August 7, 2015 On the Shelf Drawings from a Prisoner of War, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Frederick Gokliz, Warfare, ca. 1890s. Image via Slate/Newberry Library Mark von Schlegell talks about the paperback revolution and its undoing in the nineties: “I was temping at Ballantine Books in New York … My boss got copies of all the first mass-market editions of Philip K. Dick … She gave them to me free. The books I got were all $1.99 and $2.50 paperbacks in a stack. I read them all in a row, and it opened a door for me. Then they started republishing them, and now they’re $20 each. When those books were $2.50, they had a different meaning … In the paperback revolution, the mainstream was created on a literary base, because if you were Stevie Wonder and made a great album, or if you were some twentieth-century movie star like Clark Gable, or a director like Hitchcock, you always had a paperback book coming out as part of your deal. Paperback books connected everything. They were like the sea of the mainstream, and they had a richness because they were books, unlike all these other artifacts floating around. They had a deeper historical life to live.” Walter Pater’s The Renaissance is one of the cornerstones of Renaissance scholarship, a Victorian-era classic that everyone knows, one of those old tomes so essential that copies of it flood used bookstores throughout the land—except, does anyone really care about it anymore? “I can’t think of a single thing written in the last thirty years that felt the need either to denounce or to celebrate Pater’s account of the Renaissance … Perhaps Pater seemed so unthreatening or so bland that he just slipped out of Renaissance scholarly time … does Pater tell you anything about the Renaissance? Does his account of aestheticism help understand the period?” Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the latest addition to that increasingly relevant subgenre, the office novel: its heroine, Josephine, has a job in data entry. “Josephine’s work steadily chips away at her identity: it is a trudge against time, and its tedium subsumes her. Even when her mind meanders, ‘the moment would pass and the thought would be lost, trapped forever between the horizontal and vertical lines of the Database.’” “Chicago’s Newberry Library has digitized a series of ink and watercolor drawings of Apache life made in the 1890s by Frederick Gokliz. Gokliz, a San Carlos Apache, was first imprisoned along with a group of Chiricahua Apaches at Fort Marion, in Florida, in 1886 … Gokliz’s work eschews much representation of life in captivity in favor of remembered and imagined episodes of community life. His drawings depict hunts, meetings, and ceremonies, using perspective in interesting ways to show motion and conflict.” Don’t feel like reading? I can’t blame you—it’s a Friday in August, and you have the option of watching Lauren Conrad desecrate books in the name of storage. To the dulcet tones of an acoustic guitar, Conrad shreds, rips, and otherwise dismembers works of prose to create … a box, with the “spines of several books glued to one side of it, making it look, to the untrained eye, like a line of books rather than a unique storage space.”
August 6, 2015 Look Panther and Lilies By Dan Piepenbring Lajos Vajda, Panther and Lilies, 1930-33, photocollage on paper, 25.5″ x 20″ The Hungarian artist Lajos Vajda died in 1941, when he was only thirty-three—having long suffered from tuberculosis, he’d fallen ill during a compulsory stint in the Labour Service, the government’s antisemitic substitute for military conscription. Vajda’s paintings had garnered him a reputation among the avant-garde from a young age: an early critic called them “modern catacomb art.” As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, one of his exhibitions met with such disdain among the conservative faculty that he was expelled. By the end of the twenties, he’d allied himself with the Munka Kör, a revolutionary group of artists, intellectuals, and workers. Vajda spent the early thirties moving from hostel to hostel in Paris, where he developed a fascination with film that led to a prolific period as a collagist. You can see a number of his photomontages from this time below—like his paintings and works in charcoal, they exude a fear of fascism and prefigure the violence of the Second World War. Ironically enough, a posthumous show of his work in 1943 at the Budapest Alkotás House of Art had to be evacuated. It was interrupted by an air raid. Read More
