May 7, 2014 On the Shelf All the Colors in One Convenient Location, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From A. Boogert’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, 1692. Image via Colossal In the late seventeenth century, long before the age of Sherwin Williams and Pantone, a Dutch artist known as A. Boogert (!) compiled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, an eight-hundred-page compendium of paint and color. The literary critic Randall Jarrell also wrote five children’s books—several of them illustrated by Maurice Sendak. “The Bat-Poet is the sweetish story of a bat who longs to stay up during the day and sing the song of the mockingbird; to his delight, he discovers that he himself can be a songster … ‘on the willow’s highest branch, monopolizing / Day and night, cheeping, squeaking, soaring / The mockingbird is imitating life.’” Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has acquired Harlequin, whose romances offer “empathetic insight into contemporary cultures.” EBay is launching a “digital magazine” at “the intersection of retail and publishing.” The president of eBay marketplaces, Devin Wenig, says, “We’re now in the content business … for the first time, eBay has a voice. We’re telling stories. We have an editor. We have curators. And we have writers on-staff. You’ll see that evolve to some longer-form stories, some really beautiful pictures… It’s media-like.” He adds: “We’re entering a post-mobile age now,” he said. “Mobile is so important that it’s almost silly to talk about mobile.” (By the way, did you know The Paris Review has recently unveiled our new mobile site?) In Paris, to “lock in their love,” tourist couples put locks on the Pont des Arts and other bridges—which would be an innocuous tradition, as far as these things go, except it makes the bridges ugly and dangerous. Two unlikely Americans are trying to end the practice.
May 6, 2014 On the Shelf The Sound of Pure Internet, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Fleshas, via Wikimedia Commons One of the finest World War II documentaries, 1945’s The Battle of San Pietro, was faked. Does this make it less true? Here’s what it was like to attend a literature seminar taught by Philip Roth in the seventies: “He barely looked at us or made eye contact, but murmured a hello, then sat down in his chair, crossed one long leg over the other, and slowly unbuckled his watch. That’s as sexy as it got.” “Does journalism fit into capitalism? … Journalism does exist in capitalism, and capitalism is kicking journalists’ asses. The same goes for editors, and for many publications.” Matt Parker, a sound artist, has been touring data hubs—those epicenters of the Internet, where all our e-stuff takes physical form—and recording the ethereal hum they give off. The result: “musical renderings of the great churn … an incredibly loud and obnoxious place filled with white noise and buzzing hard drives.” Analyzing the artisanal toast trend: “Artisanal toast is hardly the first harbinger of our food obsession, or even necessarily the most egregious, but it’s become a scapegoat for a growing, broader cultural backlash; the toast that broke the camel’s back.”
May 5, 2014 On the Shelf The Origins of Barbecue, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Derrick Tyson, via Flickr The secret libraries of New York. (None of them are technically secrets, but “the comparatively less well-known libraries of New York” doesn’t have the same ring to it.) “A surveillance society … threatens our interiority, our right to a private self that ensures we can never be fully transparent, to others or to ourselves. In a culture driven to render us ever more transparent to one another, literature and art may be among the few spaces in which to keep hold of this understanding of the private self.” On the disappearance of spectacular cinema: “As the bulk of filmmaking has shifted away from studio productions and virtually all movies except for franchises have become, in effect, independent films, movies have fallen into conflicting extremes of artifice and of reality, and the idea of reality has become a sort of critical cult.” “The first indigenous tribes Christopher Columbus encountered on the island he named Hispaniola had developed a unique method for cooking meat over an indirect flame, created using green wood to keep the food (and wood) from burning. Reports indicate that the Spanish referred to this new style of cooking as barbacoa: the original barbecue.” These statues are very, very, arrestingly large.
