February 19, 2016 On the Shelf Naming Miss Rumphius, and Other News By Sadie Stein A detail of the cover of Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney. This account of Georg Eberhard Rumpf, a seventeenth-century botanist, is fascinating enough. But can we talk about the fact that he was manifestly the inspiration for one of the greatest characters in all picture-book literature, Barbara Cooney’s Lupine Lady? Rumpf, Atlas Obscura tells us, “preferred to go by Rumphius, the Latinate spelling of his name.” Miss Rumphius, which won the National Book Award for Children’s Picture Books in 1983, is about a woman who adds beauty to the world by sowing lupines far and wide. Other stealth children’s-lit news: FURIOUS GEORGE, reads the headline. Seeing the Year of the Monkey in with a bang, a capuchin of Paraíba, Brazil, quaffed some cachaça in a bar and chased patrons around with a knife. “It was a bar staff oversight that ended with the monkey drinking some rum and taking the knife,” said fire-department Lieutenant Colonel Saul Laurentino. So they put him in a nature preserve. But George was furious! Narrates Laurentino, “We had to recapture him because he was causing problems and threatening children living near the reserve.” In other news, he punched the Man with the Yellow Hat and robbed an armored car. In which The New Yorker applies its famously rigorous copyediting process to Donald Trump’s statement on the Pope. As fans of Soul Mining and proud bearers of the word the—it’s in all Paris Review e-mail addresses—we have complicated feelings about the Metropolitan Museum of Arts’s new logo. Primarily among them: this does nothing to elucidate the age-old confusion between the museum and the opera. Vulture has not hesitated to term the bold, new design a “graphic misfire,” but, while some of us may mourn the passing of the art-nouveau M that graced their buttons for decades, it’s always good to see the humble article getting its due. Andreas Huyssen defines the written miniature for the LA Review of Books: “Modernist miniatures are short prose texts written for little magazines or newspaper feuilletons (arts supplements) by major German, French, and Austrian modernists. Always published in groups, they reflect on the fleeting experiences of modern city life, especially as it was shaped by the arrival of photography and early cinema. As such, they register the resulting historical transformation in perceptions of time and space in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. These feuilleton texts, which we now read in book form—for example, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris or Benjamin’s One-Way Street—sought to capture the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression, social conflict, and cultural upheaval that defined urban existence. In their focus on dream images, ghostly appearances, surreal memories, and urban phantasmagorias, they largely shunned the realistic description, typical of older urban sketches like those of Louis Sébastien Mercier in the 18th century. The miniature did not merely imitate visual media — it absorbed them, condensing objective and subjective perceptions into the very structure of language and text and asserting the aesthetic specificity of literary language and its own power to capture visual experience. In their compressed form, miniatures also accommodate the short attention spans of urban readers, but in their conceptual ambition and complexity, they sit like foreign bodies in the feuilleton, a section of the newspaper mainly geared toward easy consumption.”
February 18, 2016 In Memoriam All Is Vanity: Part 2 By Alex Abramovich and Emily Barton Denise Matthews—aka Vanity—died this week, at the age of fifty-seven. In memoriam, we’re sharing this ’06 exchange from the late, lamented Moistworks, the music blog founded by James Morris and more or less edited by Alex Abramovich. Read Part 1 here. From: Emily Barton To: Alex Abramovich Date: 6/2/2006 Subject: Down on my knees Read More
February 18, 2016 From the Archive Mrs. Parker and the Pink Object By Sadie Stein At the time of this interview, Mrs. Parker was living in a midtown New York hotel. She shared her small apartment with a youthful poodle that had the run of the place and had caused it to look, as Mrs. Parker said apologetically, somewhat “Hogarthian”: newspapers spread about the floor, picked lamb chops here and there, and a rubber doll—its throat torn from ear to ear—which Mrs. Parker lobbed left-handed from her chair into corners of the room for the poodle to retrieve—as it did, never tiring of the opportunity. The room was sparsely decorated, its one overpowering fixture being a large dog portrait, not of the poodle, but of a sheepdog owned by the author Philip Wylie, and painted by his wife. The portrait indicated a dog of such size that if it were real, would have dwarfed Mrs. Parker, who was a small woman, her voice gentle, her tone often apologetic, but occasionally, given the opportunity to comment on matters she felt strongly about, she spoke almost harshly, and her sentences were punctuated with observations phrased with lethal force. That description comes from the introduction to Dorothy Parker’s 1956 Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, a document of unusual (sometimes harsh) honesty, and great humor. I’ve always tried to envision that scene: the writer, battling depression and alcoholism, her career (to her eyes) in twilight—and so was fascinated to run across this snapshot in the New York Public Library’s digital archive. It pictures Parker—petite, with signature chignon and bangs—in a distinctly midcentury room, seated on a dun-colored sofa with two poodles. Before her on a marbled coffee table is a fairly hideous arrangement made up at least in part of dried eucalyptus stems, which puts the viewer in the unusual position of being able to imagine the smell of the scene: eucalyptus and dog, with hints of coffee. (I assume coffee, rather than tea, although feel free to disagree.) The only real mystery—besides where she is, and who took the picture—concerns the pink plush thing on the stack of magazines. Hat? Chew toy? Lamb Chop? But then, as Parker herself wrote in Esquire in 1959, “In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people.” Update: a colleague feels strongly that it is a bedroom slipper “filled with either dog food or gold coins,” possibly the chocolate Hanukah kind. Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.
