Still astoundingly productive at the age of 91, the Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi has in recent years designed a giant balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, collaborated with Louis Vuitton on a line of clothing, and built an eponymous museum in Tokyo dedicated to her own artistic legacy. At this stage, her relationship to her fans can look more like that of a pop singer than a painter: visitors to her 2019 show at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York waited for hours to get thirty seconds inside her latest Infinity Room, one of a series of mirrored installations, dating to 1965, that has proven to be Instagram catnip. The vibe was zany, celebratory; as homage, some wore Kusama’s signature outfit of a glossy red wig and matching polka dot dress. A mentally ill outsider artist was now the consummate insider.
With the proliferation of communication technology and apps, it’s all too easy to never log off. At The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes frequently about capitalism’s darker influence on our lives, and a new form of self-help book urges us to reorient our attention spans: How to Do Nothing; How to Not Always Be Working; and How to Sit.
Two recent books join this investigation: Lurking, Joanne McNeil’s comprehensive history of the social internet, and Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley, which traces the boom of tech-industry optimism. Reading about these problems, we don’t necessarily learn anything new. We already know that the line between work and life is eroding. What is new—and worrying—is the growing understanding of how thoroughly we have adapted. The conflation of work and leisure is the new millennial reality, and it’s time to start imagining ways we might get out of it.
“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.” It is with this quote from philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that Zaina Arafat opens her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, setting the stage for a story that explores the implications of, and reasons behind, the infinite pursuit of possibility. An unpretentious read, what the novel lacks in richness and layers, it makes up for in accessibility and honesty, steering clear of the stereotypes that so often plague characters from a Middle Eastern background.
Even more than usual during these past few months of confinement, I have been on the lookout for books that will transport readers to another time and place. Icelandic novelist and playwright Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir's atmospheric sixth novel, Miss Iceland, is just the ticket. But be forewarned that another time and place doesn't necessarily mean a rosier time and place. Set mostly in 1963 in the author's native Reykjavík — where the weather is cold, windy, and overcast most of the year — this is a subdued but powerful portrait of rampant sexism and homophobia in a society that had yet to open up to women and gays.
It is in its exploration of Stoker’s shadowland that “Shadowplay” becomes most imaginative. Irving was linked by his role as a Freemason to a secret London-based gang that, according to one popular myth, carried out the hideous murders for which history blames the never-identified Jack the Ripper. In “Shadowplay,” it is Stoker himself who risks arrest as he revisits haunts in which no innocent man would be caught dead or alive. “God knows I should like to stop frequenting such places,” he laments. “But then night falls and I go out, as though looking for someone. Or myself.”
Is O’Connor suggesting that Dracula’s creator himself played a part in the Ripper’s crimes? Throughout this vivid re-creation of one of the most fascinating and neglected episodes in the enticingly murky history of the Gothic novel, the storyteller keeps his reader deliciously in the dark.
On a scrap of paper in the archive is written
I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out
in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher,
is without. We scramble in the drought of information