June 16, 2016 In Memoriam Bill Berkson, 1939–2016 By Dan Piepenbring We were sorry to learn that the poet Bill Berkson has died at seventy-six. Berkson’s poems appeared in two issues of The Paris Review, from Winter 1968 and Fall 1970; he was also an accomplished art critic, contributing regularly to Artforum and Art in America. In a column for Harriet in 2013, he wrote of “poetry’s sensational impact”: Read More
June 16, 2016 From the Archive Dentist Poem By Daisy Friedman From The True Philosopher and Other Cat Tales, 1919. Daisy Friedman’s “Dentist Poem” appeared in our Winter 1997–98 issue. She is a writer and teacher in New York. i I love candy, anything really chewy and so full of sugar it stings like a Sugar Daddy. No matter how much I twist and pull, the long caramel tongue lasts me the full Sunday matinee at Radio City Music Hall, but just in case, I’ve also stored in my pea coat pocket a quarter pound of Swedish Fish. When the magician is pulling a rabbit out of his hat, I bite the head off one of my yellow fish. Tomorrow I have an appointment with Dr. Shapiro, my dentist. When I get home tonight, I will find my dental floss, which is stored somewhere under the bathroom sink. I’ll pull the white waxed cord all up and down and in between my teeth. I will brush before and after dinner. Dr. Shapiro knows I like candy and if my checkup isn’t good, even if I have cavities, he will still give me a lollipop. The only time Dr. Shapiro didn’t give me a lollipop was the time I bit him. He hurt me so I bit his finger. That was many appointments ago. I hope he’s forgiven me. Read More
June 16, 2016 Brushes with Greatness In the Restroom at the Walter Reade Theater By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Sofia Coppola and Francis Ford Coppola. In 2014, the magazine In Touch broke what is still, to my mind, one of our era’s most quintessential gossip stories. The weekly claimed that Lindsay Lohan was holding court at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, in an apparent attempt to impress her retinue, wrote out the names of three dozen of her sexual conquests—most of them A-list Hollywood celebrities such as Justin Timberlake, Colin Farrell, and Zac Efron—then tossed the list aside. A mistake, obviously, since that was likely when one of the entourage pounced, retrieving the sheet and eventually getting it into the hands of an In Touch staffer. The magazine reproduced the list in Lohan’s all-caps, American-middle-school-girl handwriting. Read More
June 16, 2016 On the Shelf Designing Black Power, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Larry Ratzkin’s design for Black Power. It’s something we all dream of—that our favorite deceased writers will someday roam the earth again as robots. In Japan, that dream is becoming a reality, as the author Soseki Natsume, who died a century ago, prepares to enjoy a second coming: “Soseki Natsume is being re-created as an android by Nishogakusha University Graduate School, and will be programmed to read material out loud and give lectures. Created in a sitting posture, the robot will be 130 centimeters high and built using 3D scans of a death mask and vintage photos … The robot’s voice will be created after analyzing the voice of his grandson, Prof. Fusanosuke Natsume of Gakushuin University. Fusanosuke Natsume said, ‘Since [Soseki is] a human being, it is better that he is smiling.’ ” Tall orders for graphic designers: in 1967, Larry Ratzkin was tasked with designing the jacket for Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, meaning his assignment was essentially to turn a whole political movement into a book cover. And he succeeded, as Josh MacPhee writes: “The cover was simple yet profound: a white field, the center crowded—almost to exploding—with the giant words Black Power in a thick, slab-serifed type. The authors’ names and book subtitle stack above and below, in a more elegant, thin sans-serif. That’s it. No images, no frills … The cover to Black Power is surprisingly successful, such a simple treatment—almost elegant—for a text that caused massive conflict and defines the transition from the non-violent Civil Rights Movement to the much more militant Black Power Movement in the United States. The initial 1967 Random House first-edition dust jacket was created by Larry Ratzkin, a well-known graphic designer who turned out upwards of a thousand book covers … All U.S. editions of Black Power in the almost fifty years since its initial publishing … have used facsimile re-creations of Ratzkin’s original design … This has to be the most seen and trafficked cover of Ratzkin’s long career, yet it is never associated with him.” Two hundred years ago, Mount Tambora belched a massive cloud of volcanic ash into the sky and ruined