In the Labyrinth

The Mystery of Vivian Maier

In 2009 John Maloof went to an auction house and purchased for $380 a box of around 100,000 negatives as well as rolls of film, all secretly shot by a local nanny, Vivian Maier . The work had originally been stored in an abandoned locker. It wasn't until Maloof started looking through the negatives that he realized the importance of what he had found. The work is astonishing -- documenting all manner of urban life in the 50s and 60s in New York and Chicago. The images of people on the streets are rich and intimate -- which is so odd considering that Maier herself never told anyone about her work -- not even the few close friends she had. Maloof reached out to her after he identitfied her as the photographer, but she died a few days before he could meet with her -- leaving him with mostly questions. Now, there is a new documentary film about her life in development -- and it looks amazing. Here is the trailer:

I like her self portraits such as the one above as much as the street scenes. They are playful, always placing her inside a frame, as if to preserve a moment in her life as a discreet and private entity. You can see more of her photographs at the Vivian Maier website (a small warning -- easy to lose hours here pouring over these beautiful and sometimes haunting images.)

Reading Fiction On the Net: "Bettering Myself" by Ottessa Moshfegh

Sometimes it's good to be shaken out of one's usual fare of fiction, and for that occasion, I want to recommend Ottessa Moshfegh's killer short story "Bettering Myself," available online at the Paris Review, which also awarded Ms Moshfegh the Plimpton Prize For Fiction, given to best new voices in literature. And well deserved, I might add. 

Moshfegh is a remarkable author, creating a wise-cracking, tough, and damaged narrator who is at once repulsive, incredibly screwed up (an alcoholic high school teacher at a Catholic school in NYC), and yet strangely sympathetic, with a deep sadness that is expressed more often with inappropriate (but wickedly funny) humor. The story crackles with off hand lines like this to her students in the middle of math class, "Most people have had anal sex,” I told them. “Don’t look so surprised.” Or moments of unintended irony: "Around ten p.m. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up on me." And painful self-deprecation, "I checked my reflection in my bathroom mirror before I left the house. I thought I looked pretty normal. That couldn’t be possible." She is trapped in a kind of permanent adolescence which seems the only retreat to the catastrophe she has made of her life. It's not an easy story, but it is brilliantly written, and it succeeded in making me care about this character who is trying (with uneven results) not to destroy herself.

Jeffrey Eugenides, one of the judges for the Plimpton Prize said this of Moshfegh's work:

“Bettering Myself” did what it said it would: it convinced me that Moshfegh was even better than I already thought. The voice here is ...a sharp-witted, wayward, unpredictable first-person voice, evidence that Moshfegh is a writer of significant control and range...What distinguishes her writing is that unnameable quality that makes a new writer’s voice, against all odds and the deadening surround of lyrical postures, sound unique.

I have not yet read her other two stories available online -- but in case you feel inspired to continue reading, I will link them here for future reference: Disgust and The Chaperone.

Art: Edward Hopper, "Summer Interior."