May 2, 2014 On the Shelf Snub Your Suitors the Brontë Way, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring She knew how to say no. Charlottë Bronte, painted by Evert A. Duyckinck, based on a drawing by George Richmond, 1873. Need to reject a marriage proposal or two? Take a page from Charlotte Brontë’s book. Here’s what she wrote to Henry Nussey, a Sussex curate, in March 1839: “Do not therefore accuse me of wrong motives when I say that my answer to your proposal must be a decided negative … I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you—but … you do not know me, I am not this serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose.” Just when you thought it’d been a while since anyone asserted the death of the novel, here’s Will Self, asserting the death of the novel. “This time it’s for real,” the headline notes. What do conductors do? Divining the art of hand-flapping: “One problem some conductors encountered is what a conducting friend of mine calls the ‘Grecian Urn’ syndrome. This is where the left hand mimics the right hand exactly, tracing the outline of an antique urn. It’s more picturesque than the ‘dead hand’ syndrome, where the left hand hangs limply, but just as useless.” New research suggests that Freud was right all along: our dreams are fueled by sex. “I vividly recall the day in the late 1970s when I realized that dreams and their unconscious sexual meaning were part of a larger whole … I and another orderly were given the task of delousing, showering and cleaning up an old alcoholic who had been picked up off the streets for a drying-out period … All of a sudden this emaciated, brittle old man jumped up, stared straight at us revealing a full erection and then lifted a massive metal table over his head, threw it against the wall and began wailing in ever louder sing-song tones a string of sexual expletives that left me and my colleague terrified that the man was crumbling, psychically, before our eyes.” Inflammatory bowel disease “is fast becoming resistant to every antibiotic thrown at it.” But there is a kind of miracle cure: a fecal transplant. “Some doctors have likened the recoveries of desperately ill patients to those seen with anti-HIV protease inhibitors in the mid-1990s … Yet few other interventions elicit such disgust, revulsion and ridicule … What’s behind this knee-jerk aversion? Perhaps, as one epidemiologist believes, it’s the voice of our evolutionary ancestors, warning us away from a major source of parasites and other pathogens. Perhaps, says another researcher, it’s the fading of an agrarian life that equated manure with opportunity, whose cultural influence is now drowned out by public health warnings of diarrhea-borne epidemics in towns and cities. With the last lines of antibiotic defense beginning to crumble, however, getting past the cognitive dissonance of healthy poo as powerful curative could be a matter of life or death for tens of thousands of patients.”
May 1, 2014 On the Shelf Train Robberies for Everyone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Marius Amdam, The Great Train Robbery Junot Díaz on getting an MFA: “I didn’t have a great workshop experience. Not at all. In fact by the start of my second year I was like: get me the fuck out of here. So what was the problem? Oh, just the standard problem of MFA programs. That shit was too white.” Al Feldstein, the editor who turned Mad Magazine into an institution in the late fifties, has died, at eighty-eight. “In his second issue, Mr. Feldstein seized on a character who had appeared only marginally in the magazine—a freckled, gaptoothed, big-eared, glazed-looking young man—and put his image on the cover, identifying him as a write-in candidate for president campaigning under the slogan ‘What—me worry?’” When print books are scanned and converted into e-books, a process called optical character recognition is supposed to ensure that all of the letters are “read” correctly. But things sometimes go awry, and your e-book includes sentences like this: “‘Bertie, dear Bertie, will you not say good night to me,’ pleaded the sweet, voice of Minnie Hamilton, as she wound her anus affectionately around her brother’s neck.” DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg has a dim view of the future of the cinema: “A movie will come out and you will have seventeen days, that’s exactly three weekends, which is 95% of the revenue for 98% of movies. On the eighteenth day, these movies will be available everywhere ubiquitously and you will pay for the size [of the screen you watch it on]. A movie screen will be $15. A 75” TV will be $4.00. A smartphone will be $1.99… ” In praise of train robberies: “Dismemberment and armed robbery have been lost in today’s commuting experience … A few train robberies would do wonders for commuter attitude. Instead of insisting the city clean up all the snow as opposed to just most of it; instead of complaining that the Citi Bike seats are too long or short, too hard or squishy; instead of issuing eye rolls when a passenger shoves in ahead of closing doors, disrupting their Candy Crush level—a train heist would remind folks that any arrival, even a tardy one, is a blessing.” What’s wrong with contemporary philosophy? “The exclusion of the agrarian and nomadic, in favor of the urban and sedentary. The problem is not just ‘the West’, or Europe, or masculine domination, or white supremacy, or even the intersection of all of these. The problem is the city.”
April 30, 2014 On the Shelf Ah, Bless, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Heinrich Zille, Die Witwe, 1929. The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards: in fiction, László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet; in poetry, Elisa Biagini’s The Guest in the Wood, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky. Jenny Diski, bless her, on aging, or something like it: “I must accept that I was old because my hairdresser says, ‘Ah, bless,’ in response to whatever I say in answer to her questions. ‘Are you busy today?’ ‘Just regular working.’ ‘Ah, bless.’ ‘How was the weekend?’ ‘A friend came to stay.’ ‘Ah, bless.’ The other day, when she asked, I said: ‘I’m being interviewed by a journalist from Poland.’ ‘Ah, bless.’ … The ah-bless alters or confirms whatever it’s responding to, and in my mind’s eye (altered and confirmed) I see a small, nondescript old lady going bravely about her business. There are other signs that I am no longer young, but the ah-bless is the most open and public.” In 1968, Charles Simic witnessed a group of disgruntled poets settle things the old-fashioned way—with fisticuffs. “I stood on the porch watching in astonishment with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; I tried to tell them that this was the first time I had seen anything like that and it scared the hell out of me, but they just laughed.” A series of photos compares public spaces in North and South Korea. (The shot of the Pyongyang Metro is especially poignant.) Guillaume Nicloux discusses his new film, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, starring, yes, Michel Houellebecq: “He is also really annoying to the captors. He is always asking for wine and cigarettes, he asks for another visit from the prostitute, he is really tiresome for them. He gets angry. He begs our sympathy, but at the same time he behaves really badly.”