August 28, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Picnic Time By Sadie Stein Elizabeth Shippen Green, 1906. In 1932, an Irish popular songwriter named Jimmy Kennedy penned one of the most sinister sets of lyrics ever composed. Kennedy—who had already had Tin Pan Alley success with numbers like “Barmaids Song” and “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Later, he would go to write “Isle of Capri” and “My Prayer.” But to the contemporary ear, perhaps none of his compositions is as memorable as that terrifying song he set to John Walter Bratton’s 1907 two-step. I refer, of course, to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” Read More
August 28, 2015 Out of Print Hair Streams By Dan Piepenbring There are questions of such vast, cosmic import that most of us never think to ask them. I’ve wondered why there’s something rather than nothing; I have pondered the nature of objectivity; I’ve questioned the existence of free will. But I’ve never asked why some hairs on my body grow in one direction, and other hairs an entirely different direction. That’s where Walter Aubrey Kidd comes in. He was not like you or me; his was a mind so restive, so thick with a passion for inquiry, that no mystery, however impregnable, was safe from its advances. And so it was that in 1903 he bequeathed to us The Direction of Hair in Animals and Man, taking a fine-tooth comb to a subject most of us had hardly seen fit to tousle. Read More
August 28, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Signage, Segel, Cerebral Kisses By The Paris Review Ed Ruscha, Standard, Amarillo, Texas (detail), 1962, black-and-white photograph. Katherine Silver’s translation of Dinner, by the Argentinian novelist César Aira, found its way to me earlier this week, and I’ve since raced through it. It’s a slender, wacky fun house of a novel—featuring peptide-craving cadavers and intricate wind-up toys, among other oddities—and yet it begins at the most ordinary of places: the dinner table. There our sixty-something-year-old bachelor (who still lives with his mom) sits, having surrendered to an evening of drab gossip with a friend. Soon, and without much warning, Aira tosses us into a zombie-infested town where the dead crawl out of their graves to suck the endorphins from the brains of the living, culminating in what he tenderly calls the “cerebral kiss.” Aira writes with imagination and pith; in an interview with Bomb magazine, he told María Moreno, “In my work everything is invented, and I can go on inventing indefinitely.” I hope he does. —Caitlin Youngquist Ed Ruscha has always been enigmatic about his photographic work; he has called it a hobby, despite the fact that he has produced a number of photo books (now rare and highly prized), including the famous Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires, and Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Those books have even inspired a book of their own, the recent Various Small Books, which catalogues other artists’ riffs on and homages to Ruscha’s volumes. And now I’ve discovered a photo book about Ruscha’s photographs and photo books—the aptly titled Ed Ruscha, Photographer. Somewhere between wanting to be a cartoonist and a commercial artist and becoming a painter, Ruscha fit in a side interest in photography. The book features not only his hymns to repetition and the midcentury American landscape but also his very early snapshots (taken Europe in 1961) and his more recent photographs, which attest to his abiding interest in highway signage. There is also a smattering of color work—strange, often red-stained still lifes involving liquids and food. Think Marilyn Minter crossed with Takeshi Murata put through an Ed Ruscha filter. —Nicole Rudick Read More
August 28, 2015 On the Shelf Let Him Buy Groceries in Peace, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Is that the author of The Map and the Territory in there? Today in Houellebecq: the author has inveighed against Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, for publishing a series of unauthorized pieces about him. Calling journalists “parasites” and “cockroaches,” Houellebecq dismissed the articles for their “malicious sneakiness,” noting that he’d refused to meet the reporter and had explicitly instructed his friends not to speak with her. “Knowing which Monoprix I shop in is not a subject of national importance,” he wrote—somewhat mystifyingly, as the Le Monde piece made no mention of said Monoprix. (He’s also recently announced an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, where he’ll show “photographs, installations and films, along with commissions by other artists such as Iggy Pop and Robert Combas.”) Reading: Why bother? What’s all the fuss about? Four new books aim to show that reading makes us thoughtful and empathetic—“training” for the art of being human. “We might describe it as paideutic criticism, the term taken from the ancient Greek idea of paideia—the original foundation of humanistic study. Paideia meant the pursuit of self-knowledge