June 6, 2016 On the Shelf A Female President for the Nineties, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Peter Lindbergh/DKNY We’re closer than ever to electing a woman president—a political outcome that seemed fantastical even in 1992, when Donna Karan made an almost farcically outlandish ad campaign called “In Women We Trust” depicting a woman in high office: “Karan’s ads make the presidency look like it was art-directed by Lana Del Rey—all slo-mo and high contrast, shallow focus and delicate, practiced ennui. In Madame President’s ticker-tape parade, her crisp oxford blows open to reveal a presidential décolletage supported by what looks like a black lace bustier. She juggles childcare duties with required reading in a tube top. Our suspiciously youthful commander-in-chief commands the respect of her old, male associates in double-breasted pinstripes and a skirt slit up to there, hair always blown back, nary a part nor pore in sight. It’s a dream within a dream: A woman makes it to the top of the political food chain with her composure, mood lighting, and sensual wardrobe intact.” Say it’s 1661 and the Catholic Church has just locked you away because you’re Jewish. There’s a good chance you’ll be burned at the stake. You could mope about it. Or you could do what Francis von Helmont did: “he took his imprisonment in stride, and between trips to the torture chamber he conceived his theory of language. Usually referred to as the Alphabet of Nature, the small book outlines Francis’s concept of Hebrew and his scheme for teaching deaf-mutes to speak it. The frontispiece to the book shows Francis sitting at a table in his cell in Rome; facing a mirror, he is scientifically measuring his lips with a pair of calipers … Given Francis’ belief that all true knowledge is latent in our microcosmic bodies—accessible through divine revelation—it is not surprising that his model of language imagines the Hebrew characters as being almost engraved inside us, physically wedded to our mouths.” You probably read the Boxcar Children as a kid—many generations have—not realizing that those children were capitalist shills, seducing you with images of an illusory meritocracy: “There remains something mildly and even pleasurably heretical about the way the Boxcar Children locate the outer limits of amusement in decorous productivity—the way that, for them, there’s no better use of total independence than perfectly mimicking the most respectable behaviors of adults. They earn money, do chores when no one’s watching (‘The children could hardly wait to put the shining dishes on the shelf’), and engage in none of the mischief that other literary children take to when left to their own devices … Hard work, here, is presented as at once deviant and rewarding, and kids respond to this—I know I did—with their rarely united desires to be both unsupervised and good.” If you’ve always wished that “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” was a photo essay, your prayers have been answered: for his series “End of Crisis,” William Minke embarked on not one but two cruises, photographing the diversions on ships that aren’t exactly state of the art. “I’ve always been fascinated by heterotopias and coexisting worlds,” he says: “After reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace I decided to go on a journey of cruise ships because his description of on-board life sounded very bizarre … As a traveller one can leave behind everyday life on thirteen decks of roulette tables, bingo and shopping malls twenty-four hours a day.” Indonesia is enormous, beautiful, heterogeneous, populous … but no one is bringing its literature into English, Louise Doughty writes: “There are some countries so vast and diverse that any attempt to summarize them feels insulting: such is Indonesia. With a population of 258 million, it is the world’s fourth most populous nation and the largest formed by an archipelago. When it was guest of honor at the Frankfurt book fair last year, it appeared under the banner ‘17,000 islands of imagination,’ a phrase describing its geography but also encapsulating the complexities of representation … As yet, little of its literature has been translated into English … According to Goenawan Mohamad, Indonesia’s most well-known public intellectual and founder of Tempo magazine, which was banned for a while under the Suharto regime, ‘Asian writing is noticeable only when it comes from the site of calamity. Normally, a prolonged war, preferably one involving the U.S., or a genocide, or a tsunami, brings it to the focus of the world media, and the literary market comes next.’ ”
