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
June 8, 2016 First Person All In: Oklahoma By Brandon Hobson The second part of “All In,” by Eric Neuenfeldt, will be published tomorrow. Martin Hyers and William Mebane, Vegas, 2008, color photograph. There are more than a hundred casinos in Oklahoma, more than there are in Germany, more than in Canada, the UK, or in all of Central America. Within half an hour, I can drive to at least seven of them. Fifteen miles to the north, just before the Kansas state line, two massive casinos sprawl on Indian land. One has a hotel. To the southeast is Osage Casino, which was once a small, smoky trailer. To the south are 7 Clans Paradise Casino and Two Rivers Casino. To the west are Tonkawa East and, right off I-35, the newer, larger Tonkawa West Casino. I remember reading a few years ago that Oklahoma was the nation’s second-largest gambling market, with nearly four billion dollars in revenues. Thank God for tribal land, Oklahomans say. No need to plan a vacation to Las Vegas anymore, not when you can stop at, say, the 7 Clans Deli Mart/Travel Plaza on Highway 77 just outside of town, a convenience store that has more than a hundred slot and video-poker machines inside. Oklahoma has plenty of large casinos—with hotels, restaurants, valet parking, and players who wear suits with loosened ties—but I liked the small, gritty places. I had a theory that most of them had looser machines, which paid out more frequently. I favored one spot in particular, a dim and smoky casino in Tonkawa that played loud rock music. It’s the size of a small warehouse, tucked away down a desolate road in the country with open plains stretching out for miles. Wednesdays it had cash drawings every hour after five in the afternoon, but it was never very crowded. Read More
June 8, 2016 On the Shelf Finally, a Phone Book on CDs, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Museum of Intellectual Property Let us mourn the tech culture of the late twentieth century, which bore only a superficial resemblance to the libertarian, Objectivist, misogynist creep fest that is Silicon Valley today. Flipping through old issues of Wired, Anna Wiener admires an earlier (if ultimately no more forgivable) strain of techno-utopianism: “Wired’s recurring gadget spread, ‘Fetish,’ is where I always flip first: a catalogue of mid-nineties stuff-lust, resplendent with fine-art mouse pads, data gloves, chunky digital cameras, personal stereos, and vibrating office chairs for the gaming élite. Some of these products are unimaginable now, like SelectPhone, a digital phone book for all fifty states contained on four compact disks … In early Wired, technology wasn’t just entertaining; it was a tool, meant to liberate and enlighten. Products were positioned as socially transformative (‘We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email’). I was strangely moved by an article about Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network, an online town hall used by the city’s homeless and wealthy alike.” There are around 117,000 speakers of Cree, an indigenous language in Canada that, to go by the sample phrases in this piece, we would do well to save—and to learn ourselves: “With entries ranging from pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, the Cree word for pizza—‘the throw-up bread’ in literal English—to môniyâw-matotisân, a sauna or a ‘white-man sweat,’ a crowdsourcing project documenting the vitality and evolution of the most widely spoken indigenous language in Canada is about to be published. Neal McLeod, a poet and indigenous studies professor at Trent University, set out to connect with other Cree speakers on Facebook, aiming to gather together classical Cree vocabulary and to ‘coin and develop’ words relating to contemporary life … ‘One of the things on my bucket list … is to translate Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope into Cree,’ writes McLeod, before laying out Cree for Attack of the Clones: kâ-môskîstâkêcik aniki kâ-nipahi-nâh-naspitâtocik, ‘literally, “when the Ones who resemble each other in an uncanny fashion attack”,’ and tâpwê mamâhtâwisiw awa, ‘the Force is strong with this one.’ ” As the Soviet Union fades into the rearview mirror, it’s becoming harder to find reliable, intimate accounts of life in the USSR. A new graphic novel is trying to change that: “The Italian graphic novelist Igort went to Ukraine in 2008 and stayed for nearly two years. He met people at marketplaces and on country roads, and drew their lives. ‘Word by word I listen to the account of an existence that has become an undigested mass,’ he writes, at the beginning of one section. ‘It pushes its way out from the gut. The following is a faithful transcription of that story’ … These phrases sum up everything that is good and everything that is not so good about The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule … The translation, sadly, is often tone-deaf and downright sloppy—the peculiarly unappetizing language in this passage is just one example. But the stories he has collected are indeed an undigested mass, often a mess, and this is a good thing.” Today in old encyclopedias: the Britannica’s eleventh edition, from 1910–11, has earned a reputation over the past century as a grade-A reference text. What makes it so? “I think the eleventh more than any other edition is a feat of editorial engineering. The editor, Hugh Chisholm, actually had a vision for what an encyclopedia could be and then molded together all the contents that he had to work with to create a single statement about the optimism of the age and the triumph of technology and what progress is … Part of it is the way Chisholm templated the articles. He was a newspaper guy, Chisholm kind of looked at each one of these articles as a story. According to Janet Hogarth, who worked with him, the templates were exhaustive. Even when he didn’t know what the subject was, he knew how a story should be look and feel—how it should be structured. The result of that is a compulsive readability. There are people that sit around for hours reading the eleventh because its just such a pleasure.” A new film festival looks at genre flicks helmed by women: “The word genre comes from the French term for ‘gender,’ an etymology that’s especially salient in a kicky, wide-ranging two-week series at Film Forum that spans more than a century. Curated by Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, ‘Genre Is a Woman’ highlights what should be a well-known fact but is too commonly overlooked: that female directors, ever since the birth of the medium, have not limited themselves to the pink ghetto of romantic comedies and aspirational weepies. Distaff auteurs—beginning with cinema pioneer Alice Guy Blaché, whose The Pit and the Pendulum (1913) is likely the first-ever screen adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe—have made their marks in, among others, noirs, westerns, road movies, science fiction, and grindhouse, all types of films often thought of as the sole province of their male counterparts. ‘Genre movies’ have actually been, to some degree, equal-opportunity employers.”
June 7, 2016 Basketball Meet the New Boss By Rowan Ricardo Phillips I made a decision once the playoffs began to take a little break from this column. I know what you’re thinking: Who writes on basketball for an entire regular season and then takes a break when the playoffs start? Well … I do. It wasn’t a dramatic decision. I just wanted to step back, observe, and avoid—as strange as it may sound—the pitfalls of the playoffs. By “pitfalls” I mean the playoffs’ compulsion to repeat themselves and the accompanying impulse of the writer to search for particular significance in these repetitions. In other words, you’ve seen the Raptors–Cavs Eastern Conference Final before, countless times. The favorite wins the first two home games with relative ease; the underdog returns home to a raucous crowd and wins the next two games to even the series, stirring thoughts that the contest is evenly matched; and then, almost as if on cue, the underdog capitulates and vanishes. Read More