Swedish artist Makode Linde performed in his own piece "Painful Cake" at a party for World Art Day at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm on Sunday. With his head stuck through a hole in the table, which bore a giant pastry in the shape of a “black African woman,” he screamed as pieces of the cake were sliced from the groin. Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Lijeroth presided. It is thought that she was supposed to whisper "Your life will be better after this," before making the first incision. The internet has gonewhat Thackeray might call “black in the face” with horror. When someone sasses you, Perfect Party Cakes Made Easy suggests baking them in effigy.
1.
“Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was invited to open the festivities by performing a clitoridectomy on the cake, which she did by slicing off the part of the cake depicting female genitalia. She then proceeded to feed that part of the cake to a performance artist, done up in blackface, his head protruding through the table.”
—Fria Tider, “Shocking Photos Show Swedish Minister of Culture Celebrating with ‘N*g*er Cake,” 17 April, 2012.
2.
“ ‘Marry that Mulatto woman?’ George said, pulling up his shirt collars. ‘I don’t like the colour, sir. Ask the black that sweeps opposite Fleet Market, sir. I’m not going to marry a Hottentot Venus.’ Mr. Osborne pulled frantically at the cord by which he was accustomed to summon the butler when he wanted wine—and almost black in the face, ordered that functionary to call a coach for Captain Osborne.”
—William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1847.
3.
“If your child has a tendency towards cheekiness and you want to get your own back, this cake could well be the answer. Personalise it with your child’s hair colour, perhaps making it longer if it’s to be for a girl. You could also change the blue and white sweater to the colour of their favorite garment.”
—Carol Deacon, “Horrible Child,” Perfect Party Cakes Made Easy: Over 70 Fun-to-Decorate Cakes for All Occasions, 1996.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: The Local
Think your childhood diaries are bad? At least you didn't post them on the Internet.
Though, nothing could be as disastrous as the pairing of Axl Rose and Lana del Rey.
Perhaps in an alternate history, things between them could even make sense.
Then again, Abe Lincoln could've also been a vampire hunter, so who knows?
We might as well live in the present and just attend thought-provoking readings instead.
Just make sure you bring along a correctly sharpened pencil to take notes with.
Don't be caught texting, or you could get a snappy response. Possibly from Madam Secretary?
In short, just behave. Readings can be hard work, so let the readers do their best.
Otherwise, you might as well just go record shopping instead.
On Monday, Ashley Judd, star of Double Indemnity Jeopardy, one of my all time favorites to watch while high and twerking my friend’s mom’s StairMaster™ in high school (see also Backdraft) wrote a searing rebuttal to the various media outlets who have been speculating about the state of her face. Their conclusions ranged the whole of human experience and beyond, from “fat” to “injectable fillers.” Darwin had it that the beautiful face of Nature was packed tightly with sharp wedges, driven inward by incessant blows. This exhausting and precarious situation is probably why we ladies had to rest on easy chairs and suffer what Florence Hartley, in her 1872Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, called "the worst species of debility": fat.
1.
“[T]he recent speculation and accusations…feel different, and my colleagues and friends encouraged me to know what was being said. Consequently, I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.”
—Ashley Judd, open letter, The Daily Beast, April 9, 2012.
2.
“The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another, with greater force.”
—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859.
3.
“‘Yes! We are a self-indulgent race, this present generation. Witness our easily excited feelings; witness our late hours of rising, our sofas and easy chairs, our useless days and dissipated nights! Witness our pallid faces, our forms, sometimes attenuated and repulsive while yet in early life, age marching, not creeping, on before his time; or witness our over-fed and over-expanded forms, enfeebled by indolence, and suffering the worst species of debility—the debility of fat…. "In the education of women," writes a modern physician, "too little attention is given to subdue the imaginative faculty, and to moderate sensibility...we find imagination and sentiment predominant over the reasoning faculties, and laying the foundation of hysterical, hypochondriacal, and even maniacal diseases."’”
—Florence Hartley, “Hints on Health,” a chapter in The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Handbook for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society, 1872.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa
Is there anything more baffling than David Lynch's latest music video?
Perhaps this edible cookbook could give it a run for its money.
Although the sudden legitimacy of fanfiction is further proof that we now live in an alternate universe.
Which is probably driving writers to drink even more, in search of "sudden insights."
If only an inspirational montage was all it took to help said writers pen the next great American novel.
Then maybe they'd find a place on this hallowed literary flowchart.
The authors included in April's must-read list have a pretty good chance at making the cut.
As for the rest of us, it's mostly just a lottery, and we should just keep our fingers crossed.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the defendants in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, holding that “[j]ail strip searches do not require reasonable suspicion, at least so long as the arrestee is being admitted into the general jail population.” Any crime could warrant a strip search, including walking a dog without a leash, or, as in the case of Albert Florence, wrongful arrest for fines already paid. Twice. In part two of a series on exposure, we turn to Derrida’s writings on apocalypse, and consider how the end of the world—at least insofar as the world can be sustained by the moral rectitude of world powers—begins with a forcible denuding.
