March 31, 2017 On the Shelf Dogs Don’t Talk in Times New Roman, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A screen grab from Microsoft Bob. Prediction: Comic Sans MS is due for a comeback. Ostracized and maligned for decades, the world’s most controversial typeface is about to come in from the cold. Books will be printed in Comic Sans. Official memoranda will be typed in it. Highway signs will use it; fashion labels will use it; we will put it on the moon. Vincent Connare, a typographer for Microsoft in the nineties who designed Comic Sans, has begun to campaign for its rehabilitation. He maintains that the font is a perfect marriage of form and content, especially given Microsoft’s ambitions at the time: “One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense … Type should do exactly what it’s intended to do. That’s why I’m proud of Comic Sans. It was for novice computer users and it succeeded with that market. People use it inappropriately: if they don’t understand how type works, it won’t have any power or meaning to them. I once heard a guy at a Rothko show say: ‘I could have done that.’ He clearly doesn’t know anything about art. He’ll probably use Comic Sans without realizing it’s wrong in certain circumstances.” Oh, I forgot about baseball! Baseball uniforms will use Comic Sans. Bet your life on it. The MLB’s new commissioner, Rob Manfred, is pitching all sorts of wild ideas for the game. Why not a typeface change? After all, Jay Caspian Kang, looking into baseball’s past, reminds us that the game has seen plenty of upgrades since the nineteenth century, when warring New York and Massachusetts factions vied for primacy: “The Massachusetts game featured one-out innings and overhand pitching, and batters could be called out by being hit by a thrown ball while between bases. Typically, the first team to score 100 runs won. The New York game was a bit more genteel and pragmatic: Games were played to 21, not 100; pitchers had to throw underhand; no players had balls intentionally thrown at them; and games concluded before dark. The debates over which version was better centered on manliness, decorum and the pace of play. The Massachusetts crowd argued that it was manlier for outs to require some measure of physical pain, while the New Yorkers said that manliness could never be extricated from gentlemanly manners and that only savages ran around fields pegging balls at one another.” Read More
March 30, 2017 On the Shelf This Is the Concourse to Hell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Train to eternal damnation, now boarding at gate four. Photo: Kevin Harber If someone published an anthology called Hellscape: Thirty Writers on Why Penn Station Sucks, I would buy that thing in hardcover and pay list price for it. I would buy a whole carton and stand at Penn Station’s Amtrak gates, forcing them on beleaguered travelers. Because: everyone hates Penn Station—I’m talking about the New York one—but good writing on the hatred of Penn Station is hard to find. One must be diligent. Julian Rose, in his review of Wendy Lesser’s new book, You Say to Brick, has made a great discovery: hidden among the pages of this biography of Louis Kahn is an evisceration of Penn. “In a tour de force of architectural criticism, Lesser excoriates this building as ‘something like a living hell,’ using an extended comparison to another major East Coast transit hub, Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, to underscore Penn Station’s many failures: urban (the elegant approach to Thirtieth Street along one of Philadelphia’s main arteries versus the ignominious midblock descent into the chasm yawning below Madison Square Garden that constitutes Penn’s main entrance); environmental (the flood of warm natural light that fills Thirtieth Street versus the harsh fluorescent glare of Penn’s underground expanse); spatial (the high ceilings and symmetrical plan of Thirtieth Street, so helpful for visitors to orient themselves, versus Penn’s befuddling catacombs); and even social (the implicit democracy of the benches that limn Thirtieth Street’s main concourse versus the explicit hierarchy of Penn’s isolated waiting rooms, which are reserved for ticket holders and divided by class).” Some books have indexes, indices, whatever. No one knows why. But there they are, long lists of words with page numbers after them. In my book, the index will be a single page with the words “Just fucking Google it.” But I’m being churlish. Sam Leith argues, convincingly, that indexers—who somehow write indexes for a living—are doing the Lord’s work: “It would be a cliché to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs. A good index is, as Harold Macmillan wrote when inaugurating the society sixty years ago, ‘much more than a guide to the contents of a book. It can often give a far clearer glimpse of its spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do.’ ” Read More