June 3, 2016 On Film A Raving Maniac of the Cinema By Dante A. Ciampaglia The anticriticism of Jonas Mekas. Jonas Mekas Discussion of American film criticism in the sixties and seventies tends to hew to the Andrew Sarris–Pauline Kael binary. Their legendary, exasperating debate over auteurism and the One True Criticism shaped a generation of writers and the trajectory of film culture, so much so that both writers and their acolytes still haunt the field. But while Sarris/the cultists and Kael/the Paulettes slap-fought at center stage, a third party lobbed firecrackers from the back of the theater—at them, at anyone, at everyone—to disrupt of the status quo and redefine “cinema art.” Jonas Mekas, now ninety-three, occupies an outsize yet virtually ignored place in the pantheon of film criticism. In 1955, he cofounded the influential magazine Film Culture, which in a 1962–1963 issue included both Sarris’s landmark “Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962” and Manny Farber’s seminal “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” Three years later, on November 12, 1958, he introduced film criticism to the Village Voice. But rather than adjudicate the week’s releases, his “Movie Journal” column was a pulpit for spreading the gospel of underground cinema and the launchpad for broadsides against the establishment and its critics, censorship and its enforcers. Mekas claims a lot of titles—pioneering filmmaker, poet, activist, organizer, rabble-rouser, patron saint of the underground—but, he stated bluntly in 1968, “I am not a critic. I don’t criticize. I am a cold, objective, ‘piercing’ eye that watches things and sees where they are and where they are going and I’m bringing all these facts to your attention.” Read More
June 3, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: White Sands, Whit, Weiner By The Paris Review From Weiner. Weiner, man. You’re going to hear a lot of people telling you to see this, so let me offer a meta service and say that you should listen to each and every one of them. The documentary follows Anthony Weiner’s 2013 run for New York City mayor, which ended miserably thanks to an aftershock of the not-quite-sex scandal that had forced him from Congress two years earlier. The film makes a few diligent nods at the suggestion that the sexting scandal obscured more pressing concerns in the mayoral primary. But the real appeal here is characterological. Josh Kriegman, the former Weiner aide who shot the footage, was allowed such intimate access that he ends up, late in the film, incredulously asking Weiner why he granted it. Together with Elyse Steinberg, his codirector, Kriegman presents Weiner as a roiling tumble of contradictions: savvy and reckless, strident and insecure, charming and dickish, and never more serene, it seems, than when he’s watching himself whirl into a rage during a disastrous TV interview. Huma Abedin, Weiner’s wife and one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is in every way her husband’s opposite, and there are moments in the film when her anguish is so obvious that you’re almost rooting for her to show Kriegman, not to mention Weiner, the door. But the camera stays, and so does she. It’s no small accomplishment of this film that you can almost imagine why. —Robert P. Baird There are certain directors whose new movies you skip out of a kind of scared devotion, because the badness of their later work seems to reveal something that was essentially bad about their movies all along. Then there’s the opposite case of Whit Stillman, whose Love & Friendship surpasses his early movies but makes you (or at least me) like them even better. He has never seemed more at home than in the slightly threadbare gentility of these country houses—somehow the sets look less “period” than antique, in a comfortable way—and his characters have never seemed so at home in their skin. Tom Bennett’s first scene, playing the amiable idiot Sir James Martin, has brightened my whole week. —Lorin Stein Read More
June 3, 2016 On the Shelf Bigger, Uglier, Lonelier Cities, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Daniel Brown Furthering a grand tradition I like to call “strong opinions about parts of speech,” Colin Dickey has mounted a defense of the adverb, which had come under fire as early as last week. Anyone who finds adverbs imprecise doesn’t know how to use them, he writes: “Anne Carson writes of adjectives that they ‘are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity.’ Adverbs, then, curtail and refine—but in doing so they can pick out the unexpected resonances, the hidden valences in the words they modify. An adverb, at its best, offers a sudden shift in direction or tone, all the more unexpected considering the adverb’s seemingly slavish subservience to the word it modifies … Deployed skillfully, the adverb backstabs lovingly, subverts daintily, insurrects gallantly.” In an equally grand tradition, “strong opinions about Russian translation,” Janet Malcolm rehabilitates Constance Garnett, whose once revered translations have fallen out of favor: “A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations … As for the charge that Garnett writes in an outdated language, yes, here and there she uses words and phrases that no one uses today, but not many of them. We find the same sprinkling of outdated words and phrases in the novels of Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot. Should they, too, be rewritten for modern