Culture

print • Summer 2020

A new memoir explores a divided nation • Danielle A. Jackson

IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION, a significant influence on Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s new memoir American Harvest, the first-century prophet John is beset by visions while in exile. He sees locusts with human faces, a slaughtered lamb, a dragon with seven heads. An angel promises to condemn those who refuse God’s teachings to a fiery abyss and guarantees the return of Jesus after his people have endured a series of trials. In time, the messenger says, the old world of strife will be destroyed, and a new world will replace it. There, God will dwell with his people in peace. “And

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print • Summer 2020

Revisiting the cruel tribulations of God’s biggest fan • Sam Lipsyte

IT WAS LATE ON THE FIRST NIGHT of Corona Times Passover and my teenage son chewed on a piece of matzo. Mind you, we were not following dietary restrictions. We’d had Hawaiian pizza for dinner, during which I’d rehashed the flight from Egypt, but hours later we were bored and peckish and broke in to the box of Streit’s my wife, who is not Jewish, had been kind enough to score at the supermarket.

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print • Summer 2020

A firsthand account of Berlin under siege • Emily Raboteau

APRIL 21, 2020. Last night, the crazed leader announced that he wants to ban immigration. Today I was told to prepare for furlough at my job, and I spoke to my friend who cannot get her cancer treatments. Down the road at the hospital, they are still forklifting corpses into refrigerated trucks. The price of oil has tanked. Around the corner someone has painted these words on the side of a mailbox: PROTECT BLACK PEOPLE. COVID-19. The midwife who delivered my children is begging for masks. All of the mom-and-pop shops have shuttered. The streets are littered with discarded blue

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print • Summer 2020

Hell is New York real estate • Sarah Resnick

AS NEW YORK WAS DECLARED the COVID-19 pandemic’s epicenter, the ghost of Dorothy Parker began turning up in my bedroom at daybreak. “What fresh hell can this be?” Parker whispered, an earworm I could not stop hearing. They say the cure for an earworm is to listen to the song in its entirety; in my case, I thumbed through the morning’s headlines like a drowsy automaton until a fuller, worsened picture of our city’s new netherworld emerged.

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print • Summer 2020

Catching a glimpse of heaven in the confines of Tristram Shandy • Eileen Myles

TRISTRAM SHANDY sailed into eighteenth-century literary history alongside such bawdy picaresques as Tom Jones. But unlike the rest Laurence Sterne’s creation is an antinovel: It starts and stops, has entire pages that aren’t even text—blank or solid black or marbled or filled with lines and swirls that indicate the wayward shapes of the narrative (at such moments it seems like what Sterne really is is a concrete poet). On the occasions when the author doesn’t want you to know what naughty thing he’s saying (though he quit being a minister to write, Sterne was still a modest man) there are

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print • Summer 2020

Benedetta Carlini’s immodest visions • Moira Donegan

EVEN AS A LITTLE GIRL, Benedetta Carlini, born in a Tuscan mountain town in 1590, had the kind of persuasive charm possessed by politicians and good salesmen. When she played with a feral dog and it attacked her, she told her parents that the dog was the devil, come to earth to torment her. When she was caught playing with a nightingale, then thought to be a dangerous symbol of sensuality and lust, she explained that the bird was a guardian angel. After Benedetta joined a convent of Theatine nuns in 1599, she began having revelations from God. In one

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print • Summer 2020

A dance performance makes physical distress flagrantly public • R. O. Kwon

RECENTLY, MISSING THE BALLET PERFORMANCES I’d planned to attend this spring, I revisited a short video-installation piece I love: En Puntas by Javier Pérez, featuring a ballerina with long knives strapped to the soles of her pointe shoes. It was filmed in the Teatre Municipal de Girona, in Spain, in 2013. The dancer, Amélie Ségarra, sits on the lid of a baby grand piano, tying the pink shoe-ribbons around her ankles. With the help of a rope dangling from the ceiling, she hoists herself up until she’s balanced on the sharp tips of the knives, her feet hovering eight inches

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print • Summer 2020

EarthCam’s seductive vision of the Anthropocene afterlife • Bridget Read

AT FIVE THIRTY on a perfect spring evening, there is no one at the Trevi Fountain. The last strips of sunlight slide between apartment buildings and the water gurgles a bright, calming blue. There is only splashing, and pigeons. Not a soul is at the Pantheon, or milling around the Piazza di Spagna, at the base of the Spanish Steps. The Acropolis is absolutely still. A giant neon arrow on the Las Vegas Strip points down to an empty street. Someone has written “Hola” in large letters in the sand in the Canary Islands, but they’ve since gone. Miles of

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print • Summer 2020

Buddhist portrayals of unending human suffering • Jess Row

LATELY, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, I’ve been preoccupied with suffering and death—when I’m following the news of the pandemic, but also in my daily meditation practice, which involves chanting, sitting Zen, and reading from stacks of Buddhist books I keep handy next to my cushion. In the past few days I’ve read the chapters on death and rebirth in Tsongkhapa’s encyclopedic Lamrim Chenmo, or The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, a book so beloved that the Dalai Lama kept a copy hidden in his robes when he fled Lhasa in 1959.

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print • Summer 2020

Is hell Christian? • Michael Robbins

I REALIZED WHEN I WAS AROUND EIGHT THAT THE VERY CONCEPT OF HELL IS INSANE AND EVIL, and never looked back. I don’t regard this as an especially precocious perception—many other Christians I have known report a similar experience.

