June 17, 2016 On the Shelf With Some Help from My Invisible Friends, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Georgiana Houghton, Glory be to God, ca. 1868. Today in really, really, really, really depressing things that Silicon Valley people say with casual authority: Nicola Mendelsohn, a Facebook exec, gave a presentation in London where she claimed “that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech … ‘The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,’ Mendelsohn said. ‘It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.’ In the room, there was a perceptible shifting—perhaps because the written word seems a rather major aspect of civilization to dispatch with so quickly. But it won’t disappear entirely, Mendelsohn assured the crowd: ‘You’ll have to write for the video.’ ” In 1871, Georgiana Houghton debuted her “spirit drawings,” a set of abstract watercolors that she made with the encouragement of her “invisible friends.” People were scared: “What she put on display was unlike anything any Western artist had made, or any member of the British public had ever seen. The watercolor drawings, a little larger than A4, were intricately detailed abstract compositions filled with sinuous spirals, frenetic dots, and sweeping lines. Yellows, greens, blues, and reds battled with each other for space on the paper. The densely layered images appeared to have no form, and no beginning or end. There was no traditional perspective to enjoy. There was no mythological subject to interpret; no moral narrative to read, and no hint of portraiture or landscape to scrutinize.” It’s been a while since we thought about how worthless most literary depictions of sex are, so let’s think about that some more: “Literature about sex, no matter who has written it, is almost always terrible, and everybody knows it … In writing my own book full of sex, there was almost no one I could turn to for inspiration. There wasn’t a single book I looked to and thought, ‘What I’m trying to do is write sex like she did or like he did.’ There weren’t even movies and TV shows I felt had handled it the way I wanted to see it done. You know what movies and TV shows are really brilliant at capturing? Bad sex. They’re great at doing awkward, depressing, uncomfortable sex scenes where everyone is sort of strangled in the sheets … The other thing that movies and TV shows are good at nailing down is the kind of phonily intense sex scene in which the involved parties are grabbing fistfuls of hair and grunting and slamming each other around because their passion, their chemistry, is so overpowering it can’t be softened by courtesy, affection, or fear of causing actual physical harm.” To read the medieval poem “Pearl” requires a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the New Testament. But just go ahead and read it anyway. You will still like it, as Josephine Livingstone explains: “There is something about the very strangeness of the poem that magnifies its emotional power. When we look at a Byzantine mosaic, for instance, we may not grasp the precise meaning of its images without scholarly help—but that remoteness lends such artworks the marvelousness of something just beyond our understanding. In his new translation of ‘Pearl,’ Simon Armitage, who is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry, conveys that feeling of the almost-but-not-quite comprehensible, the feeling that can make medieval art at once eerie and wonderful.” On Jacques Audiard’s new film Dheepan, which depicts a Sri Lankan family escaping to the Paris ghetto: “The Parisian fields are a motley sort of place, self-governing—if you can call checkpoints controlled by the local drug don a form of self-government—inhabited by a mix of north African Arabs, Cameroonians, and Armenians. But not, however, Sri Lankans—who have contributed relatively little to France’s migrant waves, and are little known there. Between the main characters and their adoptive home there is no flicker of recognition, no colonial history to interpose even a reassuring mutual dislike. Plonked somewhere in the girdle of mongrel Frenchness on the outskirts of modern Paris, oblivious to the snippets of Arabic around them, they are recognized as vaguely Indian. Dheepan, who has refashioned himself as an odd-job man, is known simply as ‘Mowgli.’ ”
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