Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 359

Face Of The Day

Freya Jobbins creates sculptures our of discarded toy parts:

The Johannesberg-born artist takes her inspiration from an ecletic range of sources including the Toy Story trilogy, controversial anatomist Gunther Von Hagen, Guiseppe Archimboldo and his fruit and vegetable paintings, and various other artists. Her creations are also inspired by a keen interest in Greek mythology. Freya takes miscellaneous parts of discarded dolls and toys to create the bizarre faces, heads and busts. Each piece of plastic is painstakingly carved and glued layer over layer to add depth to each sculpture.

As well as her plastic sculptures, Freya, who moved to Australia at the age of nine and grew up in Sydney, also makes prints. She said: ‘The plastic toy assemblages, disturbing to some, I see as my humorous side and my printmaking is what I consider more my voice.’

(Photo by Freya Jobbins. Hat tip: Colossal)

A Poet’s Love For Death

Diane Mehta praises the “death poems” of Stevie Smith, noting, “Any longing that might have gone to a man Smith instead projects onto death”:

If you’re a thinking, feeling poet, you’re going to wonder what the meaning of life is, and it might depress you a little. And if, like Smith, you start off with a religious feeling and then discard it, even if you keep the spiritual dialogue up—which she did, as a practicing Anglican—you’re going to run into some sort of spiritual chasm. (It was the same for Eliot and Auden, though they chose salvation while Smith, disillusioned, was deeply ambivalent about the existence of the afterlife.) On top of that, if you give up romantic intimacy and become an old maid, well, your longing will need to deposit itself somewhere over the course of a lifetime. So Smith longs for death. “Tender Only to One,” a kind of love letter, says it straight:

Tender only to one,

Last petal’s latest breath

Cries out aloud

From the icy shroud

His name, his name is Death.

Centuries ago, “loving” death by way of exploration and religious feeling was much more in style. In a 1957 letter to Anna Kallin, a colleague at the BBC Radio, Smith explained that she was including a lecture, “The Necessity of Not Believing,” in which she showed how she was religious when young, then wasn’t at all, and then became “conscientiously anti-religious” because it was immoral to believe. Her description of the lecture is a sound description of Smith herself: “It is not at all whimsical, as some asses seem to think I am, but serious, yet not aggressive, & fairly cheerful though with melancholy patches.”

Mental Health Break

The end of the affair:

Speed Reads

Julie Bosman reports (NYT) that book publishers are now “encouraging a kind of binge reading, releasing new works by a single author at an accelerated pace”:

The practice of spacing an author’s books at least one year apart is gradually being discarded as publishers appeal to the same “must-know-now” impulse that drives binge viewing of shows like “House of Cards” and “Breaking Bad.”

Michelle Dean hopes binge-reading isn’t the new binge-watching:

The kind of trance that reading induces is qualitatively different from the experience of sitting down and watching 12 hours of television. This is true even if the television is really good, I think. It just uses a different part of your brain.

I’m aware that in a way I’m just quibbling with a label, with marketing, by saying I don’t think that “binge reading” is silly. But I just really, really don’t think this is a viable business model for imaginative work. Practically speaking, writing a “binge read” would mean writing entire epics on spec, all at once, before selling them. It also means that the slow accumulation of fans that something like Game of Thrones enjoyed would be a thing of the past. I don’t know: there’s just something about this whole idea that strikes me as the product of an industry feeling like the culture is accelerating away from it.

Gracy Olmstead considers the implications for libraries:

This scheme is an interesting study in venues and audiences. While Netflix may inspire the development, a book is different from a TV series, and a library different from an instant-watch website. With the caveat that writers’ style and quality should not suffer (due to the pressure of speed), it’s not a bad thing to release books in quick succession. It seems a wise and marketable scheme. But while all-at-once rollout may foster book buys, it may favor online sales over library or bookstore visits. If you want to buy the next book in your teen vampire series, will you wait for your local library to buy the latest copy—or will you grab the Kindle edition from Amazon? Netflix has drawn audiences away from the traditional television by offering endless hours of entertainment without the hassle. An onslaught of binge-targeted titles may have a similar effect on libraries.

An Obit In Kansas

A reader alerted me to it, in the wake of the Kansas House of Representatives passing a law that would allow widespread discrimination against any gay or straight people who could even faintly be connected to a wedding or even commitment ceremony. The obit is for a pillar of the local community:

Bruce G. “Butch” Neis was born March 15, 1953 in Lawrence, KS the son of Samuel G. Jr. and Elizabeth Kindig Neis. He was a farmer, a welder and owned Bruce Neis Trucking. He was a lifetime member of the Eudora Township Volunteer Fire Department. He also was a member of Eudora Emergency Medical Services for 22 years and a 14-year sponsor of the All-Night After Prom Party at Eudora High School.

