May 12, 2016

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

May 11, 2016

Our Daily Correspondent

Confessions of a Grubby-Footed Woman

By Sadie Stein

Adolph Menzel, 1876.

As a young woman, I went on a few highly improbable dates with a guy who did something in the realm of what, in my family, we call “beeswax.” After a few absurdly adult dinners at real restaurants, I told him we shouldn’t see each other any more. He said, “You’re probably right. I have a feeling you sometimes have dirty feet, and I can’t handle that.”

His “feeling” may have been based on certain clues—at this time in my life (the “pre-makeover Harlequin-heroine” phase) I dwelt exclusively in vintage heeled sandals, and these often proved so fragile or painful that, in the cases where my ever-present moleskin and tube of Crazy Glue didn’t work, I was forced to take them off and trudge around New York barefoot. So, yeah, maybe my feet were sometimes less than pristine. Read More

May 11, 2016

On Technology

This Faithful Machine

By Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Picturing the literary history of word processing.

Len Deighton at his home office in London.

Len Deighton in his high-tech home office in London. “The first application of the MT/ST in a literary setting was by the British spymaster Len Deighton’s assistant, Ellenor Handley.”

When did individual writers begin to use word processors? As I began work on a literary history of word processing, I found it difficult to establish a time line. Sometimes writers kept a sales record—a word processor or computer would have represented a significant investment, especially back in the day. Other times, as with Stanley Elkin or Isaac Asimov, the arrival of the computer was of such seismic importance as to justify its own literary retellings. But most of the time there were no real records documenting exactly when a writer had gotten his or her first computer, and so I had to rely on anecdote, detective work, and circumstantial evidence.