January 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Chasing the (Literal) Dragon By Oliver Lee Bateman Once I became a historian, I began to regret my teenage obsession with fantasy novels. When the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore and the avuncular “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, I didn’t bat an eyelash. Bush and Gore were, I thought, small potatoes, and I, at age seventeen, was preoccupied with Winter’s Heart, the ninth book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series, in which an ever-growing roster of oddly-named characters sought to unite a fractious, war-torn world against the machinations of the “Dark One” and a bunch of other, self-interested factions. I’d read the first book, The Eye of the World, a few months earlier, then charged through the rest. Real life, which for me was mostly dreadful, held scant appeal. I needed an alternative universe comprising details, trivia, minutiae—and Jordan obliged. Sixteen years later, I had thousands of pewter fantasy figurines, hundreds of dog-eared fantasy novels and, perhaps not coincidentally, a Ph.D. in history. Most of the fantasy I liked was pure genre schlock, R. A. Salvatore and Margaret Weis titles heaped one atop the other; others, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth titles, boasted a certain literary cachet, but I’d never cared about that. Whether it was a companion to J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts tales or those cocktail-napkin notes Chris Tolkien compiled and passed off as “Histories,” what mattered to me most was that they were chock-full of facts that I could memorize. I took creative-writing courses in high school and college, whiling away the hours as I filled notebook after notebook with imaginary family trees and historical sketches about a dysfunctional family of half ogres who were tasked with securing a remote outpost of some collapsing empire. Only years later did I realize that these efforts, sophomoric and clichéd though they might have been, represented an attempt to explore the toxic father-son dynamic that had defined my childhood. Read More
January 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Mürmurings By Chris Pomorski Uluç Ülgen invites total strangers to his home for intimate one-on-one conversations. Uluç Ülgen. All photos via www.mürmer.com. With the possible exception of certain work-from-home professionals whose clients are disposed, for one reason or another, to assume reclining positions, Uluç Ülgen has likely invited more strangers into his apartment than any other resident of New York City. Ülgen, originally from Turkey, is the founder, host, and producer of mürmur, a podcast he records in his one-bedroom Manhattan rental. To find guests, he hangs flyers from phone poles with his name, phone number, and address beside an open invitation. Unless it appears at the beginning of a sentence, the m in mürmur goes uncapitalized, a convention that reflects Ülgen’s egalitarian worldview. The podcast, which has aired 170 episodes since February 2015, has no topical theme. In fact, Ülgen actively discourages visitors from having anything particular in mind to talk about when they show up. In April 2015, a man named Sean Walker told Ülgen about his path from the honor roll to homelessness. A few weeks later, Jordan Theodore stopped by to talk about the year he spent watching a thousand movies. Another time, a woman named Flo remembered giving birth alone during the 2003 blackout. In the popular tradition of eccentric endeavors, the podcast was conceived during a dark period in its creator’s life. Relatively new to New York, Ülgen had become frustrated. He had failed to bring longstanding musical ambitions to fruition and felt unlucky in love. Reflecting that in his bleakest moments—lacking food, money, or shelter—he’d often been helped along by people he barely knew, he resolved to create a platform that would facilitate meaningful interactions between strangers. Read More
December 21, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Laura Park The latest entry in the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novel The Return of Münchausen, translated into English for the first time by Joanne Turnbull. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime (he died in 1950). “A fantastical plot is my method,” Krzhizhanovsky once wrote. “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.” In Münchausen, he borrows from the life—both real and legendary—of Baron Münchausen to spin his own absurd tale involving the baron’s post–World War I perambulations in Berlin, London, and Moscow on a diplomatic mission. Bizarre and fantastic, Münchausen (or is it Krzhizhanovky?) defends imagination above all else. The Daily is featuring a trio of adaptations of short excerpts from the novel. In our last installment, Laura Park finds the baron recalling a strange encounter in “the Land of the Soviets.” Read More
December 20, 2016 Arts & Culture The Captured Santa By Dan Piepenbring Why pop culture fixates on the incarcerated Claus. From Get Santa, 2014. Let me tell you something you already know: our culture longs to incapacitate Santa. At Christmastime, as the tired “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” apparatus lurches to serve up the same perverse images of twinkling, Old World pageantry, we dream of the captured Santa, the deposed king, thwarted by his own bumbling jollity into reckoning with his parochialism. Santa represents a tradition at its breaking point. He’s the relic of a broken Eurocentric past, held over by the glad-handing rearguard in smoky backroom deals. Everywhere you look, you marvel at how brittle his grip is on power. You can feel it in the decorations, the imperious gimlet-eyed nutcrackers and gaudy wreaths, the prickly holly bushes with their poisonous berries, the wantonly felled firs, the long wasteful chains of eco-unfriendly incandescent lights. You can smell it on nog-breathed mall Santas, their faces glistening with sweat, their hours punishingly long, the ink still wet on their International University of Santa Claus diplomas. Santa is ripe for abduction—Santa wants to be abducted. This is why pop culture is teeming with images in which he’s out of commission. Read More
December 15, 2016 Arts & Culture One Devil Too Many By Ed Simon Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at four hundred. The Devil and Dr. Faustus Meet, ca. 1825. Via Wellcome Images. Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus premiered in 1594. Nearly forty years later, people were still talking about those earliest performances. The Puritan pamphleteer and ideologue William Prynne, in his massive 1633 antitheatrical tome Histriomastix, recounted diabolical legends surrounding this most infernal of plays. The spectators and actors “prophanely playing” in that first production, he reported, had a “visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage.” The good Puritan—soon to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he would have his ears cropped for having implied that the queen was a whore—assures us that though he was not himself familiar with such theatrical dens of iniquity, he can confirm the event’s veracity as “the truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it.” Similarly, a monograph by someone identified only as “G.J.R” recounts that during a performance of the scene where Dr. Faustus begins his conjurations, there suddenly “was one devil too many amongst them.” It seems that the hocus pocus nonsense magic of Marlowe’s immense Latin learning had accidentally triggered an actual occult transaction, pulling one of Lucifer’s servants from hell into our own realm. On that stage in Exeter—there among conjuring circles, chanted invocations, and the adjuring of God’s love—the extras playing stock devils with caked-on red makeup and fake horns strapped to their heads found themselves with the chance to meet the real thing. G.J.R. informs us that “after a little pause… every man hastened to be first out of doors.” The actors (“contrary to their custom,” he duly informs us) spent the night in “reading and in prayer,” making sure to get “out of the town the next morning.” Read More