May 18, 2016 On the Shelf Robot Cars Are Totally Soulless, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “The Man Catcher,” an early effort at pedestrian safety. Remember the sixties? Me either—I was negative eighteen in ’68. Jesse Jarnow also wasn’t born yet, but his book on the psychedelic counterculture, Heads, benefits from that distance, Hua Hsu writes: “He is vigilant in his attempt to understand the idealism of the past on its own terms, and to regard the ‘head’—the archetypal, open-minded sixties explorer—as someone whose skepticism toward power structures and authority might still resonate with us today. It’s just that, back then, such an explorer might have found a little more help along the way … As I read Jarnow’s chapter on the innocent, halcyon days of LSD experimentation, the mid-sixties started to feel further away than the seventeen-hundreds. It was easy to understand the central players’ ambitions—their visions of freedom aren’t so different from ours—but it was nearly impossible to imagine the world they found themselves in; I kept anticipating the nation’s inexorable tilt back toward its Puritan roots, its choice of law and order over mind expansion.” Today in the cock ring as a metaphor: “Artists hardly even qualify as whores. Contemporary art is a cock ring on a giant erection pumped up by capitalism and keeping the masters of that game from cumming. I think they like it. I think the artists like it, too. They get to pretend to be profound. Some are. Most are hemorrhoids waiting to happen. The blood that pumps it all up is money. Green blood. Who has a problem with that? We all want some of it. Just please don’t take it seriously. No, actually, do take it seriously. If you did, I would be impoverished, and maybe my life would have been worth more.” Books can be difficult—so many words, and usually they’re the same color. But what if we made them different colors? The Folio Society’s new edition of The Sound and the Fury presents the text “in fourteen different colors that represent different time zones in the narrative,” and this one guy is super excited about it: “Colored text … feels like a breakthrough for publishing. It’s a playful approach perfectly attuned to our era. Learning in general has already moved away from dusty tomes of monochrome text to brighter, shinier and more interactive methods. In a time of short attention spans and digital distractions, could multicolored publishing work for other difficult books? Would Gravity’s Rainbow be more popular with a rainbow-colored makeover? Would Proust’s interminable sentences be easier to navigate if they switched back and forth from one color to another, allowing the reader a sense of a light at the end of each tunnel?” (Because that’s why we read Proust: for the occasional sense of relief.) If you’ve kept yourself up at night pondering the ethical dilemmas of driverless cars—like, if they’re going really fast and there’s a kid in the road, and they can either plow over the kid or jerk the wheel and kill you, the passenger—you might have even bigger problems to worry about. Daniel Albert writes: “I’m optimistic about our robot-car future. It will be really cool. But make no mistake that the development of driverless cars will flow from the same combination of forces that have carried us from the Model T to the Tesla. For some 120 years those forces have favored not mobility precisely, but automobility: a system that melds moving from place to place with industrial production and consumerism. Promoters of autonomous vehicles promise that they will defeat those forces, will wipe the slate clean. History suggests that they might also be consumed by them … Robot cars will be neither moral nor immoral in the narrow sense premised in the thought experiments now being conducted and sold as valuable. They will not exist outside of the current automotive ecosystem. They will instead enter an automotive landscape that instantiates myriad ethical choices made in the past and rehearsed daily.” In the sixties, a group of black photographers formed the Kamoinge Workshop to promote and show their work. As LeRonn P. Brooks writes, Kamoinge “began when two separate groups of young black photographers—including Louis Draper, Earl James, and Calvin Mercer, among others—gathered in 1963 to discuss ways of using their work to address the civil-rights movement and the troubling conditions of black people in their communities. It was concurrent with other progressively minded black artist groups such as Spiral, also based in New York, which included painters Romare Bearden (whom [Ming] Smith would photograph in 1977), Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, and Emma Amos, among others. Kamoinge was initially mentored by more established photographers such as Larry Stewart and Roy DeCarava served as its first director. More than just a photography collective, Kamoinge (named for a word from the Kikuyu language meaning ‘a group of people acting together’) was an important forum for creative political activity.”
