Felix Kaaya, a member of the Meru people of Tanzania, spent decades searching for his grandfather’s bones. Mangi (“Chief”) Lobulu was among the 19 Indigenous leaders hanged from a single tree on March 2, 1900, during Germany’s brutal suppression of the Meru’s resistance to colonization of East Africa. After that, his body disappeared.
Kaaya, who is now in his early 70s, suspected that Lobulu was one of the many dead African individuals whose remains were shipped to German universities and museums for study and experimentation. Konradin Kunze, a German performer and director, met Kaaya while preparing an exhibition advocating for the return of these remains. Kunze promised to help Kaaya find Lobulu. His research in German archives revealed that Lobulu’s skeleton had indeed been sent to the Berlin anthropologist Felix von Luschan and that Lobulu’s bones were among the 200 skeletons and 5,000 skulls the American Museum of Natural History purchased from von Luschan’s widow in 1924. Lobulu’s remains have spent a century on the Upper West Side.
On the Velvet Underground official bootleg “Live at Max’s Kansas City,” recorded on August 23, 1970, you can, at one point, hear the author and downtown face Jim Carroll, in the audience, asking someone to go fetch him a “double Pernod,” and then interacting with a passing drug dealer. “You got a down?” he says. “What is it? A Tuinal? Gimme it immediately.” That night, the band’s set list included songs called “New Age” and “Beginning to See the Light,” but no one could have mistaken their etiolated din for the sweet harmonies and sweeter optimism of the nineteen-sixties. In this grimy oubliette, sex, drugs, and rock and roll do not herald the dawn of some airy utopia; the mood is new, and dark. Breakdown. Atomization. Serious narcotics. “Live at Max’s” was recorded by Brigid Berlin, a onetime receptionist for Andy Warhol whose father was the president of the Hearst Corporation. Her Warhol family name was Brigid Polk, granted for her habit of randomly poking people with an amphetamine-filled syringe.
That mingling of high and low society, penthouse and pavement, was a distinguishing mark of the surrounding scene, where there was a self-conscious glorying in things sleazy. “Scum” and “punk” were terms of approbation. Values upended, à la Genet: what straight society considers irredeemably low, raised on high. People disporting themselves like minor French nobility in the Versailles of Louis XVI, against a backdrop of shooting galleries and cruising strips. In the summer of 1970, the ambisexual look and sybaritic morals of this particular underground were set to go mainstream, to be hailed as something called glam rock. And Lou Reed was its ambiguous sovereign.
“It all began with writing,” goes the first line of Adam Thirlwell’s latest novel, in which a young socialite named Celine is slandered in pornographic, anonymously authored pamphlets circulating in prerevolutionary Paris. Four pages later, Thirlwell clears his throat — actually, Celine’s publicity troubles go back to the Big Bang: “The universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order, portions of existence that tend toward a form, in which it might be possible to discern a design — and one of these was this story of Celine and her friends.” This could have gone without saying, but Thirlwell can’t help himself. In “The Future Future,” the English writer compulsively gestures to the biggest picture and decides it’s the gesture that’s profound.
Christine Coulson, who spent 25 years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written a short, clever novel that tells the story of a woman over the course of her life in a series of museum wall labels. In doing so, she acknowledges a sad but undeniable truth — that for much of the 20th century and perhaps even today, a certain kind of wealthy, white socialite in America was nothing more than an object to be critiqued, described, evaluated and displayed.
It’s hard to write about food, for more than a page or two, without folding in comparisons and allusions to another form of carnal knowledge. Food and sex: their techniques and variety borrow from the same stock of language. What we eat is as revealing as what we do in bed, and as we grow older, food is sexual compensation.
Dunlop’s descriptions explore this intertwining. The dark leaves on a stalk of Chinese broccoli are as “sleek and languid as a mermaid’s hair.” Chefs in Shanxi are adept at “thumbing, extruding, pinching, dripping, tearing, pulling, rubbing” their noodles. Menus aimed at Western customers, with their too-obvious dishes, resemble “a row of cabaret girls showing off their legs.” Textural descriptions in Chinese cookbooks remind Dunlop of scenes from “Fanny Hill,” the classic erotic novel. A simple breakfast stew is “pimped with chile and pickles.” If I had a nickel for every time Dunlop used the words “smitten” or “besotted,” I would absolutely be able to buy 40 minutes of small-town parking.
If you had met the poet Michael Field walking in London in the late 1880s, you might have been surprised to learn that the new literary celebrity dazzling critics with his “Elizabethan Method” was not a brilliant young man, but two women: aunt and niece. Before Robert Browning let the secret slip, you might have strolled past Michael Field and never known. But the women might have noticed you and returned home to write about you in Michael Field’s diary.
In Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2022), scholar Carolyn Dever pulls that diary out of a century of obscurity and unfurls 30 years and almost 10,000 pages to reveal a genre-defying, protomodernist document.