May 13, 2016 On the Shelf Elaborate Networks of Siphons, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from an illustration in an 1851 English edition of Hero’s Pneumatica. The forecast is calling for more rain this weekend. Why not stay in and curl up with a cup of organic fair-trade tea and a nice, laminated U.S. Geological Survey topographical map? Tom Vanderbilt does it from time to time: “For the past number of years, I have been collecting the U.S.G.S.’s maps, treating them as eminently affordable pieces of American art. A favorite is the 1977 map of Eureka, Calif., which contrasts, in stunning dualism, the rugged bathymetry of the Pacific Ocean against the rolling hills of Humboldt County’s redwood forests … On some gray afternoons, sequestered in my Brooklyn apartment, I will pull out, say, a map of Arches National Park, spread it over my kitchen table and trace imaginary pathways across airbrushed depictions of reddish sandstone with my finger … The beauty intrinsic to these maps is the byproduct of an entirely different mode of production, the last gasp of an antiquated way of representing the world.” While we’re on government-generated weekend-reading material: if you’re feeling morbid, you could try, instead, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s catalog of the ways people have died on the job. Something about its bland, administrative style makes it a chillingly effective memento mori: “Worker was crushed when tractor he was driving, pulling a bin dumper full of pomegranates, fell onto its side. Worker was possibly trying to make a U-turn while going too fast … Worker was engulfed after standing on a pile of beans at a bean plant … Worker was crushed by a rack of baked goods … Worker was eating lunch and swallowed a bee … ” Well before the likes of Alan Turing, the notion of artificial intelligence came alive in automata, i.e., self-moving machines. The first robots were, in a sense, waterworks. Jessica Riskin writes: “Many involved elaborate networks of siphons that activated various actions as the water passed through them, especially figures of birds drinking, fluttering, and chirping … Waterworks, including but not limited to ones using siphons, were probably the most important category of automata in antiquity and the middle ages. Flowing water conveyed motion to a figure or set of figures by means of levers or pulleys or tripping mechanisms of various sorts. A late twelfth-century example by an Arabic automaton-maker named Al-Jazari is a peacock fountain for handwashing, in which flowing water triggers little figures to offer the washer first a dish of perfumed soap powder, then a hand towel.” Claudia Rankine remembers facing young adulthood with Adrienne Rich as a lodestar: “As a nineteen-year-old, I read in Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months … By my late twenties, in the early nineteen-nineties, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published An Atlas of the Difficult World. I approached the volume thinking I knew what it would hold, but found myself transported by Rich’s profound exploration of ethical loneliness. Rich called forward voices created in a precarious world. And though the term ‘ethical loneliness’ would come to me years later, from the work of the critic Jill Stauffer, I understood Rich to be drawing into her stanzas the voices of those who have been, in the words of Stauffer, ‘abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.’” It’s one thing to translate a dead author, who can no longer quibble with your decisions—but a living author is another matter entirely. “The few living authors I’ve translated,” Lydia Davis says in a new interview with Liesl Schillinger, “tend to be very modest and self-effacing, like Snijders and Blanchot, so they’ll say, Whatever you think is best, this is really your work, that sort of thing. I have had friends who have had very different experiences with authors, who say, No, that’s not it at all, and virtually force them to write in a way that they’re not happy writing. I’ve had times when I wished an author were still alive, especially in the case of Michel Leiris, so I could ask, What exactly did you mean? Actually, Leiris sent me a couple of postcards that I framed. His handwriting is great, black spidery old man’s handwriting. As I remember, he said something like, I’m here to help in any way I can. I don’t think I took advantage of his offer, which is something I really regret, now.”
May 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Greenwich Village, 1971 By Sadie Stein Djuna Barnes. Although she died in 1982, at the age of ninety, Djuna Barnes seems to have recorded her voice on only a few occasions. The tape below was made in her Patchin Place home in 1971. Barnes is best known for Nightwood, her modernist classic, but she had a long and thriving career as a journalist and in the avant-garde literary scene. Her body of work, including The Book of Repulsive Women, Ryder, and The Ladies Almanack, spans aestheticism, Dada, and high modernism. Her books are deep, often challenging, and crucial. Read More
May 12, 2016 From the Archive Summing Up By Claribel Alegria Frederic Edwin Church. Claribel Alegria’s poem “Summing Up” appeared in our Fall 1988 issue. Alegria is ninety-two today. Her latest book is Casting Off, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Read More
May 12, 2016 On Sports Football: Three Impressions By Jean-Philippe Toussaint WONDER Football, like painting, according to Leonardo da Vinci, is a cosa mentale; it is in the imagination that it is measured and appreciated. The nature of the wonder that football provokes derives from the fantasies of triumph and omnipotence that it generates in our minds. With my eyes closed, whatever my age and my physical condition, I am the star striker who scores the winning goal or the goalkeeper who throws himself in slow motion into the ether to make a crucial save. As a child, I scored stunning goals (in my mind’s eye, admittedly). The arms that I then raised to the sky in my parents’ deserted sitting room were as much a part of the ritual and the celebration as the goal that I had just scored. It was the celebrations, the congratulations, the kneeling on the pitch, the teammates throwing themselves on me and surrounding me, hugging me, showering me with praise, that I savored most, not the move itself, it was my narcissistic triumph that brought me delight, not at all the possibility that it might one day happen in reality, that I might one day be able to control the ball marvelously well with my foot so that, with composure, with mastery, with skill, in a real stadium, facing real opponents, on a real pitch, I might propel it with a very pure twenty-five-meter strike into the top corner of the opposing team’s goal, in spite of the hopelessly floundering goalkeeper’s desperate attempt to parry. Read More
