Dostoyevsky’s novels are so schematic, so exaggerated, so over the top—there’s relatively little scenery, relatively few things—everything is pared down to foreground these crazily heightened scenes of drama and “scandal.” People are constantly falling down in hysterics, fainting, having nervous breakdowns, giving speeches, committing murder or suicide, having seizures, going on trial, writing insanely long letters and declaiming them in public spaces. Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in a room watching a small group of actors who are all trying to make eye contact with you and provoke some cathartic reaction. It’s not meant to be realistic—you know, like Oedipus Rex isn’t about killing your father and sleeping with your mother—it’s a play that depicts certain universal dramas and tensions through the bizarre and hyperbolic example of a king who kills his father and sleeps with his mother.
These kinds of dramatic exaggerations are incredible and powerful and fascinating—but personally I enjoy more the more cinematic, more historically conditioned, more realistic representations of Anna Karenina and War and Peace where you’re surrounded by detail, by the stuff of daily life. For Dostoyevsky, the important thing is dialogue and psychology, and it doesn’t really matter if the setting is a garret or a monastery or a pool hall or a forest grove or a prison cell or a charity ball—on Dostoyevsky’s stage, the costumes and set aren’t that important. For Tolstoy, on the other hand, if an encounter takes place at a train station or the horse races or a battlefield or an opera house or a hunting ground, that encounter is also in some sense really about horse racing or trains or battles or opera or hunting, and I really like that. The sets are real and very expensive. To me, Tolstoy’s novels really capture the experience of what it’s like to be alive on planet Earth—not by the kinds of exaggerated examples that invite us to look into our souls or whatever, but in a straightforward mimetic way.
This is not what I am wearing in the show, but there will be a fancy hat involved.
I’m participating in Jennifer Sullivan’s “Fall Collection” performance (a “runway show”) at P.S. 1 today in conjunction with the publication of her wearable art and fashion zine Threads, co-edited with Jenn Brehm. It’s part of the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair, details here.
Katy Rodriguez designed a capsule collection for Resurrection of short n’ sassy party dresses featuring an abstracted photograph by Wingate Paine. His 1966 book, with text by Federico Fellini and Francoise Sagan, featured sultry shots of beauties in the boudoir: brunettes with bedroom eyes.
"You like them because they are young, they are beautiful, and a trifle mad."
One other work must be noted: a book, “Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,” edited by the show’s curators, and published by the New Museum and Phaidon Press. Artists in the show, and about four hundred and fifty others who didn’t make the cut, each get a page of reproductions and description. All were recommended by an advisory cohort of roughly a hundred and fifty curators, critics, and artists from around the world. Phone-book bulky, the tome is an instant memorial to today’s international art network. In coming years, it will likely serve curators, dealers, and collectors as a Sears catalogue of inexorably older-than-Jesus talent. There’s something sickening about the scale of the art-mediating infrastructure that the book represents, advertising more stuff than one might ever get around to looking at, let alone valuing. Out there in the night, while we sleep, incredible quantities of art are being carted around, archived, and so on, because it is somebody’s job to do those things. Can we please not think about that?
–From Peter Schjeldahl’s review in The New Yorker of the New Museum’s show Younger Than Jesus.
If you’re an artist under 33 and you’re not in this book, do you exist? Should you exist?
When I’ve posted this I’ll go & have a Turkish bath & stupefy my nerves in sweaty duration. My person is developing dirty habits.
The editors’ footnote to this letter of 1931 is hygienically exact: “At this time, Trinity College Dublin did not have bathing facilities; the Turkish bath on Lincoln Place and another on Leinster Street were the two nearest to TCD.” That is good to know, but, still, where does “my person” end and the business of writing begin? Should we adhere to a Cartesian division of the two, or is it not more honest to admit that the making of literature, at the nib’s end, is not so much a noble calling as one of the “dirty habits” to which an author is compelled, no more or less mysterious than the call of the bathroom or the temptations of the fridge? When the letter was written, Beckett was twenty-four, in the first stirrings of his creative prose, and about to plunge into “Dream of Fair to Middling Women,” the headlong novel that he completed the following year. Its hero, Belacqua, who reappeared in “More Pricks Than Kicks,” Beckett’s 1934 collection of linked tales, is a fetid fellow: “He sat not looking, his head sunk, plucking vaguely at his filthy old trousers.” He is, in short, a precursor of those who populate the books of Beckett’s maturity: the encased, the unwashed, the mendicant, and all those curled up as if against the onset of a kicking. So, yes, maybe that “sweaty duration” of 1931 is of scholarly interest after all.
