Spring 2012:
Fashion
Guest Editor: Wendy Bourgeois
Donna Hathaway on perfume, Lisa Ekman on garters, Rachel Greben on Cindy Sherman, and Sandra Derrick on wearing black in Azerbaijan.
Alex Behr on Savage Beauty. Benjamin Craig on nerd chic in the NBA. Daneen Bergland on dressing a child.
Plus: Invulnerability at The Whitney Biennial, new poems, further thoughts on Rothko, and assorted other items.
Propeller is a quarterly lit, art, film, and culture magazine.
"She had never owned anything so frivolous, so fashion forward, and though her mother saw no sense in it, Dorothy made it her mission to earn enough to buy those shoes. Now, more than seventy years later, she still has them." By Chelsea Bieker.
"The four models--Polina, Katerina, Lyza, and Uliana--had their limbs and torsos and extremities painted with white acrylic paint. In some photos you can see the paint worn off, as if the skin were sanded. These women were dressed and posed. Then they vanished." By Alex Behr, with Jennifer Stady.
Late Night Library's programs include podcasts about debut titles, podcast conversations with cultural innovators, and events that connect diverse literary communities. In their latest conversation, Karen Munro asks Roxane Gay whether print publications are less likely than online journals to publish emerging writers. Roxane wisely points out, "I think they are open to [publishing new writers], but I also think there are economic realities that they have to deal with that online magazines don't. When you're putting together a magazine that probably costs $10,000 or $15,000 to produce, you need some known quantities."
"French women were wearing scarves. They wore other things, too--deceptively simple things like tunics and tailored shirts, as well as very complicated things covered in unnecessary zippers--but nothing fascinated or perplexed us more than l'escharpe." By Alexis Nelson.
"Sherman's work is undeniably demanding. It is enticing, repulsive, funny, and horrible, but also, it is democratic." By Rachel Greben.
Famed beauty, veteran of scandals, lover of kings and knaves: Lola Montez offers advice on readers' pressing fashion quandaries.
"I realized while moving through the Whitney that I'm quite drawn to investigations of process, documentations of transitional states, or examinations of change--and these kinds of pieces are present throughout this Biennial--when they also carry the vulnerability and risk of delivery in a finished state." By Dan DeWeese.
"What I can't admit to her is that I don't have any fashion credentials. My rules have veered from 'Do whatever Molly Ringwald is doing' to 'Wear what's comfortable and doesn't smell bad.'" By Daneen Bergland.
"When I was a child I would look at the magazine ads for a scent called Vent Vert featuring artistic renderings of women with windblown hair of vivid green and wish fervently that I could smell this apparently magical liquid. Once I was earning my own money, I discovered the wonders of fragrance and never looked back." By Donna Hathaway.
"For me, a big part of growing up has been figuring out that I can change the story. I might see myself as the girl who can't put together an outfit, but I don't actually have to be her. Though if I really wasn't going to be her, I needed to find a garter belt." By Lisa Ekman.
"It felt good to let go, and over the course of the 552 illustrations I went from being terrified of even touching a paint brush, because of how loosely one had to let the lines and colors flow from it, to being almost addicted to that level of freedom. I never had this with pen and ink." Matt Kish on creating Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page.
"We don't really know what is possible in a narrative poem until we try it. Can I say I'm trying to write an experimental-narrative poem? I'm trying to write an experimental-experimental poem? Even experimental poems start having conventions." Janine Oshiro on the Kundiman Poetry Prize, her book Pier, and creating her own givens.
"In this other realm, everything was red and black, so he dressed like that so they could always find him. He also made movies that only existed in that realm, and he made drawings about the movies. He was starting a bus line in another dimension called Red Hound. You could ride on these luxurious buses that were all red and watch his movies." Christine Shields chats about filmmaker George Kuchar, the San Francisco art world, and painting "Red Man."
"The Marchers," "First Responder," "Good Form," "Trisomic Dialogue," and "Love Song for Another Boy."
"Accounts," "Crunch Time," "Push Comes to Shove," and "Universal Amsterdam."
"We believe, deep down, that images we find important belong to us in some way, and that we know how these images should be presented. We believe that because we care about them, we must also know how to care for them." By Dan DeWeese.
Results will be updated. Culture is not actually an elimination tournament. Betting is discouraged, though tolerated.
"Because we can't see the reality in which we live--we simply don't know if the person we pass in the hall each day is the next great author or simply an office clerk--we fabricate a world in which we imagine a reality we can see. The mythologizing of place is a distancing act that opens an imaginative space: a spectacle of reality, like a world created on a stage." Sarah Kruse on Evan Hughes's Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life.
"The characters in Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories are not, as in many contemporary stories, so wounded as to be abject, so flawed that they hover above the invisible line dividing farce and its opposite." Review by Mary Rechner.
"The travel scenes, racing back and forth like Rick Steves on speed, ultimately serve to show how these relationships mask, heal, or exacerbate Pam's childhood wounds." Review by Rachel Greben.
"In What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander eschews certainty in favor of the whole bewildering strata of contemporary Jewishness." Review by Wendy Bourgeois.
"In his first published collection, Orientation and Other Stories, Daniel Orozco grabs you by the collar with his startling humor, surprising plot turns, and remarkable variety of characters." Review by Brian Rozendal.
"By skipping over the most painful part of Bit's growth from child to adult, Groff avoids the cliches of the bildungsroman and directs the reader instead to study the effects of an intense coming-of-age--in the person of adult Bit--rather than the process." Review by Benjamin Craig.