May 25, 2018 Arts & Culture The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls By Rainer Maria Rilke Rilke wrote this essay after having viewed the dolls of Lotte Pritzel at a Munich exhibition in 1913. They were not designed for children. These elongated and emaciated dolls were mounted on small baroque stands and dressed for the most part in weird gauzy costumes, their postures and limbs and long scrawny fingers suggestive of dance and decadence. Olivier Joseph Coomans, The Old Doll, 1882. Faced with the stolid and unchanging dolls of childhood, have we not wondered again and again, as we might of certain students, what was to become of them? Are these the adult versions of those doll childhoods cosseted by genuine and feigned emotions? Are these their fruits, reflected fleetingly into this atmosphere so grossly saturated with humanity? False fruits whose seed could never come to rest, almost washed away sometimes by tears, at other times exposed to the passionate aridity of rage or the desolation of neglect; planted into the most compliant depths of an utterly venturesome tenderness, to be torn out again time after time and hurled into a corner with angular broken things, spurned, despised, done with; just where it should really be given to them, smearing themselves with it like spoilt children, impenetrable and, in their advanced state of inevitable corpulence, unable at any point to absorb even a single drop of water; without any judgement of their own, yielding to any rag and yet, once appropriated, taking possession of this in a particular way, negligently, smugly, impurely; awake only for an instant as the eyes flicked open, then off to sleep again with disproportionate and insensitive eyes open, scarcely able, it would seem, to tell whether it is the mechanical eyelid which weighs on them or that other object, the air; inert; dragged along through the changing emotions of the day, lying for a while in each; made into a confidant, an accomplice, like a dog, but not as receptive and forgetful as a dog, and a burden in both roles; initiated into the first nameless experiences of their owners, lying about in their earliest uncanny spells of loneliness as if in empty rooms and all that was needed was to exploit this new spaciousness crudely with all their limbs; dragged as companions into cots, abducted into the deep furrows of illnesses, appearing in dreams, entangled in the disasters of feverish nights—such was the nature of those dolls. For they themselves took no active part in these events, they just lay at the edge of childhood sleep, filled with nothing more than rudimentary thoughts of falling, letting themselves be dreamed, just as they were accustomed to being inexhaustibly lived during the day by alien forces. Read More
May 24, 2018 On Music A Siren in a Paper Sleeve By Christopher King Still from Ghost World, by Terry Zwigoff. I am a record collector. The type of disc with which I am obsessed, the 78-rpm phonograph record, is made of slowly decaying organic materials, bound together and coated with synthetic compounds. John Blacking, a pioneering ethnomusicologist of the twentieth century, proposed that music is a “humanly organized sound,” a pat yet inclusive definition. Like most of the music he studied in the fifties, the 78-rpm phonograph record is a relic of the past, a fossil. These curious black discs are all that connect us with the best part of our musical past, with the rapture that we were once able to convey through deep song and dance. These records are fragile, yet they were the dominant medium of auricular permanence and commerce for roughly the first fifty years of the twentieth century. When I was young, I discovered that 78 recordings—unlike so many other parts of contemporary culture—needed no outside validation, just an attentive, appreciative listener. I was the listener, and the artists that made them were my friends. They were constant. People would betray you, institutions would fail you, but this, this old music, a music lacking all pretension, would never change. Read More
May 24, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: It’s Not Sad at All, Any of It By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, My wife and I are expecting a baby in five months. We are both women, and she is carrying it. The months feel expansive and momentous, like I need to get myself wholly together, smooth out all my rusted-in neuroses, do all the wild kayaking, dancing, writing, and running around in forests. I need to do all that so I’m perfectly composed and ready for the sacrifices of parenthood. I feel I should be savoring every delicious hour of this right-before-baby time, but I’m still worrying and feeling a little bereft and not working out, just like usual. I can’t wait to meet our son or daughter, but how can I graduate to fully baked adult in just five months? What if I’m not good at it? I need a poem that speaks to crossing a big threshold, and the inevitability of unreadiness for being a mom. Sincerely, Not Grown Up Yet Dear NGUY, Every new or expectant parent I’ve ever spoken with has shared the anxiety you articulate beautifully and concisely: “What if I’m not good at it?” I remember being fascinated by the realization (it came embarrassingly late) that before they had my older brother, my parents had never been parents. Some part of me just idly assumed they’d been born parents, fully equipped to handle our feeding and fevers and acne crises. Read More