August 6, 2015 First Person My Grandmother’s Wheelchair By Stephen Hiltner The author, posing with his grandmother, Natalie Faunda, at a park in Budapest, in 1990. My grandmother had a stroke in her late sixties. She was out in her garden, struggling in the hot sun, when she collapsed into a row of tomato plants. A neighbor heard her cries for help and called an ambulance. It was a mild case of heat stroke, a doctor said; he sent her home. That night, having returned to her house on Vaughn Avenue—in what, even then, was one of the poorest parts of Youngstown: a neighborhood on the East Side called the Sharon Line—she suffered a second stroke. This one was much more severe. When she stabilized, days later, the right side of her body was paralyzed. She had a few months to live, maybe a year. Except that she didn’t; my grandmother would go on to live for nearly twenty years. And in the weeks that followed, at a local rehabilitation center, she learned to do with her left hand everything she’d done predominantly with her right: to write, to eat, to tie her shoelaces, to button her shirts. With the assistance of a quad cane, she eventually learned to walk—though in truth it was never much more than a shuffle. Read More
August 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Perils of Self-Care By Sadie Stein From an early twentieth-century ad for St. Moritz. Here is a partial list of things to dread about spa treatments: Read More
August 6, 2015 On the Shelf At the Hundredth Universal Esperanto Congress, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the 1909 Esperanto Congress. In 1969, Life ran a photo essay called “What it takes to be a lady author anymore,” with predictably outmoded advice: “swim a little,” for starters, “exercise in a bikini,” and be “photographed in bed.” The magazine photographed Jeanne Rejaunier—who was promoting a new novel called, ironically enough, The Beauty Trap—in various titillating poses, and also raking leaves in a Victorian dress. “Just possibly because she smiles so prettily on the book jacket (the back and the front of the book),” Life wrote, “The Beauty Trap is now in its fourth printing.” Today in obscure centennials: “Last week the 100th Universal Congress of Esperanto was held in Lille. The public program included a traditional dance workshop in the Place du Théâtre, an ecumenical service in the Eglise Saint-Maurice and concerts by Esperanto singers. There were also introductory lessons in Esperanto, and an international football match between Esperanto and Western Sahara. (The match was abandoned at half-time with Western Sahara 4–0 up.)” Rock music and fiction haven’t blended terribly well over the years—there’s a Great Jones Street here, a Goon Squad there, and not much between. But 2014 saw no fewer than five entrants in the ongoing contest for Great American Rock Novel, and “interestingly, none of these 2014 titles concerns itself with conveying the over-the-top elements of rock on the page. Rather, they focus on characters dabbling in rock within the larger context of their more domestic pursuits: growing up, falling in love, finding a path, having a family; in short, the arcs that have been part of the novel’s scope since at least Austen. Much of the trouble for these characters comes when their more universal journeys collide with their need to make music, play in band, tour in an airbrushed bus.” Salvador Dalí’s childhood diaries remain untranslated, which is a shame, because they find him witnessing the unrest in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War: “At this point in the journal, the illustrations by Dalí … have become morbid. An old man hangs from a noose with his tongue lolling out. On the facing page, a warrior with sword in hand extends the severed head of a long-haired man toward the viewer.” On the literary scene in Ukraine, which has a strange emphasis on finality: “Ukrainian literature—or Ukrainian culture more broadly—employs the words last quite often: last territory, last bastion, the last issue of a magazine, the last books of a bankrupt publisher, the last Ukrainian-speaking readers, writers, translators. There is a well-known contemporary classic, a collection of essays by one of Ukraine’s best-known authors, Yuri Andrukhovych, called My Last Territory; there is an art management agency called Last Bastion.”
August 5, 2015 Look Teenage Dream By Dan Piepenbring Four paintings from Grace Weaver’s “Teenage Dream,” showing for two more days at Thierry Goldberg Gallery. Weaver takes the title of her show from Katy Perry’s (not undeservedly) ubiquitous 2010 single. She imagines her paintings as pop songs. See more of her work on her Web site. Match Point, 2015, oil on linen, 72″ x 72″. Read More