May 10, 2016 On the Shelf A Superman at the Supermarket, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Bob Adelman during the march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965. So you’ve bought an English country house—great! And you have a time machine, allowing you to choose when you’ll reside at said country house—great! May I recommend the interwar period? It was a truly exceptional time to own an English country house. Adrian Tinniswood has a new book about the era, arguing that it was “a world of energy, invention, and change … The loosening bonds between family, mansion and local community meant the country house was changing, but it was not dying … A ‘spirit of restlessness’ characterized the age. Country-house parties could last from forty-eight hours to three weeks. The word week-end entered common usage as expanding rail networks and car ownership meant that people could dash to the country on Friday and return on Monday exhausted after a race, a ball, a shoot, or a political gathering … Women, in particular, were confronted with grueling social expectations: a seven-day shooting party, for example, would require multiple outfits for every day of the week.” The photographer Bob Adelman has died at eighty-five. “In his college years, he studied philosophy to try to figure out the point of being alive,” Ann Beattie wrote of him in 2014. “In the civil rights movement, he found his answer.” Mary Reinholz remembers him as “your quintessential New York Jewish intellectual turned artist and activist … For me, Adelman was also a big daddy figure, a superman at the supermarket who always seemed to be there for this lowly scribe, offering sensible career advice, recommending prospective employers he knew, warning about a sportswriter boyfriend who had broken my heart. I wondered why he chose to live alone after the breakup of a relationship with a much younger woman … He didn’t drink or smoke but struggled for years with his weight and photographed his ‘shrinking’ size in nude pictures he took of himself for Esquire magazine. He once said in an interview: ‘When I photographed, I was intent on telling the truth as best I saw it and then to help in doing something about it.’ ” Ian Penman on Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train, which finds her visiting writers’ graves a bit too fashionably, if not too regularly: “The spell-casting mood of M Train demands that Smith fly off on a moment’s whim, spurred on by nothing more than a lovely line in a new book she’s picked up: she realizes she loves Writer A, who either lives or is now buried in City B, decides she has to be there NOW, and before you know it she’s graveside again, the Intercity angel of death in dark Helmut Lang pants and Ann Demeulemeester cloak. It’s all so smooth and hassle-free … There are things in M Train that niggle at me in the same way [Bruce] Chatwin’s work often did: the feeling that for all their much vaunted ‘realism’ these treks occurred in a rather privileged sphere. There’s always a rich pal to provide a bed, a dinner table, a handy castle to stay at for the season; there’s always someone in the background to make sure the plane tickets arrive; fresh figs on the bedside table. Special people, living by special rules. Like Chatwin, Smith is also a bit of a consumer fetishist: the simplest things have to have a special aura or signature—or, let’s get real, a high-toned brand name. It has to be a certain Moleskine notebook. The pencil has to be Conté. The ink has to be from a little shop no one knows in the backstreets of Florence.” The landscape architect Adriaan Geuze (pronounced “Huh-zaa”) is changing our notions of what a park can be. But to understand his work it helps to understand his past in the Netherlands—unless you’ve never wondered about the formative years of an influential landscape architect: “‘Ecology in Holland is in grids,’ Geuze said. ‘Every frog in Holland is in a line, because all the water is linear … The smell of the tide near Dordrecht, it intoxicated my brains … All the boys were into soccer, but I could not play soccer.’ Waiting out the school day, he would think, he said, ‘I have a tree hut. I have secret places you don’t even know where they are.’ When Geuze was a teenager, his father took him along to international industry and agricultural shows. ‘We went to the German Hanover machinery expos, where there would be not five machines but five thousand machines. He took me on very big boats, at least in my imagination—ocean steamers—and even an oil platform. Even into the engine rooms, where the violent noise was there. When I am romantic, I am thinking about these things.’ ” Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues, cartoonists who collaborate under the name Paper Radio, have been quietly breaking the mold since 1999: “Working together, often under pseudonyms, they changed the form and content of comics as few other artists have, radically distorting extant storytelling genres and emphasizing experimental approaches to drawing and printing … A Paper Radio publication could contain subversive fan fiction about the Muppet Babies, elaborate fantasy adventures, psychedelic space operas, or crude slapstick gags. All of these works circulated in small editions among an audience of like-minded artists and musicians, members of a largely unchronicled New England subculture whose aesthetic continues to seep, credited or not, into popular visual forms, from music videos to subway advertisements.”
