November 9, 2016 On the Shelf Writers, Start Writing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Knowledge will break the chains of slavery,” a propaganda poster from 1920s Russia. This site is dedicated to literature, arts, and culture. Electoral politics are usually beyond our remit. On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless. But I don’t want to add to the chorus of despair, because I do believe there’s a role for art at a time like this, and I don’t say that lightly—words like these don’t come easily to me. I would rather make fun of things, and I’m struggling against an inborn fatalism. (My iPhone just reminded me to water my plants, and I thought, why bother?) The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay. Read More
November 8, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Four Quotes from The Way We Live Now, 1875 By Dan Piepenbring A Donald Trump cake being wheeled into Trump Tower. Photo: Jason Volack, @jasonvolack, via Twitter It’s a good night for Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, at the center of which is one Augustus Melmotte, a financier who runs for Parliament. Read More
November 8, 2016 Our Correspondents O Rangasayee By Jeff Seroy Mark Morris brings back his iconic solo dance. Mark Morris in the original performance of “O Rangasayee,” 1984. Photo: Beatriz Schiller A young saddhu, a lone devotee, with nothing to his name but passion for the form of god he’s chosen to worship and the rag of a dhoti wrapped around his loins, crouches in a ball in dim golden light at the back of the stage. He slowly raises his head and shoulders, stands, and strikes a pose. Then another. The poses form a sequence. They’re reminiscent of figures in Indian temple sculpture, but not quite classical somehow. One arm is outstretched like an arrow; the hand on the other, palm outward, covers eyes that gaze up and away. Or his hands hang limply from his arms, bent like dog paws. Or, with both palms down and open toward the audience, his head bobbles on his neck, looking like something between an elegant Indian dance move and a camp imitation of a kitschy Eastern European tchotchke—you know, the one your mother brought back from Romania. His torso welcomes torque. His fingertips and palms are painted betel red. So are the outlines of his feet. A sitar whines, a tabla strikes, a raga singer with a plaintive voice wills the devotee to action. Thus begins “O Rangasayee,” by Mark Morris, one of the great modern dance solos of the twentieth century. Morris made this work for himself as a young man early in 1984. In December that year, he performed it as part of a sensational program in BAM’s Lepercq Space, after which The New Yorker’s Arlene Croce anointed him the Next Great Thing and he exploded onto the scene. It’s not clear how the audience that night had found their way there—I knew someone who worked a restaurant kitchen with some company members—or what they were expecting—but had a meteor crashed through the ceiling and landed smack in the middle of the gymnasium-like space, smoking and spitting flames at the bleachers, it wouldn’t have been met with a greater sense of awe. Read More
November 8, 2016 At Work Before Pictures: An Interview with Douglas Crimp By Sarah Cowan Douglas Crimp at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, c. 1970. Photographer unknown. In September, the art historian Douglas Crimp was speaking about his new book, Before Pictures, at the Whitney Museum when the slide projection was turned off and the screen rose, revealing the sunlight bobbing on the Hudson River and a view of Pier 52. It was there that, forty years prior, Gordon Matta-Clark had carved his monumental and illicit work Day’s End in an abandoned warehouse and Crimp had gone cruising for sex. The piers were known to be dangerous, Crimp writes, but at the time he had no fear of them, except the anxiety that their lure was distracting him from his work. Now the seventy-two-year-old was backlit against a thoroughfare of joggers and Citi Bike riders along Eleventh Avenue. The “vast and hauntingly beautiful” structures he describes had long ago been flattened into a parking lot for the Department of Sanitation. Read More
November 8, 2016 On the Shelf Teens Are Forever, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Samara Scott, Lonely Planet II, Frieze London, 2015, stainless steel, water, mixed media. Image via Sunday Painter/Frieze This year’s Nobel and Booker winners have destabilized the literary prize scene—it was only a matter of time until the aftershocks spread to other awards. Op-Ed writers have helped it along: there’s never been a better time to stroke your chin and ruminate pseudo-controversially about the purpose of prizes. How should a literary award be? What is “prestige”? Shouldn’t I be voting right now instead of asking rhetorical questions? Anyway, now Tom LeClair has the National Book Award in his crosshairs: “Some months ago … I identified a trend I called ‘commercialit,’ craft fiction, like craft beer, for popular consumption produced by young M.F.A.-holding novelists whom one might expect to be artists rather than artisans. In attempting to reach what the National Book Foundation calls ‘new communities’ of book buyers and to please its corporate sponsors, the National Book Award for Fiction—once more prestigious than the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award—has turned toward commercialit and artisanal creations. In my judgment, this year only two books of ten have any reasonable claim on the award.” Today in good reasons not to do things: Tim Parks thought he might set out to retranslate The Decameron. Then he read the original English translation and thought, why bother? “Are new translations always better, or always feasible, even? … I suspect what it suggests is the importance of finding the right translator for the first translation of a literary work, one who has a genuine affinity with the style of the original, and, above all, can root it into our own literature in a moment when it makes sense, when the culture can really receive it in its own idiom. In Italy, with the lapse of copyright on Faulkner’s writing, there have been a number of new Faulkner translations that are doubtless more semantically accurate than those made back in the Forties and Fifties. And yet those old translations—made when a modernist work was still a matter of excitement, rather than an aesthetic museum piece—seem more aware of the energy and spirit of the original and certainly a better read than more recent, academic efforts.” Read More
November 7, 2016 Look It Was Just This Moment By Dan Piepenbring Katharina Wulff’s exhibition “It Was Just This Moment” is at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York through December 23. Her latest large-scale paintings depict her community in Marrakech, portraying crowded gyms and a hotel lobby. “The free and somewhat anarchistic way people interact here is one of the many things I find really interesting about Morocco,” she said in 2012. “In Europe there’s practically no real communication anymore.” Katharina Wulff, Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 46 3/4″ x 37 5/8″ Read More