Peter Hujar’s photographic subjects were not specimens of American male perfection; his nude figures were idiosyncratic yet erotic. In one of his signature nude studies, Bruce de Ste. Croix (1976), the subject is seated in a chair, contemplating his erection. This portrait represents Hujar’s conscious attempt to reintroduce male genitalia into Western art, and he was taking it a step further: the erection had never before been photographed with such aesthetic regard.
Books
The B&N Podcast: Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Perhaps no social movement of the 21st century has had the impact of Black Lives Matter. Born as an online outcry in 2013, it became a fully-fledged vehicle for nationwide protests that have called for for criminal justice reform and a reckoning with racism’s continuing force. In this episode, authors and activists Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele join Miwa Messer in the studio to talk about their stirring new book When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.
From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.
See more books by Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
See more books by asha bandele.
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Image of Patrisse Khan-Cullors (c) Curtis Moore.
Image of asha bandele (c) Michael Hnatov.
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The Guilty Soul of Pope Francis
As a bishop in Argentina, Francis was opposed to the country’s military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, but he maintained a public silence on the terrors of the regime. Later, there were claims that he had collaborated with the military junta. Although the justice system investigated and found no evidence against him, those charges resurfaced once Francis was anointed as pope. The Vatican fervently dismissed the accusations as “slander—the very word that Francis just used to defend Bishop Barros from accusations of protecting a child-abusing priest.
Gus Bofa’s Low-Life Art
Gus Bofa’s drawings suggest the existential darkness that overtook a Europe defaced by war and modernization. The illustrations he made for Mac Orlan’s moody novel of espionage Mademoiselle Bambù—of spies, prostitutes, sailors, and drifters—compliment the tale of a web of interconnected characters as they circulated around Europe’s port cities, a depiction of the dark unease of the early twentieth century. Bofa’s contributions appear in rough black and white, sketch-like, as if somehow disappearing into themselves. In these drawings, his style is dark, almost resembling the aesthetics of film noir, though at times it is also goofy or playful.
The Transition
As windows into the anxieties of modern living go, few are quite as clarifying as trip to a newsstand. Magazine cover lines blast a consistent message of encouragement and promise, varying the theme depending on whether the magazine is targeted at women (“20 ways to drive him wild in bed!”), men (“killer abs in 10 days!”), investors (“the next tech companies set to soar!”), or just a self-aware human (“scientifically proven steps for mindfulness!”). The lines are engineered to make you to open your wallet for the magazine and whatever it’s shilling inside, and I trust I’m not alone in habitually reversing their sentiments to expose how they judge you: you’re not having sex right, you’re out of shape, you’re bad with money, you lack calm, you lack, you lack, you lack.
Karl, the middle-class British suburbanite at the center of Luke Kennard’s debut novel, The Transition, embodies the anxiety and entrapment of everyday capitalism, the way you can be a critic of commercialism’s abuses even while you can’t help being one of its victims. Karl is on the verge of a prison term for being a mostly (but not entirely) unwitting accessory to an online money-skimming operation, and badly overextended financially, maxing out even the “one beautiful, transparent credit card which shimmered like a puddle of petrol.” He has one last-ditch option, his accountant friend informs him: The Transition, a public-private outfit of vague origins that promises a path out for Karl and his schoolteacher wife, Genevieve, so long as they sign on to be mentored — practically drill-sergeanted — into getting with the program of being an effective consumer-investor widget.
Those mentors, the couple Stu and Janna, are the kind of hyper-confident, go-get-’em capitalist achievers that have been the target of many a corporate satire in the past twenty years. Stu has interesting hair and a fearsome workout regimen; Janna is a straight talker who blunts her candor with Karl by also appearing to be sexually available. A wall in their home has a poster that parodies the British stick-to-it-ive-ness of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” transforming it into a Nike swoosh: “Get Things Done.” But their dynamism is seductive to Genevieve, who has a history of anxiety, dislikes her job, and feels a dose of “economic house arrest” couldn’t hurt, if all it involves is keeping a diary on the tablets they’re given. And giving some of their earnings to the Transition. And weaning herself off drugs, which Janna says are harmful. And . . .
