May 16, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Pity the Fool By Sadie Stein From Paris à travers les siècles, 1879. Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool. —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night I feel sorry for people who don’t suffer fools. They’re missing out on so much! The quotidian, absurd human comedy; several of Shakespeare’s finest characters; TV. I can speak with total authority on this point, because I am a fool. I am also descended from a long line of fools. I don’t mean we’re given to gnomic utterances on the futility of existence: we’re just idiots who don’t know how to do practical stuff. We’re also very prone to prancing around and singing. True, some of us are also asses, a couple are gullible, and a few are jerks—and there are occasional exceptions that prove the rule, like my brother, for instance. But I think fool is our genus. Read More
May 16, 2016 Arts & Culture Sculpture in the Landscape By Jonathan Lippincott The art and life of Mark di Suvero Mark di Suvero in 1998 finishing his sculpture Pyramidian, 1987–1998, installed at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. Photo: Jerry Thompson. © Mark di Suvero. Three decades ago, long before the development of the High Line, the sculptor Mark di Suvero led an effort to transform an illegal garbage dump in Long Island City into a vast green space devoted to large-scale sculpture. Di Suvero was fifty-three years old at the time, and already a veteran of the public-art movement. During the sixties and seventies, he had taken part in several outdoor sculpture exhibitions—in Cincinnati, Houston, and Grand Rapids—and he later created citywide solo shows of his work across the United States and Europe. By 1980, he was working out of a studio in Long Island City, not far from the four-acre landfill, and it wasn’t long before he was dreaming about alternative uses for the neglected riverfront parcel. In 1986, di Suvero arranged to lease the property from the city for a dollar a year. Working with the Athena Foundation, an organization he had created nearly a decade earlier, he employed members of the community to clean up and replant the site. That fall, the newly christened Socrates Sculpture Park held its first public exhibition, which included work by Vito Acconci, Bill and Mary Buchen, Rosemarie Castoro, di Suvero, and others. Read More
May 16, 2016 On the Shelf More Novels Starring Coins, Please, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Only this watermarked stock photo of a walking one-euro coin truly captures the thrill of novels with currency at their centers. I find novels starring people—or any animate creatures, really—to be unthinkably dull. For this reason I do most of my reading in the mid to late eighteenth century, when novels with inanimate objects at their centers enjoyed a brief but memorable time in the literary limelight. The most famous one was told from the perspective of a coin: “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea thrilled contemporary readers with ‘Views of several striking Scenes,’ an insider’s account of the scandalous doings of the ‘most Noted Persons in every Rank of Life,’ and tales from the gold mines of Peru, the streets of London, the canals of Amsterdam, the ports of the Caribbean, and the front lines of the Great War … It was a tipping point for what are frequently referred to as ‘it-narratives.’ It-narratives, also called ‘novels of circulation’ or ‘object narratives,’ are novels or stories that take an inanimate object or an animal as its narrator … With a market proven, writers for hire began churning them out with variable quality. By 1781, a bored reviewer in The Critical Review complained, ‘This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or—any thing else, is grown so fashionable now, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection.’ ” In which Nabokov, talking to us from 1926, attempts to make sense of his exile: “There is a very seductive and very dangerous demon: the demon of generalities. He captivates man’s thought by marking every phenomenon with a little label, and punctiliously placing it together with another, similarly carefully wrapped and numbered phenomenon. Through him a field of human knowledge as changeable as history is turned into a neat little office, where this many wars and that many revolutions sleep in folders—and where we can pore over bygone ages in complete comfort. This demon is fond of words such as idea, tendency, influence, period, and era. In the historian’s study this demon reductively combines in hindsight the phenomena, influences, and tendencies of past ages. With this demon comes appalling tedium—the knowledge (utterly mistaken, by the way) that, however humanity plays its hand or fights back, it follows an implacable course. This demon should be feared. He is a fraud. He is a salesman of centuries, pushing his historical price list.” Today in dramatic acts of digital preservation: if ever the Daily shuts down, we hope to survive in a kind of bardic oral tradition, having former readers pass down our stories one at a time through the generations, at great