through examination of the beautiful and the good … By reading and rereading the classics in the company of these genial guides, Virgils to our Dante, we can, in a more modestly modern way, achieve some similar serenity.” We can also find serenity in forgetfulness, which allows us to let go of that ultimate nuisance, personal identity: Going along with Locke’s view of memory as identity is the narrative theory of identity—the idea that one forges and maintains an identity by weaving a coherent narrative out of memories, tying one’s present to one’s past. Memory and the process of remembering are essential to this. Forgetting is an enemy, causing narrative gaps and undermining the sense of having a coherent narrative … Some people court forgetfulness. My students like to quote the old adage that ‘ignorance is bliss’ when we talk about memory and forgetting; from this they think it follows, as night follows day, that ignorance is to be preferred to knowledge when such knowledge undermines happiness. If forgetfulness serves the goal of bliss, who wouldn’t pursue it?” In the wake of the controversy surrounding Duke and three students who refuse to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Sam Stephenson remembers his time teaching at the university’s Center for Documentary Studies: “ ‘There are people teaching at Duke that barely graduated from UNC,’ I’d tell my students on the first day of class. The ones who laughed usually proved to be the more engaged and thoughtful documentarians … The outlying students—the ones frustrated by the emphasis of their fellow students on linear, pre-professional tracks—tended to find their way to our building, on the wrong side of the tracks, literally … These three students who are objecting to Bechdel’s book could use a dose of good documentary engagement. (I doubt they would have thought my introductory class joke was funny.) The words document and doctor come from the same Latin root, docere, which means, variously, to teach, to learn, to pay attention, to care, and, ultimately, to heal.” There’s a highly advanced, deeply treacherous form of storytelling far beyond the realm of mere literature: dating. Specifically, sugar dating, in which courtship between a sugar daddy and a sugar baby is clouded by the exchange of money. “You can tell yourself whatever story you want, and eventually you’ll forget you’re telling a story and you’ll find yourself in the parking lot of a Pizzeria Uno getting sucked off by someone who thinks she’s getting the better end of the deal. And the worst part is, you’ll think you’re helping her. And she’ll give you that blow job, all the while wondering how she could get so lucky, how you could be so dumb. Everyone gets what they want. And, sure, what’s so wrong with that?”
August 27, 2015 Look Poultry Suite By Dan Piepenbring Jean Pagliuso, Black #5, 2005. Jean Pagliuso takes pictures of chickens. It’s a risky subject—to hear about it, you’d worry you were dealing with the same kitschy, quasi-ironic veneration of farm and fowl that animates many an Etsy shop—but there’s nothing decorative or trite about these portraits. On the contrary, they’re warm and almost perturbingly sincere. In part you can thank the artist’s pedigree for that; Pagliuso has enjoyed a long career in fashion photography, having shot everyone from Richard Gere to Sophia Loren for Vogue and Rolling Stone, and she worked with Robert Altman for a while, too. Having shown these pictures in galleries the past few years, she’s now assembled a book, Poultry Suite, out this month. Pagliuso was inspired in all this by memories of her late father’s avocation: he raised show chickens, and after he died, she wanted to photograph one in memoriam. One, it turned out, did not suffice. She uses Thai Mulberry paper and a silver gelatin emulsion technique to confer a jarring dignity on her subjects, which seem paradoxically more alive than they would in full color. They’re chickens and owls, sure. But they’re—elegant? That’s it. They’re elegant. And in the time of “Put a Bird on It!”, that’s a remarkable thing. Read More
August 27, 2015 On Language What Happened to O? By Gabe Rivin The death of an exclamation. William Blake had me thinking about death. I was lying on my couch, Norton Anthology in my lap, when I stumbled on Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose.” I’d read the poem before, and I remembered its famous opening lament: “O Rose, thou art sick!” What follows is a compact poem built of stark imagery. An invisible, amorous worm is flying through a storm at night. It descends on a rose. A death is at hand. And the perpetrator of the rose’s death, Blake warns, is none other than the worm’s secret love. I reread the poem, parsing its lines for meaning. Then I read it once again. The night was late, and I felt drowsy. As sleep approached, an inchoate thought began to surface. I sat up. O Rose, I thought. O Muse. O death. I stood from the couch and found a pen. I tore off a piece of scratch paper, and on it I wrote myself a note: “What killed O?” Read More