Among his survivors are

two sons; Richard B. Neis (spouse Carrie) of Eudora, KS, Aaron M. Neis (partner, Thaddeus Winter) of Honolulu, HI … and two brothers; Samuel D. Neis (spouse Bill Spinney) New Bedford, MA, Russell D. Neis (spouse Tina) …

My italics.

You know why the Christianists will lose? Because they are insisting that a man like Neis disown his partnered gay son and his married gay brother. Happily the far right does not seem to have succeeded in tearing this particular family apart.

So Close …

Here’s the latest data, as of this morning, for Dish revenue since our independence over a year ago:

You’ll remember that we managed to beat January 2013′s total last month. And we’re at the very brink of equaling all of February 2103′s by the end of today. The total last February was $105,500. As of this writing, we’re at $104,800 on February 15. Can we beat last February in almost half the time? Help us get there. Subscribe here.

By the way, the total number of auto-renewing subscribers is now 26,070. There’s no other online-only journalism site with that kind of subscriber base. We really are building the future of the web – without pageview whoring, sponsored content, auto-playing videos, pop-ups, slide-shows and corporate propaganda. If you value all that white space, and a time each weekend for less frenzied cultural and intellectual coverage each weekend, then help us make this model truly lead the way for others.

Subscribe here. Under $2 a month or more if you love us. Update from a subscriber:

I just got a friend a year of the Dish for her birthday tomorrow. I had to search the “gift the dish” page though. That shit should be a “keeper” on the right side of the page, no?

It’s actually right there in the sidebar, in cartoon form between our Keeper Archive and our Recent Threads. But the gifting link is here for quick access. Update from another subscriber:

Sorry it took me so long to renew, but life has gotten in the way recently with a death in the family andit’s been hard to make time for the little things. I chipped in forty bucks this go ’round, an arbitrary number that I could probably explain by saying that I’ve paid that much before for dead-tree magazine subscriptions, ones that don’t give me a full magazine’s worth of reading EVERY GODDAMN DAY.

Regardless of what’s going on in life, and in fact often specifically because of what is going on in life, Ialways, always make time for The Dish. There are few things that I consistently derive as much pleasure and interest from as this blog. Y’all have a good thing going here and you managed to cycle through your first year as a free agent without screwing it up. If anything y’all keep getting better.

On Saturdays I eagerly await my Window View contest and on Tuesdays I look forward to the reveal. On any given day my wife and I cull a topic for discussion. The running threads are wonderful and well-curated. Through the years you’ve posted some of my emails (and thankfully ignored some of the shitty ones), and I feel this is a truly unique community with the best moderated dialogue on these here Internets. And there’s an ever-creeping dose of sports now! Last week you even posted my wife’s VFYW pic. In a word, neato.

Thanks again for all you and your team do. I’m happy to stay onboard and love knowing that on any given day I get to help steer this fucker.

Now do make some t-shirts.

Stay tuned.

The Photography Of Ghost Towns

Sean O’Hagan wonders why we’re drawn to images of abandoned places:

[T]here are the images of cities or entire landscapes that have been deserted and left desolate, whether swaths of downtown Detroit or the modern ghost towns that border Chernobyl following the nuclear accident of 1986. In the former, the broader arc of history and commerce is suggested, not just in the decline of a great city, but possibly of a country, an empire. In the latter, our fear of nuclear disaster, and its apocalyptic aftermath, is summoned. Here, too, the precedents are fictional, but they tend to be darker, from the metaphysical chill of TS Eliot‘s epic poem The Waste Land to post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels, most notably the dystopian and oddly prescient stories of JG Ballard or, more recently, Cormac McCarthy‘s unremittingly bleak survival novel, The Road. …

Herein perhaps lies something of the true nature of our fascination with abandoned places: they allow us to look at, even surround ourselves, with the traces of decay and desolation, without actually experiencing the human cost. That there are no people in these photographs is, of course, part of their haunting power, their melancholic force. For the photographers, this is an aesthetic call.

(Image of the entrance to the zone of alienation around Chernobyl via Wikimedia Commons)

A Short Story For Saturday

The opening paragraph of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols,” published in the May 15, 1948 issue of The New Yorker:

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

Read the rest here. For more, check out The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Explore previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free  gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

The View From Your Window

Kennesaw, Georgia, 8.28 am