June 2, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Twang, Texture, Truck Drivers By The Paris Review Robert Rauschenberg. If you, like me, are a fan of Harry Chapin’s “Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas,” you’ll love Finn Murphy’s The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road. Murphy, a truck driver since 1980, lets us ride along as he crisscrosses the U.S. ad infinitum. We journey down Colorado’s deadly Loveland Pass, where he sweats his air brakes’ ability to hold; bomb straight through 199 miles of South Carolina swampland in a nine-truck convoy; and get lost out in America’s lonely “couple of thousand miles of corn.” The Long Haul delivers because it is a survey of a culture fused to a working man’s memoir—and Murphy, smartly, avoids sentiment and lazy comparisons: “I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom of any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.” There’s a theory that the secret engine of American literature is movement—Melville sent Ishmael to sea, Kerouac hit the road, Don DeLillo forced the Gladneys out of their home—and if it’s true, it’s amazing we haven’t yet seen the Great American Truck-Driving Novel. Once a viable career, the job is threatened by cost-cutting corporate structures and the inevitable adoption of driverless cars; soon truckers may go the way of whalers and typesetters. Maybe, as America’s reliance on the profession fades into the rearview mirror, we’ll see that novel yet: I predict, and hope, that The Long Haul marks the beginning of a new set of American road tales. —Jeffery Gleaves MoMA’s huge Rauschenberg show—“Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends”—has opened, and, as Dan has already pointed out, opinions of his work will abound. Mine was formed long ago; Rauschenberg’s was among the first art that appealed to foundational elements in my own aesthetic: texture, materiality, color, unruliness. I caught his massive traveling retrospective when it came to Houston in 1998 and so have seen a good deal of the work in this new show, but I wasn’t aware of the extent to which collaboration, which this exhibition aims to highlight, was central to his practice. I knew, for instance, of the sets and costumes he made for Merce Cunningham and for Trisha Brown, but not that he’d shared studio space with a young Cy Twombly and that Twombly contributed to his friend’s early Combines; that he staged the process-based program Hommage à David Tudor in 1961 with Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, and Jean Tinguely; that he was friends with Öyvind Fahlström and the two traded work (on view is Fahlström’s translation of Rauschenberg’s name into Birdo, Fahlström’s invented language based on bird sounds). He and Johns shared a studio in the late fifties, and Rauschenberg recalled, “Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, ‘I’ve got a terrific idea for you,’ and then I’d have to find one for him.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
May 26, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Panjandrums, Poets, Power Struggles By The Paris Review Still from David Lynch’s The Cowboy and the Frenchman. I’ve had a thing for reptilian monsters lately, and this week’s no different: I ducked into a theater to see Nacho Vigalondo’s kaiju film, Colossal, and was agape from start to finish. It follows an entitled fuck-up millennial named Gloria who’s seemingly spent much of her adult life running her mouth, partying too hard, and doing it all without consequence. But when her dreamy yet insufferable boyfriend dumps her and she’s forced to move into her unfurnished (and unoccupied) childhood home in upstate New York, things take a turn for the peculiar: a giant lizardlike creature materializes in Seoul—and Gloria somehow controls it. Monster as metaphor is an all-too-familiar trope, but this film—with its mix of dark hilarity, stunning cinematography, and gripping take on the self-infatuation that plagues many of us—is brilliant. What I love most, though, is that it’s a revival of what A. O. Scott once memorialized as “the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut-rate genre entertainment,” which was nearly driven to extinction in the early aughts. With Colossal’s low-budget sci-fi feel, it’s wacky, outrageous plot, and its unwavering look at the monsters we harbor inside us, B flicks are back and better than ever. —Caitlin Youngquist An elderly civil servant comes home from work one evening and finds a young man waiting to see him. This person turns out to be a fan—in fact, the representative of a small fan club—devoted to the old man’s only book of poems, published thirty years before. That’s the premise of Arthur Schnitzler’s chillingly ironic novella Late Fame. Written in the early 1890s, then lost for a century, the story of poor Eduard Saxberger, a washed-up writer lionized for reasons he doesn’t quite understand, has aged much better than its hero, for the power struggle between an artist and his or her admirers is rarely captured with such bitter economy. —Lorin Stein Read More