everyone’s summer, so much so that they called it the “Year Without Summer.” Perhaps not unrelatedly, Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein: “Our too-easy version of Frankenstein—oh, it’s all about technology and scientific hubris, or about industrialization—ignores completely the humanitarian climate disaster unfolding around Mary Shelley as she began drafting the novel. Starving, skeletal climate refugees in the tens of thousands roamed the highways of Europe, within a few miles of where she and her ego-charged friends were driving each other to literary distraction. Moreover, landlocked Alpine Switzerland was the worst hit region in all of Europe, producing scenes of social-ecological breakdown rarely witnessed since the hellscape of the Black Death.” London’s Foundling Museum is hosting an exhibition called “FOUND.” It’s about finding things, which, at the risk of being obvious, tends to involve losing them first: “Some found materials have been made into complete works, like the African textiles from Portobello Market that have inspired much of Yinka Shonibare’s art, including the Trumpet Boy … Or Polly Apfelbaum’s string of wishbones, graded from small to large, ‘electroplated like baby-shoes’ in copper—a string of good luck. But there’s bad luck here too, like the chain of pawnbroker’s tickets that Ron Arad found in London early 1970s. All are dated 1951, the year of his own birth, and many are marked ‘GWR’—gold wedding ring. Finding can provoke a shiver, a sadness.” Zadie Smith introduces one of her favorite new writers, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: “I’m sure she is coolly skeptical of the phrase black-girl magic … but some version of that is what Rachel brings to me. I was very affected when I was a kid by a phrase of novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s, ‘The black woman is the mule of the world.’ This is not the only truth about us, and Zora is proof of that: despite all the difficulties, she lived her life with verve, purpose and joy. Rachel’s got some of the Zora energy; she walks into a room and it’s a kind of event. I’ve learned from Rachel that black culture is a house with a thousand rooms, with windows looking out on so many views. Her writing is like a high-wire act: Can she pull it off? Are these swirling ideas going to cohere? But they do. I admire her bravery, boldness and attention to the craft.”
June 15, 2016 Look Road Trip By Dan Piepenbring Greg Drasler’s exhibition “Road Trip” opens tonight at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Reservations, 2014, oil on linen, 40″ x 44″. Read More
June 15, 2016 On History When Emperors Are No More By Michael Lipkin Why did an intelligent Jewish scholar write an appreciation of a German tyrant? From the paperback cover of Inventing the Middle Ages. In 1992, a medievalist named Norman Cantor published Inventing the Middle Ages, a series of light, biographical sketches intended to show readers how a few historians from the twentieth century had brought the Middle Ages alive to the general public, with, as the flap copy put it, “vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies.” One chapter, “The Nazi Twins,” was devoted partly to Ernst Kantorowicz, a Princeton scholar who’d written a magisterial study of sovereignty in medieval law, philosophy, and art. Cantor alleged that Kantorowicz—who was not only Jewish, but had spoken up against Hitler at great peril to his academic career, and whose mother has perished in a concentration camp—had “impeccable Nazi credentials”: an outrageous slander, in the eyes of his former students and colleagues. When The New York Review of Books ran a largely favorable essay on Inventing the Middle Ages, the magazine received a flood of angry letters. “Where is this Cantor [a] professor? Disney World?” demanded one reader. But “this Cantor” was not entirely specious in his claims. In 1927, when he was only thirty, Kantorowicz had written a seven-hundred-page biography of Frederick II, a Holy Roman Emperor from the thirteenth century. In lofty German that imitated the Latin style of Frederick’s time, Kantorowicz painted the Emperor as a redeemer of the German people who united the north with the Roman south and brought the barbaric East under his iron rule. Kantorowicz had a Hindu good luck symbol, the swastika, put on the biography’s cover, and on its dedication page he recalled laying a wreath on Frederick’s grave in Palermo. “That wreath,” he wrote, “may fairly be taken as a symbol that—not alone in learned circles—enthusiasm is astir for the great German Rulers of the past: in a day when emperors are no more.” Among the book’s enthusiastic readers was Hermann Göring, who gave Mussolini a signed copy for his birthday. Read More