Manzotti: There is no such a thing as a thought that lies between your body and the Coliseum, or the photo you saw of it, or the article you read about it, no need for some sort of immaterial thinking magic to connect your actions with the external world. Simply, there is your body and there is the external thing your body has been in contact with. Of course, there’s also a lot of neural machinery that allows the world to produce effects through the body, but the experiences we call thoughts are no more, no less, than the external object as it affects the body. Let’s try an experiment. Think of something, right now. Anything.
Books
Ku Klux Klambakes
Most of us who grow up in the United States learn a reassuring narrative of ever-expanding tolerance. Yes, the country’s birth was tainted with the original sin of slavery, but Lincoln freed the slaves, the Supreme Court desegregated schools, and we finally elected a black president. The Founding Fathers may have all been men, but in their wisdom they created a constitution that would later allow women to gain the vote. And now the legal definition of marriage has broadened to include gays and lesbians. We are, it appears, an increasingly inclusive nation. But a parallel, much darker river runs through American history.
Hart Crane’s View From the Bridge
Walker Evans’s photographs of Brooklyn Bridge emphasized the lyric intimacy at the core of Hart Crane’s work by inviting the reader to look closely at the bridge from unconventional points of view. In one photograph, taken directly underneath the bridge, Evans’s lens, pointed up, turns the horizontal structure into a thrusting vertical funnel, soaring and expanding out of the frame. In another image, with the camera pointed down this time from a position somewhere midway on the span, the bridge doesn’t appear at all, just the shipping in the river below it, as if we were seeing what only the bridge sees. Evans’s photographs transfigured Brooklyn Bridge into abstract form that almost functions independently of subject matter.
Outing the Inside
In her long life, Louise Bourgeois experienced both extremes of the female artist story—marginalization, even invisibility early on, and decades later a fierce and passionate following by younger artists and curators. Her status was based on an independence from fashion, and on calling attention to emotions that most people prefer to keep hidden: shame, disgust, fear of abandonment, jealousy, anger. Occasionally, joy or wonder would surface, like a break in the clouds. But Bourgeois was an artist, not a therapist. Her imagination was tied to forms, and how to make them expressive. Her gift was to represent inchoate and hard-to-grasp feelings in ways that seem direct and unfiltered.
Trump and Havana’s Hard-liners
Trump is right: the Cuban military does exploit and abuse its people. The problem is that Cuba is governed by a military regime, which has a hand in virtually every aspect of the country’s economy, from hotels to farms to rental car companies. Cuba’s private sector, while entrepreneurial and growing, is minuscule by comparison. So not engaging with the Cuban military means barely doing business at all. But as the last fifty years have demonstrated, a US embargo will not starve the Cuban military into submission.
Anni Albers: Picking Up the Thread
What strikes you as you enter the Guggenheim show is: Why on earth should she have been forgotten at all? One of the first pieces is also one of Albers’s earliest, a design for a wall hanging executed in 1926, while she was still a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar. She had arrived feeling “a tangle of hopelessness” and taken a textile class, grudgingly, because it was the only one on offer to her as a female student. Despite the poor tuition, she quickly realized that she had found her métier. The design is only thirteen-and-a-half inches high, in pencil and gouache: a rectilinear, Mondrian-like puzzle of yellow, black, and blue stripes and blocks, enforced by the weaving style Albers selected. Woven into a silk, rayon, and linen hanging by her Bauhaus colleague Gunta Stölzl, forty-one years later, it still looks immaculately contemporary. From the “tangle,” she had found shape and line.
Big Money Rules
Two recent books—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time—seek to explain several puzzling aspects of American politics today. Why do people of modest means who depend on government-funded health care and Social Security or other supplements to their income continue to vote for candidates who promise to privatize or get rid of those very programs? Why do people who are poor vote for politicians who promise to cut corporate taxes?
Sylvia Plath’s Different Shades
Brunette Sylvia was certainly the way Plath felt a serious woman writer should present herself. In any case, a representation of Plath is still a blank slate on which readers, curators, observers, and fans project their views of her and their assumptions about the proper portrait of the young female artist. Plath anticipated that she would become famous for her sexuality and her suffering, as well as for her poetry. In “Lady Lazarus,” she speaks in the voice of a terrifying alter ego, a suicide survivor and femme fatale who rises from the ashes with her red hair and eats men like air. Lady Lazarus angrily warns the voyeuristic spectators that they must pay to see her.
Michael Flynn and the Turkish Connection
Flynn faces possible fraud and money-laundering charges for failing to disclose a payment of $530,000 from the Turkish government. Flynn could also face conspiracy and kidnapping charges for allegedly negotiating a payment of $15 million to deliver to Turkey Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric and political foe of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. If indicted on these charges, Flynn could end up in jail for a long time. But knowing there is a potential presidential pardon in the works could dissuade Flynn from telling the truth as a cooperating witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Let Them Buy Cake
When David Mullins and Charlie Craig walked into Masterpiece Cakeshop, a bakery in Denver, Colorado, five years ago, they had no inkling that the encounter would take them to the United States Supreme Court. All they wanted was a wedding cake.
Sig Nordal 