May 19, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Hipster Stewardesses, Swedish Paper Mills, Soil By The Paris Review From the cover of Afterland “In American Apparel I feel old. Especially when I ask one of the hotties for help.” So begins one of the dozens of prose poems in Jeremy Sigler’s new book, My Vibe. Another one: “I want to be watched so bad. I want a voyeur to be here so bad. A secret admirer.” Some of Sigler’s lines read like poetry (“Words like flat barges trace slowly past the jagged architecture. Buildings punch the sky like staple guns.”), but by and large, the poems are nimbly unpoetic. They’re conversational, and Sigler’s persona is like that weird, boozy guy who corners you at parties and won’t stop talking and one subject leads seamlessly into another and you keep looking over his shoulder for escape but he doesn’t notice and sentences keep spilling out of his mouth. Except that in this instance, I don’t want to escape. I find the poems incredibly charming because they are observant, indulgent, and funny: from flirting with a hipster stewardess to get an aisle seat on a plane by admitting bladder-control issues, to awkwardly complimenting a woman on her Yayoi Kusama hoodie and then discoursing briefly to the reader on Kusama’s art. “Being a Freudian,” Sigler writes in another poem, “my research is, um, dreaming. So I’ll have no choice but to drop my pen and take a nap.” —Nicole Rudick I already mentioned it this week, but I haven’t been able to shake Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile of Gerhard Steidl. I’d heard that Steidl, who runs the world’s most meticulous photography press, was an eccentric, but Mead brings the intensity of his commitment into sharp relief. He is, somehow, a technician aesthete, consumed equally by specificity and beauty. (Maybe only Germany could produce such a person.) His fastidiousness flirts with the ridiculous: even the notecards for his dinner table were custom-made at a Swedish paper mill dating to the nineteenth-century. But there’s no denying the almost monastic clarity of his vision. Steidl lives onsite at his factory in Göttingen, and he leaves as rarely as possible. His advice on this point flies in the face of contemporary wisdom about work/life balance, but I find it difficult to ignore. “It makes a huge difference,” he says, “when you are not isolated from your work, when working and living is a symbiosis. Normally, when you have a business and you produce something industrial, you have the plant somewhere and it makes a lot of dirt, and poison, and noise, and destroys the environment. You are working there all day, and then in the evening you drive home and you have your pleasant place to stay, with clean air, while poor people have to live with the dirt you are producing. I control my noise, because I am sleeping there, with an open window, every night.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
May 12, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Serpents, Slinkies, Online Shopping By The Paris Review From the poster for Obit. Last week, I stayed up late every night reading the galleys of Stephen Greenblatt’s study The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. I have already recommended it—at possibly tedious length—to my uncle, my shrink, our Southern Editor, and Sadie, who is reading it now. Greenblatt begins his history with the sensible, but to me startling, question of why the ancient Hebrews bothered to make up a creation story at all. (Really—wouldn’t it have made more sense to just start with Abraham?) He shows that, right from the beginning, people have found the story peculiar—that magical trees and talking snakes were by no means a thing, even during the Babylonian exile, and that lots of people wondered where exactly Moses was getting his facts. From the shaping of the Torah to early allegorical readings of the story, Jewish and Christian, to the radical reinterpretation of the Fall by Saint Augustine, Greenblatt shows how often the story of our first parents, and its meaning, have been up for debate—and how, as Adam and Eve became more and more familiar, more and more human, thanks partly to Renaissance art and Paradise Lost, they grew harder and harder to believe in. The story ends, inevitably, with Darwin, and with Greenblatt in Uganda observing chimpanzees. It is compelling at every turn, right down to the appendix, comprising legends of the fall, e.g., this, from the medieval theologian Duns Scotus: “Adam saw perfectly clearly that his wife had been deceived and that the serpent had lured her into a trap from which she could not now escape. She will have to die, he thought, and God will offer to create a new companion for me, either from another one of my ribs or from some other source. But I do not want a new companion. I want this one and only this one. There is but a single way in which I can remain with her, and that is by conjoining my fate to hers. We will live—and when the time comes, we will rot—together.” —Lorin Stein At the time of his death, in 2005, the legendary curator Walter Hopps was at work on a memoir with Anne Doran and Deborah Treisman; he’d worked with both during a later phase of his career as art editor of Jean Stein’s quarterly, Grand Street. The memoir, The Dream Colony, will finally be published next month, shaped by Treisman but unfinished: Hopps left off in 1987, at his founding, with Dominique de Menil, of the Menil Collection in Houston. But the ground he managed to cover is considerable. It’s hard to overestimate Hopps’s influence on the shape of twentieth-century art: he championed the work of countless artists, among them Ed Ruscha, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Anne Truitt, Robert Irwin, and Frank Lobdell as well as the Hairy Who and underground comix; he was an early supporter of Pop, and he found work produced in the middle of the country to be as worthy of consideration as that made on the coasts. But in his buoyant memoir, he often recounts the details of his many astounding accomplishments as a series of escapades. Among my favorites is Hopps’s narration of a concert given at the Pasadena Art Museum by John Cage, who ground vegetables in a micced blender and then drank the concoction (he was accompanied on piano by David Tudor). The painter Clyfford Still, an elder statesman at that point, listened to the “interesting concert” and then relayed a note: “Please convey my compliments to Mr. Cage, even though our aesthetics are committed to their mutual destruction.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
