July 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Photos of a Pioneer By Carson Vaughan Solomon D. Butcher’s prairie photographs embrace homesteading life in all its complexity. Solomon D. Butcher, Nebraska Gothic (detail). All photos courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society (Digital ID: nbhips 10236). My grandparents lived in a massive two-story home with creaking pinewood floors and lace curtains that hung like ghosts from the windows. It figured prominently in the nightmares of my childhood, and yet I loved that old house, every inch of it sprinkled with dust and wonder. Come summer, the pear tree out front littered the yard with fruit and the paint curling from the wraparound porch clung to our blackened, clammy feet. My brothers and I loved the basement, cool and damp and packed with my grandpa’s peculiarities—junk mostly, shoeboxes filled with rubber bands and fat rolls of stickers from bygone political campaigns. We loved the attic, too, wide and flat as a roller rink, it seemed, with corners so deep and dark I never dared explore them. But it’s the second floor hallway that still crops up in my dreams. My distant relatives lingered on that floor, hanging from the burgundy walls in black and white. None of them smiled. They never slept. They stared at me. They sat upright in wooden chairs in front of their soddies, surrounded by the trappings of their frontier existence: their sheep, their horses, scythes, spades, guns, grinding wheels, framed photos of their dead loved ones. Their lives seemed tiny and brutally sincere, swallowed by the grass and sand of Custer County, Nebraska, a land so vast and so empty it appears often dimensionless in the photos. These faces had a way of sobering me as a kid, stopping me cold in a playful sprint around the house. Later, when my grandparents passed, my mother brought the photos home and displayed them in our living room. Read More
July 19, 2017 Arts & Culture Odd Jobs By Tony Duvert Niko Pirosmani, Threshing Floor, 1916, oil on cardboard. The French writer and philosopher Tony Duvert published the slim volume Les petits métiers in 1978. A satirical, caustic, and yet delightfully light collection of fables, the book comprises twenty-three narratives from an imaginary village where denizens perform the strangest—and dirtiest—traditions and professions. A new translation, by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press this fall. We’ve excerpted a handful of these very odd jobs below. —Ed. The Snot-Remover He’d set up his pump at the entrance of the school, and knew each child by name. My grandfather told me that in his time, the snot-remover had no pump: he only had a small reed pipe with which to suck up the mucus with his mouth. Also, to completely clean out the nostrils without swallowing anything, he’d put such flair into it that the scamps would have preferred having two boogers instead of one, to endure the delicious service longer. The work of the pump had less charm. I remember that at some point, certain schoolmates would even snub the snot-remover and blow into their fingers, sweeping down their hands to smear the sidewalks and their clean uniforms. Read More
July 18, 2017 Arts & Culture How to Read a Squiggle By Polly Dickson William Henry Bunbury’s print The Siege of Namur, published in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Stern. Text is composed of lines both literal—the ink on the page—and conceptual—the story line or plotline that, like thread unwinding from a spool, guides us through the turns of a narrative. When we depict someone reading, we tend to signify text with a continuous wiggly line on the pages or the cover of a book. This kind of squiggle, hovering somewhere between text and image, conveys the singular shape of a narrative text. It’s a figure for the act of reading. One of the most recognizable literary lines of the eighteenth century is precisely such a squiggle. It occurs in the ninth chapter of the fourth volume of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, during a conversation between Tristram’s Uncle Toby and his faithful manservant, Corporal Trim, about bachelorhood and celibacy. The corporal, a character usually prone to long, sentimental speeches, declares, “Whilst a man is free—,” and gives “a flourish with his stick thus—” Read More