May 9, 2016 Bulletin The Secret’s Out: We’re BORINGASFUCK By The Paris Review Subscribe now and receive 10 percent off with the promotion code BORINGASFUCK. In 1953, William Styron introduced the first issue of The Paris Review with a simple mission statement. The magazine, he wrote, “should welcome these people into its pages … the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders.” He said this knowing full well that non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders are boring as fuck. It was only a matter of time before someone caught on. In the Guardian today, Jessa Crispin blew our cover with three simple words. “We all have to be in job-interview mode all of the time,” she told Michelle Dean of writers today. “We’re not allowed to say, ‘The Paris Review is boring as fuck!’ Because what if The Paris Review is just about to call us?” Our fabled CIA connections notwithstanding, the Review has always admired those who speak truth to power. That’s why, for the next twenty-four hours, new subscribers can use the discount code BORINGASFUCK for 10 percent off one year of less-than-scintillating reading. Subscribe now to enjoy the best in boring fiction, boring poetry, boring interviews, and boring art. Because we all need something to read while we’re waiting by the phone …
May 9, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Noisy Neighbors By Sadie Stein You heard the man. As I write this, there are six workmen constructing a building within five feet of the window, as has been the case for the past eight months and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not a quiet business at the best of times, and at the moment they’re blasting “Rockin’ Robin.” They start work at seven A.M., and they have one of those special permits from the mayor’s office that allows them to work on Saturdays, too. Along with the two preschools and the slew of amateur musicians who inhabit the surrounding buildings, it makes for a cacophony. I used to wear noise-canceling headphones and sometimes earplugs, and I’d fume like an angry cartoon character, but now it doesn’t bother me much. In balmy weather, it even feels sort of Rear Window–ish and picturesque. Or so you can tell yourself, especially when one amateur musician noodles on his sax for several hours at a time. I realize I have come to love it. Read More
May 9, 2016 Correspondence Let’s Talk About Skin By J. D. Daniels and Mike Nagel Charles Landseer, 1813. Wellcome Library, London. In the exchange below, J. D. Daniels and Mike Nagel discuss Didier Anzieu’s The Skin-Ego, available in a new translation by Naomi Segal. Anzieu (1923–99) was a French psychoanalyst and theorist whose work brought the body back to the center of psychoanalytic inquiry; The Skin-Ego, first published in the mideighties, found him meditating on the function and structures of the skin as a “psychic envelope.” Naomi Segal is a professor of modern languages, specializing in comparative literary and cultural studies, gender, psychoanalysis and the body. Dear Mike, I just got back from New Orleans, where my friend Nicky told me his theory of swamp karma. Anything you drop down here will sprout, he said, whether it’s a seed from a plant or a deed you sow. This land is fertile and karma is quick. If you do good, you get good. If you do bad, you get bad. If you don’t know how you did, you can always check on what you got. Read More
May 9, 2016 On the Shelf The Natural Springs of New York City, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A woman drinks at Carman Spring, on West 175th Street east of Amsterdam Avenue, New York City, c. 1897–1902. Photo: James Reuel Smith/New York Historical Society. Today in the expenditure of effort: one reason serialization has become so popular, Juliet Lapidos, is that it curtails the reader’s (or viewer’s) setup time, encouraging a kind of economy in entertainment: “The most demanding part of any narrative art form is the beginning, when everything—the style, the plot, the characters, perhaps even the universe in which the characters operate—is new … Series minimize that period of difficulty relative to the total experience. You do the work once, and then you’re free and easy … For the last twelve years, I’ve been addicted to serial novels.” Gregory Woods’s new book, Homintern, is a history of gay conspiracy in the arts—a history that, as Caleb Crain writes, requires some paradoxical thinking to address properly: “Homintern was a portmanteau word, a mash-up of Comintern, the name of the international communist organization that flourished between the two world wars, and homosexual. It referred, originally in jest, to the notion