In 1945, the United States had its first atom-bomb test; in 1949, the Soviets blew up one of their own. These events inspired, most immediately, what the newly Americanized W. H. Auden described as “The Age of Anxiety”—and, more recently, Dr. Atomic, the most boring and worthless John Adams opera imaginable. Did anyone relax at all between Auden and Adams? Yes: on drugs.
Human reason has this peculiar fate,” Immanuel Kant wrote in 1781, “that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” He was talking about the way reason can speculate about, and yet not know, the ideas that transcend it. For some philosophers, consciousness—what Kant called the self—counts as one of these ideas. We can no more illuminate the nature of our selfhood than, as in a celebrated
On November 7, three days after Election Day, Alain Badiou gave a lecture at New York University on theater and philosophy. The discussion afterward, conducted in a mixture of French and English, quickly turned to the president-elect. “Obama?” Badiou replied. “As actor or as politician?” When the audience laughed, he explained that he did not mean the distinction negatively. While it was too soon to judge Obama as politician, Badiou stipulated, we could already judge him as actor, one who had broken with modern modes of self-presentation by returning to a classical style: sober, thoughtful, deliberate.
To be the child of true believers—whether religious zealots, political ideologues, or Cubs fans—is to learn from the cradle that beliefs have consequences. For Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose parents joined the Socialist Workers Party a few years before he was born in 1968, those consequences included poverty, abuse, and a promise of revolution as empty as it was constant. His tale of how utopian dreams led to both the dissolution of a marriage and a disillusioned childhood, When Skateboards Will Be Free, plays out like the fate of the past century’s revolutions in miniature: When things fall apart for the Sayrafiezadeh
The wonderfully vivid photograph of the young Grace Hartigan on the cover of her newly published Journals takes me back to the time more than half a century ago when I first encountered the artist and her work. She had come to Vassar in 1954 to give an informal talk in conjunction with her solo show at the college art gallery. Ten years younger than she and an inexperienced instructor at my alma mater, I was immensely impressed with the power of her painting and just as excited by the forceful exoticism of her persona. She seemed so bold, so
In her memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody recounts her first strip at an amateur contest in a Minneapolis topless bar. In a feather boa and “five-inch, clit-pink Lucite platform stilettos” purchased for the occasion, she finds herself surrounded by seasoned pros and amplifies her performance accordingly: “I was concerned about my balance in the pink death-stilts, so I clung to the pole and gyrated like Gypsy.” While Gypsy Rose Lee would probably have been tickled by the homage, the reference demonstrates how much we’ve needed a biography of the patron saint
New York’s Civil War– era underworlds aren’t what they used to be. Denounced in their own time by antivice crusaders as being so immoral that decency forbade even vague description, they’ve resurfaced with a vengeance in a remarkable succession of recent books that prowl in minute detail through the inventive urban libertinism of the 1850s and beyond. From these accounts, we know where the brothels were, who ran them, and how a typical evening progressed, from the parlor entertainment to the habits of the madams, johns, and sex workers (male and female) to the houses’ very plumbing. We know about the
In his introduction to The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, Harry Shearer leads off, naturally enough, with a joke: “Without Harvey Kurtzman, there would have been no Saturday Night Live. What a horrible thing to say about him, but it’s true. . . . OK, this might be better. Without Harvey Kurtzman, there would have been no Simpsons.”
Born in 1935 and a published mangaka before he was out of high school, Yoshihiro Tatsumi has enjoyed a long and prolific career, albeit one unfamiliar to English-speaking readers prior to Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s recent efforts to translate his body of short works. Three collections have been produced under the editorship of cartoonist Adrian Tomine: The Push Man and Other Stories (2005), Abandon the Old in Tokyo (2006), and Good-Bye (2008). In each volume, Tatsumi delivers curt, sharp slaps of city angst as his near-identical characters wander hazily through doomed, damned times—usually the ’60s and ’70s (when the
Not only are computer-based works largely missing from histories of twentieth-century art, it is often hard to avoid the impression that blatant ignorance (as well as, sometimes, nonchalance) about the past reigns even among the artists, gallerists, and critics promoting such art today. One may always claim, of course, that digital art is still a newcomer yet to be embraced by the art world, but there is a considerable body of works, ideas, and theories that has been largely neglected by art curricula, critical discourses, and dominant institutions alike. As a consequence, contemporary digital artworks that manage to make their
A week after moving to New York, I hired a car service to take me to the commercial loading docks at Kennedy Airport. I was trying to pick up several cartons of books I had shipped from Paris. After signing for the contents, I proceeded to the Customs Office, where an agent was waiting to stamp the import papers. I had forgotten my passport; all I had was an expired, out-of-state driver’s license. “Kafka, eh?” he said, looking closely at the license, then at me. There was a pause. “I guess you must find this all pretty Kafkaesque!” He chortled—actually
Bill Traylor—born into slavery in Benton, Alabama, in 1853; poor and illiterate; the murderer of his first wife’s lover in the early 1900s; the father of a son who was killed by two Klan-member policemen in 1929; and a victim of Jim Crow’s systematic dehumanization—used art, as Mechal Sobel argues in her convincing study Painting a Hidden Life, as a way to order his inner turmoil and offer coded pictorial resistance to racist oppression. He was “the man with a fire in his belly that he painted a number of times.”
