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A Brief History of Seagull Hatred, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Winslow Homer, Rocky Coast and Gulls (detail), 1869.

  • Claudia Rankine on Serena Williams, black excellence, and the strange status conferred by corporate largesse: “The London School of Marketing (L.S.M.) released its list of the most marketable sports stars, which included only two women in its Top 20: Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. They were ranked 12th and 20th. Despite decisively trailing Serena on the tennis court (Serena leads in their head-to-head matchups 18–2, and has 21 majors and 247 weeks at No. 1 to Sharapova’s five majors and 21 weeks at number 1), Sharapova has a financial advantage off the court … There is another, perhaps more important, discussion to be had about what it means to be chosen by global corporations. It has to do with who is worthy, who is desirable, who is associated with the good life. As long as the white imagination markets itself by equating whiteness and blondness with aspirational living, stereotypes will remain fixed in place.”
  • Kingsley Amis, says Rachel Cusk, approached the short story as a kind of journeyman, self-consciously avoiding any rhetoric about the form’s high modernist possibilities: “His own stories, he said, were mere ‘chips from a novelist’s work-bench’ … With his talk of product and workbenches, Amis is trying to create the image of the writer as an ordinary worker, to dispel art’s associations with foppishness and pretentiousness and self-aggrandizement … It is as though, in the modernist possibilities of the short story, he perceived a threat both to his masculine and his writerly identity; yet for a generation of American male writers emerging contemporaneously with Amis, the short story was a sort of ‘working man’s’—indeed almost a macho—form.”
  • Reader, I implore you to take a moment out of your day to consider the seagull—it is, now as ever, among our most maligned birds, and the root of our hatred for them is deep and etymological: “The word ‘gull’ doesn’t appear in English until the late medieval period, and its origins are unclear. It’s probably a loan-word from the Cornish guilan or Welsh gŵylan. But in the early modern period, the seagull suffered from its homonyms, particular the verb meaning ‘to deceive’.”
  • At last, the year’s most essential, most probing listicle: a complete ranking of literary magazines funded by or affiliated with the CIA. The New Leader is there, and The Kenyon Review, and Mundo Nuevo, and—oh, what’s this? “Of all the publications on this list, The Paris Review may be the one with the weakest connection to the CIA … But the record clearly shows that The Paris Review benefited financially from selling article reprints to CCF magazines. This was far from the CCF’s direct participation in management of Der Monat or Encounter, but The Paris Review did derive some benefit from the CIA, and there is circumstantial evidence that this affected the choices of authors for its interview series. In a way, the Paris Review case shows how difficult it was for ‘apolitical’ highbrow literary periodicals to get through that period of the Cold War without some form of interaction with the CIA.”
  • Garth Greenwell has spent many hours with Lidia Yuknavitch’s sex scenes, and has emerged a wiser, richer person for it: “Yuknavitch forces us to see the body in all its physicality, its flesh and fluids and excretions, and she depicts scenes of sex, including fetishistic and sadomasochistic sex, that are brutally visceral. Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.”