July 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Six Hundred Thousand Faces By Erik Hinton What Gershom Scholem’s take on Jewish mysticism can teach us now. Gershom Scholem In the wake of so much political turmoil, we’re hungry for books that diagnose our broken world: books that lay out a grand ethical program and claw back some hope for humanity. Online, I’ve noticed a loose reading list coalescing. We’ve called on Hannah Arendt, who cut into the heart of evil and found a weak organ of banality instead of an engine of diabolic creativity; Walter Benjamin and his “weak messianic power,” which inspired us with the latent energy of history’s failed revolutions; the totalitarian gloom of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale; the grim prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. Surely, the thinking goes, we could be saved if we find the proper pattern, fitting our dismal and uncertain present to the prescriptions of history. In Gershom Scholem, the historian who popularized the study of Kabbalistic and Messianic movements in Judaism, I’ve found a refreshing vision of revolutionary change and justice, stimulating the utopian imagination beyond the traditional touchstones of leftist thought. Though he was a friend of Benjamin’s and, more distantly, of Arendt’s, Scholem is the least widely read of the three and arguably the least accessible. A scholar of esoteric Jewish experience who rarely divulged his personal religious and political philosophy, Scholem resists the immediate, quotable relevance enjoyed by his contemporaries. His work features ecstatic stories of men who believed they were the Messiah, and incoherent descriptions of God’s celestial chariot—of limited use to political dissidents, war victims, and alienated workers. When the jackboots of authoritarianism are kicking in doors, Scholem’s apocalyptic religiosity can seem cloying. Why should we need to hallucinate the end of days? It’s here. Read More
July 11, 2017 Arts & Culture Dragons and Deprivation: Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma in Conversation By Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma Akhil Sharma, left, and Gabe Hudson. On the face of it, Gabe Hudson’s debut novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon has little in common with A Life of Adventure and Delight, the new collection of stories by Akhil Sharma. Gork follows a dragon at WarWings Military Academy who must, as his graduation day approaches, ask a female dragon to be his queen, even though he’s the nerdiest dragon in the class. (If she declines, he’ll becomes a slave.) The eight stories in Adventure of Delight, meanwhile, are all set on Earth as we know it. They focus on Indian families at home and abroad, all of them navigating the vagaries of morality and love—a wife in an arranged marriage is shocked to find that she’s in love with her husband; a divorcé reads women’s magazines in an effort to become an ideal partner. You’d think two such writers would have little to say to each other. But Sharma and Hudson are longtime friends, and fate has dictated that their new books be published on the same day—today, in fact, July 11. To celebrate, the pair convened at a Park Slope apartment belonging to neither of them, where, over lasagna and cashews, they discussed the terrifying prospect of releasing their work into the world; enduring fallow periods of more than a decade between books; and the pleasures of imagining life on planet Blegwethia. —Ed. SHARMA It seems very special to have written something so artful and yet accessible. Gork, the Teenage Dragon has to be one of the more original novels that Knopf has published. HUDSON I think it’s safe to say that this is Knopf’s first space dragon. When I first started writing Gork, people would ask me, What are you working on? I would describe the book a bit, and it would sound absurd—for the longest time it was just me believing in this dragon, this space dragon. So now, to hear people reference Gork like he’s an actual entity has been the great pleasure. Gork has started to take on a life of his own, at this point. My goal was to write something that any type of reader would be able to commune with. I always think of myself as a kid—like, a fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old trying to make sense of the chaos of the world. Back then I was so grateful for Kurt Vonnegut, whose books sent a signal out to me, saying it’s okay to be kind of crazy, or, actually, this whole “life” thing you’ve been born into is kind of a lie, so let me tell you some even more outrageous lies to get at the truth. I was hoping, in writing this book, to send that signal out to anyone who might be in that position. Read More
July 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Freud Fainting By Nausicaa Renner Seymour Chwast, Freud Had It (detail), 1970s. Yesterday, inexplicably, I fainted. I was stepping off the subway and I collapsed onto the platform. I’d known it was going to happen for maybe a minute beforehand. I thought if I could just get to my stop, sit down, and get some fresh air, I’d be okay. But as soon as the doors closed at the stop before mine, I knew it was unstoppable—I crossed the threshold from “might happen” to “will happen.” A grayness clouded my vision. I made eye contact with a woman and absently wondered if I should tell her I was about to faint, if she could read it on my face. I’ve never fainted before in my life. I came close as a kid: kneeling during mass and standing up too quickly. The grayness would creep in, and I’d lean my weight against the side of a pew. But before now, I’d never fully fainted. I’m sure there’s a physiological explanation: I was probably overheating, dizzy from standing. But that’s no fun. So I looked into the psychological, emotional reasoning behind fainting. Read More