You get the idea — the Transition is a malevolent force in debt-refi clothing. And though Kennard is wise enough to know that we, like Karl, are skeptical of the scheme from the start, he ably spaces out the increasingly troubling revelations about the Transition across the novel. A hefty manual of dark, gnomic parables has the air of the cultic, while Stu and Janna’s pronouncements about pharmacological cleansing and separation from mainstream society have a strong whiff of Scientology; Karl’s discovery of a resistance to the Transition, via a message scraped in tiny letters on his Transition-provided bed, is torn clean from the “don’t let the bastards grind you down” samizdat in The Handmaid’s Tale. Karl’s investigations ultimately lead him to an occult novel that suggests just how rapaciously the Transition behaves. It is, creepily, getting things done.
Kennard presents Karl’s enlightenment (and horror) as a kind of intellectual thriller — can our hero save his life and save his marriage and find a meaningful path to a comfortable middle-class existence? That’s a pleasure in itself, though The Transition also reflects an anxiety similar to Karl’s — the problem of how to effectively braid a thriller and a social novel. The Transition itself is unquestionably a menace, but Kennard is strenuously avoiding the more stormclouded rhetoric of dystopian novels like 1984 or even The Handmaid’s Tale, which means he only glancingly considers the social structures that prompt the scheme’s existence in the first place. Little is made, for example, of the fact that Karl’s post-arrest career — writing positive reviews of products he hasn’t used and ghostwriting term papers — is soaked in immorality. Karl is designed to be a recognizable Everyman, with a deep store of sarcastic remarks and indie-rock T-shirts, but he’s a harder sell as the slacker leader of a resistance — his complaints have more to do with how he’s personally affected than how millions are. The sole character who seems to point to a deeper rot is the accountant who suggested the Transition in the first place, and who’s prone to ugly Mephistophelean diktats: “Institutions have their flaws, Karl, but ultimately they’re just tools and structures. There’s no right or wrong, there’s no morality whatsoever; it’s irrelevant.”
Believing in that ugly sentiment, Kennard suggests, is the oxygen that the Transition needs to breathe. But though the shame in that rightly belongs to the kind of political and commercial interests that would create something like the Transition, we don’t get a clear sense of what those interests look like. Instead, we mainly see how it trickles down, the kind of self-blame that it produces: “A generation who had benefited from unrivalled educational opportunities and decades of peacetime, who nonetheless seemed determined to self-destruct through petty crime, alcohol abuse and financial incompetence; a generation who didn’t vote; who had given up on making any kind of contribution to society and blamed anyone but themselves for it.”
Kennard’s not wrong there; humans do have their flaws. But so do institutions. The best dystopian novels recognize both.
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Facebook’s Fake News Fix
There is no way to know, yet, if outsourcing discernment—if that’s what polling a random collection of two billion people is—will cut down on the amount of propaganda, lying, and deception on Facebook, or if such a survey will simply replicate existing ideological divisions. But it is also unclear where the more than 50 percent of Facebook users who get their news from the site will get it now, if anywhere, since there will be so much less of it. And maybe that is the point. This diminution of news might be a way for Facebook to walk away from the public sphere—or, at least, appear to walk away—at a time when it has been taken to task for its overweening influence there.
The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master
What really triggered the sensation over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero, was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov. It was this elite Kremlin adviser, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging.
The Horror, the Horror
On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved the sentences of 346 prominent people, including the dramaturge Vsevolod Meyerhold, the former NKVD (secret police) chief Nikolai Yezhov, and the writer Isaac Babel. All were shot. Babel had been arrested on May 15, 1939, in the middle of the night, and, the story goes, he remarked to an NKVD officer: “So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?” Grim wit was Babel’s trademark.
Female Trouble
The title of Hillary Clinton’s memoir of her unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, What Happened, has no question mark at the end, although many people around the world might reflexively add one. Clinton’s defeat surprised—stunned—many, including, as is clear from her recollections, Clinton herself. The majority of polls of the likely electorate indicated that she was headed for a nearly certain win, although her prolonged struggle for the Democratic nomination against a wild-haired, septuagenarian socialist from Vermont was a blinking sign of danger ahead. A significant number of voters were in no mood to play it safe, and the safe choice was what Clinton far too confidently offered in both the primaries and the general election.
Fragonard’s Merry Company
In Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “fantasy portraits,” his congenial sitters are caught mid-stream in a range of pleasurable, intimate activities. The spontaneity and speed of his performance are palpable: hues are blended wet on wet; brush strokes retain their traces; the tip of his brush inscribes zig-zag scribbles deep into the impasto of ruffs, collerettes, and sleeves.
Sig Nordal 