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
May 6, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Milk-guzzling Sheriffs, Metallic Fiber, @MythologyBot By The Paris Review A still from Flamingo Road. In 1955, Stith Thompson, a folklorist at Indiana University, published the first volume of his Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Betraying every bit of the gumptious optimism of the midcentury milieu in which it was conceived, the work was intended as “a systematic arrangement of the whole body of traditional literature.” Eventually it grew to six volumes, but lately it has found a new life on a microscale. Every three hours, @MythologyBot raids Thompson’s index and drops a new motif, a sort of freeze-dried folktale, into the feeds of its thousand-plus followers on Twitter: “Fetish betrays fugitive,” “Ghost laid by prayer,” “Rainbow as loincloth.” Given the primary-election season that we’ve all just cowered through, it’s hard to insist that any of us needs more bewilderment in our lives. But @MythologyBot’s little gusts of absurdity are often just the thing, I’ve found, to disperse the mental drear. —Robert P. Baird I’ve been going to the movies a lot since I moved to New York, particularly to Metrograph, an art-house theater on Ludlow Street that grandly claims to be “the ultimate place for movie enthusiasts.” Last week, my boyfriend and I saw Flamingo Road (1949), a work of high Hollywood melodrama starring Joan Crawford as Lane Bellamy, who begins the film as an impoverished carnival dancer stranded in a small town in the South. Glowing and assured, Bellamy gets a job at a local diner; her goal is to live on the town’s most prosperous street, the eponymous Flamingo Road. But when a flirtation develops between Bellamy and the town’s deputy sheriff, her ruin becomes the obsession of Sheriff Semple, a milk-drinking political wire-puller who’s grooming the deputy for the governor’s seat. It’s luminous to see a woman in early Hollywood assume a role so empowering. In her own life, Crawford had recently reemerged as a star—Flamingo Road mirrors all the energy of her comeback and is blighted only by knowing of Crawford’s self-destructive final years, when she became a recluse after seeing an unflattering photograph of herself. “If that’s how I look,” she said, “then they won’t see me anymore.” —Caitlin Love Read More
May 6, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Four Episodes in the Life of Einstein’s Mother By Adam Ehrlich Sachs Simpler, Simpler On October 22, 1905, two weeks after he’d sent his father (but not his mother!) the issue of the Annalen der Physik containing his article “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which laid out for the first time the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein received in return a letter not from his father but from his mother, Louise Einstein née Rosenberg, the daughter of a prosperous grain trader from Württemberg, who explained to her son, a little bit bashfully but with a distinct note of reproof, that she, too, was interested in his intellectual life—all the more so because his intellectual life was his life. There is simply no partaking in my son’s life if I cannot partake in his intellectual life, she wrote, such is the nature of my brilliant but pensive son, my inward-oriented, eternally brain-dwelling son! And so, she wrote, even though the article had not been sent to her, she’d snatched it up—“Please do not reproach me for this!”—as soon as his father was finished with it and set about studying it herself. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of it. Despite her deep, her profoundly deep aching to understand, she wrote, the fact remained that she did not speak the physico-mathematical language in which her husband and son were fluent. “Please, Albert, explain it to me more simply! Put it in terms so simple that even the daughter of a Württemberg corn merchant can understand it!” Read More