October 19, 2016 On the Shelf A Pocket Versailles, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The penthouse at Trump Tower. Photo: Sam Horine. Thom Jones, a high school janitor whose short stories vaunted him into the literary spotlight in the early nineties, has died at seventy-one: “ Jones worked on the Betty Crocker Noodles Almondine line at a General Mills plant. He was fired as an advertising copywriter because, he was told, a client would not countenance his proposed slogan for the Jolly Green Giant—which was more or less, with an expletive inserted, ‘These are the best peas I ever ate’ … His ferocious, semiautobiographical short stories about boxers, custodians, soldiers, crime victims, cancer patients and asylum inmates coupled a fateful machismo—the eternal pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was his hero—with grim humor.” Our indefatigable efforts to drill into Trump’s psyche have led us to this: a close consideration of his interior decorating. Back in his eighties heyday, the Donald—still with Ivana then—turned to the designer Angelo Donghia to help him tame the Trump Tower penthouse. But in the intervening decades, something, some remaining tendril of good taste, was irrevocably broken, and now, as Thomas de Monchaux writes, the Trump penthouse is overstuffed with decorative diversions: “From the reflective ceilings to the gilded Corinthian capitals, a would-be Sun King eventually built himself a hall of mirrors, a pocket Versailles. Closer to the truth may be that a restless eye sought for itself a home that, detail upon detail, eye-catcher upon eye-catcher, provides constant diversion. The current Trump penthouse is a place for a short span of attention, a place without threat of stillness, a place where you don’t spend a lot of time wondering whether something is right or wrong. Ironically, the task of making such a place is not a matter of quick judgment and definite attitude, but is methodical, belabored, and slow.” Read More
October 18, 2016 Look West Ridge By Dan Piepenbring Claire Sherman’s exhibition, “West Ridge,” is at DC Moore Gallery in New York through November 5. Sherman’s latest paintings focus on what she calls “unraveling environments,” depicting archetypes of forests and islands in varying states of agitation. She paints quickly, refusing to spend more than a day in the studio working on a single piece. “The physical quality of paint is something I find very seductive,” she told Hyperallergic in 2014. “Paint has the ability to describe, fall apart, be chaotic, rigid, uncontrollable, fluid, and surprising all at once.” Claire Sherman, Sea Cave, 2016, oil on canvas, 78″ x 96″. Read More
October 18, 2016 Correspondence In His Own Words By Luisa Zielinski Newly revealed letters from Heidegger confirm his Nazism—not that there was any doubt. Illustration: Herbert Wetterauer. Martin Heidegger never apologized for his support of the Nazis. He joined the party in 1933 and remained a member until the bitter end, in 1945. First, he spoke out enthusiastically in favor of a conservative revolution with Hitler at its helm. From about 1935, he found his own ambitions disappointed, and grew more silent. Yet, when he called his dalliance with National Socialism his greatest mistake after the war, he was upset not at his crime, but at the fact that he got caught. Not that Heidegger has had to apologize, either. For the past seventy years, his many apologists and acolytes have gone to astounding lengths in trying to prove that his philosophical oeuvre exists independent of what was, they avowed, a mere weakness of character, an instance of momentary opportunism. In 2014, a group of French philosophers even tried to halt the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, his philosophical diaries. But if antisemitic references in his philosophy are oblique and, as some would have it, coincidental to his critique of modernity, the Notebooks leave little room for such charitable reading. Even after the war he would bemoan the Jewish “drive for revenge,” with their aim consisting in “obliterating the Germans in spirit and history.” And yet, the Black Notebooks haven’t lain to rest one of the more irksome debates around continental philosophy. Perhaps that’s what the release of Heidegger’s correspondence with his lifelong confidante, his brother Fritz, will achieve. His heirs, having held back these letters for many years, have finally caved to the pressure that began to mount following the release of the Black Notebooks. The excerpts released in advance by Die Zeit and Le Monde last weekend show Heidegger for what, apparently, he was: the real deal, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi who bought into Hitler’s ideology wholesale. And he wasn’t a particularly sophisticated one. In his letters, the forefather of deconstruction voices his impassioned belief in Volk and Führer, perpetual German victimhood, “world Jewry,” the threat of Bolshevism, and American decadence. Perhaps it’s inconvenient, but it’s hardly shocking: Heidegger was not just a member of the Nazi party, but also a Nazi. Nor was he just a “metaphysical antisemite”—he also just really disliked Jews. Let’s hope this settles the matter. Read More
