It’s a Beautiful Day to Be Stuck on a Container Ship, and Other News

The Hanjin Geneva, doing exactly what it can’t do now.

Today in ridiculous situations brought to you by global capital: the artist Rebecca Moss has been stranded at sea, stuck on a container ship owned by a now-bankrupt shipping line; ports around the world have denied the ship because it can no longer pay the docking fees. Moss had boarded the ship for an artists’ residency. She has some good material now: “When I watch back all of the footage I have of the containers being loaded, for example, with the knowledge they are destined for nowhere in particular, it becomes comic, but also such a tragic waste of labor. Whereas before I was trying to tease out an absurdity, now it is hitting me in the face everywhere I look … I change between emotions of amusement to anger and incredulity. It is a dumb situation. The fact that nobody is rushing to buy these containers off of us shows that they cannot be needed that desperately in Asia. In some ways they feel very valuable (surely some contain food?!) but apparently they are worthless. Some of the containers contain animal skins. What did they die for?”

One man has set out to do the impossible: to defend Jonathan Franzen on the internet. In Franzen’s aversion to technology, and in his treatment of women, Charles Finch sees more honesty than the Twitter commentariat have been willing to concede: “It’s a curious paradox that a writer whose signal gift is his almost barometric sensitivity to the emotional drift of our society attracts the most reductive, disconnected responses to both his work and his attempts to explain it. Again and again, over the years, people have called him a sexist … It’s certainly true that the structures of the world favor the type of person he is; it’s also true that many of the women he writes about, from Patty Berglund to Edith Wharton to Purity Tyler, are troublingly disempowered. But of course another place where women are troublingly disempowered is late capitalist society, and inconveniently for Franzen’s feminist critics he has been obsessed with that very fact.”

While we’re all disputatious and shit, here are some defenses of Pevear and Volokhonsky, the translators of Russian lit who took, as you may recall, quite a drubbing from Janet Malcolm in the NYRB over the summer. But the literary world loves a rebuttal: “Not even an acute critic like Janet Malcolm is qualified to pass judgment on a translator’s work if she has no knowledge of the text in its original language. It is one thing to express a preference for the spontaneous and graceful style of Constance Garnett, with those fine short sentences that Hemingway so admired, over the more ponderous renderings of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. However, it is quite another to put up your dukes as Malcolm does … It goes without saying that translation is an impossible task, fraught with pitfalls, and that the result can never be more than an approximation. Personally, as a translator I try to create a window onto the text, as fine and transparent as I can make it. And personally, as a reader I love the translations of Pevear and Volokhonsky because I always sense the presence of the original behind the window.”

Let’s turn our attention to less critical matters. How about dolls? Sure. Dolls. Here’s the story on a provocatively lifelike nineteenth-century Japanese number designed by Hananuma Masakichi: “The legend is that Masakichi completed this particular doll in 1885, when he was desperately in love, but was dying of tuberculosis. He decided to make a lifelike statue in his own image to gift to his beloved so that she might always remember him. As he wasted away, he labored in his studio, surrounded by mirrors so that he could see every part of his body. He forged the statue out of 2,000 pieces of wood, recreating every curve and crevice. He drilled small holes into the doll's skin to act as follicles, then plucked the corresponding hair out of his own body and inserted the strands into the doll. He did this with the hair on his head, but also his eyebrows, body hair and pubic hair. Some rumors say he gave the doll his fingernails. Others claim it was his teeth … Despite his efforts, the woman he loved left Masakichi, possibly because he spent all his free time making this doll.”

Dolls aren’t your thing? Okay. Can I interest you in some glass bricks instead? So chic! So translucent! So démodé! Molly Lambert makes an appealing case for them: “Today glass bricks are most closely associated with the decadence of 1980s architecture, which channeled the elegance and streamlined surfaces of Art Deco—an eighties callback to the retro future imagined in the twenties. Though they are designed to look pristinely high-gloss forever, time and dirt take their toll on most. There’s something kind of sleazy about them and not just because they show up in the background of so many scenes shot in Encino porn houses. You find them in corner bars and mini-malls, reflecting neon or LED light. They’re often installed to replace windows, providing translucency but keeping the outside firmly out. If they once signaled progress, nowadays glass bricks signify an oddly compelling sort of decline.”

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2bXv6m1

TOBI'S DESK