Advertisement

Sign In

Disappearing Doo-wop, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

markhavenssweetbriarandatlantic

Mark Havens, Untitled (Sweetbriar & Atlantic), 2006. Image via T Magazine

  • Anxiety has always been a fixture of the human experience—who doesn’t enjoy a good bout of angst and fear now and again? But the word worry is, in its current sense, a fairly new addition to the English language: “Although it was used in the sixteenth century, in all of Shakespeare’s works worry appears just once—as a transitive verb denoting strangling or choking. Only in the Victorian era did its contemporary meaning come into widespread use. The advent of literary modernism in the twentieth century placed the personal inner world center stage. From James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom to Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay, worriers came to abound in the modernist canon.”
  • August Kleinzahler is in Montreal and trying to speak French: “In general, Quebecers seem to like Americans, in approximate measure to their dislike of Anglophone Canadians. Insofar as no other nationality that immediately comes to mind ‘likes’ Americans (even the Irish seem to have gone off us during the George W. Bush era), I find being in Montreal again a most genial circumstance. ‘You must find yourself a French lover and learn the language on the pillow,’ the fromagier told me.”
  • So you’re looking for a literary agent? Here’s a cool publishing hack: pretend you’re a man. It is, evidence suggests, dramatically easier to find representation that way, as Catherine Nichols learned when she sent out her query letter under a pseudonym: “George sent out fifty queries, and had his manuscript requested seventeen times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in twenty-five … I imagined him as a sort of reptilian Michael Fassbender–looking guy, drinking whiskey and walking around train yards at night while I did the work. Most of the agents only heard from one or the other of us, but I did overlap a little. One who sent me a form rejection as Catherine not only wanted to read George’s book, but instead of rejecting it asked if he could send it along to a more senior agent … George’s work was ‘clever,’ ‘well-constructed,’ and ‘exciting.’ No one mentioned his sentences being lyrical or whether his main characters were feisty.”
  • In fact, even if you prefer simpler hobbies, such as coloring books, the world is determined to rain on your parade: “The bizarre thing about the new adult coloring books is they are virtually impossible to complete. They have to be difficult, because adults are still embarrassed to be seen working away at infant activities … But the main thing making coloring ‘socially acceptable’ is the link to mental health. The mindfulness industry has planted its flag on the business and many books are being sold as an offshoot of meditation … The new mindful coloring books are mindless. You should be drawing your own pictures!”
  • “Flashy neon lights, kidney-shaped pools, asymmetrical design elements, and a plethora of plastic palm trees”: these are the “Doo Wop” motels of the Wildwoods, “the three kitschy southern New Jersey shore towns that are home to the largest concentration of midcentury motels in the nation.” A new series of photos by Mark Havens documents “the interplay of an idealized past and its inexorable disappearance.”