May 5, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mothers, Metromedia, Murderous Amphibians By The Paris Review From Rachel, Monique… Last night, I dipped into Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novel, Mrs. Caliban, which New Directions will reissue later this year, and am already agog over it. I’ll admit, its premise seemed a smidge too outré, even for me, but after the first few pages I was hooked. Mrs. Caliban follows a lonesome housewife, Dorothy, who—tormented by the malaise of domestic life, her husband’s infidelity, and the loss of their two children—takes up an affair with a six-foot-seven, murderous amphibian named Larry, who’s just escaped from the Oceanographic Research Institute. Thirty pages in, the two have already “made love on the living-room floor and on the dining-room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs, and upstairs in the bathtub.” As deranged as the whole thing is, Ingalls’s prose, strikingly austere, taps into a profound sadness, too: Is Mrs. Caliban a work of fantasy or are we inhabiting the psyche of a woman unhinged? Whatever the answer, the book is, as Michael Dorris wrote in his 1986 review in the Times, an “intriguing portrait of a woman’s escape from unacceptable reality,” and one that begs to be read over and over again. —Caitlin Youngquist Sophie Calle’s new project at Green-Wood Cemetery has gotten a lot of attention this week, deservedly, but I’m hung up on Rachel, Monique…, a memorial to her mother in the form of a lavish, clothbound book, with an embroidered cover and iridescent fabric. Based on Calle’s 2010 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the book arranges diary excerpts and family photographs to tell an oblique story about mothers and daughters, and the narrative that coalesces around a life glimpsed in fragments. Calle’s mother, who died in 2007, comes across as observant and sharp, with a charming fatalism waxing and waning over the years. Calle, unsurprisingly, likes to linger on her thinking about death. One diary entry says simply: “God, I hate spring!” In another, she writes, “I would already like Christmas to be over. Or perhaps I’d like my life to be over.” And elsewhere: “Good-bye, Diary! I’m off to New York. Let’s hope it will all be wonderful. If the plane crashes, here’s a cheery farewell to life!” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
April 28, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bikes, Bogs, Bolshies By The Paris Review From You & a Bike & a Road. I’m kind of in awe of Eleanor Davis’s drawings. Her color work creates whole new worlds, but her black-and-white art is really eye-popping. In a comic last year, she made a remarkable drawing of two intertwined figures that breeds Japanese shunga with Aubrey Beardsley’s switchblade Art Nouveau. In her new book, You & a Bike & a Road, she leaves many of the drawings uninked. The comic logs her solo trip, by bike, from Phoenix to Athens, Georgia, over the course of fifty-eight days; the bare pencils accentuate the spontaneity of her adventure and her recording of it and reveal the impressive underpinning of her art. The array of forms that are so vivid in her color work come through here as layers of patterns or as gentle, articulate outlines. Her characteristic hulking but weightless figures are drawn with a fluidity that begins to approximate Saul Steinberg’s uncannily descriptive line: the quick tiny marks indicating a man’s underarm hair, the ethereal contour of enormous clouds hovering over a broad landscape, the symphonic chaos of a city scene. There is sometimes the sense that as she travels, the road and landscape exist only just ahead of her front tire, as they do for Harold and his crayon, and that making discoveries is only a matter of pushing forward, even when you don’t know if you can and even when you don’t know what lies down the road. —Nicole Rudick To mention the lost generation these days is to summon a miasma of Left Bank clichés and nostalgia for expat glamour. None of that works its way into Julia L. Mickenberg’s American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, which focuses on an entirely different sort of lostness. Forget “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”: this is “Bernice Becomes a Bolshie.” At the heart of the book is Ruth Epperson Kennell, who in 1922 left San Francisco for Siberia, where she and other like-minded Americans founded a communist colony. Kennell and her cohort valorized the working life. “We are building here,” she wrote in The Nation, “not a new Atlantis, but a new Pennsylvania.” As that decidedly unglamorous description suggests, life in the colony was full of drudgery, and the equality Kennell sought was not always in evidence. But with time she came to feel liberated in Siberia, especially when communism helped her shrug off bourgeois morality: in short order she dumped her husband, swam nude, and found love. “I seemed to move in a dream world,” she wrote, “constructed of desires I had never hoped could be realized.” Mickenberg tells Kennell’s story—and those of many other women who traded domestic servitude for Das Kapital—with flair and aplomb. And there’s not a flapper in sight. —Dan Piepenbring Read More