1.
“The opinions in earlier proceedings, the briefs on file, and some cases of this Court refer to a “strip search.” The term is imprecise. It may refer simply to the instruction to remove clothing while an officer observes from a distance of, say, five feet or more; it may mean a visual inspection from a closer, more uncomfortable distance; it may include directing detainees to shake their heads or to run their hands through their hair to dislodge what might be hidden there; or it may involve instructions to raise arms, to display foot insteps, to expose the back of the ears, to move or spread the buttocks or genital areas, or to cough in a squatting position. In the instant case, the term does not include any touching of unclothed areas by the inspecting officer. There are no allegations that the detainees here were touched in any way as part of the searches.”
—Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court Majority Opinion in Florence v Board of Chosen Freeholders, April 2, 2012.
2.
“…one of the ‘bleus’ ordered her to strip. When she refused, he removed all her clothes himself, and with the aid of one of his accomplices, strapped her down in the dentist’s chair….Djamila was lashed down in the chair, completely naked, while her captors exchanged obscene jokes and drank beer, which they spat over her in mouthfuls till her body was all dripping wet. Then they tried to twist the electrical terminal wires round her nipples, but the wires slipped on her beer-drenched skin, so they fastened them into place with lengths of scotch tape.”
—Gilsèle Halimi with Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion, 1962.
3.
“Apokalupto, I disclose, uncover…I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the genitals or what ever might be hidden, a secret, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that does not show itself or say itself, that perhaps signifies itself but cannot or must not first be handed over to its self-evidence…What seems most remarkable in all the Biblical examples I was able to remember and must forego exposing here is that the gesture of denuding or affording sight—the apocalypticmovement—is more serious here, sometimes more guilty and dangerous than what follows.”
—Jacques Derrida, “Of An Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” 1980.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image: Picasso, sketch of Djamila Boupacha, August 12, 1961.
The Paris Review has released their 200th issue, and they have much to celebrate.
Perhaps St. Martin's press can help them do so with their recent surprise delivery.
Suffice to say, they probably won't go to the movies and watch Michael Chabon's John Carter.
Though Chabon could quell any resulting anxiety with a trip to an MFA writing workshop.
You never know what could be brewing in those; possibly the next One Teen Story?
And if all else fails, you can do some comfort cooking with your favorite vegetables.
Photo of detective with narcotics stash / NYDN, 1951
The plaintive, kazooish earworm that is Megan Draper’s performance of “Zou Bisou Bisou” in the season five premiere of Mad Men has been burrowing into the hive brain for the last two days. AMC even released it as a single on iTunes. What is really enchanting, though, is the see-through sleeves she dons (sorry) in her dance of the seven drapes (really sorry), and the “huge undergarments” in which she concludes her performance of the episode. You may be surprised to know that Immanuel Kant has some ideas about huge undies, while Eve Sedgwick offers us the definitive word on the veil. My Mad Men prediction, if you can’t tell, is that Don will murder Megan. I have a fresh perspective: Sunday’s was the first episode I’ve seen.
1.
Q: Speaking of costumes, tell me about the lingerie you wore in the "house cleaning" scene...
A: It's vintage stuff. It's funny, the scene is so risqué...but it's like the hugest undergarments. I mean, it's quite large. It's not very skimpy.
—Mad Men’s Jessica Paré, aka Megan Draper, is interviewed after the premiere of the show’s fifth season, in which she performs a “light burlesque” version of Gillian Hills’s 1960 hit “Zou Bisou Bisou,” and cleans her apartment.
2.
“…The attributes of the veil, and of the surface generally, are contagious metonymically, by touch, and that a related thematic strain depict veils, like flesh, as suffused or marked with blood…The veil itself, however, is also suffused with sexuality. This is true partly because of the other, apparently opposite set of meanings it hides: the veil that conceals and inhibits sexuality comes by the same gesture to represent it, both as metonym of the thing covered and as a metaphor for the system of prohibitions by which sexual desire is enhanced and specified…Note, though, how much the veil is like the veiled, the flesh that is prized for its ‘dazzling whiteness’ (the phrase occurs formulaically). The flesh, moreover, seems valueless without the veil.”
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil,” an essay about Gothic Literature from 1981.
3.
“The Platonizing philosophy of feelings never exhausts its supply of such figural expressions, which are supposed to make that intimation comprehensible; for example, ‘to approach so near the goddess wisdom that one can perceive the rustle of her garment…since he cannot lift up the veil of Isis, he can nevertheless make it so thin that one can intimate the goddess under this veil.’ Precisely how thin is not said; presumably, just thick enough that one can make the specter into whatever one wants. For otherwise it would be a vision that should definitely be avoided.”
—Immanuel Kant, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” (trans. Peter Fenves), 1796.
