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Let’s Do Some Fictional Drugs, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Possible side effects include double lives.

  • The drugs in the real world are okay. But fictional drugs—those are some drugs. A tour of drugs in fiction suggests, among other things, that we’ve been disappointingly unimaginative in choosing names for actual drugs: Where can we find the likes of “moloko plus” or “The Diabolical Drug” in day-to-day life? And where, in fiction, can we find a drug that isn’t a metaphor for our dumb ambition? “We all want to be stronger, sexier, more formidable; taking a synthetic shortcut, in drug fiction, is rarely a good idea … That’s the commonality throughout all of our mind-warping fictions: they’re mostly depictions of our hubris. They skewer our persistent belief that there is some pill, some plant, some substance that could cure everything for us, fix things.”
  • Meanwhile, the explosion of narrative food writing seems to have helped everyone but the service staff: there are no signs of labor to be found. “Contemporary cookbooks devote as much energy to their narrative or expository content as they do to providing recipes; they tell stories, that is, rather than merely instruct. Despite this impressive reach, however, you have to read hard, and most often in vain, to catch glimpses of waiters, dishwashers, or line cooks … If one were to do the impossible, and take food criticism seriously, we would have to imagine a restaurant as a kind of lively phantasmagoria, where food and beverage enter the purview of the critic as if of their own volition. It is the staging ground for the most classic forms of commodity fetishism.”
  • Today in TV nostalgia: from 1947 to 1957, a live TV show called Kukla, Fran and Ollie attracted some four million viewers each night, in prime time. Its secret: puppets. “It revolved around the antics of the Kuklapolitan Players, a theater company made up of one human—radio actress and vocalist Fran Allison—and a dozen puppets, all of which were animated by the show’s creator, Burr Tillstrom. The puppets talked and danced and sang on a small stage while Allison stood in front of it and talked and danced and sang with them … Kukla, Fran and Ollie created a new, gentle intimacy with its audience, one shaped by routine but not bound by formula, in which it was always possible to be delighted or moved. Perhaps it’s less that it’s strange for adults to feel strongly about children’s television and more that we’ve coded such qualities as childlike.”
  • Mary-Kay Wilmers on Marianne Moore: “In place of a diary she kept a notebook … She didn’t use it to write about her feelings or about herself. She was interested in the fate of her poems, not in the mood she was in. Her mother had warned against introspection; consciously or unconsciously, she’d taken the lesson to heart. Or perhaps she didn’t need a lesson. Ideas, attitudes to this and that were more rewarding, and more fun to think about and make fun of, even her own. But words principally gave her pleasure. Sentences, metaphors, tropes, her own—she worked constantly at them—and other people’s, including her mother’s, were noted down and reappear in the poems, which borrow many of Mary’s mannerisms as well as those of the home language more generally: not its sentimentality but its histrionic tone and nursery décor and its tendency to metonymise and otherwise play the figures of speech. Like Wallace Stevens, whom she much admired, she made jokes, and even more than in Stevens’s case, the jokes were sly, hardly perceptible, there for her own pleasure. Yet for all the ironies, visible and invisible, some of the poems even have a moral.”
  • The artist Ana Mendieta, a Cuban émigré who died thirty years ago, is at last getting her due: “The young and promising Cuban-American artist fell to her death in September 1985 from the 34th-floor window of her Greenwich Village apartment; her newlywed husband, legendary sculptor Carl Andre, was indicted, tried, and eventually acquitted of her murder … [Mendieta] used her own body as a major component of her artwork. Her films and photos often used her sometimes naked form as subject and many had deep, earthy, bold colors and natural but stark shapes and elements. She used sticks and blood and dirt and plants—her work has the feeling of a pagan ritual. It is somehow both haunting and life-affirming.”