June 30, 2016 On the Shelf We’re Both Dippy Over Him, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Gee whiz! If you’ve been listening to pop music your whole life, you might think that love is a many-splendored thing, subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the human condition. You would be wrong. Love has exactly seven stages—no more, no less. Stendhal said so: “In 1818, Stendhal—then an unsuccessful writer in his midthirties named Henri Beyle—met one of the loves of his life, Méthilde … But Méthilde kept Stendhal at arm’s length, and even limited their interactions, only allowing him to visit her once every two weeks, which, in turn, gave Stendhal time to develop and nurture his fantasy of her, to exaggerate his love and admiration to truly grandiose proportions. ‘This is a love that lives only through the imagination,’ Stendhal recorded in his journal … Stendhal kept track of his emotions, and began to think about love with an almost scientific scrutiny. The result of this project was called De l’Amour, in which he described his famous concept of the stages of love. There are seven stages in all—which could conceivably follow like episodes on a season of The Bachelor—evolving in a form of crystallization: ‘a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.’ ” While we’re talking love—David Rees found his grandma’s diaries, and they are full of it. Mainly the object of her affection is ice cream; sometimes boys, too. “My teenage grandmother’s great genius was flirting,” he writes: “Those amazing boys! The peachy, dandy, charming boys of Gloversville, anointed with adjectives now reserved for Yelp reviews of bed-and-breakfasts. I can barely keep up with her crushes, or their fluctuations in status: ‘But what do you suppose [Peggy] told me? That Bill was mad at me because he thought I was mad at him because he talked to Velma Thorne! And there I didn’t even know he’d been talking to her! Wasn’t it funny. … So I told [Ralph] to tell [Bill] I wasn’t mad and it didn’t bother me how much he talked to Velma!’ It turns out poor Bill, being ‘stout’ and a cigarette-bummer (‘I hate to see a fellow smoke when he’s with a girl on the street, don’t you?’) was no match for Grant. Or Jonsey. Or the mysterious ‘Sunshine,’ who, if my grandmother is to be believed, was, for one summer in 1911, the most alluring young man in the universe: ‘one grand rower, fisher and sportsman. Really I never saw anybody like him. Emma & I are both dippy over him!’ ” So like imagine you’re a young Karl Ove Knausgaard and you get on the elevator in a fancy midtown building and hey now, it’s some hotshot publisher and you’ve got about thirty seconds to pitch My Struggle: “Ah, hello. Yes, going up. I haven’t chosen a floor yet. You may know me. I’m a writer. Imagine: A young man boards the bus to his grandparents’ flat in Elvegaten. He usually sits on the left side of the aisle, a few rows from the back, by the window, if the seat is available. It is: He sits there. He—there’s more to it, actually, but—yes, have a nice day.” Marianne Moore revised her poems restlessly, constantly—and sometimes publicly. In her willingness to let her readers see a poem in different iterations, she anticipated the Internet, Ali Pechman writes: “Particularly with respect to the way she changed her work, Moore has always struck me as more of a digital-age artist than any of her contemporaries. Her poems were as malleable as something written online … Her process gives a hint of how a poetic mind might use the Internet. In poems such as ‘An Octopus,’ she collages together text from newspapers, guidebooks, and overheard remarks at the circus in a shimmering representation of Mount Rainier. ‘Marriage’ contains roughly thirty sources from Francis Bacon to Ezra Pound to the inscription on a statue in Central Park. Such poems are a reflection of the hours she spent scouring countless books at the library and attending lectures. Her democratic sphere of influence apes the Internet—and, to follow, her aggressive self-editing reads like a symptom of that kind of capacity. One wonders what she would have written if she had had references at her fingertips.” Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, an Oulipo project, tells a love story without ever referring to gender—a feat that’s all the more impressive in French, which has gender baked into its grammatical constructs. “To get around these rules, Garréta digs deep into the French language. Instead of the passé composé she uses the literary form of the past tense, the passé simple, which does not employ participles that require agreement, and relies heavily on the imparfait, which describes continuously-occurring past actions. Sometimes Garréta uses sentence fragments to avoid the verb altogether. She describes A***’s body indirectly, taking advantage of the fact that, in French, an arm (un bras) is masculine even if it belongs to a female and a leg (une jambe) is feminine even when it belongs to a male. No primary or secondary sex characteristics are ever mentioned, of course: in the sex scenes thighs and crotches end up doing the erotic and narrative heavy lifting. And in one important instance a genderless English noun stands in for its gendered French equivalent.”