Here's the video of Paré's performance: Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre!
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Image via AMC
What with Daisey and D'Agata in the news, do you think the truth is malleable?
David Sedaris seems to agree, though his stint as a Christmas elf seems to be mostly true.
Meanwhile, Toni Morrison finds the truth boring, which is why she is cancelling her memoir.
Maybe Philip Roth can attest to the same thing as he reaches his 80th birthday.
Though Lee Gutkind would pipe in that the truth is important no matter what.
And even more important, possibly, is saving some words from extinction.
Perhaps the punks could turn their political attention to linguistics as well.
Or maybe even Blade Runner could do some literary saving-the-world.
Though it would be interesting what Stalin would have to say, or perhaps his iTunes.
But that's in the past -- and maybe in the past, everything --including the books people read-- was better.
In their Fall 2012 collection, Rodarte designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy used a number of prints drawn from Aboriginal artworks and cultural materials. A representative of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues questioned their ethics—morally and financially—and said she would be “sickened” to see women walking around New York in the clothes. In the rag trade, who owns, has owned, or should own textile and artistic practices? We used to think the cotton plant was a living lamb attached to a stem, who, when it had finished eating all the grass the vicinity of its stalk, would simply perish.
1. "There is a long history of misappropriation of important Aboriginal artworks and cultural material, which has been subsequently used in inappropriate ways…Rodarte did not confirm the licensing of any artwork…until my comments yesterday. Until then, when asked about the inspiration for the collection, they were on the public record as stating that their collection ‘came out of nowhere.’”
–Megan Davis, an indigenous Australian lawyer and representative of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, speaking to Frockwriter last week about fashion label Rodarte’s use of Aboriginal printsin their Fall 2012 collection. The designers have since confirmed that they licensed the work from an artist named Benny Tjangala of the Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd.
2. “…another version of the story was circulated in which the lamb was described…as being a living lamb attached by its navel to a short stem rooted in the earth. The stem, or stalk, on which the lamb was thus suspended above the ground was sufficiently flexible to allow the animal to bend downward, and browze on the herbage within its reach. When all the grass within the length of its tether had been consumed the stem withered and the lamb died. This plant lamb was reported to have bones, blood, and delicate flesh, and to be a favorite food of wolves…”
–Henry Lee, from The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant, To Which is Added a Sketch of the History of Cotton and the Cotton Trade, 1887. The myth he describes came from Western Europeanaccounts of seeing cotton for the first time in Tartary, Scythia, and India.
3. “With the introduction of cotton cloth by Arab caravan traders in the nineteenth century, production slowed and eventually faded out, limiting the use of barkcloth to cultural and spiritual functions….The objectives of the safeguarding project are to: train craftspersons, especially young artisans, in making bark cloth; establish sustainable practices of using the Mituba trees; popularize the making and use of bark cloth; ensure legal protection and income generating activities; and promote recognition of and respect for the cultural value of bark cloth. Training activities [are] to be widely publicized in the mass media …”
—“Barkcloth Making in Uganda,” Inscribed on UNESCO’s representative list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.
Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the lavalamp, gaslight, candlelight, campfire, torch, sometimes even the starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The form of the column strives to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” Each week you will find here some citational constellation, offered with astonishment and without comment, that can serve as an end in itself, dinner party fodder, or an occasion for further thought or writing. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem“If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."
Taking a cue from Buzzfeed's recent list of internet terms, I decided to take a break from deleting my "turklebaum" and think up some new terms to help describe the current literary atmosphere.
Aspbooker n. an obsessive reader. She was such an aspbooker about Harry Potter, it was embarrassing.
Canned adj. a term used to describe books that are popular with or come out of hispter/DIY culture. The second Werner Herzog read Go The Fuck To Sleep it became like uber-canned.
Chicortle v. the gag reflex resulting from an excess of chick lit. I'll totally chicortle if you recommend Jennifer Weiner one more time.
Libro Luddito, El n. any book or magazine being read in paper form; "Un Luddito" is a person who exclusively reads paper. Can you grab el libro luddito before it falls off the couch? My iPad died.
Movel n. a novel one's mom might recommend. Do you want this movel or should I just donate it?
Polybiblymous n. a person who reads using multiple formats. Look at that polybiblymous checking his messages. We could totally mug him.
Straight Veg n. any novel that is or will be considered a classic and that is actually awesome. Anna Karenina is straight veg, but I just don't have the patience for War and Peace (cf. "War'n'Rainbows") .
War'n'Rainbows adj. a person or book trying too hard to impress others. War'n'rainbows also suggests intellectual weariness. That Adam Levin book The Instructions was just too war'n'rainbows for me, and it gave me scoliosis.
What other new phrases might be useful? What should we call housewives who read porn in plain sight? Or the book that isn't out yet but you've already heard so much about you're no longer interested? Feel free to offer your suggestions below. Or just threadjack the comments.
image: wikiality.eikia.com
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