Did you see that performance by “artist” David Datuna, who ate a banana taped to the wall at Art Basel in Miami? The banana was part of a work of concept art by another “artist,” Maurizio Cattelan, and it was valued at $120,000. I say was. It still is. Most headlines—why are newspapers covering this?—tell us that a “man ate a $120,000 banana” or that a “man ate a work of art.” Neither is true. He did eat a banana, but—oh, the shtick of concept art—the banana itself was not valued at $120,000. The idea of the banana taped to the wall was valued at $120,000. There’s even a certificate to prove it. My guess is that either Cattelan staged this little publicity stunt or the people who bought the “work of art” did. What better way to make an immediate return on investment?

In other news: Harry Houdini hired several private investigators to expose psychics claiming to commune with the dead. Foremost among them was Rose Mackenberg: “By her count, Mackenberg investigated more than 300 psychics and seers in the two years she worked for Houdini and many more after that. In a career that lasted decades and led her to testify before Congress, she proved to be quick-witted, adept with disguises and unblinkingly skeptical.”

Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street, has died. He was 85.

Kevin Young reviews the selected letters of Ralph Ellison: “His correspondence charts the turning away from socialism and social realism that would produce his novel’s potent surreality. He was not alone in this, of course: a homemade surrealism infuses the folk and blues traditions that Hughes and Hurston mined. ‘I told Langston Hughes in fact, that it’s the blues, but nobody seems to understand what I mean,’ he later writes to a friend about the novel now under way.”

A. N. Wilson reviews David Hall’s “transatlantic history” of the Puritans: “‘Puritan’ is a term of abuse, and we tend to use it to refer to such figures as the nightmarishly moralistic, sour-faced women who force Hester Prynne to be emblazoned with the Scarlet Letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. But David D. Hall, doyen of 17th-century puritanism, goes deeper than this. His history is not so much one of ranters as of honest men and women trying to get right the most fundamental things of all: the human relationship with God, and hence the right way to be living and the right sort of society to be ordering.”

Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep “is a post-apocalyptic novel, with a twist,” John Wilson writes: “Around 2025, we learn, the intricately interconnected global society that you and I today brood about, even as we take it for granted, came crashing down. How? That isn’t made clear. Among the remnant that survived, in Britain at least, a new (old) order emerged, presided over by the Catholic Church. In their new calendar, 2025 becomes 666 (the biblical ‘number of the beast,’ as described in Revelation 13:15–18). So 1468 is just a bit more than 800 years in the future from our present moment. I hear some grumbling in the audience. Another grim post-apocalyptic wallow? No thanks. But Harris isn’t grim.”

An intimate portrait of Stevie Ray Vaughan: “An oral history is only as good as its sources, and Texas Flood is thorough and far-reaching, with Vaughan’s bandmates, crew and family taking center stage. Especially fascinating is his complicated relationship with his older brother, Jimmie, himself a spectacular guitarist with the Fabulous Thunderbirds (‘Stevie would never love another guitarist more than Jimmie,’ says the crew member Cutter Brandenburg), and Vaughan’s ill-fated role in David Bowie’s band, an apparent big break that he quit because he was told he couldn’t promote his forthcoming debut album.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney writes about the plight of small American towns like Imogene, Iowa and the resilience of those living in them:

“Main Street is an unpaved gravel lane, wide enough for one car. Along the street’s entire three blocks, there is not a single business. The whole town has only two institutions, really: a Catholic Church and an Irish pub.

“In fact, it’s a bit misleading to say Imogene has St. Patrick’s and Emerald Isle. Imogene is the church and the pub.

“If you picture a country church in a 30-person town, hidden in the remotest corner of Iowa, you might picture a modest, decaying building. Conversely, if you know the history of Catholic immigrants to the Midwest in the 19th century, you might expect an impressive crumbling structure that faintly gives off the echoes of faded glory. So you would never expect St. Patrick’s.

“The brick Gothic church standing atop Imogene might be the most beautiful country church in America. The three impressive front doors, flanked by two towers, are capped by the pointed arches typical of the Gothic revival period. Walk through the doors, and you’ll be stunned. Intricate stained-glass windows ring the church and fill it with delightful light. The oaken hammer-beam ceiling, like everything in this church, points worshipers’ eyes toward heaven.

“Italian marble is everywhere, including the baptismal font, communion rails, and the carved Pieta in the back of the church, a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding her son’s corpse at the foot of the cross.

“The walls of every Catholic church in the world are punctuated with a series of scenes from the suffering and death of Christ — the Stations of the Cross. At your average rural church, the Stations are paintings in wooden frames. At St. Patrick’s, they are gold-leaf mosaics in ornate marble frames.

“Finally, at the far end of the church are the three marble altars, topped with Gothic spires. There’s one altar for St. Joseph, one for the Blessed Mother, and a stunning central altar, spires reaching up three stories, built around a golden tabernacle.

“It was a good metaphor for my trip to Imogene. I came to Fremont County expecting to write a very different story. Fremont has one of the very worst rates of opioid overdoses in the country. It has no major cities. The factories and schools are closing down. Its population is shrinking.

“I came here to write about a community that is falling apart. Instead, I found a community that is constantly coming together. In the heartland, small-town America is fighting for its life.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Ulaanbaatar

Poem: Amit Majmudar, “The Pencil”

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