December 10, 2015 On the Shelf Lighting Up the Greed Decade, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sandy Skoglund, Sound of Food, 2005. Image via Slate/Ryan Lee Gallery Eve Sedgwick, the groundbreaking queer theorist, died in 2009. Since then, her husband, Hal, has maintained her apartment—they lived in separate ones—as an archive, amassing all her work, her belongings, and even her cat. Jane Hsu spoke with him: “ ‘The idea of having one love in your life was not an aspiration for us,’ Hal said, when I ask him what it was like to be the primary love object of a queer theorist who wrote so prolifically about the complexities of desire and relationships. Later, Hal referenced D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘holding environment,’ in which the mother creates a safe space for the child that allows the child to then look out into the world, to think about something else beyond the mother’s care. Eve used this idea in her work. Hal offered it as a way of thinking about what they both did for one another.” Do you know a sad professor of English? Sure you do—they’re everywhere. And their sadness is justified: “Socialization to the discipline,” Lisa Ruddick explains, “has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss … The progressive fervor of the humanities, while it reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction … These days nothing in English is ‘cool’ in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole … We will find scholars using theory—or simply attitude—to burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation. Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the engulfing collective.” In the eighties, Sandy Skoglund was struck by a disparity she saw throughout New York, where Wall Street and crime rates were soaring side by side. She began to photograph the city, and now she’s made a series of collages, “True Fiction,” that try to capture the aura of that decade with stark contrasts and bright colors. “I never saw a particular implied narrative other than astonishment, which was a mirror really of my own experience of the contradictions of New York City and living in the 1980s … I hope they have a kind of transcendent quality that does allow a kind of open interpretation and not just an ahistorical document.” Whither the black detective novel? In 1950, Hughes Allison wrote the first black detective story, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And there was John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night, from 1965, with its iconic Mister Tibbs, who’s more a construction of blackness than a realization of it. And after him? “It would take another two and a half decades after In the Heat of the Night for the next iconic black detective character to emerge, Easy Rawlins, from Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). Mosley didn’t just live in the skin of Rawlins, a post-World War II private eye, he breathed his entire experience of America, contemporary and the past, into the character … For a moment in the 1990s, after Walter Mosley and Devil in a Blue Dress, crime fiction made room for more black writers. But then writers like Eleanor Taylor Bland, Penny Mickelbury, Paula Woods, Charlotte Carter, and others perhaps fell away in the relentless turnover of the publishing industry: canceled contracts, merged companies, and shifting editorial priorities. In recent years, few black crime-genre writers have reached Mosley’s level of popularity.” Next year, the SAT’s verbal section will do away with a lot of treasured vocabulary: recalcitrant, accretion, grandiloquent, plenitude, diaphonous. There’s only one way to see these words off—to use them all in one short story. Ann Wroe gave it a try: “Joe’s hour had come. Impetuous, redoubtable and sanguine (though fully cognizant of looming disaster), he seized the damsel’s hand. Exit was exigent. She was not apathetic, or obdurate, or truculent, but surprisingly amenable. Together they raced down the nearest conduit to the street. Behind them, a maelstrom of flame became a conflagration. Ubiquitous gray ash poured from the sky. But as they paused, at last, to recover their breath, all that seemed quite tangential.”
December 9, 2015 On Poetry The I and the You By Ben Lerner Last night, Pioneer Works, an artists’ space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, hosted a celebration of John Ashbery, who turned eighty-eight this year. The poets Geoffery G. O’Brien, Mónica de la Torre, and John Yau read some of their work and their favorite poems by Ashbery. Before Ashbery came to the stage, Ben Lerner made the following remarks. —D. P. Good evening. Some of my favorite words written about John Ashbery were written by John Ashbery about Gertrude Stein. Reviewing Stanzas in Meditation, in the July 1957 issue of Poetry, he wrote: Read More
December 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Diplomacy By Sadie Stein For centuries, the lights of the Hanukkah menorah have inspired hope and courage. They may have also been responsible for inspiring then–General George Washington to forge on when everything looked bleak when his cold and hungry Continental Army camped at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777/8. The story is told that Washington was walking among his troops when he saw one soldier sitting apart from the others, huddled over what looked like two tiny flames. Washington approached the soldier and asked him what he was doing. The soldier explained that he was a Jew and he had lit the candles to celebrate Hanukkah, the festival commemorating the miraculous victory of his people so many centuries ago over the tyranny of a much better equipped and more powerful enemy who had sought to deny them their freedom. The soldier then expressed his confidence that just as, with the help of God, the Jews of ancient times were ultimately victorious, so too would they be victorious in their just cause for freedom. Washington thanked the soldier and walked back to where the rest of the troops camped, warmed by the inspiration of those little flames and the knowledge that miracles are possible. Whether or not Rabbi Susan Grossman’s account is true, it took the presidency a while to acknowledge the Jewish Festival of Lights. Sure, Jimmy Carter may have lit the National Menorah, but the White House has only hosted an official annual Hanukkah party since 2001. Read More
December 9, 2015 Contests Update: Writers, Named By Stephen Hiltner “Paris Review,” by Anthony Russo. (Click to enlarge.) On Monday we announced a contest based on a recent archival discovery: a decades-old illustration, by Anthony Russo, of a Paris Review office packed with writers. To our surprise, after more than three hundred entries, we have only one winner: David DeJong, a copywriter from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The writers are as follows: 1. Joan Didion2. Milan Kundera3. Samuel Beckett4. Tama Janowitz5. Truman Capote6. Saul Bellow7. Kurt Vonnegut8. William Styron9. Norman Mailer10. William S. Burroughs11. John Updike Congratulations, David! And thanks to all those who participated.
