Staff Picks: Mortar, Machine Guns, Manuscript Porn

Marc Yankus, Haughwout Building, 2016

When the paleologist Christopher de Hamel first conceived Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, he wanted to call it Interviews with Manuscripts, but his publisher wouldn’t let it fly. His pitch, eccentric though it may be, was that encountering texts like The Copenhagen Psalter and The Hours of Jeanne de Navarre in their original forms, deep in the bowels of the world’s most esoteric and inaccessible libraries, is not unlike interviewing famous celebrities in their current homes. “The idea of this book, then,” he writes in the introduction, “is to invite the reader to accompany the author on a private journey to see, handle and interview some of the finest illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.” For how seriously De Hamel takes the premise—and he takes it, like, aggressively seriously—Meetings can feel, somewhat hilariously, like big-league manuscript porn: “As you sit in the reading-room of a library turning the pages of some dazzlingly illuminated volume,” he says, “you can sense a certain respect from your fellow students on neighboring tables consulting more modest books or archives.” Each of the book’s twelve studies is meticulously researched, and De Hamel showcases them with such self-evident joy that they’re irresistibly immersive. —Daniel Johnson

We featured a portfolio of the artist Marc Yankus’s “Secret Lives of Buildings” series in our Winter 2014 issue. Last week, Yankus packed the newly relocated ClampArt gallery for his fifth solo show, up through November 26. His new work furthers his obsession with New York’s architecture; once again, Yankus plays with geometry, texture, and ornament, tricking the eye with his masterful and often painterly attention to brick and mortar—obsessively blurring the lines between photography and illustration. Yankus seems to bring out the very best in these buildings, some that we’re so familiar with that we have ceased really seeing them. His work asks us to take a second look—and the images are imbued with optimism and splendor at a time when it’s often difficult to feel uplifted. Yankus has left behind the sandpaper tones and textures from his last body of work, introducing more light through a white-washing effect. The sheer scale of some of the prints gives the impression that you could easily step, like Alice through the looking glass, from the gallery floor into one of Yankus’s deserted streets. —Charlotte Strick 

From the cover of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

A tabloid item about Kristen Stewart (didn’t you hear? She’s dating St. Vincent now) reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to Clouds of Sils Maria, the Olivier Assayas movie she starred in a few years back, opposite Juliette Binoche. On the face of it, the premise is recherché as fuck—Binoche plays an aging actress, and Stewart is her sharp, eager personal assistant; in the resplendent isolation of the Swiss Alps, they begin to run lines for Binoche’s next project, a play whose nervous, percolating eroticism mirrors the tensions in their working relationship. Soon enough, you can’t tell when they’re rehearsing and when they’re “being themselves”; the script’s indignation and injury threaten to rupture into their own lives. It could be an exercise in self-referential wankery (and also maybe a Certified Copy rip-off, right down to Binoche’s casting). But in practice, and in no small part thanks to Stewart’s subtlety, it’s a smoldering, startlingly poignant movie that strikes at the vexing power and oddity of performance. I can’t stop turning it over in my head. —Dan Piepenbring

A still from Clouds of Sils Maria, 2014

When was the last time you made yourself not read a book because you so badly didn't want it to end? It happened to me last month with The Summer Book, Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel-in-stories about a little girl and her grandmother on an island off the Finnish coast. As Nicole wrote in the Daily two years ago, “Its stories are miniatures not just in length but in perspective as well.” The tiny island, the brief summer—which the grandmother knows may be their last—make up an entire world that I hated to leave. —Lorin Stein

I’ve only just started Ishion Hutchinson’s newest collection of poems, Lords and Commons, but I’m already quite taken by it. The book, Hutchinson’s second, offers an arresting lyricism and an unflinching vision of life in Jamaica, his homeland and muse. (Far Districts, his first book, also brought us there.) We’re led—gently, as if by the hand—through the histories, geographies, and stories of the land, where violence reigns over the lush, ravishing landscape. Hutchinson takes us from Duckenfield, where the cane cutters are “thirsty for blood and for rum,” to “the shadowless lion-bluff” of Pigeon Island, to see the “white army of luxury boats,” idle in the bay, waiting “to ignite another plantation.” I’m only about halfway through, but here are a few of the most devastating lines so far, from “The Garden”: “the flags stiffened on the embassy building / but did not fall when the machine guns / flared and reminded that stars were inside / the decrepit towns, in shanty-zinc holes, staring at the fixed constellations … ” —Caitlin Youngquist 

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