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Fucking with the Feds, and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring

July 18, 2016

On the Shelf

James Baldwin with Charlton Heston, left, and Marlon Brando, 1963.

If you’re a best-selling author, here is a great way to piss off the FBI: announce that you’re writing a book about the FBI. In 1964, writing in an issue of Playbill, James Baldwin mentioned some future projects he had in mind, including one on “the FBI and the South.” Cue federal anxiety: “When [J. Edgar] Hoover himself was informed of the project, his response was characteristically curt—‘Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?’ This being Hoover’s FBI, that was not a rhetorical question, and it launched an additional inquiry in the nature of Baldwin’s ‘perversion.’ Whatever the FBI planned on doing with this information, it all ultimately proved rather moot—Baldwin never wrote the book, and there’s strong evidence he never planned to.”

The artist Bruce Conner once provided a list of adjectives to describe his work: the first four were “beautiful, horrible, hogwash, genius.” He was, somehow, right on the money. J. Hoberman remembers the first time he saw a Conner piece: “As a fifteen-year-old Pop Art aficionado wandering through the Whitney Museum’s 1964 Sculpture Annual, I discovered Conner’s work in the form of the assemblage Couch. There was no warning. It was like rounding a corner and bumping into Death … a derelict remnant of a nightmare haunted house. Conner took a moldering, paint-spattered, wax-encrusted Victorian divan and managed to imbed it with a child-sized mummy. The simulated, decomposed corpse was nestled into a corner. On closer inspection, it looked as though it might have been strangled.”

It’s widely accepted that one of the few attractions of a career in medicine is regular exposure to nude people. In the eighteenth century, aspiring doctors had such a hankering for nudity that they took it upon themselves to construct very, very, very detailed wax women: “Known today as Anatomical Venuses, these wax figures of women were life-sized and fully dissectible, with their removable organs completely exposed to all, while their faces were kept intact with beautiful, oddly serene features … I was especially struck by a number owned by the French doctor Pierre Spitzner (whose collection is now at the University of Montpellier), which date to the second half of the nineteenth century: one was a wax automaton, featuring a Venus who ‘breathed,’ with a rising and falling chest; another is of a girl in an impeccably white nightgown undergoing a caesarean section, with four distinctly male hands prodding her revealed organs, bizarrely attached to no bodies—phantom hands, complete with white cuffs and the sleeves of black jackets to add an extra layer of eeriness.”

In the age of the seven-figure advance, as Nathan Scott McNamara writes, “major presses are inadvertently helping foster an environment where American indie presses can thrive by doing the very thing they’re best at: being small and, by extension, focusing on creativity and originality over sales … In reorganizing the priorities of book publishing—by inventing new models rather than trying to repeat past success, by valuing ingenuity over magnitude, by thinking of sales as a way to make great books possible rather than the point—indie presses aren’t just becoming the places where the best books are published; they’re already there.”

Let’s finish things off in the gutter, where a group of dirty-minded linguists have started to name all the words that sound sexual but aren’t. For starters: cordwangle, invigilation, formicate, uvula, quincunx. Mark Liberman writes, “A colleague (who has request anonymity) and I have developed a fondness for perfectly innocuous words which, to the linguistically unwashed masses, sound sexual. My colleague’s example sentence is ‘Because her husband was intestate, she sought to dilate her fungible assets; despite cunctation for titivating, she managed to masticate and lucubrate far into the night.’ ”