June 19, 2015 On Sports Kid Chocolate By Brin-Jonathan Butler Cuba’s boxing culture. At the Rafael Trejo boxing gym. Photo: Brandon Downey, Monster in the Ring, 2013. In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city’s state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado. After the revolution, they changed the names and put up new signs, but if you asked directions from a local today you’d get the old names. They all meant something personal to the people who lived on those streets. That avocado grew in the garden of a convent. That hope was for a door in the city wall before it was torn down. That soul refers to the loneliness of the street’s position in the city. Sometimes these streets lead you to dead ends and other times you stumble onto cathedrals, structures built with the intention of creating music from stone. The sore heart Havana offers never makes you choose between the kind of beauty that gives rather than the kind that takes something from you: it does both simultaneously. While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history coexists at once. Just before the triumph of the revolution, progress took shape in ambitious proposals made by American architects to erect grand skyscrapers all along the Malecón seawall offering a fine view and convenient access to a newly constructed multicasino island built in the bay. To accommodate the gamblers, vast areas of Old Havana were to be demolished and leveled for parking access. In 1958, Graham Greene wrote, “To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.” Yet this beauty the people of Cuba unquestionably possess walks hand in hand with their pain. Whoever you might encounter in this place lacking the ability to walk or even to stand for whatever reason will inevitably remain convinced they can dance. When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista’s government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet José Martí. From the little I’d learned of it, the revolution’s hold on Cubans resembled not so much poetry as the chess term zugzwang: you’re forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Cuba had become an entire population of eleven million people with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dike. Read More
June 19, 2015 On the Shelf Printing Wikipedia “from Aaaaa! to ZZZap!,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via Denny Gallery Today in Sisyphean undertakings for the greater good: Michael Mandiberg, an interdisciplinary artist, is “transforming the English-language Wikipedia into an old-fashioned print reference set running to 7,600 volumes … [He] describes the project as half utilitarian data visualization project, half absurdist poetic gesture.” You can watch him transfer the digital files to a printer in real time at Denny Gallery, on the Lower East Side, where an exhibition, “From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!,” began yesterday. Joshua Cohen on Dostoevsky’s The Double, whose hero Golyadakin “doesn’t know how to present himself socially—or, in a contemporary phrasing, he doesn’t know which self to present, struggling as he is with a decaying class system, stagnant bureaucracy, Godlessness, materialism, precarity, and dread—all of which have rendered him incapable of appropriate behavior, or even of defining appropriate behavior, in front of friends, lovers, colleagues, the church, the state, himself. And I think we’re living in a culture like that today.” Alan Hollinghurst’s first chapbook, 1982’s Confidential Chats with Boys, is prized among collectors, but Hollinghurst seldom talks about it. A new interview finds him looking back at those early poems: “I suppose I always had the idea that gay sexuality was essentially innocent, even though it’s almost universally been stigmatized and criminalized. But actually it was innocent and natural … what you’re writing about might in a conventional sense be ‘hard-core’ because you’re writing very explicitly about sex, but actually it was something to which no opprobrious moral definition could be applied.” In 2013, Mark Strand reviewed a show of Edward Hopper’s paintings at the Whitney, and the handwritten text was rediscovered after Strand’s death last year. “My own encounters with this elusive element in Hopper’s work began when I would commute from Croton-on-Hudson to New York each Saturday … I would look out from the train window onto the rows of tenements whose windows I could look into and try to imagine what living in one of those apartments would be like … It was thrilling to suddenly go underground, travel in the dark, and be delivered to the masses of people milling about in the cavernous terminal. Years later, when I saw Approaching a City for the first time, I instantly recalled those trips into Manhattan and have ever since. And Hopper, for me, has always been associated with New York, a New York glimpsed in passing, sweetened with nostalgia, a city lodged in memory.” Are nature writers “just fiddling while the agrochemicals burn”? “The real danger is that nature writing becomes a literature of consolation that distracts us from the truth of our fallen countryside, or—just as bad—that it becomes a space for us to talk to ourselves about ourselves, with nature relegated to the background as an attractive green wash. The project of re-enchantment might restore to us a canon of lost writings about the eeriness and mystery of our landscape.”