May 12, 2016 On the Shelf Congratulations, You’re Everywhere, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring William Sergeant Kendall, Narcissa (detail). Today in mirrors: they’re everywhere. As Alexandra Kleeman points out, they’ve proliferated to such a degree that our self-image is inescapable. There’s never been a better time for ridiculously narcissistic people to walk the earth, and never a harder time for everyone else: “For much of mirrors’ long history, they were luxury items, fragile and expensive to produce, owned mainly by the aristocratic and the wealthy. Who could have imagined, then, that they would one day be so cheap and so common that we’d use them to wallpaper our bathrooms and dance floors, line our skyscrapers with their smooth, shiny surfaces, and affix them to our cars? … In the elevator, I watch myself in the convex security mirror, my head ballooning. When you seek out—or seek to avoid—your own reflection, the modern city becomes a hall of mirrors: car windows, reflective walls, and plate glass are everywhere, transmitting a cacophony of different versions of you—this one too short, that one too wide, another one with a sickly color you’ve never seen before. Your own face runs rampant through the world and, like a word repeated too many times, begins to lose its reference.” The poet Michael S. Harper has died at seventy-eight: “In a preface to his poems in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, he wrote, ‘My poems are rhythmic rather than metric; the pulse is jazz; the tradition generally oral; my major influences musical; my debts, mostly to the musicians who taught me to see about experience, pain and love, and who made it artful and archetypal’ … ‘I was writing plays, one-acters, about musicians who were speakers of the idiom I loved most: black American male speech, full of curse words,’ he wrote in an autobiographical essay for the reference work Contemporary Authors in 2004.” The art of literary hate mail endures, though you’d think people today would have better things to do or at least more prominent people to hate. William Giraldi offers a history of the form, a glimpse at some of his own hate mail (received, not sent), and, best of all, a sample of D. H. Lawrence’s scornful contributions, which reveal him as a true master of spleen: “To poet Amy Lowell in 1914: ‘Why do you deny the bitterness in your nature, when you write poetry? Why do you take a pose? It causes you always to shirk your issues, and find a banal resolution at the end.’ To Katherine Mansfield in 1920: ‘I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption,’ to which he amends this barb: ‘The Italians were quite right to have nothing to do with you.’ To critic John Middleton Murry in 1924: ‘Your articles in the Adelphi always annoy me. Why care so much about your own fishiness or fleshiness? Why make it so important? Can’t you focus yourself outside yourself? Not forever focused on yourself, ad nauseam?’ To Aldous Huxley in 1928: ‘I have read Point Counter Point with a heart sinking through my boot soles … It becomes of a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia, inertia, inertia and final atrophy of the feelings.’” Forty-five years ago, Sports Illustrated hired Hunter S. Thompson to write five hundred words about a motorcycle race in Vegas. What emerged from the assignment was … different: “The final version would clock in at 204 pages (more than sixty thousand words)—over the course of which Thompson would manage to include a grand total of twenty-two psychopharmacological substances. Acid/LSD appears the most: it’s mentioned thirty-nine times and is consumed, in scene, twice. Mescaline comes in second, referred to on nineteen different occasions, but regarding consumption it takes top billing … While Hunter Thompson would manage to include in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a wide variety of subjects, one theme we tend to overlook, today, is a perspective on drugs that manages to articulate, with surprising foresight, our own present-day relationship with psychopharmacology—with stimulants, especially. After all, Thompson wasn’t taking Dexedrine to get high, to expand his consciousness; his amphetamine use could be egregious, yes, and on these two trips, after so many days of constant consumption—of drinking and not sleeping—the end result, the general degradation of his physical and mental state, would seem to suggest otherwise. But he didn’t use the drug to escape the reality of the world around him … ” The artist and illustrator Aidan Koch, who contributed the cover and portfolio to our Summer 2015 issue, talks to Daily contributor Chantal McStay: “Looking at paintings, it’s often hard to focus. Especially ultra-dynamic ones or ones that have many characters or little actions happening. Medieval paintings are insane because there’s so much going on all the time. I’ll draw in museums a lot because it makes me look at a painting much more than giving it ten seconds and moving on. Because then you miss all these teeny tiny nuanced emotions or gestures … I use classical imagery all the time, and it definitely is partly trying to confront my actual problem with that imagery and the existence of that history, but also loving classical painting so much and being so enraptured by how powerfully beautiful it is.”
May 11, 2016 Look Echo By Dan Piepenbring Miao Xiaochun, Triumph of Death, 2015, acrylic on linen, 13′ x 13′. Miao Xiaochun’s new exhibition, “Echo,” is at Galerie Paris-Beijing from May 12 through June 18. A Chinese digital artist, Xiaochun specializes in what he’s called “algorithmic painting,” recasting work from a religious European tradition—famous canvases from the likes of Bosch or Brueghel—as vibrant, science-fictional virtual worlds. These dreamscapes are “populated,” as the gallery puts it, “by strange cybernetic beings, with no clothes, character, or expression.” See more of his work on Art Radar. Read More