October 18, 2016 Our Correspondents Let No One Sleep By Alison Kinney “Nessun dorma,” Donald Trump, and the best and worst of fans. The hero of Turandot lurks behind the opera’s icy princess. Ever since Jacopo Peri wrote Euridice (1600, the earliest extant European opera) to celebrate the marriage of Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici, opera has been ripe for political interpretation, partisanship, and misappropriation by its makers and its fans. Unfortunately, one of opera’s most fervent, prominent boosters used Richard Wagner’s music for anti-Semitic propaganda in Germany in the thirties and forties. Opera fans who aren’t Nazis—especially, perhaps, Jewish musicians—sometimes feel a little embattled about our fan community alliances and image; defensively, we latch onto more congenial fellows like hard-core Wagnerite W. E. B. Du Bois, who attended performances of Lohengrin and the Ring at Bayreuth. Or the ten-year-old fan who listened to Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert on the radio, later wrote about it for a high school speech contest (“there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity”), and married a classical singer, Coretta Scott (who said of the New England Conservatory of Music, “This is where I knew I was supposed to be”). Or Juilliard-trained pianist Nina Simone, whose opera fandom would leave an indelible mark on Porgy and Bess and The Threepenny Opera. Then Donald Trump joined our fan club. Last November, the fact that his rally sound track featured the late Luciano Pavarotti singing the aria “Nessun dorma” (“Let no one sleep,” from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot) was just a weird frisson troubling opera Twitter. By July, when the Pavarotti family argued that Pavarotti’s “values of brotherhood and solidarity” were “entirely incompatible” with Trump’s worldview, none of us could ignore the aria’s message anymore: “Vincerò!” I will win! Read More
October 18, 2016 On the Shelf Pick Up the Phone, Bob, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Can you hear me, Bob? Bob? [Beep.] Is it rolling, Bob? Ha, get it, that’s from Nashville Skyline … which all of us here at the Academy just adore, by the way—your voice sounds so beautiful without all those cigarettes chewing it up. But anyway, I’m calling because … well, you know why. Okay, Bob? Bob, are you there? Hey, Bob? … Bob? We’ve got this prize to give you. Bob. It’s the big one, ha-ha! It’s the highest honor! … C’mon, Bob, pick up the phone. I know you’re there. Don’t let me just blather on like this—again—Bob? Come on, man. We’ve been trying to get you on the horn for days now. Maybe it’s—you know you can e-mail us, right? I get it, the phone numbers get pretty long when you’re calling international, maybe you’re just sick of trying to dial … plus the time difference … I mean … just have your manager e-mail a little whatever, He accepts, he thinks you’re great … okay, Bob! Look, we’re not saying you have to get in touch. It would just be nice. We’re all big fans and we have—arrangements—to be made. For the banquet. In Stockholm? For the fucking Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob, which, frankly, we went out on a limb, giving this thing to you, I don’t know if you’ve seen the hot takes, and if you could just show a little decency—I mean not decency-decency, we’re all big fans—but it’s, it’s not like we haven’t taken some heat on this one, right, and now with the prolonged silence and all it sort of looks—just … call us back. Please, please call us back, Bob. Read More
October 17, 2016 Events Tonight at McNally Jackson: A Celebration of Henry Green By The Paris Review New Yorkers: tonight at seven, join The Paris Review’s Lorin Stein at McNally Jackson, where he’ll be in conversation with Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Greenberg, and Craig Lucas; they’re discussing the brilliant Henry Green (1905–1973), whose novels Back, Loving, and Caught will be reissued this fall by New York Review Books. Green talked to The Paris Review about Loving back in 1958: I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash. Green was a divisive writer in his lifetime. W. H. Auden called him “the best English novelist alive” (NB: he was still alive at the time); The Partisan Review called him “a terrorist of language.” Who was right? The answer to this question and many others, tonight.