December 9, 2015 Arts & Culture Invisible Adventure By Nicole Rudick Watching a film about Claude Cahun. When Alan Pierson conducts, he stands with his feet together, sometimes springing onto his toes and then plunging forward at the waist. Other times, he takes a step forward, only to return immediately to his original spot. He is tall and thin, and his reedy build exaggerates his movements: he could be one of Robert Longo’s flailing suited men, but he is poised, like an exclamation mark. He is conducting Alarm Will Sound onstage at Merkin Concert Hall as part of the Sonic–Sounds of a New Century Festival. He is also onscreen at the back of the stage, in a short film in which he conducts the same composition but without orchestra or audience. The live Alan Pierson conducts with his back to the audience in the hall, but onscreen he frequently appears frontally and in close-up, and his expression—of delectation and wonder—is fed by his body’s exuberant movements. Read More
December 9, 2015 On the Shelf What’s Your Sign? And Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Aztec zodiac man,” a facsimile of the original painting or codex, 1831. For the cultural critic, astrology is low-hanging fruit: a gimmicky, pervasive pseudoscience that preys on our superstitions, our solipsism, our need to make sense of the unknown. It’s easy to ask people, How can you buy into that shit? But the editors of n+1 point out that “a better question might be why people like it, or whether it’s a problem to subscribe to something in which you don’t believe.” They point to astrology’s redemptive features: “We trust it because it corresponds to nothing; it doesn’t pretend to be true, or demand our belief. Unlike the pernicious pseudosciences of the past, or the scientism and pop neurology of the present, astrology poses little threat of getting serious … As a supplement to other points of view—what’s visible on first impression, say, or what you know of someone from experience—it adds another dimension, pulling some features into the foreground and pushing others to the back, reminding you of a person’s complexity … To consider that the shy person is sometimes wild, the considerate person sometimes duplicitous, is to practice something rather like empathy.” At business schools, meanwhile, they’re teaching something much more treacherous than astrology: literature. At Columbia, aspiring executives can take a three-hour weekly course called Leadership Through Fiction, taught by Bruce Craven: “A four-minute promotional video posted online alongside Craven’s syllabus outlines the rationale for repurposing literature as management shibboleth … These novels, he explains, are ‘narratives about characters in many different professions’ who must find a ‘balance between their professional obligations, their personal expectations, and goals.’ Like real people, fictional characters stumble, and it is ‘through their stumbling,’ Craven promises, ‘that we will learn how to prepare ourselves for the future.’ ” In her Nobel Lecture, Svetlana Alexievich—who will not, one suspects, be auditing Craven’s class—puts forth a more nuanced purpose for literature: “Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think—how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. We haven’t been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don’t appreciate it, we aren’t surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk … I love the lone human voice … It always troubled me that the truth doesn’t fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There’s a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I’m interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.” If you really want to steep yourself in “the everyday life of feelings,” look at 108 years of high school yearbook photos reduced to a minute-long video. Researchers at UC Berkeley compiled the images to study the changing face of the American teen: “The regular nature of yearbook photos—schools have been asking students to face forward and be recorded for posterity since the early twentieth century—made them a good candidate for this kind of machine-driven visual analysis, which can catch small variations in repetitive images … The final data set is made up of 37,921 forward-facing portraits. The population represented in the dataset is from 115 high schools, in twenty-six states … The researchers created a delightfully named ‘lip curvature metric’ to measure smile intensity, finding that while everyone smiled more as time went on, girls always smiled more than boys.” As our nation’s smile intensity has changed, so has the valence of its slang. Take the word badass: in the mid-1950s, as Hermione Hoby explains, it was “used for the kind of men whose posturing invited mockery. To call someone a badass was to seek to puncture puffed-up masculine pride.” Today, though, it’s become perhaps the single most nauseating faux compliment: “the phrase ‘badass women’ peaked in 2015. This, in other words, was the year in which badass underwent such a regendering that it became understood as the foremost battlecry of feel-good feminism … If female badassery, as we understand and value it, comes down to maleness in the most basic and anatomical sense, if virtual dicks are now the yardstick for female power, then we have a problem. Because beneath the feel-good female bravura of badass is a decidedly feel-bad notion, namely that the only way a woman can exercise power is to submit herself to the drag (in both senses) of ‘behaving like a man.’ ”