sensibilities?” Most of the world’s monotonous, massive, forbidding cities were built by people. Big mistake. Daniel Brown’s photography proves that algorithms can do it better: “Brown makes his images using generative design software he wrote himself. It creates enormous, complex 3-D patterns that he searches until finding something interesting … ‘I set about programming algorithms to generate an imaginary city,’ he says. ‘One that I could populate with buildings and structures without having to draw or 3-D model’ … Brown isolates the shape, and tweaks it until he arrives at something he likes. Then the program applies bits and pieces of public domain photos of 1970s apartment buildings. The result is hulking, maze-like structures that appear to go on forever.” Sasha Chapin became addicted to chess, which he regards as an infection of the brain: “Chess is what they call a perfect information game. At every moment, you are informed of everything taking place. There’s no bluffing. No guessing. No suspicion. If that notion doesn’t immediately excite you, take a second to consider all the imperfect information games you play all the time. I don’t mean games like poker. I mean dating, for example. Have you ever, a month into a relationship, unearthed some hidden facet of your new partner that makes you think, Holy shit, get away from me? Slowly discovering things about people is wonderful, in theory, but we often find that the mysterious reaches of the human soul contain bear traps and poison darts. Imagine if you could instantly behold the entirety of a person before you, and say, ‘Hi, let’s go to the beer location,’ with perfect confidence?” Need a good weekend read? Might I recommend Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research by that most laureled of authors, the NSA? “This book appears to be excellent,” Paul Ford writes. “A reasoned, thoughtful overview of the Web as an entire system, written for intelligent people who had a need of expertise and mastery over the medium. The book throughout emphasizes security and privacy, and it’s as complete as possible. It tells you how to secure your Wi-Fi, and what things to uncheck in your Internet Explorer. It helps you with complex research problems. It’s granular, and dry, and exhaustive—and thus incredibly helpful.”
June 2, 2016 Correspondence Thomas Hardy’s Letters Will Ruin Your Day By Dan Piepenbring Have a bad day. Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? Please stop. It’s Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and he will wipe the smile right off your smug, contented, life-affirming face. You’re dealing with a man who knew how to deploy the word Niflheim, defined by the OED as “the region of eternal darkness, mist, and cold inhabited by those who died from old age or illness.” Hardy uses it to dispirited perfection in The Woodlanders, relating a kind of failure to connect: “But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.” Actually, The Woodlanders is full of an evocative, despondent murkiness. It extends even to the tiny twigs on the ground, which Hardy takes care to describe as they’re destroyed by a passing carriage: “they drove on out of the grove, their wheels silently crushing delicate-patterned mosses, hyacinths, primroses, lords-and-ladies, and other strange and common plants, and cracking up little sticks that lay across the track.” But I’ve already digressed. I’m writing mainly to share a few excerpts from his letters that find him at his morose peak (nadir?). As a kind of warm-up, here’s a note from 1898 in which he critiques a prime minister’s funeral—always an exercise in good taste. Read More
June 2, 2016 Arts & Culture Dearer to the Vultures By Scott Beauchamp How the perspective of war stories has shifted—from gods to guns. From the cover of the American edition of Anatomy of a Soldier. My memories of war are fractured: faces disappear like smoke while literal plumes of smoke, their specific shapes and forms, linger on vividly for years. I remember the mesh netting, concrete, and dust smell of tower guard, but the events of entire months are completely gone. I remember the sound of a kid’s voice, but not anything he actually said. I guess that’s what Tim O’Brien meant when he wrote about Vietnam, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning or end.” Memories of people, too complex to carry through the years, fall apart. It’s easier to find purchase on memories of objects. The weapon I was assigned on my first deployment to Iraq was an M249 SAW, or what we would colloquially and inaccurately refer to as the “Squad Assault Weapon.” I remember the way it felt to disassemble—the slight give of the heat-shield assembly, its tiny metal pincers clinging to the barrel. I remember the sound of the feed tray snapping shut on a belt of ammunition. And I remember the tiny rust deposits on the legs of my weapon’s bipod, which would never go away, no matter how hard I scrubbed with CLP (Cleaner, Lubricant, and Protectant oil). I remember my SAW’s voice and the things it said. Read More