May 17, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery The Musician’s Day By Erik Satie A drawing by Satie in a letter to Jean Cocteau, 1917. “Monsieur Sadi in his house—he’s thinking.” Erik Satie, the composer and pianist, was born on this day 150 years ago. “There are many kinds of eccentric,” Nick Richardson wrote in the London Review of Books last year, “and Satie was most of them.” The musician’s description of his diet, comprising all-white foods, many of them inedible, is often quoted as evidence of this eccentricity. It comes from an even more eccentric whole, Satie’s book Memoirs of an Amnesiac. The relevant passage is reprinted below, with some of his drawings of imaginary buildings and busts, because why not … —D.P. An artist must organize his life. Here is the exact timetable of my daily activities: I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy ride on horseback round my domain follows from 1:19 P.M. to 2:53 P.M. Another bout of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07 P.M. From 4:27 to 6:47 P.M. various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, swimming, etc.) Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20 P.M. From 8:09 to 9:59 P.M. symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10:37 P.M. Once a week, I wake up with a start at 3:19 (Tuesdays). My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit-mould, rice, turnips, camphorated sausages, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuchsia. I am a hearty eater, but never speak while eating, for fear of strangling. Read More
May 17, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Shakespeare Garden By Sadie Stein Perhaps you ran across a story in today’s New York Times about re-creating Emily Dickinson’s Amherst garden. Historians are discovering the layout of the family’s conservatory and planting heirloom varieties of fruit trees that would’ve grown in the orchard. Dickinson was apparently a prolific gardener—a talented amateur naturalist who attended carefully to her studies of the natural world. The article explains that her expertise “profoundly shaped her poetry”: Read More
May 17, 2016 First Person Letter from West Virginia By Matthew Neill Null “A newspaper for people who can’t read, edited by an editor who can’t write” Jim Comstock (1911–96) was the iconoclastic editor of the West Virginia Hillbilly, a “weakly” paper based in Richwood, a former logging boomtown in Nicholas County fallen on hard times. I spent the first years of my life over the mountain from Richwood, where Jim’s stunts were much discussed. The Hillbilly wasn’t just a paper—it was an art project, a platform for historic preservation, a conservative wailing wall, and, above all, an exploration of the West Virginian id. Once, in early spring, Jim famously added “ramp oil” to the ink at the printing press, a tribute to Richwood’s Feast of the Ramson, which celebrates the wild leeks that sprout in the mountains after a hard winter. They give off a terrible stench. Warehouses full of mailmen were made to gag. To his delight, Jim received a stern rebuke from the postmaster general. “Now we’re the only newspaper under orders from the federal government not to smell bad,” Jim told the Associated Press. “That’s an awful thing to do to a striving newspaper.” Read More
May 17, 2016 On the Shelf Get Up There! and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Fellow from the American Academy in Rome peers down through the Pantheon’s oculus from the roof, ca. 1975. Photo via The New York Review of Books. Most people see the Pantheon and think, What a neat-looking old thing. Others look at it and can only wonder how and when they’ll get to the top. “Although it may come as no surprise that the Pantheon’s roof is off-limits in our highly litigious times,” Matt Donovan writes, “groups of scholars and artists from the American Academy in Rome climbed the dome on a regular basis as recently as the 1970s. One visitor described the short walk as a straining and vertiginous affair, ‘a bit like rock climbing up a slope on a hike in the Appalachians.’ He also told me that once those exterior stairs end, a climber feels utterly precarious. Differences in temperature between the building’s cool interior and the sun-warmed roof created downdrafts that could literally suck someone through the opening. In what might be read as a blurring of prudence, humility, and reverence, visitors needed to creep toward the roof’s opening on their stomachs in order to peer through its oculus—a full twenty-seven feet across, and known as the ‘eye of god’—down into the space below.” (There are pictures.) The appeal of Jane Austen’s novels to young women should be no mystery, Mikita Brottman writes, because Austen’s books are full of hidden pain, just like teens: “The world of Jane Austen’s heroines—that ‘two inches of ivory’—is so small that everything matters almost too much, which is precisely what the world can feel like to an eighteen-year-old girl … The tiniest breach in teenage