June 29, 2016 Look Intimisms By Dan Piepenbring “Intimisms,” a new group exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, looks at the legacy of the Intimists, a group of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists—Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard among them—remembered for the rich closeness and empathy of their portraiture. The French writer and critic Camille Mauclair defined intimism as “psychologic poetry in painting … a revelation of the soul through the things painted, the magnetic suggestion of what lies behind them through the description of the outer appearance, the intimate meaning of the spectacles of life … the daily tragedy and mystery of ordinary existence, and the latent poetry in things.” The artists in this exhibition aim to further that tradition. Gahee Park, Night Talk, 2016, oil on canvas, 85″ x 65″. Read More
June 29, 2016 Our Correspondents Last Exit By Lucy Sante I plan to exit from my house before the end of the fiscal year. No, I don’t mean I intend to leave it, physically. I’m here in my basement, as I always have been, and where would I go? But I will install a policy of silent noncooperation with the other rooms, beginning with the kitchen. I have long resented the kitchen’s implicit high-handed judgment of my habits, always shaming me with its leafy greens, its ancient grains, its paucity of refined sugars. I well remember those golden years of pizza for breakfast and frosted cereal for lunch with an unlimited supply of carbonated power drinks, and seethe at how I have cravenly allowed the kitchen to dictate a regimen it loftily considers to be better for me, as if it knew. I will make my eating habits great again. Read More
June 29, 2016 Prison Lit Woman Alive By Max Nelson The memoirs of an imprisoned suffragette. Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on John Cleland’s very erotic prison novel, here. In 1908, when she was thirty-seven, Lady Constance Lytton took a vacation by the sea in Littlehampton. She’d accepted a friend’s offer to spend the summer at the Esperance Club, a charity meant to teach working-class women traditional English dances and folk songs. During a walk through town one day, she found a crowd gathered around “a sheep which had escaped as it was being taken to the slaughterhouse.” Watching the animal stagger around to the crowd’s amusement, she wrote, A vision suddenly rose in my mind of what it should have been on its native mountain-side with all its forces rightly developed, vigorous and independent. There was a hideous contrast between that vision and the thing in the crowd. The vision of the sheep comes at the start of her 1914 autobiography, Prisons and Prisoners, in a chapter titled “My Conversion.” “It seemed to reveal for me for the first time,” Lytton continued, “the position of women throughout the world.” Read More
June 29, 2016 On the Shelf We’re All on Location, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the set of Intolerance. D. W. Griffith’s film Intolerance is a hundred years old. Its lavish sets—replete with plaster elephants, ornate ten-story walls, and all manner of Babylonian spectacle—testify to a creepy brand of movie magic that has long since leaped from the screen: “Intolerance is where fake movie architecture began its complicated dance with the real thing, affecting how audiences perceive the past, reconfigure their present, and anticipate the future … Even though it’s largely vanished from movies, the attraction of a reality that is recognizably phony and yet honest-to-gosh exists has hardly vanished from our culture … Increasingly, shopping malls, hotels, and the like do their best to emulate the same effect. We’re all on location, baby, even when we’re just shopping or hunting for a bite to eat. Intolerance anticipated many things, and one of them was Disneyland. In turn, Disneyland anticipated a lot of the modern environment we live in—not just at the multiplex or while on vacation, but full time.” The journalist Suki Kim went undercover as a teacher in North Korea and wrote a book about what she witnessed there—but her publishers decided to call it a memoir, thus exposing one of the industry’s many fault lines. She writes, “As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible. By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was a subtle shift, but one familiar to professional women from all walks of life. I was being moved from a position of authority—What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: How did you feel?” In which Geoff Dyer reflects on the condition of the secular pilgrim: “I’m always up for a bit of pilgrimage, really. But I’m so aware of the capacity of the secular pilgrimage to disappoint, whereby you go to the place the great writer lived, and it doesn’t work for you. That’s something I talk about in the Lawrence book [Out of Sheer Rage]. You can’t fake it. You might try to summon up the feeling, but quite often you can’t. So although the pilgrimage itself might be disappointing, quite often there’ll be all sorts of incidentals that render the pilgrimage worthwhile. So in the case of that chapter on Gauguin, you know, it pretty well all sucked, all the Gauguin stuff in Tahiti that I encountered, but there were other incidental things that made it very worthwhile.” Stephen Orgel’s The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces reminds us that “the history of any particular book does not conclude with its publication.” As Dustin Illingworth writes: “Over five in-depth studies, including an investigation of a school boy’s 500-year-old Latin grammar book and a deep dive into a bold countess’s library and letters, [Orgel] conducts a kind of archaeology of margins, gleaning sociological insight and human depth from the calcified life at the edge of the text … This historical understanding of books as locations, as readerly edifices within which one might store practical information, binding legal documentation, jokes, and ownership lists, alongside more traditional textual engagement, challenges our contemporary perception of a book’s materiality, one which often equates pristine margins with the value of the new.” Let’s check in on the ever-widening field of self-help, shall we? Treatments today—especially, one imagines, in the Greater Los Angeles area—increasingly resemble a kind of conceptual-art experience: “Dream Reality Cinema (DRC) comes from Budapest … According to the company’s upbeat, Kickstarter-ish video, the practice gives you the ability to ‘hack the firewall between the subconscious and conscious minds’ using lucid dreaming … The first half-hour was gentle, screen-saver-y, repetitive — in two distinct sections (with a hypnotic interlude in between), a pulsing orb moved around the screen against changing backgrounds. My soothing female voice instructed me in the ways of the life force, the ways in which knowledge is connected, whole systems can be comprehended, all awareness is attainable. At one point, I saw faces in the background grid.”
June 28, 2016 Our Correspondents Even the Chickens Dance By Jeff Seroy This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Jeff Seroy, who has written on ballet before for the Daily. “It’s got everything, including a Maypole.” I asked the choreographer Mark Morris—erstwhile bad boy of the dance scene, now about to turn sixty—as we were discussing a memoir he intends to write, to name a work by another choreographer he loved. His answer couldn’t have intrigued me more: Frederick Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Even aficionados of ballet may never have seen La fille mal gardée. It sounds antimodern and retrograde and frumpy and drearily clichéd. A comic ballet set in the countryside about a young girl in love with a shepherd whose bossy mother wants her to marry up? That reeks of mildew and lacks the authority of a canonical warhorse to excuse it. But trust Morris’s taste. La fille may turn out to be the best thing you’ve never seen—or you may wonder, as I now do, whether it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen. After many years out of repertory, American Ballet Theater has just revived their production of this masterpiece, and it’s perfection. Read More