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print • Summer 2020

The season’s outstanding art books • Bookforum contributors

Gillian Haratani in a Bernadette Corporation look, 1996. From Fashion Work 1993–2018: 25 Years of Art in Fashion. Cris Moor But is it art, or fashion? In FASHION WORK 1993–2018: 25 YEARS OF ART IN FASHION (Damiani, $45), Danish-born curator and critic Jeppe Ugelvig offers a refreshing take: that this question should not be framed […]

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print • Summer 2020

Pittsburgh artist Thaddeus Mosley’s sculptural improvisations • Albert Mobilio

The titles of Thaddeus Mosley’s recent wood sculptures are often plainly descriptive: There’s a curve in Curved Closure, branches in Branched Form, and an oval in Oval Continuity. This straightforward denotation of the works’ spatial and geometric character indicates Mosley’s matter-of-fact approach. At ninety-four, the self-taught artist isn’t inclined toward mystification or obscurity. In an essay by curator Brett Littman, included in this volume, Mosley recounts how in the 1950s he saw “decorative furniture with details like small birds and fish made out of wood” in a Pittsburgh department store. “They wanted a fortune for those pieces, so instead I

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print • Summer 2020

A new book tracks Frida Kahlo’s Paris years • Porochista Khakpour

It’s the second week of March in Paris, and COVID-19 still hasn’t shut the city down. I am staying at the Hotel La Louisiane, the haunt of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cy Twombly, and more—an oddball historic dive in the heart of the Sixth Arrondissement. I spend my days retracing the steps of literary and art icons and reading in cafés. I’ve been asked to write about The Heart, Marc Petitjean’s new book about Frida Kahlo’s life in Paris in 1939, and it seems to haunt me at every step. I walk over the Seine

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print • Summer 2020

A group biography of five female artists who met at the dawn of the feminist revolution • Sam Huber

For many of its participants, the women’s liberation movement represented a saving break with an unremittingly bleak past. A switch flipped at the end of the 1960s, and the culture flooded with light. Where once there had been only darkness—Ladies’ Home Journal, back-alley abortions, MRS degrees—now there was feminism: Kate Millett made the cover of Time, Shirley Chisholm made the ballot, and young women picketed bridal fairs and beauty pageants that they might have attended a year before. In 1971, fiction writer Tillie Olsen remarked with awe that “this movement in three years has accumulated a vast new mass of

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print • Summer 2020

The start of the (indie) world as we know it • Carl Wilson

“In Athens, Georgia, in the 1980s, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible,” Grace Elizabeth Hale opens her new book Cool Town, about how the B-52s, R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt, and scads of lesser-known alternative-rock artists sprang out of one small southern college town four decades ago. My first impulse was to substitute the line Tolstoy might have written if Tolstoy had been really into rock bands: All local music scenes are the same, but every music scene is local in its own way. Young people coalesce around a few emerging performers or spaces

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print • Summer 2020

A new book compiles the public murals of New York City’s bygone eras • Juliana Halpert

In Murals of New York City, all of the Big Apple’s bygone eras seem to blend together. On the walls of Neoclassical courthouses and Art Deco airports, hallowed hotel bars and brick borough halls, we see the Rockefellers and Roosevelts still running things, and the Astaires, the Barrymores, and the Fitzgeralds forever flitting around. People smoked in restaurants, and artists—apparently—had studios in the attic of Grand Central Terminal. Graffiti didn’t yet have a name. The New School was still new, as was the New Deal. The Works Progress Administration paid for everything. It’s the Gilded Age, and the Jazz one,

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print • Summer 2020

Hervé Guibert’s account of the AIDS epidemic • Marco Roth

A few months ago, the thirtieth-anniversary republication of a book written at the peak of the HIV epidemic and chronicling the impact of the virus on an intimate social circle of French writers, artists, medical professionals, and intellectuals—Michel Foucault among them—might have been a boutique or scholarly curiosity. AIDS, after all, has become one of the few medical and socio-biological “success” stories of recent decades. Testing plus an effective cocktail of antiretroviral drugs, alongside newer prophylactic treatments like Truvada, has reduced the illness to a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. In so-called advanced nations, the disease is mostly

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print • Summer 2020

Nick Tosches follows his subjects down to the crossroads • Eric Banks

For all his love of Dante, I don’t think Nick Tosches was much of a Boccaccio man. Still, he might have admired the saga that begins The Decameron. It is the story of one Ser Cepparello da Prato, un pessimo uomo, a dandy gentleman who wets his beak in every vice—blasphemy, forgery, booze, sex, crooked dice, marked cards, you name it. But nothing gives him a bigger kick than stirring up bad feelings, for, according to our storyteller, “the greater the evils he saw . . . the greater his happiness.” Dispatched to Burgundy to collect on the Boss’s loans,

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print • Summer 2020

Searching for prophecy in the midst of a pandemic • Joshua Cohen

A FEW NIGHTS AGO, I WAS VISITED BY AN EMAIL. Back before the world gasped, my brother, the doctor, hardly ever wrote me anything beyond a “dinner Friday y/n,” and yet here he was, in the breathless thick of it, attaching a file of 7,241 words. I’d thought that he was far out in the boroughs intubating the sick or putting them through dialysis—and he was—but somehow he’d also found the time and adrenalized energy to put more language down on the screen than I, the ostensible writer, had managed to eke out in weeks, even months. The instructions that

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excerpt • April 30, 2020

Reflections on the work of Tim Etchells • Jarvis Cocker

What’s the opposite of nostalgia? I ask that question because the stories in this book take me back to a time & place I thought I’d forgotten—but I really wouldn’t want to go back there.

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