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The Clown Spirit of 1923, and Other News

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On the Shelf

gusinde-clown-spirit

Ulen is a clown­-like male spirit, whose role is to entertain the audience of the Selk’nam Hain ceremony, 1923. Photo: Martin Gusinde/Anthropos Institute/Éditions Xavier Barral, via NYRB

  • In New York, most of the iconic bookstores make certain distasteful concessions to consumers. Their books are in alphabetical order, for example, on neat, clearly marked shelves. Not so in John Scioli’s Community Bookstore, which has been a fixture in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill for more than thirty years. Now it’s closing, and Scioli, having collected five and a half million dollars, wants you to know a few things: “A lot of young people can’t handle this type of store. They want everything to look like a supermarket, like Barnes & Noble. Very neat. Some young people come in and they say, ‘Do you have a computer?’ I’m like, ‘No, do you want to buy a computer?’ and then they start to walk out. They don’t know how they’re supposed to find anything without a computer—like, they want Hemingway, and I tell him that their book is under the ‘Hemingway’ section … they never saw a messy bookstore.”
  • From 1918 to 1924, Martin Gusinde, a priest, traveled to Tierra del Fuego, where he began to the photograph the Selk’nam, Yamana, and Kawésqar peoples, whose cultures were even then facing extinction. His pictures are collected in The Lost Tribes of Tierra del Fuego: “Several photos show naked male figures standing barefoot in the snow, their bodies painted in bold white stripes on dark ochre and wearing eerie, phallic headdresses. An image of a snowy field strewn with corpse-like forms—according to the caption, initiates enacting a passage through the underworld—evokes uncanny echoes of the actual Selk’nam genocide. White bone-dust covering the skin and conical masks of Kawésqar initiates gives them a spectral, hallucinatory quality.”
  • Today in brouhahas with the classics: Spanish academics have derided a new, more accessible translation of the famously difficult Don Quixote as “a crime against literature.” “You cannot twist the flavor of the words of the greatest writer in our language,” one professor said, though I had thought you couldn’t twist any flavor, period.
  • Dance criticism was once a regular part of magazines and newspapers—but in recent years, the New York Post, Time Out New York, The New Republic, the Village Voice, New York, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle have all let go of their dance critics, thus reinforcing the fact that “dance is the least respected of the fine arts … That’s been the case ever since the fourth century when the church took over the arts and banished dance from public religious ceremonies.”
  • Clancy Martin on Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel Eileen: “We expect this pathology of dissatisfaction, ennui, and frustrated need in a certain brand of narcissistic male hero, but in a female narrator it is more disturbing, more interesting, and more exciting. Her hunger lends her a perceptiveness you won’t find in a more content character. Her observations are always a bit too disturbing, too repellent—but they are never blithe, silly, or conventional. She has that scalpel-like, cynical intelligence and insight that one gets with a blistering hangover.”