April 10, 2017 On the Shelf Spin the Historic Book Odor Wheel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring For a book that reeks of pipe tobacco, try smoking a pipe into your book. Take a whiff of a musty old book—isn’t that nice? We all have our favorites. Me, I like the ones that smell like my granddad’s scalp just after a hot-oil treatment, or like a saucepan of raw sheep’s milk left out under the hot noonday sun. As Claire Armitstead writes, scientists are learning more and more about old-book smell every day: “In a paper published this week in the journal Heritage Science, Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič describe how they analyzed samples from an old book, picked up in a second-hand shop, and developed a ‘historic book odor wheel,’ which connects identifiable chemicals with people’s reactions to them. Using fibers from the novel, they produced an ‘extract of historic book,’ which was presented to seventy-nine visitors to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Chocolate, cocoa, or chocolatey were the most frequent words used to describe the smell of a copy of French writer Panait Istrati’s 1928 novel Les chardons du Baragan, followed by coffee, old, wood, and burnt … The researchers believe the historic book odor wheel could become a useful diagnostic tool for conservators across a wide range of areas, helping them to assess the condition of objects through their olfactory profile.” There’s only one thing that smells better than an old book, and that’s a genuine human-hair wig. Very few artisanal wigmakers survive these days. One of them, as Annie Correal reports, lives in Staten Island: “Nicholas Piazza keeps six hundred pounds of hair in his Staten Island garage. He stores it in plastic bins and cardboard boxes, opposite the fishing supplies. ‘Got grays, got browns, got blonds,’ he said. ‘Got everything.’ Inside one bin, shiny brown bundles nestled around one another like snakes. He picked two thick braids and lifted them from the bin. Uncoiled, they were three feet long and nearly reached the ground. ‘This is all Russian hair cut right off people’s heads,’ Mr. Piazza said … Mr. Piazza is one of the last Old World wigmakers making wigs for the public in the city, men and women trained mostly by Italian and Jewish immigrants in the centuries-old trade of hand-tying wigs, a fussy affair that on the patience spectrum falls somewhere between tailoring a jacket and counting the stars.” Read More
April 7, 2017 On the Shelf This Bridge Is for Saxophonists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge in the sixties. The Williamsburg Bridge is a fine name for a bridge, especially when one half of that bridge ends in Williamsburg. But not every Williamsburg Bridge has given a safe harbor to one of the greatest jazz musicians in history—and say one had? Shouldn’t we name it after the saxophonist, and not the neighborhood? The neighborhood has had a good run; it’s time for a change. Amanda Petrusich has the story of Sonny Rollins’s secret tenure on the bridge, where the tenor player loved to practice, hiding in plain sight: “In 1961, a story by Ralph Berton appeared in Metronome, a trade rag … Berton had come across Rollins playing atop the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects North Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He filed a short dispatch about the encounter. In an effort to keep Rollins’s practice space private, Berton changed the location to the Brooklyn Bridge, and gave Rollins the somewhat ridiculous sobriquet ‘Buster Jones’ … Almost every day between the summer of 1959 and the end of 1961, Rollins—who was born in Harlem, and at the time lived in an apartment at 400 Grand Street, just a few blocks from the entrance to the bridge—walked out and stationed himself adjacent to the subway tracks, playing as cars full of commuters rattled past.” Michael Hofmann reminds us that Elizabeth Bishop is essentially a fugitive figure, unstuck in time: “At Vassar, she was ‘the Bish,’ had an early, nay, prophetic taste for tweed, was recorded in the 1930 yearbook as ‘Bishop of the barbarous hair.’ There was something out of place or out of time about her, or both; attributable perhaps, partly, to spending her earliest years in Nova Scotia, and having three grandparents who were Canadian. A singer of hymns and a student of the harpsichord, her favorite poets George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Baudelaire—was she more seventeenth-century, or nineteenth? … Since her death in 1979, Bishop has been so universally and I think often falsely or sentimentally championed by us, we don’t see the contrariness or the heroic effort of living against her time and culture; we like to think of her in San Francisco, blithely passing a joint to Thom Gunn or accepting one from him, and generally letting it hang out after all, all or some.” Read More
