April 18, 2019 Pinakothek The Empty Room By Lucy Sante In his new biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. The more empty the photograph, the more it implies horror. The void that dominates an empty photograph is the site of past human activity. It presents itself as a hole in the middle of the picture. The beds, tables, chairs, lamps are not the subject; they are the boundary. Some empty images tease the eye, suggesting clues that may dissolve upon closer examination. More often the scene is as near to a blank canvas as it can be without fading into nothingness. But then we, as habituated viewers, tend to brush a dramatic gloss upon such pictures. What we see cannot be as perfectly banal as it seems. The lighting and composition awaken unconscious memories of crime-scene photos; the drama comes from what is missing. It’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’s dog who did not bark. What is missing is an apparent reason for the picture to have been taken. Read More
April 18, 2019 Look Gone in Sixty Sentences By Rachel Kushner Matthew Porter, Valley View, 2013. From Matthew Porter: The Heights (Aperture, 2019). © Matthew Porter. Every time I’ve attempted to start this side-winding meditation on Matthew Porter’s airborne muscle cars, cars that are things and also backlit silhouettes of things, I end up scrolling the new version of the old Autotrader, online, and looking at models of cars I’ve always wanted and haven’t yet owned, and also their silhouettes. If I had a hundred grand to drop right now, this morning, which I don’t, I could buy a 1969 GTO Judge, mint. But really it’s not my style. A ’67 GTO and its classy cigar-box lines is what I always wanted. The ’69 is a novelty item, like roller skates or a leather shirt, and anyhow I get bored of the color orange. I’d love a GTO but I don’t need a Judge, even if there are certain days—Tuesdays?—when I feel like I need a Judge. For a Sunday drive I want a Stutz Blackhawk; doesn’t even have to be the one Elvis owned. I’ll humbly accept some other Stutz, but the more I research who owned Stutzes—Dean Martin, Wilson Pickett, George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Willie Nelson, and Barry White, just to cherry-pick from the longer list of celebrity owners—I get mad that I haven’t yet myself acquired the pink slip for a Stutz. Even if I could afford one, there aren’t very many, and today none are listed for sale. There’s a 1965 Mercury Marauder, I always liked those. Even if the lines are a little square, the fastback makes up for it, although it’s a car that has to have sport rims or forget it. Why is 1965 the chicane through which all American car design went from curved to boxy? Nineteen sixty-eight was another chicane, which led to puffy quarter panels, and even outright blimpage. Read More
April 17, 2019 History In the Name of Notre Dame By Chris Knapp Henri Matisse, Notre Dame une fin d’après-midi, 1902 In September 2016, police found a Peugeot with missing plates parked just steps away from Notre Dame; inside the car, they found seven cylinders of gas. The following week, four women—one of whom was carrying a letter declaring allegiance to ISIS and describing the planned attack as a deliberate act of terror and vengeance—were arrested and charged in connection with a plot to destroy the cathedral. As it happened, the eldest of these four women, Ornella Gilligmann, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, had been a close acquaintance of my wife’s from childhood, for which reason these events became especially vivid in our minds. If the women hadn’t removed the license plates, we agreed, no one would have noticed the car, and the plot might have come off without a hitch. “Can you imagine if they got the Notre Dame,” my wife kept repeating. I understood this as a rhetorical question, posed in the same spirit we often invoked at the prospect of a Trump presidency: it was impossible precisely because it was too horrible to imagine. The fire that nearly destroyed the eight-hundred-year-old cathedral on Monday (which French authorities are investigating as an accident) is not, of course, a catastrophe in the order of the 2016 election. But looking on from the banks of the Seine, it was hard not to experience the fire as a nontrivial data point on the timeline of a slow-motion apocalypse, which from a Western perspective stretches back (depending on whom you ask) to the 2016 elections, to the Brexit referendum, to 9/11, the paroxysms of the early twentieth century, to the intractable dependence on fossil fuels, to Napoleon’s campaigns in Europe, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment—through all of which, the Notre Dame cathedral stood intact. What would it mean, at a time when civilization itself was starting to seem like a failed idea, for one of civilization’s signal achievements to burn to the ground. Read More