May 24, 2018 At Work This Flesh Container We Call a Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel By Patrick Cottrell Rita Bullwinkel’s first story collection, Belly Up, is a kind of miracle. Imbued with darkness and absurdity, the stories in Belly Up announce Bullwinkel as a writer of deep intelligence and bold style. A snake thinks of himself as a pear in a tree, two high school girls fantasize about turning into plants, and a woman becomes slowly unhinged after witnessing a car accident. Bullwinkel is a gifted technician of words and moods. The quotidian is turned on its side. The economy is so bad that instead of buying a bra, a mother pays a man off Craigslist to hold up her daughter’s breasts. A missing thumb leads to a suicide. Desire for knowledge leads to misery. The dead come back. The scale of what is possible in Bullwinkel’s worlds is overwhelming. Upon finishing this book, I was deeply moved. A couple years ago, when Bullwinkel and I first met, she told me that she had walked from where she was staying in East Los Angeles to our meeting place, in Chinatown. In Los Angeles, there are no direct walking routes; there are no grids or city blocks. There are steep hills and chickens in backyards and sidewalks in disrepair. She said the walk took her over an hour. And yet, I was surprised to find, she wasn’t sweating. A year later, I spent a few nights in her apartment above a hardware store in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, a musician. I remember art on the walls, various musical instruments, and plants with bright-green waxy leaves spilling over the edge of a kitchen table. Bullwinkel is very good at keeping things alive. Her home, like her writing, gives one the impression of a peculiar and generous mind. This interview was conducted over email. INTERVIEWER When you were young, were you focused on writing, or were you interested in other arts? BULLWINKEL I didn’t start writing until I was in college. Before college I had never read any books of fiction that I liked, so I thought I didn’t like fiction. I used to make all of my own clothes. I also painted and made furniture out of broken surfboards and other trash I found in dumpsters. I was not very good at any of these things, but I knew I liked making things. The thing I was best at as a child was sports. I was recruited to play water polo in college, which I did all four years. I now view that as a completely insane and irrational thing to have done. I have almost no connection anymore to that part of my identity. Read More
May 23, 2018 In Memoriam Will There Ever Be Another Writer Like Philip Roth? By Megan Abbott I first discovered Philip Roth at age fifteen. My parents, bless them, placed Goodbye, Columbus in my hands. Having grown up in the suburbs of Detroit—the rock-ribbed WASP enclave of Grosse Pointe—I found him exotic, thrilling. His audacity staggered me. His books were smart and dirty, and until then, I didn’t know you could be both. In college, in grad school in New York, I kept reading him—going back into his early works and moving forward with the latest ones. I taught American Pastoral to undergraduates, standing in front of a classroom in upstate New York and trying to explain why this book was so important from an intellectual perspective when really all I wanted to talk about was how moved I was by it, how it brought me to tears. I’d have Roth jags, where I’d read or reread several of his books in a row, like that one heady summer, around age thirty, when I read the first four Zuckerman novels in sweaty sequence, the paperback print smearing in my hands on the subway. In recent years, I read his slimmer novels in near tandem with my dad, and we swapped emails about them, savored them. And I’ll never forget the experience of reading Nemesis, Roth’s exquisite and haunting final novel, and reading it so slowly, with such care, because there already was this sense, confirmed a year or two later, that Roth might not reward us with another. Read More
May 23, 2018 Look Fragile but Fixable: The Collages of Deborah Roberts By Deborah Roberts “Fragile but Fixable,” Deborah Roberts’s Los Angeles solo debut, is on view at Luis De Jesus through June 16. In her collages, Roberts takes found images of black women and girls and alters them with pigment and paint, manipulating the optics of advertisement to create new fictions of beauty. “My art practice,” she writes, in her artist statement, “takes on social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in my work; I create a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty in the form of the ideal woman.” Deborah Roberts, Filling in the gaps, 2018, collage on paper. All images courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Read More