October 11, 2016 On the Shelf Bringing Back Brutalism, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: (c) Roberto Conte, www.robertoconte.net It’s back! The architectural movement you’ve been craving—with the ethics you can’t live without! It’s social democracy in building form! It’s an expression of the human desire to achieve! It’s Brutalism! Nikil Saval writes, “Despite two generations of abuse (and perhaps a little because of it), an enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings beyond the febrile, narrow precincts of architecture criticism has begun to take hold. Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness. For an aesthetic once praised for its ‘ruthless logic’ and ‘bloody-mindedness’—in the much-quoted phrasing of critic Reyner Banham—it is a surprising turn of events … In countries still reeling from the worldwide financial crisis, it’s a solace to look back to an era of muscular, public-minded development.” Henry Green’s novels are being reissued, and you should read them as soon as you can. Don’t even finish reading this post. Just get up and go buy them and read them. I’ll be here. If you’re not inclined to do what I tell you just because I told you to do it, Leo Robson can convince you more elegantly: “Green believed that well-groomed, well-behaved English was an obstacle to expression. But his style wasn’t a merely negative exercise, a winnowing or clearing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-bodied alternative. The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.” Read More
October 10, 2016 Look In the Pines By Dan Piepenbring “In the Pines,” an exhibition of paintings, ceramics, and works on paper by Rebecca Morgan, is at Asya Geisberg Gallery through October 29. Morgan grew up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania; her work plays with stereotypes and caricatures of hillbillies and country people. The woods suggest a coarse and hedonistic culture: it is the scene of bonfires, hunting, sex, drunken revelry, camaraderie, fights, and perversion. Morgan said in an interview with TOH Magazine. “I navigate my reverence and aversion to the place that has rejected yet charmed me. I operate in modes of frustration, cynicism, and reclamation.” Rebecca Morgan, Family Reunion, 2016, oil and graphite on panel, 24″ x 30″. Read More
October 10, 2016 First Person The Book of Life By Shelley Salamensky Aunt Rose, right, et al., 1942. In her book Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood recounts how she faked her own death, staging a car crash in the Philippines. My great-aunt Rose did something of that nature—if, admittedly, in the less dramatic mode of an aged Jewish lady with used tissues tucked into her sleeve and sagging, off-color support hose. Rose’s ride to a wedding in Newark from Paterson showed up as planned, and as confirmed by her the week before. Somebody’s nephew. Rang, rang the bell. —No answer. —Upturned an ashcan in the alley, climbed and, clutching at the window ledge, peered in. Aunt Rose was gone. Read More
October 10, 2016 Books Being a Bumpkin By Oliver Lee Bateman Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity. From the cover of Hillbilly Elegy. Scan the headlines and you’ll find that everyone’s talking about how the white trash have made their presence felt. The white trash support Trump; the white trash are losing ground; the white trash should be honored by the government for their hard work and sacrifices; the white trash are continuing to redirect their aggression at other racial minorities instead of the robber barons who exploit them. But who exactly are these people, these trashy whites who have found themselves, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, “without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power?” Read More
October 10, 2016 On the Shelf Someone’s Sending Feces to Philosophers, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Full of shit. There are plenty of people in this world who deserve to find an envelope full of human feces in the mail. Philosophers, in my experience, are not among these people; the life of the mind does not often cry out for comeuppance. But someone thinks otherwise. Sally Haslanger, a professor at MIT, was among four philosophers to receive shit in the mail last summer: “Haslanger wasn’t as confounded as one might expect a well-respected philosopher to be when faced with a mysterious package of poop. That’s because three other philosophers also received shit in the mail last summer … All four philosophy professors were embroiled in a 2014 academic brawl over what they perceived as an abuse of power within their field. Now they say someone is sending them shit in an attempt to shut them up. The question is, who? And why now?” Let’s take a trip to the annals of ghostwriting, where new research suggests that Hitler actually wrote Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, a 1923 book previously believed to be the work of Baron Adolf Victor von Koerber. “I’m convinced from the presented sources that Hitler himself wrote this short text or gave at least the basic information to an editor,” a German newspaper editor said. “This is important because it shows that Hitler thought about himself as the ‘German savior’ as early as 1923. So I think this is a small but important advance in researching Hitler’s biography.” Read More
October 7, 2016 From the Archive LBJ Ranch Barbecue By Catherine Bowman Catherine Bowman’s poem “LBJ Ranch Barbecue” appeared in our Fall 1990 issue. Read More