was not himself familiar with such theatrical dens of iniquity, he can confirm the event’s veracity as “the truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it.” Similarly, a monograph by someone identified only as “G.J.R” recounts that during a performance of the scene where Dr. Faustus begins his conjurations, there suddenly “was one devil too many amongst them.” It seems that the hocus pocus nonsense magic of Marlowe’s immense Latin learning had accidentally triggered an actual occult transaction, pulling one of Lucifer’s servants from hell into our own realm. On that stage in Exeter—there among conjuring circles, chanted invocations, and the adjuring of God’s love—the extras playing stock devils with caked-on red makeup and fake horns strapped to their heads found themselves with the chance to meet the real thing. G.J.R. informs us that “after a little pause… every man hastened to be first out of doors.” The actors (“contrary to their custom,” he duly informs us) spent the night in “reading and in prayer,” making sure to get “out of the town the next morning.” Read More