May 12, 2015 On the Shelf Hw r u ts mng?, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ethel Wakefield, a Western Union telegraph operator, June 1943. “Indigenous Architecture through Indigenous Knowledge,” a 52,438-word dissertation by a Ph.D. candidate named Patrick Stewart (not that one), “eschews almost all punctuation. There are no periods, no commas, no semicolons … ” Stewart “wanted to make a point about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and ‘the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.’ ” He conducted his oral exam last month; his teachers questioned him for hours. But in the end, he passed. What someone ought to do is write an entire dissertation using turn-of-the-century telegraphy abbreviations, as decoded in this 1901 book: “Wr r ty gg r 9” means “Where are they going for No. 9”; “Is tt exa tr et” means “Is that extra there yet?” Disclaimer: the remark above was not intended to senselessly valorize an outmoded technology. “I’ve heard many a nostalgist say there was something more, well, effortful, and therefore poetic, in the old system of walking for miles to a record shop only to discover they’d just sold out. People become addicted to the weights and measures of their own experience: We value our own story and what it entails. But we can’t become hostages to the romantic notion that the past is always a better country.” For the second time, the avant-garde company Elevator Repair Service is mounting a theatrical adaptation of The Sound and the Fury: “Even if Faulkner isn’t your thing, or if confusion of characters and time frames aren’t, either, it’s important to see the piece, if only to understand how scripts work—and how they transform the actors in the space of the stage.” In which Ottessa Moshfegh tries mayonnaise: “Mayonnaise, to my mother, was like peanut butter to the French: disgusting, uncivilized, and impossible to find. On a scale of respectability, a jar of mayonnaise came in somewhere between a vat of pig fat and one of those plastic pails of Marshmallow Fluff.”
May 11, 2015 Look Coypel’s Quixote By Dan Piepenbring Workshop of Peter van den Hecke, after Philippe de Hondt, Arrival of the Shepherdesses at the Wedding of Camacho, 1730−45 (before 1748), wool and silk, 10′ 3″ x 18′ 3″. Photo: Michael Bodycomb This is the final week to see Charles Coypel’s extensive Don Quixote tapestries, paintings, prints, and books, on display at the Frick through May 17. Coypel, Louis XV’s painter, was commissioned by Paris’s Gobelins Manufactory to produce the series, which he worked on for a good portion of his life, from 1714 to 1734; it comprises twenty-eight episodes from the novel, in full-scale preparatory paintings that the manufactory later wove into tapestries. Coypel, himself a playwright, took a theatrical approach to the images, as evidenced by the gestures and poses of his characters; the curator Esther Bell writes, “His playful visual innuendos were targeted at both a rowdy parterre and aristocratic circles who equally embraced puns and dirty jokes, while the depiction of ballet and costume mirror both the repertoire of the Opéra and private performances for the privileged members of the King’s household.” Coypel’s became the most influential eighteenth-century illustrations of Quixote; tapestries like the one above were indebted to his work. Read More
May 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Booksellers Week By Sadie Stein Carl Spitzweg, Kunst und Wissenschaft (detail), ca. 1880. One of the few remaining bastions of character on New York’s Upper West Side is its smattering of sidewalk booksellers. Up and down Broadway—displaying wares by American Apparel, blasting Bach, and hawking signed Roth novels in front of Zabar’s, dressed in velvet by the Eighty-Sixth Street Uptown 1—these are the folks who keep the neighborhood alive. Over the weekend, I was perusing the stall of a certain bookseller when another customer—a “character” in a many-pocketed fishing-tackle vest—strode up and began barraging the mild-mannered proprietor with questions. Read More
May 11, 2015 Books (Give Me That) Old-Time Socialist Utopia By Ezra Glinter How the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction went from utopian to dystopian. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Near the beginning of The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, a 1970 novel by the Russian science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the innkeeper, Alek Snevar, proposes to his guest, police inspector Peter Glebsky, that mystery is always preferable to explanation. “Haven’t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known?” Snevar asks. “The unknown makes us think—it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It’s like a fire flickering in the depths of the night.” It’s a strange idea to appear at the beginning of what seems to be a locked-room mystery novel—a genre in which all puzzles are meant to be solved. Soon after Glebsky’s arrival, a blizzard blocks the road to the inn. Right on cue, another of the guests, a Scandinavian named Olaf Andvarafors, is found dead in his room with his neck twisted, the window open, and the door locked from the inside. Everyone at the inn is a suspect: Simone Simone, a nervous, billiard-playing physicist; Hinkus, a “youth counselor” on sick leave; a celebrity magician named Du Barnstoker and his androgynous ward, Brun (“the sole