April 29, 2014 On the Shelf Searching for Cervantes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring We’re going to find this man—with radar. Juan de Jauregui y Aguilar, Miguel de Cervantes, seventeenth century. In Spain, forensic scientists have begun to search for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes—using the power of radar. Dave Eggers wrote a rhapsodic introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. But in 1996, when the novel was first published, he had less enthusiastic things to say. (The phrase “wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea” is especially damning.) If we blame Helen of Troy for starting the Trojan War, are we not slut-shaming? In China, the Uighur writer and scholar Ilham Tohti “has been charged with separatism for the peaceful expression of his views on human rights.” A long list of writers has signed a petition demanding his release. Have you been searching for the proper periodical for the young arriviste in your life? “Teen Tatler knows what its readers are destined for: a cokey phase where they fuck a member of a dynasty pop-rock band, before a lifetime of medicated bliss on the arm of some kind of viscount.” Subscribe now. Let’s remember our nation’s historic first sperm bank—it all started in the Iowa of 1952, with two doctors, some bull semen, and a lot of dreams…
April 28, 2014 On the Shelf Malamud Lookin’ Good, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Charlotte Strick’s new designs for the Bernard Malamud centenary. Image via FSG Work in Progress Here’s our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, on the art of preservation—not in the sense of manly survivalism but in the sense of making jam. His essay was recently nominated for a James Beard Award. And here’s Charlotte Strick, our art editor, interviewed about her sharp new designs for the Bernard Malamud centenary. While we’re at it, Daily contributor Caleb Crain has asked, “how much gay sex should a novel have?” (“The half answer, half protest that immediately springs to mind is, It depends. Many are the conditions that it depends upon.”) And Daily contributor Willie Osterweil found that today’s sports movies have comparatively few feats of athleticism in them. “There’s a new breed of sports movie in town, one that does away with all that pesky team-building and ersatz democracy. These films celebrate the real heroes of sports, the real heroes of any workplace: the bosses.” The lost art of memorizing poetry: “Many of today’s prominent poets seem to be writing poems that actively resist memorization. Take John Ashbery, for example … As I walked uphill, repeating Ashbery’s lines to myself, I found them as slippery as an eel.” Why do we tend to place painful episodes in parentheses? A variety of literature has “windows in a wall of verse or prose that suddenly open on an expanse of personal pain. Masquerading as mere asides, they might hold more punch than parentheses are usually expected to hold, more even than the surrounding sentences, and have all the more impact for their disguise as throwaways.”
April 25, 2014 On the Shelf Warhol via Floppy Disk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Andy Warhol, Andy2, 1985, ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum Shakespeare: playwright, poet, armchair astronomer. “Peter Usher has a very elaborate theory about Hamlet, in which the play is seen as an allegory about competing cosmological worldviews … Claudius happens to have the same name as Claudius Ptolemy, the ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer who we now associate most closely with the geo-centric Ptolemaic worldview.” From the mideighties: Andy Warhol’s rediscovered computer art. New research by the University of California-San Diego’s Rayner Eyetracking Lab—nobody tracks eyes like the Rayner—suggests that speed-reading apps might rob you of your comprehension skills. “I have been surreptitiously scrutinizing faces wherever I go. Several things have struck me while undertaking this field research on our species. The first is quite how difficult it is to describe faces … We might say that a mouth is generous, or eyes deep-set, or cheeks acne-scarred, but when set beside the living, breathing, infinitely subtle interplay of inner thought, outward reaction and the nexus of superimposed cultural conventions, it tells us next to nothing about what a person really looks like.” In Germany, business is booming. The secret: pessimism. “German executives are almost always less confident in the future than they are in the present.” Discovered in an archive of the LAPD: more than a million old crime-scene photographs, some of them more than a century old.
April 24, 2014 On the Shelf Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Beijing’s new twenty-four-hour bookstore. Fact: in 1934, H. G. Wells interviewed Stalin. Professor Richard H. Hoggart has died, at ninety-five. In 1960, Hoggart helped to end British censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; he is “widely credited as the most persuasive in convincing a jury of nine men and three women that Lawrence’s graphic descriptions of sex between Lady Constance Chatterley and her husband’s groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors, were not obscene.” Beijing now has a twenty-four-hour bookstore. It has nightly promotional offers and air-conditioning. “We want to create an intellectual environment for book lovers,” the store’s manager said. But lest you think it sounds like paradise: “We mainly sell social science books.” The critic Franco Moretti “pursues literary research of a digital and quantitative nature”; in other words, he handles books as if they’re mountains of data. “I’m interested in the survival of genres, of texts, of forms. I’m a formalist. I think that should be the basis of literary analysis because, I suspect, that is also the basis of readers’ choices, although readers may not be aware of that. They don’t seem to choose a story. They choose a story told in a certain way, with a certain style and sense of events.” For Mary Gaitskill, Let’s Talk About Love, Carl Wilson’s excellent book about Céline Dion, becomes a meditation on our preoccupation with cool: our ferocious disdain for Dion suggests we live in “a world of illusory shared experiences, ready-made identities, manipulation, and masks so dense and omnipresent that in this world, an actual human face is ludicrous or ‘crazy’; a world in which authenticity is jealously held sacrosanct and yet is often unwelcome or simply unrecognizable when it appears.”
April 23, 2014 On the Shelf The Logistics of Ark-Building, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Simon de Myle, Noah’s Ark on the Mount Ararat, 1570 Will García Márquez’s unpublished manuscript ever see the light of day? The eagerly anticipated third edition of the OED won’t appear until 2034—and it probably won’t be available in print. “The ark is the first impressive man-made creation, the world’s first ambitious piece of technology. In the world of Genesis … a world of slick-talking snakes, cherubs with flaming swords, and guys who live to be eight hundred years old—the ark gives us something pragmatic, something with worldly dimensions. In other words, some literary realism.” Meanwhile, in 1895: What compelled Paul Gauguin to take off his pants and play the harmonium? Science may never know. Hey, hotshot: “the way we Americans casually, often unthinkingly, incorporate gun metaphors into our everyday slang says a lot about how deeply embedded guns are in our culture and our politics, and how difficult it is to control or extract them.”
April 22, 2014 On the Shelf The Cosmonaut Survival Kit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Почтовая марка СССР, 1980. Интеркосмос Have booksellers discovered Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary? Laura Ingalls Wilder collaborated with her daughter on many books in the Little House on the Prairie series, and it wasn’t always a cooperative arrangement. A letter from 1938 suggests the scope of their creative frictions: “Here you have a young girl,” Wilder’s daughter wrote to her about one character, “a girl twelve years old, who’s led a rather isolated life with father, mother, sisters in the country, and you can not have her suddenly acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight.” What was in your average Soviet cosmonaut’s survival kit circa 1968? Among other specialties: three balaclavas, a tripartite rifle/shotgun/flare-gun, and a pistol intended to frighten “wolves, bears, tigers, etc.” in the event of a crash landing. A new app called Cloak helps you “avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat—anyone you’d rather not run into.” Which makes life a bit more miserable, it turns out: “‘All Clear: There’s nobody nearby’ reads like such a strange, sad message, such a lonely thing to have achieved through technological control of our social environments. Looking at that screen makes me want to place my phone face down on my desk, go out into the street, and walk around until I bump into someone I know.” Christian Montenegro, an Argentinean illustrator, makes arresting drawings that look like eclectic contemporary woodcuts.