June 9, 2016 From the Archive Becoming a Redwood By Dana Gioia Dana Gioia’s poem “Becoming a Redwood” appeared in our Summer 1991 issue. His latest collection is Pity the Beautiful. Read More
June 9, 2016 Our Correspondents Live Online By Wei Tchou Tending my Internet archive. J. M. W. Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters, 1844, oil on canvas. This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Wei Tchou. My parents visited me a few weeks ago, when I was feeling blue for the normal New York reasons: another breakup, a looming eviction, the smell of dead rats wafting up from the basement of my building. (The exterminator hadn’t been by in a while.) My father brought along a few things to cheer me up. The two-and-a-half pound tin of “European Formula” Ovaltine turned out to be something of a ruse; he’s diabetic, so my mother doesn’t normally allow him that sort of indulgence. But he also brought three beautiful, hard-to-find bottles of baijiu, a high-proof Chinese liquor, along with a memory. “I was reading through my date book from this time in 1983,” he told me. “Thirty-three years ago, I was receiving a notice every week to arrive in Philadelphia to be deported.” Read More
June 9, 2016 First Person All In: Susanville By Eric Neuenfeldt The first part of “All In,” by Brandon Hobson, ran yesterday. Martin Hyers and William Mebane, Vegas 009904, 2008, color photograph. For three humiliating months, I lived in a yoga studio behind my parents’ garage, in Los Angeles, while I was looking for work. The only job I could find was teaching developmental reading and writing in Susanville, California, a remote mountain town in the Eastern Sierra that is known, if it is known at all, for the state and federal prisons nearby. Classes began in just a few days, so I threw clothes and a few books into my car and began the long journey that took me through the mountains and high desert of Nevada and California. As I drove the desolate stretch of Highway 395 that carried me north out of Reno, I tried to convince myself the isolation would prove restorative. It was a nice thought, and a brief one. When I arrived in Susanville, late at night, the sky was raining firebrands and ash from a massive wildfire. The fire had taken down the power lines that brought electricity through the mountains, and the town was completely dark. People were walking the streets with camping lanterns. I pulled into the parking lot of the first motel I saw to ask about a room. The desk clerk was registering guests—mostly firefighters from the state forestry department and from around the West—by candlelight. Read More
June 9, 2016 On the Shelf They Call It “Photography,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Adolphe Braun In the seventies, Barbara Williamson founded the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research, “a nudist community that promoted personal freedom through open marriage and group-sex parties.” She became known as “the most liberated woman in America,” but in 1975 the foundation closed for good and Williamson, leery of the Reaganism to come, dropped off the map. Now Alex Mar has paid her a visit and found that she’s raising big cats: “Barbara asks me to choose from the boxes of tea in the open cupboard—‘Lemon ginger? Green? Chamomile?’—as the lynx has rounded the corner from the living room and is now trailing me from one counter to the next. She is making a sound that’s unmistakable, even to someone who has never before spent time with an exotic cat. A deep, low, insistent growl … Barbara shoos the lynx away, but the animal does not listen.” I love book reviews, but sometimes they’re just so long—so subtle! Some parts of the book are good, some parts are bad, some parts kind of depend, blah, blah … It’s like, why don’t you just give the book a fucking letter grade and be done with it, so I can pursue my reading life with the standards of a Consumer Reports subscriber? Fortunately, Book Marks is here, the new “Rotten Tomatoes of Books” that assigns every book a grade. The only problem: every book passes with flying colors. Alex Shephard writes, “Nearly all of the more than 100 books graded by Book Marks seem to be worth reading, which renders it somewhat useless as a recommendation resource … If it is doing exactly what it was designed to do—reflecting the current state of literary criticism—then the real problem is that literary criticism, like America’s universities, is suffering from severe grade inflation.” In London, a new show, “Seizing the Light: Photography in the Age of Invention,” gathers some of the earliest examples of photography from the nineteenth century, when “pioneers began to document the world around them with unprecedented accuracy … [Prince Albert] and Queen Victoria, who had a darkroom in Windsor Castle, were early photography enthusiasts … As well as portraits of Pope Pius IX and Franz Liszt, Adolphe Braun made Alpine and Alsatian landscapes, and specialized in carbon print reproductions.” Today in over versus more than, one of my favorite longstanding usage battles: “Someone has recently created a new Twitter account, @over_morethan, dedicated to the idea that over may not be used with numbers: one thing may physically only sit over another thing, in this view. But to write, as The Economist has recently, of ‘over two-thirds,’ ‘over 150 fellows of the Royal Society,’ or ‘over a year’ is to take a pure preposition and debase it with metaphorical usage … Using over with numbers was even banned by the Associated Press (AP) stylebook, which many American newspapers use as their own, and which thus gives it a kind of sanctified status. According to one account, there was an audible gasp at the meeting of the American Copy Editors’ Society when AP announced that it was abandoning the ‘rule.’ ” The oldest gallery in New York is hosting an exhibition of twenty-five Hudson River School paintings, including work by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand. “It becomes clear that there is another pair of kindred spirits in these Hudson River School pictures: on the one hand, the natural world—already under siege by an expanding economy and the ravages of the Industrial Revolution—and, on the other, sojourning humanity. It was a nodding acquaintance, as Emerson described it in Nature: ‘The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable,’ he wrote. ‘I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.’ ”
June 8, 2016 Look Henchman of Chance By Dan Piepenbring Daniel Spoerri has been making “trap pictures” since the late fifties. His procedure is simple: he goes to a flea market or a dump, riffles through heaps of trash or near-trash, recovers whatever discarded objects strike his fancy, and hangs them on the wall. Describing himself as “a henchman of chance,” Spoerri is especially drawn to the detritus that remains unsold at the end of a flea market. His latest set of assemblages, “What Remains,” is on display at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna through July 23. Spoerri’s portfolio with Emmett Williams, “An Anecdoted Topography of Chance,” appeared in our Winter 1966 issue. Daniel Spoerri, #23 Flohmarkt Wien, April 2016, 2016, assemblage, 47″ x 34″ x 17″. Read More
June 8, 2016 My First Time Helen DeWitt on The Last Samurai By Caitlin Love Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria. This installment features Helen DeWitt, who discusses her debut novel, The Last Samurai, published in 2000. After seven years of writing unfinished novels, DeWitt decided to quit her job as a legal secretary and devote herself to finishing one book. “I thought, I just I have to quit until my money runs out … I’m going just to sit down and do nothing but work on this book, and I’m going to finish it in a month. Then I will have a finished book, and, see, it doesn’t matter what happens then.” Read More