progeny of [his] dear departed brother”); an imperious alcoholic named Albert Moses, and his knockout wife, Mrs. Moses. Then there is Snevar and his maid, Kaisa; a St. Bernard named Lel; and Luarvik L. Luarvik, a mysterious one-armed man who shows up half dead after being caught in the storm. With this bizarre cast you expect to find plenty of red herrings before a hiding-in-plain-sight solution is revealed. Instead, The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn departs from anything that either detective or reader could deduce. For the Strugatskys, the deviation was practically involuntary. In his 1999 memoir, Comments on the Way Left Behind, Boris Strugatsky writes that they intended to write a commercial mystery novel along the lines of Erle Stanley Gardner or John le Carré. But they were unable to resist their speculative impulses: in place of a clever solution for the events at the inn, they introduced a bigger mystery. Read More
May 11, 2015 On the Shelf The Return of the Glass Delusion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Zoja Trofimiuk, Despair, 2012. Chris Burden—who spent five days in a school locker, hammered a metal stud into his sternum, and had himself shot in the arm by a rifle from fifteen feet, all in the name of art—has died at sixty-nine. “Power was a central motif in Burden’s work. He approached it as an almost tactile, palpable material, one with visual, physical, emotional and social meanings … His work delved into the power of individuals, tribes and nations. Often he explored the realm of science and technology as distinctly modern manifestations of power’s dual capacity for the creation of magical delight or total annihilation.” Send a (well-encrypted) thank-you note to the antiauthoritarian librarian in your life: “Librarians have frequently been involved in the fight against government surveillance. The first librarian to be locked up for defending privacy and intellectual freedom was Zoia Horn, who spent three week in jail in 1972 for refusing to testify against anti–Vietnam War activists. During the Cold War, librarians exposed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s attempts to recruit library staffers to spy on foreigners, particularly Soviets, through a national effort called the Library Awareness Program. The post-Snowden Internet age is no different.” The county of Dorset, along the coast of England, gave Thomas Hardy “the pastoral landscapes that he is famous for describing; the farmland and heath with sandstone cottages, sheep pastures and Roman roads ending abruptly at dramatic seaside cliffs. And since Dorset is relatively unspoiled by modern development, it isn’t hard to imagine, with a squint of the eyes, the countryside as Hardy saw it.” The Irish landscape, meanwhile, contains such well-documented beauty and blight that any writer who takes it on risks courting cliché—but why not try anyway? “Over the years I had avoided what I call ‘the landscape solution’ in Irish prose, whereby the writer puts the word ‘Atlantic’ or ‘bog’ into the story and some essential yearning in her character is fixed. But there I was myself, getting fixed on the green road, and it seemed to me that this was something I should allow myself to write about now.” Today in living, breathing metaphors: people who think they’re made of glass. When glass was a new and seemingly magical material, glass delusions manifested relatively commonly; about midway through the nineteenth century, though, doctors began to see fewer and fewer of them. “It’s easy to assume society and culture are so changed that mentally ill people would no longer manifest this particular delusion. But a psychiatrist from the Netherlands has uncovered contemporary cases … The glass delusion has powerful contemporary resonance in a society in which anxieties about fragility, transparency, and personal space are pertinent to many people’s experience of, and anxieties about, living in the modern world.”
May 8, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Crosscurrents, Kandy Kat, Casino Cohesion By The Paris Review Charles Burchfield, Tile Roof, 1930–43, watercolor, gouache, and charcoal on paper, mounted on board, 24 3/8″ x 35 7/8″. Photo via D.C. Moore In my mind, I’ve created a dream exhibition of portraiture by Alice Neel, Mickalene Thomas, and Hope Gangloff: crosscurrents of eroticism, identity, bodies, and embellishment. For now, I’ll settle for a show of new portraits by Gangloff, whose paintings are gratifyingly overstuffed with garish details rendered in contrasting patterns and in nips of fluorescent orange and extravagant swathes of hot pink. There’s a funny play between color and patterning in her work—the elements are at once discordant and of a piece, excessive and sensible. There’s something of that, too, in Charles Burchfield’s watercolors, on view a couple blocks south. Burchfield saw a second plane of reality, a spiritual palimpsest shimmering over the world you and I see. The scenes he painted are heightened versions of the real thing, electrified and otherworldly but always recognizable. In a study of what looks like a denuded landscape, his ghostly outlines of trees become visible, lightly filling in and giving life to the empty hills. Color also seems to exist in the spiritual realm. A note on an ink sketch reads, “Leaves a hot red (tinged with umber?), as glowing embers of a dying fire.” —Nicole Rudick Read More