March 29, 2017 On the Shelf Painting Is the New Shouting, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from a painting by Kaya Mar reprinted in Satire Magazine. We live in a golden age for clever protest signs. As bodies in the streets have proliferated, so, too, have canny shows of devastating wit. (Also, pussy hats.) If you go to a protest with an unfunny sign, or just kind of a meh sign, or a small index card with potential slogan ideas that you focus group on the fly, you could end up the laughingstock of the resistance. Kaya Mar will never suffer such a fate. He carries around stately protest paintings—elaborate political cartoons in oil on canvas. And the effort he puts into them functions as a kind of megaphone: people are too impressed not to take pictures. Sam Kinchin-Smith spoke with Mar, who lives in England: “The trick, he explained, is to ‘get your disappointment, anger, rage onto the canvas’ with a quick and simple story. ‘Everybody has to recognize what I’m trying to say, not just in England, all over the world … When you try to force meaning, you lose the plot. When you are tribal, you censor yourself, and you won’t produce something good’ … Mar finds out that rallies are taking place because photo agencies call to ask if they can stage some shots with him and his paintings: ‘Normally they give me two days’ notice, because they like to have me there. I have every one of my pictures on Getty.’ This isn’t a sham; it’s a strategy. Protests ‘haven’t changed anything in all the time I’ve lived here,’ Mar said. ‘Politicians love them because they are a valve. But to have your voice heard, you need television and print media.’ And Mar has infiltrated those more effectively than any other satirist I can think of, by feeding the agencies that fuel so much of the media’s output. He can paint whatever he likes, however weird or angry, and Alamy and Shutterstock, the PA and the AP, will guarantee it gets the national platform denied to the protesters he stands alongside.” Fan fiction is great, but who has the time? Sarah Engeler-Young has married the art of fanfic to the art of compression; an aficionado of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she “writes fiction that retells Spike-centric episodes via haiku. She calls them Spaiku.” And she says: “Buffy’s is a hero’s journey for the ages, and it has been a wonderful show to watch again and again with my daughter as she navigates adolescence … My desire to interact with other people who love Buffy eventually led me to a very supportive online community at LiveJournal. I read (and commented on) tons of fan fiction, made fabulous new friends, and wished that I could contribute something as well. Alas, the plotting requirements of long fiction are completely beyond me. I thought, ‘Well, maybe if I made something very small … ’ ” Read More
March 28, 2017 On the Shelf Steal This Coin, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I bet you can pick it up all by yourself. Hey, are you busy tonight? I want to run something by you: I think we should steal the world’s largest gold coin. Yes, it is 221 pounds. Yes, it is Canadian, and unfortunately known as the “Big Maple Leaf.” And yes, it was just stolen—like, two nights ago—from a museum in Berlin. But don’t you see? This makes our work even easier. The original thieves already took care of the hard part. All we have to do is find them, neutralize them, and abscond with our booty in a very large, very stable cart. Here’s Melissa Eddy with some background: “The coin is about twenty-one inches in diameter and over an inch thick. It has the head of Queen Elizabeth II on one side and a maple leaf on the other. Its face value is 1 million Canadian dollars, or about $750,000, but by gold content alone, it is worth as much as $4.5 million at current market prices. And though it weighs about as much as a refrigerator, somehow thieves apparently managed to lug it through the museum and up at least one floor to get it out of a window at the back of the building. The police are still trying to figure out exactly how they did it … Their theory for now is that the thieves dragged the coin through the museum, out the window and then along the railway track, possibly reaching a park on the opposite bank of the river near the Hackescher Markt, a public square in Berlin that is home to a number of late-night bars and cafes.” (This is where we’ll begin our quest.) Dora Zhang reminds us not to confuse our love of literature with a generic, feel-good love of books—and not to allow the exploitation of literature: “If it seems natural today that we can and do love literature, a popular strain of bibliophilia predicates that love precisely on its utility—in particular its capacity to make us better people. This is evident from the moral uplift of Oprah’s Book Club to Alain de Botton’s project of rewriting the Western literary canon in the genre of self-help. His London-based School of Life organizes retreats in sumptuous country estates, promising discussions about how books can change us and individual consultations with ‘bibliotherapists’ who can make personalized recommendations. (One can only imagine the prescriptions—for greater stoicism, one dose of Hemingway; for better friendships, a splash of Montaigne; for cheerful optimism, avoid Beckett at all costs.) There’s little doubt that books can transform us. But transformation isn’t always comfortable—‘a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,’ Kafka said. When literature is at once luxury commodity and magic pill, the change we seek from it is unlikely to be the kind that comes from being alienated, devastated, or having the ground under us whisked away.” Read More
