June 2, 2014 On the Shelf Reddy Kilowatt, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via Retronaut Envisioning the brick-and-mortar bookstores of tomorrow: “Wide steps double as seating and lead down to a bar and a stage, where a writer performs—‘authors will become more like rock stars’—or a ‘book wizard’ explains the craft of making books. The book you make might be one by the writer on stage, something you’ve written yourself, or any other text the robots conjure up.” “I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance and that shouldn’t happen, because it’s the most delightful thing … We have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel. We are quite used to downloading an album and listening to certain tracks … poetry needs to be consumed in that way.” On Tolkien’s 1926 translation of Beowulf, which was finally published last month: “The literary landscape has changed since then in a way that Tolkien would have neither expected nor accepted: he now towers in fame over Beowulf. Last year, Penguin repackaged its Michael Alexander translation as one of five ‘classic [stories] that inspired J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit.’ but far more people will read the book for Tolkien’s sake than for Beowulf’s.” “Though their obsolescence has been prophesied at various points, neighborhoods remain a vital—perhaps the most vital—way of thinking about the modern city.” A 1959 promotional comic touts the glories of atomic energy through Reddy Kilowatt, everyone’s favorite grinningly electric asexual mascot: “I’m a real, live wire and I never tire. Yes, sir—I’m a red-hot shot. I can cook your meals, turn the factory wheels, ’cause I’m Reddy Kilowatt.”
May 30, 2014 On the Shelf The Inner Beethoven, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Under gastrointestinal duress. Joseph Karl Stieler’s portrait of Beethoven, c. 1819. Discovered on the walls of Angkor Wat: more than two hundred hidden paintings. An intimate new biography of Beethoven: “Suchet also presents ongoing reports regarding Beethoven’s gastrointestinal issues, which run through the book like an idée fixe. These begin with a description of the stomach pains and diarrhea that Beethoven experienced before his first concert at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1794, followed by periodic updates on his irritable bowel syndrome, bad digestion, irregularity, acute constipation, colic, distended stomach, and more … one begins to wonder whether the book might have been more aptly titled The Inner Beethoven.” On September 18, 1970, John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara appeared on The Dick Cavett Show. They were all completely sozzled. An attempt to categorize poetry in translation: “It seems impossible and so it is. But that is why we try, and every time we try we establish a small area of possibility. In fact if we are doing it well we are doing more than that: we are establishing an area of possibility that is itself a poem and the world is never poorer for a new good poem, which is like a new piece of knowledge of the world.” Today in protein news: in praise of alpaca meat.
May 29, 2014 On the Shelf Darwin’s Basket Cases, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring James Davis Cooper after a James Crichton-Browne photograph, Illustration from Chapter XIII of The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals; Insane Woman Showing the Condition of Her Hair, c. 1871-1872; image via the Public Domain Review “It’s a curious thing to think of Charles Darwin sitting alone, closely studying photographic portraits of the afflicted and insane. But in the late 1860s, that’s exactly what he began doing: he sifted through portraits of kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, sufferers of severe self-importance, hysteria, and general mania.” Our very own Nicole Rudick on Bough Down, a new book of prose fragments and collage by Karen Green, who “faces a special difficulty: her husband was David Foster Wallace. This fact is both central to Bough Down and incidental to it. On the one hand, he was a famous, much admired writer, and Green’s new identity as ‘the designated survivor’ is one she can’t escape. ‘You are like the moon,’ she writes to Wallace, ‘you shed light on my insignificance from a great, wordless distance.’” Charles Simic remembers the poet Russell Edson: “He thought of poetry as a cast-iron airplane that sporadically flies, chiefly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or does not.” At the Library of Congress, two hundred and fifty of Thomas Jefferson’s books are missing. The Mesmerists of the eighteenth century believed that music played a vital role in the practice of animal magnetism. The proper tune could cure what ailed you, especially if it were played on one instrument in particular: the glass harmonica. “In fact, the association of the instrument with Mesmerism was one reason why it quickly went out of fashion.”