April 6, 2017 On the Shelf Technology Is Telepathy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A man fixes telegraph wires during the U.S. Civil War, ca. 1863. Image via Public Domain Review. In the nineteenth century, as communications technologies proliferated and spiritualism spread across the U.S., people began to wonder, not unreasonably, if telepathy was real, and if our dreams could be used to predict the future. It’s an idea that retains a certain currency even today. For instance, last night I dreamed I lost my thirty-day unlimited MetroCard on an escalator; I spent two hours looking for it, riding the escalator again and again all hunched over. I experienced this search in real time. Now all I have to do is lose my MetroCard in real life and whammo, I can claim to be a telepath. But wait, back to the nineteenth century: Alicia Puglionesi writes, “Despite skepticism from some scientists, people took the idea of spontaneous, unconscious mental transmission quite seriously, as a possibility and as a danger, in an age when powerful ideas crisscrossed the nation through new and mysterious channels. From mass print to the telegraph to the railroad, burgeoning communication systems collapsed time and space through increasingly rapid connections. They brought unprecedented economic growth, creating new forms of investment and trading that depended as much on information flow as they did on the movement of commodities. Such precipitous connectedness also posed a threat to the socioeconomic order: it allowed laborers to organize, abolitionists and suffragists to rally. Dangerous ideas could spread uncontrollably, and many worried that hardware might not limit their range. The line between technology and telepathy blurred, with medical men like William Carpenter explaining the nervous system as a telegraph and extending its reach beyond the individual body; he believed that ‘nerve-force,’ as a form of electricity, could ‘exert itself from a distance, so as to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another.’ ” Family vacation idea: take a guided tour of America’s nuclear facilities. Peggy Weil did it, and she discovered vast subterranean networks of apocalyptic weaponry that most Americans never truly contemplate. Also, there were cartoons: “The Minuteman III Launch Control Centers are located deep underground in remote areas of North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Montana; these facilities support the approximately 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that now comprise our land-based nuclear arsenal … Operational from 1965 until 1997, Oscar-Zero was one of fifteen Missile Alert Facilities run by the 321st Strategic Missile Wing, its crew responsible for ten of the 150 Minuteman missiles then housed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, about eighty miles to the northeast … But Oscar-Zero is not all gunmetal grim. One corner melts into an azure photomural depicting a lush tropical seascape. In another mural, two missileers stride proudly under the slogan WHO YA GONNA CALL? … The commanding officer is depicted as an American eagle and his deputy commander is the Muppet character Oscar the Grouch, who declares: ‘Hey! This is a job for the BEST of the BEST!’ Both officers are wearing patches that read: KREMLIN KRUSHERS. On one cabinet there’s a picture of Donald Duck lazing against a palm tree.” Read More
April 5, 2017 On the Shelf Don’t Lick the Wallpaper, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Bitten By Witch Fever, a new book on poisonous wallpaper. Is the present better than the past? No. Progress is a sham. Suffering is endemic, resources are dwindling, exploitation is the norm. Still, we should all pat ourselves on the back, because there’s no more arsenic in our wallpaper. We figured it out. We fixed it. In Victorian England, on the other hand, people had no clue. They were totally surrounded by bright, poisonous wallpaper, letting it eat away at them, staring at death on every wall and not even knowing it. Like common fools! Kat Eschner explains how it all came to light: “The root of the problem was the color green … After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, ‘Scheele’s Green’ became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic. One prominent doctor named Thomas Orton nursed a family through a mysterious sickness that ultimately killed all four of their children. In desperation, one of the things he started to do was make notes about their home and its continents. He found nothing wrong with the water supply or the home’s cleanliness. The one thing he worried about: the Turners’ bedroom had green wallpaper.” The American experiment has culminated in this: we can binge-watch television about superheroes. Sam Kriss tried out Marvel Studios’ latest, Iron Fist, and he is duly afraid: “Netflix creates its plotlines and pacing by observing the aggregated metadata for all the other programs on its site; it knows when people take toilet breaks in the less interesting sequences, it knows when they get bored and decide to go outside. This thing, Iron Fist, a dopey man with a doughball for a head wandering around and punching people, is what viewers want; for all the negative reviews, it’s Netflix’s most binge-watched show to date. In some sense, it’s the deep ideological truth of our society. Stories about superheroes have, in the last decade or so, become inescapable; they’re our primary cultural substratum, our equivalent of Church dogma or mythic cosmogony. In the same way that the Homeric epics encoded the social and psychological structure of antique Greece, telling us through stories about gods and wars and monsters how the ancients imagined their world, Marvel comic-book narratives encode the word of postmodernity. When the Iron Fist punches a ninja for the fiftieth time, he’s not fighting some fictional ancient order but hammering through the contradictions of capitalism.” Read More