April 17, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, the 1960 short-story collection by British writer Penelope Mortimer, carries a note of gratitude to the editor of The New Yorker, “in whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.” Three years earlier, Mortimer had signed a contract with the magazine for six stories a year, after which she provided them with what she describes as a “steady stream” of pieces drawn from her day-to-day experience. “There was no need to look for ideas,” she explains in About Time Too (1993), her second volume of memoirs. “I mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.” Mortimer—who, by the time she died, at the age of eighty-one in 1999, had published nine novels, one short-story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism—drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. “None of the stories could accurately be described as fiction,” she goes on to confess in About Time Too; “the moment I fabricated or attempted to get away from direct experience The New Yorker regretfully turned it down.” During the late fifties, when she wrote the twelve stories included in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Mortimer was famous for being the beautiful, lauded authoress wife of the renowned barrister-cum-writer, John Mortimer. Profiles of the writerly couple ran in magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping through Tatler, by way of Books and Bookmen. There were often photographs of them with their six picture-perfect children. Wife and mother were the identities that defined Mortimer, even as a writer. She had a regular parenting column, “Five Girls and a Boy,” in the Evening Standard newspaper, and her fiction dealt predominantly with the subjects of marriage and motherhood. She wasn’t writing twee, cosy tales of domestic bliss though; instead she penned sharp, shrewd portraits of marital infidelity, strained, unhappy housewives and their insensitive husbands, impotently railing against the draining demands of parenthood. Much of this material she drew from her own life: namely the cracks in her and John’s marriage, and the conflicts associated with finding much of her worth and value in the role of caregiver, while feeling stifled by domesticity. Her fourth novel, for example, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1958), the book that precedes Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, depicts a suburban mother’s attempts to procure an abortion for her student daughter (the situation Mortimer had found herself in the previous year when her eldest daughter, then at university, fell pregnant). It was a daring topic for its day, not least because of the resistance and disgust with which Mortimer’s protagonist Ruth’s attempts are met: “You would really advise her to do this thing? Your own daughter? Good God Ruth, I’m sorry. You make me sick,” expostulates the family doctor when she turns to him for help. The reviews, however, were excellent. “A remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement,” declared one. By the time Saturday Lunch with the Brownings was published, Mortimer had quite the reputation for dismantling the domestic idyll. Read More
April 16, 2019 Redux Redux: Everything Is a Machine By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. In this week’s Redux, we’re in a reflective mood. Read Wallace Stegner’s 1990 Art of Fiction interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Jefferson’s Beauty,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Wallace Stegner, The Art of Fiction No. 118 Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990) I don’t think straitjackets are the way to get at fiction. I would rather define the novel as Stendhal did, as a mirror in the roadway. Whatever happens in the road is going to happen in the mirror too. Read More
April 16, 2019 Arts & Culture So What If Lincoln Was Gay? By Louis Bayard “Why do you need him to be gay?” This is how a friend (urban, liberal, male) responded when I told him I was working on a historical novel about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed. The implication of his question was clear. If I was going to go there, if I was going to plant my rainbow flag on the Great Emancipator’s grave, I would have to account for my private agenda. Now that I type it out, that phrase sounds an awful lot like “gay agenda” and peels away to reveal the same fear at its base—that our received notions about historical figures might crumble under too close an inspection. And yet, in many cases, the evidence is often hiding in plain sight. Queen Anne, as the recent movie The Favourite underscored, wrote passionate letters to the Duchess of Marlborough. Michelangelo composed love poems for his male models. King James addressed his beloved Duke of Buckingham as “my sweet child and wife,” and Shakespeare publicly directed his first 126 sonnets to a “Fair Youth,” theorized by some scholars to be Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. Lincoln may look like he played things closer to the vest, but even his contemporaries, pondering his youthful aversion to girls, his lack of female conquests, and his relatively late marriage, struggled to come up with face-saving explanations. Judge David Davis, a friend of Lincoln’s from his circuit-riding days, insisted it was only the great man’s conscience that “kept him from seduction” and “saved many—many a woman.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s biographer and law partner, spread rumors (almost certainly unfounded) that Lincoln had caught syphilis from a girl in Beardstown, and went so far as to resurrect a long-dead New Salem maiden named Ann Rutledge, who emerged under Herndon’s burnishing as the love of Abe’s life. Read More