February 18, 2016 Look No Life Lost: The World of Berlinde De Bruyckere By Yevgeniya Traps Berlinde De Bruyckere, to Zurbaran, 2015, 2015, horse skin, fabric, wood, iron, polyester, 46″ x 63″ x 50″. All photos: Mirjam Devriendt. The foal’s spindly legs, gently bound together in a chiasmus and lit, as though by overhead moonlight, formed a shy shadow on the darkened gallery floor. The animal—sacrificial, symbolic, stunning, meaning both marvelous and stupefying—had its eyes covered by frayed cloth, but, coming into sharp view, it was revelatory, a subtle kind of piercing. Laid out on a wood-and-iron table, the foal evoked Francisco de Zurbarán’s small oil painting Agnus Dei. And indeed, the piece, by the Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere, was called to Zurbaran and dedicated to that Baroque master. De Bruyckere—a soft-spoken woman, whose quiet, deliberate intensity echoed the steel-rod strength of her work—saw Agnus Dei about a year and a half ago at a Zurbarán exhibition in Brussels and was, she said, “surprised” by it. Standing in front of her work on the eve of the opening of her show “No Life Lost” at Hauser & Wirth, De Bruyckere said that the only way she knew to “react to that painting was making a work out of this feeling and emotion. I was so attracted by what I saw I couldn’t do anything else, just work with that idea, that feeling.” And so she began with the visuals: “The holy lamb was bound—the legs together in the same position as I did with the foal. And then it was also placed on wood, very poor wood; it’s not a rich table with a lot of class and glamour, it’s a really poor wood. And also the fact of chiaroscuro—the dark and the light in the painting was something that inspired me, and it’s also why I decided to keep the darkness in the space.” But as she worked on the fragile blankets that would bind the animal, she felt that it was not enough. This was around the time she first saw images of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy, and these images elicited again the feeling she had at seeing the Zurbarán. “From that moment on,” De Bruyckere said, “I was doing the blind-making of the horse not in terms of making blind in a negative way but just in a positive way. It was like the dream of [the] people of Syria who try to make it to Europe. They have a dream, and very often this dream will never happen. And especially with the boy who arrived dead already, there was no chance to live and to become someone. And it was the same with the foal, he died after one day, there was no future for him.” Read More
February 18, 2016 Basketball Liftoff Is Like a Fingerprint By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Aaron Gordon’s best slam dunk in the whole world, ever. Via Twitter. This past weekend, Toronto became the center of the NBA universe as the NBA All-Star Weekend, with its various constellate events—the celebrity game, the skills competition, the three-point contest, slam-dunk contest, and other haute nouveauté—once again went down with its familiar mix of gauche, sizzle, and panache. I was asked more times than I can remember if I’d be in Toronto for the festivities but I maintained my proud record of never having attended an All-Star game. That won’t change anytime soon. I get All-Star Weekend, really I do. I understand where it’s coming from and how it can be considered exciting. The best basketball talent in the world all gathered in one place for one weekend and something with something that seems somewhat like a game of basketball eventually happening in the end. I get it. Give me Westbrook, Curry, Thompson, Leonard and Green on the court at the same time. Give me Wall, Wade, George, Anthony, and James on the court at the same time. I get it. I want to anoint my soul with it. But it’s simply not my thing. I watch out of habit far more than out of awe. And at some point I realized that to be the objective of it anyway: to be accounted for more than having a profound feeling. It is what it is. And I can live with that. Read More
February 18, 2016 On the Shelf There Is a New Record for Most Bollywood Lyrics Ever Written, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Tu Dharti Pe Chahe Jahan Bhi Rahegi” Lyricist Sameer Anjaan has entered The Guinness Book of World Records—they had to make a new category—for writing the greatest number of Bollywood songs, ever. By the numbers: 3,524 songs, 650 films, 33 years. Writes his biographer, “Sameer was a hit both with the fans and the singers because he wrote songs that did not require dictionary to understand. He wrote in the language of the common people.” Listen to his top twenty-five songs here. In other lyrical news: Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera as part of its 2016–2017 season—the first opera by a woman the company has mounted since 1903. Female spies in seventeenth-century Northern Europe had all sorts of ingenious means of transporting information, writes historian Nadine Ackerman, author of “Female Spies or ‘she-Intelligencers’: Towards a Gendered History of Seventeenth-Century Espionage.” The women—who ranged from poets to bakers, aristocrats to peasants—were generally considered unsuspicious, even in times of war, and if caught did not face the capital punishment of their male counterparts. In a pair videos, the author re-creates several of their espionage methods: using artichokes and hollow eggs. In many ways, we are less intrigued by The Vatican Cookbook revealing the Holy Father’s love of pizza than by the fact that such information is “as told by members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard.” It seems like breaking some kind of seal, or at least NDA, but no! In fact! “Polish nuns do the majority of cooking at the Vatican, but the Swiss Guard chefs do step in to make food on formal occasions or to fulfill a special request. Though a guard cooking is a rarity, these men know more about the Pope’s eating habits than anyone else, since they are no more than a few steps from him at all times.” “What does it mean to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the street looking at machines?” asks Jacob Weisberg in The New York Review of Books. Writing about four new books that plumb different aspects of our dependence on—ambivalent relationship to—technology, he finds that most raise more questions than they answer—we’re still living the answer in real time.