that a clique of gay men and (in smaller numbers) lesbian women controlled the arts world from behind the scenes, giving undue preference to the work of their lovers, ex-lovers and would-be lovers, and skewing taste away from the ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’ … [Woods] rightly debunks the idea of a Homintern, pointing out that it’s unfair to single out gay men for mixing romance and art—‘as if,’ he writes, ‘heterosexual people never dedicate their books to their lovers or spouses’ … Woods then proceeds, however, to devote the bulk of his book to recounting, and even celebrating, links between gay men in the arts that were half hidden and often sexual in nature—the same links that he thinks it would be unjust, if not paranoid, to make too much of.” Easy advice: when you’re feeling down, look at a painting of a Russian person’s face. You’ll be surprised, delighted, perhaps even moved. They’re formidable faces. Jenny Uglow is especially fond of the portraitist Ilya Repin, whose work is well represented in a new show at the National Portrait Gallery: “I found these serious, unsmiling portraits astonishing. They feel governed by the belief that a portrait—like an intense conversation between artist and sitter—can bring us closer to its subject than any new-fangled photograph could do … There is humor in Repin’s portraits as well as empathy and understanding. Great warmth, for example, in his sexy, self-possessed pianist Sophie Menter, Liszt’s brilliant protégé; and a keen wit in his classic swagger-portrait of the salonnière Baroness Varvara Ikskul von Hildenbandt with her wickedly pointed hat and veil. At once bold and restrained, this is painted with such enjoyment that we can almost feel the weight of the locket chain round her arm and touch the gathers of her scarlet blouse and sweeping skirt.” A century ago, James Reuel Smith could still recall the days when a New Yorker might reasonably expect to stumble upon a natural spring within city limits: “In the days, not so very long ago, when nearly all the railroad mileage of the metropolis was to be found on the lower half of the Island, nothing was more cheering to the thirsty city tourist afoot or awheel than to discover a natural spring of clear cold water, and nothing quite so refreshing as a draught of it.”(His book Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx: New York City at the End of the Nineteenth Century contains an abundance of photographs of refreshed spring-sippers.) It’s about time someone wrote a history of oral histories that isn’t also an oral history: “The term oral history has been around for decades, though, early on, it was primarily the domain of folklorists, archivists, and academics. In the 1930s, the Federal Writer’s Project, funded by the New Deal, gathered the first-person narratives of former slaves, still alive in America; people who had traveled West in covered wagons; and others with interesting stories, say, about meeting Billy the Kid or surviving the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 … Some early guidelines, penned by longtime oral historian Willa Baum, in her book Oral History for the Local Historical Society, included tips that remain relevant even now: ‘An interview is not a dialogue … Ask one question at a time … Ask brief questions … Don’t let periods of silence fluster you … Try to avoid “off-the-record” information … Don’t switch the recorder off and on … Don’t use the interview to show off your knowledge, vocabulary, charm or other abilities.’ ”
May 6, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent A Toast to Babies By Sadie Stein Master of baby jokes. The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary. —Longfellow, “The Rainy Day” In New York, the foreseeable future is unremittingly gray. (That’s not strictly true; there’s one lone “sunshine” icon in the ten-day forecast, which otherwise is a vertical column of rain clouds and two midweek bashful suns.) In short, it’s dirty weather. Weather that, in a perfect world, would find us turning to hot-water bottles and cozy reads and stupid movies and, I don’t know, stews, but that more often means trudging through subways smelling of wet dog and never quite getting your feet warm. Such a grim outlook calls for a lot of things. (Personally, I’m a great believer in the palliative effects of a bright-orange towel, but then I also own a Feel-Good Candle, so.) But one great reliable is Mark Twain. So if you’re feeling dreary and blue and chilly, do yourself a favor and read his “Toast: The Babies,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and furthermore can be read from your desk. Read More