March 27, 2017 On the Shelf Scared Shitless, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Man and woman, scared shitless. Not pictured: absence of shit. Looking for a fun, easy way to spice up your writing? Try throwing in a fecal intensifier or two. They’re the shit, and you’ll be thrilled shitless with the results. As the translator Brendan O’Kane writes, fecal intensifiers are the idiom of the moment, but it’s hard to follow their logic: “A certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus … noted that ‘people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.’ This cracked the room up, naturally, but it also seemed slightly off … I might be scared shitless, but I’m unlikely to be amused, bored, delighted, outraged, or annoyed shitless. This is curious, since shitlessness would seem to be the natural result of something scaring, boring, or annoying the shit out of me—all distinct possibilities, according to my understanding of the idiom. In particularly unexpected circumstances, one might even shit oneself—as a response to fear, outrage, amusement, or surprise, rather than delight or (unless as a last resort) boredom.” If shitlessness is too taboo for you, there are other ways to jar and unnerve your potential readers. Take pains to pepper your prose with irregardless, for example, and watch the hate mail pour in. According to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, “Irregardless is one of those words that people love to hate. No one is lukewarm about irregardless. I don’t use it, but what I love about it that it has hung around on the periphery of English for over 200 years. It’s like this barnacle that you can’t get off the hull of the language, and I think that’s great.” Read More
March 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Cows Will Kill You, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Henri Rousseau, Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris, 1909. Go ahead and laugh at the cows, with their multiple stomachs, their indolent cud chewing, their superfluity of feces. The cows will kill you. Deep in a cow’s soul is an existential rage, a hatred of its own cowness that, once activated, generates an unslakable thirst for blood. And it is human blood they crave, for it is humans who have made their condition one of endless bondage. The statistics bear me out on this—at least in the United Kingdom, where, as Glen Newey writes, you’re more likely to die under the hooves of an angry steer than you are at the hands of a terrorist: “The HSE [Health and Safety Executive] logs seventy-four ‘fatalities involving cattle’ in the UK in 2000–15, compared to fifty-three deaths caused by Islamist terrorism in the same period. Many of the victims were farm workers, while eighteen were ‘MOPs’ or members of the public. These victims were disproportionately older people (only one was under fifty, thirteen were over sixty and as many as five were over seventy). More chilling still, as the HSE report makes clear, is the specific threat posed by out-of-control mothering cows. Of incident reports where the gender of the assailant was identified, ten involved cows with calves, and only one a bull. Hence it emerges that predominantly older people are being targeted by nursing cattle. Vegans seem largely to have been spared. But nobody is wholly safe from this civilizational threat, not just to our persons but to our old, carnivorous values.” Since the election, Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here has been having a moment, as Americans continue to wrap their minds around the basic irony that it has, in fact, happened here. But Steven Michels recommends another book by Lewis—his 1919 novel, Free Air, which is one of the earliest iterations of road-trip literature and presents, Michels says, “Lewis’s most affirmative vision” of freedom: “Free Air is the story of two young people, Milt and Claire. Milt is a small-town mechanic and garage owner, and Claire is from Long Island and in the middle of a coast-to-coast trip to Seattle with her father. Like many Northeasterners, Claire believes that the rest of the country is filled with folks who are good but simple. Milt knows better. He had been plotting an escape from its dreary doldrums, but is enthralled with Claire when she comes through town, and he ends up following her and her father on their journey west. Claire quickly falls for the heartiness of the outdoors, even though she sees Milt more like a brother than a romantic partner. ‘There is an America!’ Claire cheers by her tent, after she and Milt forgo her usual hotel … Once they get to their destination, however, they discover that everyone is obsessed with ‘the View’ and ranks houses accordingly. What’s worse is that everyone builds and buys from the assumption that houses ought to resemble the East Coast as much as possible.” Read More