Marisol, in 1963.

• Marisol, the mononymic pop-art sculptor known for her carved wood figures and legendarily long silences, has died at eighty-five. “Marisol was a star of the New York art scene in the 1960s, breaking through with a 1962 solo show at the Stable Gallery that featured her bright, boxy sculptures of people representing a range of American life—everyone from the Kennedys to a dust-bowl farm family to the artist herself. The works, which combined painted and minimally carved wooden figures with found objects like shoes and doors, were funny but incisive, simple-looking but expertly made. They helped launch a career that included great artistic success and stardom, followed by decades of obscurity and, more recently, a revival and renewed appreciation of her exceptional work.” (Marisol designed a print for The Paris Reviewin 1965.)
• While we’re on sculptors: Liene Bosquê works in souvenirs. As Sarah Gerard recalls, “I first saw her work in the MoMA PS1 show ‘Greater New York,’ where she was showing a piece called Recollection, comprising dozens of hand-sized souvenirs from her travels, laid out on a plain, wooden table in a grid pattern resembling Manhattan’s. Though the souvenirs are found objects, she also uses them to make molds for other small sculptures in clay or plastic. With a background in architecture and an interest in history’s relationship to memory, Bosquê gives equal consideration to mathematical precision and sensory stimulation in her pieces—she has a rule that all of the souvenirs she uses in her work must be hand-sized, small enough to carry in her pocket as she picked them up on her travels over fifteen years. ‘Something that’s close to you,’ she explains.”
• Hold the phone, everybody. Paul Simon’s dancing again. He’s dancing and using cuss words. He’s limbering up. “In June,” Kelefa Sanneh writes, “Simon will release his thirteenth solo album, Stranger to Stranger, which is friskier and funnier than its recent predecessors—his most danceable music in decades. He meets his old nemesis near the end, in a song called “Cool Papa Bell,” named for the great Negro League center fielder. ‘Motherfucker,’ Simon mutters … Simon doesn’t apologize for his conviction that music should be easy on the ears. He has shown little interest in the grit and grunge that often signal rock-and-roll authenticity, and even now, at seventy-four, he sings in a voice that is boyish and clear. More than any other musician of his age and stature … he seems unburdened by the years, and by his own reputation. He has managed to become neither a wizened oracle nor an oldies act, and his best songs convey the appealing sensation of listening to a guy who is still trying to figure out what he’s doing … Not long after Simon’s fiftieth birthday, on an episode of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head, Beavis referred to him as ‘that dude from Africa that used to be in the Beatles.’ ”
• You know that old saying, “It’s always the inveterate masturbators who try to censor the mail”? Well, that’s true. It’s true now, and it was true in the 1870s, when Anthony Comstock, an intrepid dry-goods salesman whose diaries reveal that he liked to jerk off a lot, began his crusade to suppress erotic materials through the postal service. “As Comstock told it, a fellow employee at the dry-goods store became afflicted with a sexually transmitted disease after developing an interest in erotic literature. Comstock went to the bookstore where his friend made his purchases, bought some illicit reading material, and returned with a police captain who arrested the dealer … In February 1873, Comstock asked [Morris] Jesup to send him to Washington to plead for a more stringent federal postal law. Jesup bought him a ticket and Comstock boarded the train with an assortment of offensive items from his trove … Republican leaders gave Comstock an enthusiastic welcome. [Schuyler] Colfax allowed Comstock to set up an exhibit of his unspeakable wares in his Senate office.”
• In closing, let us meditate, as we are wont to do, on the role of hedgehogs in Slavic folktales: “These adorable animals are predominantly found in Russian movies and fairy stories but they appear, also, in tales from neighboring countries. The Bulgarians have two particularly interesting accounts of the hedgehog, both of which point to his wisdom. In one tale, he advises God on how to use the sky to cover the earth, while in another he is the only animal not to attend the wedding of the Sun and the Moon. When asked for the reason, he says that he’s busy learning to eat rocks, for if the union takes place and the Sun has lots of little sun children, all the plants in the world will dry up … In the Soviet animated film Ezhik v tumane(Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Hedgehog is the bridge between the conscious and the dream world, evoking sympathy from the audience as they watch him lost in a thick mist, chasing after the mirage of a white horse in the clouds.”