—Anthony Lane on Beckett’s letters in The New Yorker.
(I’m quite fond of the confluence of person, myth and work.)
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s last unfinished novel, The Pale King, about mindful tedium and the IRS (to be published next year) and a new profile of DFW.
“Amen to that,” says Cindy Greene when I pay compliments to their continued use of recycled materials—she and Johnson Hartig got their start screenprinting Midwestern thrift store finds. “And we shook off the skull.” Formerly their signature image, which spawned many imitators high and low.
Recycling ideas or eras is tricky business, and fashion designers do it a lot. (This season, the ’80s. Groan. Strawberry, Forever 21, H&M, Rainbow…I could go on and on about the cheapie tweenager stores for whom the ’80s has been and continues to be a staple. But hey, if you want to give $1200 to Marc Jacobs to do it for you, be my guest!) But to make use of actual recycled goods—this should be the real future in fashion.
At Libertine, the future meets the past, like rummagers sorting through a dump in the English countryside and applying their pictographic language. Books are something you wear, not read. Also aptly timed: This Italo Calvino short story in the New Yorker this week.
Life: an excuse for an anecdote. Thinking of anecdotes as accessories, carried in a book strap. The title tells you everything you need to know and conveys the essential point. Good title: leaves you wanting more. Bad title: the book stays closed.
Could we walk around with typed pages of conversations on our straps? Or maybe just a calling card: “Here is what I’m about.” A real time saver. Like anecdotes. Just the funny or interesting bits. None of the filler. Andy Warhol would have been a totally different kind of filmmaker if he’d used a filter.
Simon Doonan, the fashion industry’s cheekiest personality and disher of irreverent witticisms and style tips for those looking to unleash their inner Little Edie, launched his latest tome, Eccentric Glamour, at Barneys New York last night. First in line for a signing by the author, his copy fresh from Amazon? Mr. John Waters, who’s responsible for creating some pretty deliciously eccentric universes himself. Here, Waters talks to The Nunu about Botox, eccentric glamour, and why Paris is so damn fashionable.
You and Simon Doonan definitely have a similar sensibility. What I’m getting from his new book is that it is really anti-fake boobs and Botox and this tabloid idea of glamour. What’s your take on eccentric glamour?
Well, I played the Grim Reaper on television. If I had gotten Botox, I would have never have gotten the part! I’d be afraid. Even when I see people who have had really good facelifts, they still look like somebody else. That’s my fear - not looking like a freak. But what’s the point of looking like a younger you if you look somebody else? Have you seen Connie Francis’ facelift?
No….
It is the most amazing of all.
In what sense, because it looks so bad?
Well, I don’t want to say that. But it is an extreme look! It is science fiction. Maybe she wanted that. Who’s sorry now? I don’t know. But it is quite a picture. It was in the Globe this week.
Maybe that’s the future, people doing really radical surgeries.
Well in L.A., they all look like that.
Maybe that, in a way, is just another type of eccentricity. Though I guess it’s not very glamorous.
Those people with the really extreme facials, they don’t look old, they just look frightening. They don’t look young. I don’t know. It’s really just a dumb thing for actors to do, though, because unless you’re making a movie about an insane movie star, what can they play?
What does eccentric glamour mean to you?
Eccentric glamour is effortless. It’s just an inner fashion sense that has nothing to do with money. It’s when you’ve just found your look. It can be a band-aid, it can be a rag. It’s a signature look that somebody effortlessly put together that’s singularly them and that other people copy. That’s eccentric glamour. You can’t plan to be it, you just have to have it.
Your moustache would be a good example.
Well, I didn’t say that, you did, but I’ve had it since I was 19. In Baltimore, everybody finds a good look and sticks with it. And New York is like Paris, everybody has a style here, everybody has a look. They’re skinny, and wearing black. That’s a good look, always. Too much eye makeup, too thin.
It’s hard to argue with that.
And good shoes.
I feel like New York is becoming a little bland these days.
Everywhere is today. But in fashion, I don’t think it is. In Paris, everyone looks great.
Paris is a great city for fashion inspiration.
Everybody looks good there. Even charwomen have flair.
[Photo by Ryan Saylor]
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