etiquette could have all kinds of terrible repercussions, but the pain it caused couldn’t be expressed. Responses had to be regulated at all times. At eighteen, most girls live in a world of secret anguish. This is why young women such as my students can identify with Austen’s heroines—because they live, for the most part, in a similarly limited world … My students loved talking about the grand country houses, the balls with half-hour-long dances, the old-fashioned courtship rituals, the families, the dresses, the weddings. I tried to tell them Jane Austen was all about pain, but, unsurprisingly, they refused to listen. ‘I myself prefer a novel that gives me an escape from the sometimes crude realities of this world,’ wrote one girl. Another claimed: ‘Reading Jane Austen’s work simply makes me happy.’ ” Today in writers who should be more widely read: Albert Murray’s name was “never household familiar,” Thomas Chatterton Williams writes, but “he was one of the truly original minds of twentieth-century American letters. Murray, who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-seven, was an accomplished novelist, a kind of modern-day oral philosopher, a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the writer of a sprawling, idiosyncratic, and consistently astonishing body of literary criticism, first-rate music exposition, and cunning autobiography. In our current moment of identity politics and multicultural balkanization, the publication of any new Murray text would serve as a powerful reminder that his complex analysis of art and life remain as timely as ever—probably more so … Murray’s name still functions as a sort of password, announcing to like-minded souls a particular willingness to look further and stay longer, to dig a little deeper through the crates in pursuit of hidden treasures. That the broader culture hasn’t held on to Murray reveals far more about it than him.” Audrey Munson was, in the Gilded Age, the preferred nude model of the American Beaux Arts movement. As Allison Meier writes, Munson appeared “in countless early twentieth-century statues, from the seated figures that once guarded the Manhattan Bridge and are now installed outside the Brooklyn Museum, to the gilded lady on the top of the Manhattan Municipal Building, to a duo of marble sculptures by Daniel Chester French in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her neoclassical beauty, with her strong silhouette and raised brow, along with feminine curves, made her a favorite among the bohemian artist community of Greenwich Village’s MacDougal Alley, where she went door-to-door looking for work after being discovered on the streets by a photographer.” She became a household name—a new biography, James Bone’s The Curse of Beauty, argues that modernism was her undoing. “Bone describes Munson’s visit to the studio of avant-garde French-Cuban painter Francis Picabia, one of New York’s first modernist transplants from Europe, who asked Munson to walk around rather than hold a static pose. Munson derided the resulting painting as ‘an incongruous collection of color splotches.’ ” I think it’s nice that you’re reading this post on a glowing screen. I’m happy you’re here. But if you’re a big picture kind of person, you should probably stop and print this out before you keep going, environmental repercussions be damned. A new study “offers evidence we process texts differently if we are reading them on paper, as opposed to an electronic device. It finds we remember concrete details better if we’ve read a work on a laptop or tablet. We grasp the larger inferences of a story more thoroughly, however, if we’ve read it in print … Seventy-seven participants filled out a survey designed to indicate whether they were thinking in small-bore or big-picture terms. They were given the category ‘Joining the Army,’ for example, and then asked which of the following phrases ‘best describes the behavior for you’: ‘signing up’ (concrete detail), or ‘Helping the nation’s defense’ (big-picture). Forty participants filled out the survey on a digital screen, while the other thirty-six did so using pencil and paper … Those who used the classic paper-and-pencil method ‘exhibited a significantly higher level of preference’ for the more abstract of the two choices, compared to their counterparts who used a touch screen.”
May 16, 2016 Events Knausgaard the Publisher By The Paris Review The Pelikanen team. When Karl Ove Knausgaard joins us in New York this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for the Norwegian-American Literary Festival, he’ll do so not just as the author of My Struggle but as the publisher of Pelikanen (Pelican), the house he founded in 2010. Knausgaard runs the press on what he calls “an idealistic basis”—it’s a nonprofit—with his brother Yngve, Asbjørn Jensen, and a few friends. “As a writer you’re always alone,” Knausgaard told Ane Farsethås of the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet, explaining why he chose to become a publisher: Read More