November 8, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Four Quotes from The Way We Live Now, 1875 By Dan Piepenbring A Donald Trump cake being wheeled into Trump Tower. Photo: Jason Volack, @jasonvolack, via Twitter It’s a good night for Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, at the center of which is one Augustus Melmotte, a financier who runs for Parliament. Read More
August 23, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery The French Fries Had a Plan By Dan Piepenbring Is Kanye’s McDonald’s poem a parable of class struggle? Avoid temptation. When I wrote in May about the seriocomic implications of a Burger King Spa opening in Helsinki, I thought I’d pegged the most extraordinary fast-food story of the year. Reader, I blew it. In the past month alone, McDonald’s has opened a “McDonald’s of the Future” in Saint Joseph, Missouri, luring customers to their purportedly healthier, Chipotlified restaurant by promising all-you-can-eat fries; BK has debuted the “Whopperito,” a burger-burrito hybrid that fits in your cup holder; and KFC has sold two thousand bottles of fried-chicken-scented SPF 30 sunscreen. For any writer hoping to capture the texture of our greasy-fingered moment, the ineffable Sturm und Drang of life in a world where Denny’s believes the ideal male body is a stack of flapjacks, the outlook is grim. As Philip Roth wrote, American reality “stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.” And he said that before Chicken Fries were a thing. But Philip Roth is no Kanye West, and Kanye West won’t just sit there while actuality outdoes his talents—heaven forfend. Instead, Kanye West has published a poem about Mickey D’s in Boys Don’t Cry, a one-off zine from Frank Ocean. It goes like this: Read More
May 17, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery The Musician’s Day By Erik Satie A drawing by Satie in a letter to Jean Cocteau, 1917. “Monsieur Sadi in his house—he’s thinking.” Erik Satie, the composer and pianist, was born on this day 150 years ago. “There are many kinds of eccentric,” Nick Richardson wrote in the London Review of Books last year, “and Satie was most of them.” The musician’s description of his diet, comprising all-white foods, many of them inedible, is often quoted as evidence of this eccentricity. It comes from an even more eccentric whole, Satie’s book Memoirs of an Amnesiac. The relevant passage is reprinted below, with some of his drawings of imaginary buildings and busts, because why not … —D.P. An artist must organize his life. Here is the exact timetable of my daily activities: I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy ride on horseback round my domain follows from 1:19 P.M. to 2:53 P.M. Another bout of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07 P.M. From 4:27 to 6:47 P.M. various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, swimming, etc.) Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20 P.M. From 8:09 to 9:59 P.M. symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10:37 P.M. Once a week, I wake up with a start at 3:19 (Tuesdays). My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit-mould, rice, turnips, camphorated sausages, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuchsia. I am a hearty eater, but never speak while eating, for fear of strangling. Read More
May 6, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Four Episodes in the Life of Einstein’s Mother By Adam Ehrlich Sachs Simpler, Simpler On October 22, 1905, two weeks after he’d sent his father (but not his mother!) the issue of the Annalen der Physik containing his article “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which laid out for the first time the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein received in return a letter not from his father but from his mother, Louise Einstein née Rosenberg, the daughter of a prosperous grain trader from Württemberg, who explained to her son, a little bit bashfully but with a distinct note of reproof, that she, too, was interested in his intellectual life—all the more so because his intellectual life was his life. There is simply no partaking in my son’s life if I cannot partake in his intellectual life, she wrote, such is the nature of my brilliant but pensive son, my inward-oriented, eternally brain-dwelling son! And so, she wrote, even though the article had not been sent to her, she’d snatched it up—“Please do not reproach me for this!”—as soon as his father was finished with it and set about studying it herself. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of it. Despite her deep, her profoundly deep aching to understand, she wrote, the fact remained that she did not speak the physico-mathematical language in which her husband and son were fluent. “Please, Albert, explain it to me more simply! Put it in terms so simple that even the daughter of a Württemberg corn merchant can understand it!” Read More
February 16, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Pun Home: Or, The Double Meaning of Life By Sadie Stein Via: The Telegraph “The only thing harder than crafting a good pun,” wrote Ted Trautman in these pages, “is finding someone to appreciate it.” But as Trautman makes clear, those people who love puns really love puns. They’re the Peeps eaters of the wordplay world: few, proud, and defiant. The stronghold of the pun — besides our own ingenious puzzles, I mean — is, of course, the UK: if not king there, the pun is certainly a minor entry in Debrett’s. And so it should come as no shock that from across the pond comes—wait for it—a history of the world in visual puns. You didn’t know you needed that in your life, did you? You didn’t know you needed, say, a list of ten puns on the assassination of Julius Caesar. And maybe you hear, Why did Julius Caesar buy crayons? He wanted to mark Antony, and think, Wow, that’s really lame. But then, Peeps lovers always do claim that they’re better stale.
October 21, 2015 Department of Tomfoolery Floating Capital By Dan Piepenbring Fear him. The eeriest and most gravid of today’s new emoji is this guy: the so-called Man in Business Suit Levitating. In Apple’s rendition, he cuts an imposing figure, like a rich kid who’s just aced his LSATs—a simpering, dubiously pompadoured fella in polarized glasses and a natty suit. His tapered silhouette hangs above a blip of a shadow. He’s a superhuman exclamation point. He’s the floating face of capitalism. And if literature has taught us anything, it’s that he brings nothing but bad news wherever he roams. I’m prepared to advance an entirely unfounded argument based on an hour of Googling: that this levitating businessman is the latest, most accessible form of a character who has haunted literature for more than a century. Sometimes wily, sometimes unscrupulous, and sometimes merely misguided, he’s held aloft by Adam Smith’s invisible hand only to be flung earthward again. Join me, won’t you, on an impromptu whistle-stop tour of THE LEVITATING BUSINESSMAN IN LITERATURE. Read More