April 12, 2016 Books Bodies Moving Through Space By Edward Gauvin How Blutch’s graphic novel Peplum shatters the Satyricon. In an interview after Peplum’s first publication in book form, Blutch tells of a reader who asked him why he was such a difficult author. “But I don’t feel like I’m difficult at all!” he exclaimed. “I don’t understand why I get asked that. What I do is fairly simple, and not at all intellectual. In my stories, I try to favor action.” And in action, Blutch’s book abounds: stabbing, stoning, amputation, eye-gouging, sex, seafaring, Attic dance, pirate attacks. Yet these sequences are as artificial as they are visceral, feral, and formal at once. Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic—one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty. Read More
April 12, 2016 Look From Peplum By Blutch Blutch’s Peplum, a graphic novel, is out this month from New York Review Comics. A phantasmagoric take on the Satyricon, it was originally serialized in the French magazine À suivre in 1996; this is its first appearance in English. In his new introduction, Blutch’s translator, Edward Gauvin, writes, “Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic—one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty.” Read More
April 12, 2016 On the Shelf Lego Karl Ove, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via Instagram (@legokarlove). Today in things you didn’t know you wanted: scenes from Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, reconstructed with Legos. Throw in some gravlax on an IKEA plate and you’d have a veritable orgy of Scandinavian exports. Ever wondered what a corporate bookstore in the UK looks like? Well, friend, you needn’t book a flight to London just to check out a Waterstones. Alice Spawls went to one recently, and it wasn’t pretty: “Gifts now seem to take up as much space as books, at least on the tables, where the prettiest paperbacks are distributed among Orla Kiely pots and enamel cups … Something is working, because digital sales are down and those of paper and glue books are up, but the ephemera isn’t only disguising the books, it’s disguising the rise of the non-book book … Books can function as gift objects, lifestyle signifiers, thematic attributes; they can be non-book products too, word-based diversions, color-me distractions, bucket lists, how-tos, extensions of celebrity brands. Putting something between two covers doesn’t make it a book, and putting them on shelves doesn’t make a bookshop.” Poor Kafka. Even beer, which many German men have turned to in times of need, proved fraught for him: “His most joyous—and meaningful—memories of beer were of the drinking sessions he shared with his father. But these memories were also inextricably allied with the twin sites of his childhood humiliation … [His father] Hermann was a blustering bully. But the deeper problem was that father and son had such different personalities, they were like slapstick antagonists. Hermann the confident and coarse shopkeeper vs. the timid Franz, who worked in insurance (Hermann derided it as a Brotberuf, or ‘bread job’), wrote weird stories in his room, became a vegetarian, and showed no interest whatsoever in the family dry-goods store … The only time his father had a word of praise for him, wrote Kafka, was when ‘I was able to eat heartily or even drink beer with my meals’ … Beer made everything better.” Christina Crosby, a professor at Wesleyan, suffered a devastating bike accident that left her paralyzed. Her memoir A Body, Undone eschews the clichés of disability narratives; instead, as Michael Weinstein writes, Crosby lavishes “brutal detail on the pain of her post-accident body—of finding her sphere of movement and sensation contracted down to almost nothing—and on the slow, excruciating process of navigating her quadriplegic body’s new limits. She describes waking to find her frame cobbled together and held in place by a man-made exoskeleton: ‘My mouth was full of metal, arch bars that ran from side to side to keep the roof of my mouth from caving in—somehow the bits of bone that had been my chin were pinned together, as were other bones in my face—and I wore a very high, tight, and rigid cervical collar around my neck. I could not turn my body or sit up. I could not move my legs or feet. I could not lift my arms or use my hands, which were uselessly curled up into loose fists by atrophying muscles and tightening ligaments.’ An entire chapter is devoted to describing Crosby’s bowel program, while half of another chapter discusses her intestinal gas.” Jennifer Moxley on poetry, prizes, and poverty: “The poet needs money to live, but the poem needs only a reader. Which is more difficult to secure? In the history of the West, in some perverse way, a poet’s integrity has long been bound up with periodic privation, in love, in luck, in money. Publicare, the Latin root of the English ‘to publish,’ means also ‘to prostitute,’ to make public and ask money for what should remain private, whether your thoughts or your body. Perhaps the whiff of shame in making money from poetry comes from this etymological association, and drives poets to claim penury as their excuse.”
April 11, 2016 Arts & Culture The Rest Is Silence By Henry Giardina Chaplin’s trip abroad. From the cover of My Trip Abroad. In the fall of 1921, journalists were clamoring to know if Charlie Chaplin intended to play Hamlet. They asked him in Chicago at the Blackstone Hotel. They cornered him at the Ritz. His response each time was coy and evasive: “Why, I don’t know.” Of all the unlikely questions they tended to ask him at this point in his career—“Are you a Bolshevik?” “What do you do with your old mustaches?”—the Hamlet question seems most out of place. Why would an actor known for his comedy and silence take on a famously verbose and tragic role? Hamlet, with his hemming and hawing, didn’t seem a natural fit for an actor in Chaplin’s position. But then, no actor had ever been in Chaplin’s position before. Read More
April 11, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Always Right By Sadie Stein New York City subway, May 1973. The other day I noticed something for the first time. “Please allow all customers off the train,” said the recorded voice over the subway sound system. Customers. Not passengers, not riders: customers. What did it mean? Something bureaucratic, obviously—but philosophically? Had the transaction at last been stripped of all artifice? Had the civic connotations of public transit been cast off in favor of naked commercialism? Or was this a simple acknowledgment that we’re paying for the ride—and that, in the way of all American customers, we are always right? Read More
April 11, 2016 Look press++ By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Ruff, press++01.16, 2015, chromogenic print, 72 7/8″ x 91″. The German photographer Thomas Ruff’s “press++,” showing now at David Zwirner Gallery, comprises space-age images culled from the archival clippings of various American newspapers. Ruff scanned both sides of the original documents and layered them in Photoshop, thus presenting both the photos and the context—the smudges, cropping, commentary, and retouching—that surrounded their initial publication. “I think photography is still the most influential medium in the world, and I have to deconstruct these conventions,” he told Aperture in 2013: I try to find out how the image was created and in what context—historical, political, or social—the image belongs … There are a lot of different photographs, and different photographs have different intentions. Fine art, medical, propaganda, and of course the most influential image-production machine is advertisement. This transformation, let’s say, of the scientific photography into the art world, or advertising photography into politics (as seen in the last U.S. election)—this modification of images from one intention to another brings about interferences. The image, and the meaning of the image, changes. “press++” is up through April 30. Read More