April 4, 2017 On the Shelf I Go Nowhere Without My Boa Constrictor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Today’s heiresses are boring: their idea of adventure is trying to sip a green juice while their lips are still numb from cosmetic surgery. (Oops—dribbled a bit on that Balmain dress!) Aimée Crocker, a San Francisco railroad heiress born in 1864, used her wealth to scandalize prudes and scald the bourgeois palate. Her 1934 memoir, And I’d Do It Again, describes her saturnalian adventures around the globe. Now it’s been reissued, and Libby Purves read it with relish: “When Aimée Crocker took up with a feudal Chinese warlord or a ‘Wild Man Of Borneo’ in the 1890s, it shocked everyone but her. When, back in New York, she invited the cream of society to a dinner and appeared, heavily decolletée and wrapped in a sixty-pound boa constrictor whose muscular form she found erotic, there were faints and shrieking … She falls for a ‘repulsively ugly’ hypnotist in Honolulu, dumps him after an incident at a leper colony, and reports not un-gleefully that two years later he put himself into a ‘hystero-cataleptic’ trance, was presumed dead and was autopsied while still alive. But by this point she’s only just getting going … to China, where she ransoms a girl from a cathouse and becomes the prisoner of a warlord, who makes her watch an execution by a thousand cuts and informs her, ‘I am the master of all that is beautiful in this house. I may keep those things, give them away or break them if it pleases me.’ ” For Andrew Blevins, “the central question of chess” is one of paranoia: “How are they trying to get me?” Revisiting Garry Kasparov’s famous loss to Deep Blue, he sees a silver lining: it’s taught humans to lose, and to move on without getting caught up in the existential angst of it all. Of course, for Kasparov himself, the angst is never-ending. As Blevins writes: “There’s a famous moment in Deep Blue vs. Kasparov that I find revealing. After staying up all night with his team trying to figure out a particular Deep Blue move, an exhausted Kasparov accused IBM of cheating. He didn’t say this flat out but instead declared that the move reminded him of Diego Maradona’s infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal in the 1986 World Cup. The move was genius, incredibly farsighted, far above any move that Deep Blue had played so far, so much so that Kasparov believed it must have been illegal … Deep Blue had selected the move at random, something it was programmed to do in the event of a certain malfunction. But experts also believe that the move in question wasn’t as brilliant as Kasparov thought it was either. Instead, it was weird and unexpected, which can be, in certain cases, even more devastating.” Read More
April 3, 2017 On the Shelf Sometimes Poets Are Successful, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yevtushenko reading before thousands in the Soviet Union. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died this weekend at eighty-three, reminds us that sometimes a poet can achieve that rare thing: popularity. All it requires is persistence, good fortune, and cultural conditions dramatically different from those of the contemporary U.S. At the height of his powers, Yevtushenko commanded audiences of thousands in the Soviet Union, where his readings gave voice to the hopes and fears of a generation struggling to come out from under Stalinism. In an obituary for Yevtushenko, Anna Nemtsova writes, “He was like a giant loudspeaker sending messages across Soviet borders on behalf of his country, without sarcasm or cynicism, even when his country’s leaders made it impossible to love the state, when they beat down his own love for Russia by banning the best avant-garde art, destroying lives, repressing dissidents, deploying armies to foreign states … Yevtushenko and three other famous poets, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, and Robert Rozhdestvensky, turned poetry into a cult, brought it to stadiums, recited their lyrics for thousands of spectators. Once, during one such poetic concert, Yevtushenko’s fans carried him around Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, as if an Olympic champion of poetry.” Listening to the lounge chanteuse Diamanda Galás, Hua Hsu hears a voice unadorned, “ancient-feeling in its primal ambitions,” and thus at odds with almost everything on the radio right now: “In the early days of pop music, the microphone was still an instrument to be mastered. Singers like Holiday, Sinatra, and Baker explored the possibilities of what amplification could accomplish, cooing and chatting over their bands in a way that felt intimate, as though the words were being poured into your ears alone. Our expectations are different nowadays. Some of the most exciting current experiments in pop music involve processing those voices, using technology not to capture the singer’s quiet whisper but to make the singer sound unfamiliar, pulsing and flickering, swirly and surreal. It’s music conscious of our states of constant distraction, the voice tracking the surges and flows that comprise life in digital spaces.” Read More