Country friends have flocked to London for a little shopping, and you’d like to offer them luncheon. Or perhaps your cook’s mother has developed one of those sudden and disastrous illnesses endemic among cooks’ mothers during the holidays. Or maybe you’d like to prepare “a restrained and anglicized Bouillabaisse” for guests who refrain from meat. What do you do?
If the Book is doomed, it could have no better funeral director than Austin-based artist Lance Letscher. He may be inclined to dismember the deceased, but he’ll leave behind a beautiful corpse. The raw materials for his intricate and startlingly colorful collages are mined, by and large, from his favorite Dumpster out back of a local used-book and -record store, where he collects discarded volumes—he’s especially fond of shiny-covered college tomes and beat-up high school books—for his studio-cum–chop shop. The resulting mosaiclike collages call to mind the work of Martín Ramírez and Adolf Wölfli in their near-vibratory geometry and imagistic
Tennis may be a joy to play and a pleasure to watch, but it’s not a sport that lends itself easily to literary endeavor. The average tennis match has a few hundred largely indistinguishable points, and the scoring system reads like something out of a high school calculus book. An entire library devoted to the sport might be reduced a handful of volumes and one classic work of nonfiction, John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, published forty years ago.
The Bun Field begins with a typical comic-strip scenario: An adolescent girl lies in bed, dreaming of talking ducks and dinosaurs. This Slumberland scene displays little Winsor McCay–like polish, though; the Disneyesque ducks are rendered with childlike simplicity, and the dinosaur is as crudely penciled as a drawing taped to a kindergarten wall. The child smiles and winces in her sleep and then, at the sound of nuts being cracked, awakens to a daylight world scarcely less surreal than the one she just left behind. In her debut graphic novella, Finnish cartoonist Amanda Vähämäki proves to be a master at
As a retrospective of the work of Wassily Kandinsky makes its way from Munich to Paris to New York over the course of this year—roughly tracing the artist’s own westward path during his lifetime—fortunate viewers will experience one of the greatest concentrations of his art. Much as previous shows have presented piecemeal considerations of his body of work, so have publications tended toward examinations limited to certain media or particular periods. But to see the evolution of his painting is to witness the birth of a modernist master: early figurative canvases mixing French Impressionism and Fauvism with Russian folktales; the
What secret was trying to pierce through this hallucinatory and hermetic language?” asks poet Ghérasim Luca in his long-lost classic The Passive Vampire. The book, first published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l’Oubli in Bucharest, is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era’s dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. Writing of the earthquake that devastated Bucharest on November 10, 1940, Luca internalizes
“O LORD, WHAT A VARIETY OF THINGS YOU HAVE MADE! In wisdom you have made them all.” We know He made the lamb and the tiger, but what about the yeti, the kraken, and the manticore? Not to mention the Invunche, a “twisted, deformed, pathetic creature” that started out as “an innocent Chilean boy who is sold to a warlock.” Then there’s the flesh-eating Burmese Khimakha, an ogre so hideous that he’s ugly “even by ogre standards.” Oh, and Mothman: It looks like a human, except that it has “massive wings, no head, and a set of large, reflective eyes
Early in his new book of essays and reviews, George Scialabba declares himself a “utopian” and a “radical democrat,” though he concedes, parenthetically, that he owns up to this identification “on fewer days of the week than formerly.” It is the most succinct statement Scialabba provides of the sensibility governing What Are Intellectuals Good For?, which collects the work of more than two decades spent addressing the broadest philosophical and historical issues in five thousand words or fewer in the back pages of newspapers and magazines.
