November 18, 2016 On Music Gotham Lullaby By Adam Shatz Meredith Monk at the National Sawdust Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes Maybe it’s a post–11/9 condition, a porousness to emotion, but whatever it is (or isn’t), Meredith Monk, who performed last night at the National Sawdust Theatre in Williamsburg, spoke to me as no other performer has in a while. By the simplest of means: made-up words (from the Monkian lexicon) and a handful of minor chords at the piano. I guess this is what the critics mean when they talk about the “transfiguration of the commonplace.” She faced us at audience level, on a stage barely larger than a living room. “I think we’re all in need of lullabies now,” she said as she sat at the piano, and played her “Gotham Lullaby” from Dolmen Music: her cries, hesitations, and pauses nearly brought me to tears. I was not alone. Read More
November 18, 2016 Our Correspondents At Sea By Merritt Tierce On the defunct language of nautical flags. Willem van de Velde II, Sea Flight, mid-1800s–early 1900s, pen and brush and brown and gray ink, 7″ x 11 1/8″. There are forty flags in a complete set of international maritime signal flags—one for each letter of the English alphabet, one for each number, and four flags called substitutes, which perform special operations. The flags are a way of raising a meaning to the eye, at a binoculared distance, and while most vessels still carry a set on board, the flags themselves—unfurled, unraised—now mainly signify that we are seafaring in the time of radio and digital and satellite and do not need to communicate so slowly or primitively, via material squares of color. To a ship’s crew, I imagine they signify something like what a drop-down oxygen mask signifies to the commercial air traveler: if you think about it, all you realize is you don’t want to think either about the situation in which you’d have to use it or exactly how unable it would be to fully remedy that situation. The ships carry the flags in case they lose all other means of communication, but what set of circumstances could cause that kind of outage and also be cured by flying some flimsy flapping message? Read More
November 18, 2016 On the Shelf “Painting Like a Man,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Grace Hartigan, The Massacre, 1952, oil on canvas. © Estate of Grace Hartigan; collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Image via The Atlantic. I always like to talk about The Paris Review’s shadowy CIA past. True, it all happened well before I was born, let alone before I was employed here, but I feel it lends my personal story an air of roguish midcentury intrigue. But I should knock it off, because the fact is this: the CIA’s alliance with belles lettres was quietly despicable, a mark on the magazine’s history. Rob Spillman spoke to Joel Whitney, the author of the new book Finks, about the broader, soft-power implications of the CIA in the early Review’s aesthetics: “[Review editors] interviewed Europeans and Americans who they put in a belles lettrist context. They basically were politicizing the apoliticization of art. They made it seem apolitical, and did so very effectively … There’s a de-emphasis on historical truth. You see that across all the CIA aesthetics that they championed. Abstract expressionism was depoliticized against the backdrop of social realism. You have new criticism, which was almost rabidly not interested in historical or the post-colonial context. The Paris Review pretended they didn’t do politics … If it looks apolitical, that doesn’t necessarily make it so.” Looking to the same period, Sarah Boxer renews a sixties-era argument about women and art: “Women artists have been put down in many ways over the years, but the basic technique boils down to this: A critic, a curator, a dealer, or an art historian describes how women paint differently from men, then declares this quality inferior. Women are pegged as controlled, tentative, personal … Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss. It is no accident that ‘painting like a man’ used to be dished out as a supremely delicious compliment. Irving Sandler once asked Grace Hartigan ‘if a male artist ever told her she painted as well as a man.’ She replied tartly, ‘Not twice.’ ” Read More
November 17, 2016 From the Archive Zebras Anything By James Tate From a 1938 WPA poster for the Brookfield Zoo. James Tate’s poem “Zebras Anything” appeared in our Fall 1975 issue. Read More
November 17, 2016 Our Correspondents In Step By Wei Tchou Taking to the streets for New York City’s Trump protests. Photo: Dustin Kirkpatrick. On Sunday evening, after four days of involuntarily clenching so badly that my jaw had started to ache too much to fully open, I dosed myself with painkillers and melatonin and finally got a full night of sleep. No bad dreams, only blackness. New York City has hummed with tension since the election—most people I know feel as though we’re in a nightmare we can’t wake from. The best I’ve been able to do so far is start at square one every day when I get up: turn on the kettle, read the headlines, jot a sentence in my diary, and remember to take a jacket on my way out the door. The protests that have roared up Fifth Avenue frightened me when they began last Wednesday evening; the pictures I saw on Twitter and Instagram captured a version of a city too unwieldy for me to comprehend. I flipped through countless posts of protesters’ faces, indistinct except for their anger. Their crudely made signs were chilling in their simplicity: FUCK TRUMP. I appreciated my peers’ passion and readiness to action, but I was still too numb to be moved. What was the point? Trump won the election fairly. Weren’t we flouting President Obama’s call to “go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens”? Weren’t we behaving like the faceless mob we’d spent this entire campaign decrying? These, and many other questions, rattled me. So on Saturday morning, I did what I am inclined to do when I don’t understand something: I grabbed a notebook and headed for the crowds. Read More
November 17, 2016 My First Time Karl Ove Knausgaard on Out of the World By Dan Piepenbring Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. Today, Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his 1998 debut novel, Ute av verden (Out of the World): “I got up at six in the evening, I woke up, and then I sat and wrote all night, till eight or nine in the morning … I was so egocentric, it was really the only thing I cared about for sixteen months. When you write a book you don’t know why you’re doing it.” Knausgaard wrote the book for his father, who died just before it was published. “I realized the book was meaningless,” he says. “I wanted to say to him, Look, this is me, you don’t know me, you never knew me.” Read More