June 18, 2015 Look Gluey and Scissory By Dan Piepenbring John Ashbery, Bingo Beethoven, 2014, collage on vintage bingo board, 8 1/4″ x 7 1/2″. Photo courtesy Tibor de Nagy Our Spring 2009 issue featured eleven collages by John Ashbery, who’s been working in the medium since he was an undergrad at Harvard—roughly the same time he began to write poetry. “One thing he obviously values in collage is its implied anyone-can-do-it modesty, its lack of high-artiness, its resistance to monumentality,” the New York Times says of his art: His own collages have this character. They’re light and slight. They feel more like keepsakes than like art objects, souvenirs of a life and career that gain interest primarily—some might say entirely—within the context of that life and career. Read More
June 18, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Say Your Prayers By Sadie Stein Christopher Robin Milne with Winnie the Pooh in 1928. Christopher Robin Milne’s first two memoirs, The Enchanted Places and The Path Through the Trees, are in the canon of great ambivalence books. Perhaps you’ve read that Christopher Robin, as A. A. Milne’s son and muse, grew to loathe his fame and the hordes of Pooh fanatics who stalked him even as an adult. (Milne fils supported himself as a successful bookseller; all the royalties went into a trust fund for his disabled daughter.) “It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders,” he wrote, “that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.” But the books don’t read as an angry indictment so much as an attempt to grapple with his condition. Yes, there’s some record straightening—but the author’s sense of frank exploration is sympathetic, and it feels honest. Although he’d ultimately detach from his remote parents, his feelings are complex, and he describes his experiences with sensitivity and nuance. Milne died in 1996; in later life, he’d even come to embrace his father’s legacy, gamely showing up at the occasional official event coming to appreciate the love of nature bestowed by his Sussex childhood. Read More
June 18, 2015 Arts & Culture Lot 51 By Maria Bustillos Borges, Xul Solar, and the occult. Alejandro Xul Solar, Trogloditas, 1948. This story is an excerpt from To the Country, a new iBook album by The Size Queens featuring fiction by Joy Williams, Rick Moody, and more. Lot 51, “The Aleph” by Alejandro Xul Solar, oil, minerals and metals on canvas, 32″ x 44.25″, 1930. Xul Solar first painted the Aleph in 1930, but years were to pass before he and his friend J. L. Borges were able to make full use of its divinatory properties, even though it was clear from the moment the work was finished that the quasi-reptilian figure filling the image’s First Door, known to the two as Platon, was able to move freely about the canvas according to his own purposes (his skin in motion acquiring bluish-silvery reflected tints that faded in repose.) Experiments demonstrated that the viewer’s affinity with Platon and certain other figures in the composition resulted in an increased ability to understand and speak foreign languages (“babelismo”); subsequently other correspondences were revealed. Borges, whose middle finger Platon learned to reach out and grasp in a papery but very tight clutch, drawing a little more blood each time, was to prove the image’s most successful interpreter. Such was the lure of the mental enhancement thereby produced that Borges never failed to offer his hand to the painting, which was hidden in the dark recesses of Solar’s attic chambers, whenever the opportunity arose. In time the author’s left middle fingernail split in two with a thick dark pointed scar in its center. And as his inward sight grew keener, Borges’s physical vision commenced to fail: another price he gladly paid. Solar made three more attempts to depict the Aleph. The second of the four (1931–33, tempera on wood panel, 112.5 x 78 cm) proved to offer the richest “prepotencies” as the visions came to be called. Impulsively, Solar gave the painting to Borges at the end of a somewhat maudlin and vinous evening full of French poetry and games of panjedrez, all of which Borges lost, just before the sun rose on a fragrant Buenos Aires bower in November of 1936. Solar’s diaries and sketchbooks reveal a keen regret over having made this gift, but being a proud man as well as a kind one, he never asked for its return. Read More
June 18, 2015 On the Shelf Our Nation’s Poets Wallow in Tomatoes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Wilkie, Trout, Grouse, Tomatoes (detail), 1877. “I see The Paris Review as much as an ‘object’ as I do a venerable and essential literary quarterly. The look and feel is both so important to the readers’ experience … The logo we now use was scanned from a midcentury back issue, and it has all the character of the original lead type that created it.” Talking shop with our art editor, Charlotte Strick. On Henry James’s mommy issues: though the author was close with his mother, “he did not write much about mothers in his fiction. In fact, many of his best novels have no mothers at all. They are safe spaces for orphans, or semi-orphans … James loved his mother and he also wanted to get away from her. It is as though those desires were oddly close to each other, both sides of a coin, or nudged each other gently.” Juan Felipe Herrera, our new poet laureate, has at last revealed the fetish that drives the creative class: tomatoes. “We are hermits, that is true. We live in tiny rooms, and we stay in those rooms hours upon hours … But we also like to walk around and throw ourselves into big crates of tomatoes, and roll around in them, and then get up all tomato-stained.” In 1983, the philosopher Vilém Flusser published Towards a Philosophy of Photography, which took an entirely technical view of the medium—and in the age of social media, the book’s arguments about technology read as eerily prescient. “Flusser claimed that the camera was the ancestor of apparatuses, which are in the process of ‘robotizing all aspects of our lives, from one’s most public acts to one’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.’ And when we look at social media—from blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, and to Instagram—we can see he was correct. The Twitter game is like Wittgenstein’s language games; we must learn the rules in order to play.” “Bring an excitement form wise—not just word-wise excitement but the twist of the hip—even the way we walk will be put in the poem—it gets that basic. Should if we let it. Thus those damn readers get their money’s worth. They meet us. Watch us dance.” Letters from John Wieners to Robert Greene and James Schuyler.