length and with little regard for accuracy. The website hi.co, which I’d never heard of before about ten minutes ago, is taking fewer chances. Instead of vanishing into the mists of time, they’re keeping their users’ contributions “in a nickel-plate ‘book’ designed to be readable for the next 10,000 years … Everything on the site—roughly two million words and fourteen thousand photos—will be etched in microscopic size onto a series of nickel plates. Everything will be readable with an optical microscope.” (One of the site’s founders notes that the plates are “fire resistant” and “deal well with saltwater.”) Some drink to remember, some drink to forget. Pour yourself a glass of marc and you can do both: “With marc, my favorite digestif, both the mortality and the miracle are there in the glass: sip it and you taste the pulverized remains (stems, grape skins, pips) of the wine refined to make it, as well as experiencing resurrection through distillation, in those unpromising oenological afterthoughts given new life. A marc is like a vanitas, the skull that artists once included in paintings to deliver a warning that no pleasure, however great, can last. Behind the smooth sophistication of strong, well-made alcohol, there is the musty hint of old grape skins—a pungent reminder that even the magic of alcohol cannot make a grape, or a drinker, eternal.” Philosophy departments are among the most Eurocentric in all of academe—which is fine, as long as they practice truth in advertising. Write to your congressman: “Any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself ‘Department of European and American Philosophy’ … We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the Bhagavad Gita as they do the Republic, that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980–1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Kwasi Wiredu (1931– ), Lame Deer (1903–1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.”
May 13, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Songs We’re Stuck With By Sadie Stein Real McCoy. At a coffee shop, standing on line (because I’m a New Yorker, and for some reason that’s where we stand with lines—on them, never in them), I began to cry. This in itself was not so extraordinary—the mascara has not yet been invented that’s proof against my tears—but this jag happened to be music related. The José Gonzalez cover of “Heartbeats” had come on the sound system, and the time-machine jolt to 2006 was so sudden that my body didn’t know how to respond except with tears, although it wasn’t grief I felt. Read More
May 13, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fear, Fumes, That Fucking Cardinal By The Paris Review From the cover of Esopus 23. Photo © Estate of David Gahr Horacio Castellanos Moya published Revulsion in 1997, less than a decade after the official end of the Salvadoran civil war. The book—the first English edition of which is forthcoming from New Directions this July—began as an exercise in style, an attempt to ape the unrelenting antagonism of Thomas Bernhard. The result was a slender, scalding diatribe that brought Moya death threats and infamy. With no plot, no real action, and only the slightest sketch of two characters, Revulsion is barely a novel, and nowhere near its author’s best. (For that, try Senselessness or The She-Devil in the Mirror.) But its sprays of vituperation are often funny, and even nineteen years on, the book’s atmosphere of exasperated rage feels itchy, jagged, and real. —Robert P. Baird You don’t have to be a Stones fan to fall in love with Rich Cohen’s The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones. Part rock history, part memoir, it’s so charming, so candid, such a mixture of sweetness and disillusionment and deep fanboy research, that I found myself reading the first four chapters out loud to Sadie—then staying up late, racing to finish, so she could take my copy. —Lorin Stein Read More
May 13, 2016 On Music You Think You’re Special By Dave Tompkins Prince Pizza Aktion restaurant, Innsbruck, 2013. Photograph by author. I have 294 records of showers of living things … there’s no accounting for the freaks of industry. —Charles Fort, Book of the Damned While My Guitar Gently Gets Bent at Pizza Hut The florist sat drunk in the corner booth of a Pizza Hut in Myrtle Beach. “Erotic City” quietly grinded away on a jukebox over near the bathrooms. For the past three hours, I’d been feeding the florist cans of Coors Light while he drove his son and me across South Carolina. Purple Rain played the entire route. “Let’s Go Crazy” in Pageland, “The Beautiful Ones” in Ruby, “Computer Blues” through Cheraw, “Take Me with U” to Aynor. That October of 1984, my friend’s listening habits skewed toward Pyromania. Mine: keytars, eyeliner dudes, and black radio—whatever Les Norman, “The Night-Time Master Blaster,” happened to be playing on WPEG. I remembered Leppard for their one-armed drummer arrested for spousal abuse. Meanwhile Prince played, like, twenty different instruments while having sex in the backseat of taxicabs, ducking the Antichrist, and shouting for gun control. Also: girlfriend on drums. What’s fair is fair. Read More