May 28, 2014 On the Shelf Supine Access to Your Favorite Tome, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration from an advertisement for the Holloway Reading Stand and Dictionary Holder, c. 1892; image via Retronaut. Around 1892, the world of books greeted perhaps the most salient advance since the invention of the printing press: the Holloway Reading Stand and Dictionary Holder. “For invalids and those accustomed to read themselves asleep it is invaluable … The tired man or woman may read while resting.” Working for J. D. Salinger’s agent: “One of Ms. Rakoff’s tasks was to respond to the steady stream of fan mail for the legendarily reclusive author … The letters, many of them handwritten, were personal and passionate. There were old men who had served with the author in the war and young people discovering the hypocrisy of the real world for the first time. Ms. Rakoff went off script and began to write back, giving the fans her own advice and opinions.” What explains the spate of novels about famous novelists’ wives? “Vera Nabokov, as far as I know, has not yet been transformed into the heroine of a novel. But it’s only a matter of time. The demand for fiction cast in the template of ‘the creative person’s wife’ shows little sign of abating.” Remembering Bernard Natan, “a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth.” “An emergency gives reading a practical urgency, but practical urgency and literature have little business mixing. This is exactly why reading, at its best, is good for you: there’s almost never an immediate, practical reason to do it. It cuts against the grain of the everyday—of the jobs we have to work, the bills we have to pay, the conversations and fashions we’ve been convinced we need to keep up with, the stock language and thought that float in our cultural ether, clogging our vision.”
May 27, 2014 On the Shelf Hey, Babe, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Frédéric Soulacroix, The Cavalier’s Kiss Julian Gough’s celebration of Joyce wins the award for Title of the Year: “James Joyce: You can’t ignore the bastard.” “Joyce entered your life very differently in rural Ireland in the early 1980s. Back then, he still existed outside the official system. Too difficult, too scandalous for school. It was still possible for teenagers to read Joyce as an act of rebellion against teachers, government, church. You read Joyce the way you listened to late punk, or early rap.” What’s the point of infantilizing pet names? “In the mid-twentieth century, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that babies’ cuteness is an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation without which they wouldn’t survive; adults need some sort of incentive to provide them with constant care, and Lorenz thought that motive was admiring their cuteness. He believed men carry this preference into adulthood by looking for women who retain elements of babyish ‘cuteness.’” The story of an art historian’s shrewd detective work: “A supposedly minor work from the Qing dynasty turned out to be a masterpiece nearly 700 years old.” In 2012, before Kara Walker’s exhibition arrived there, David Allee photographed Brooklyn’s dilapidated Domino Sugar Factory. “While his pictures could not convey the smell of the factory—‘crème brûlée mixed with mold and rot’—he hoped to communicate something about its complicated history … Inside the prison-like spaces, there was also ‘a visceral sense that the work that took place here was torturous.’ At the same time, he said, ‘everything is literally sugar coated.’” In the sixties, TV and film writers dreamed up a bunch of supercomputers with one thing in common: they were hell-bent on annihilating humanity.
May 26, 2014 On the Shelf The Wide World of Typewriter Art, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Otto von Bismarck (1898), typewriter art published in George Mares‘s The History of the Typewriter (1909) The Glasgow School of Art’s library, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, caught fire over the weekend, but the art school is confident that most of its holdings are intact. A new anthology of typewriter art explores “the development of the typewriter as a medium for creating work far beyond anything envisioned by the machine’s makers.” Remembering the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919: “Just after noon on January 15, 1919, a hail of gunshots rang out in the North End. The thunderous cascade of collapsing metal caused the ground to rumble and shake. Residents barely had time to register the sounds before an astonishing sight greeted them: a two-story wave of molasses barreling down the streets at thirty-five miles an hour.” The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a number of utopian preconceptions of what would become the Internet. Among them was Paul Otlet’s plan for “electric telescopes,” which he hatched in 1934; the telescopes “would allow anyone in the world to access to a vast library of books, articles, photographs, audio recordings, and films … Otlet also wrote about wireless networks, speech recognition, and social network-like features that would allow individuals to ‘participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.’” The many lives of Aubrey Lee Price, “the Bernie Madoff of the South.”