March 26, 2014 On the Shelf Alice Munro Is Legal Tender, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Royal Canadian Mint Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize last year, which is neat and all, but what’s even cooler is that her face is going to appear on a five-dollar Canadian coin—an honor second only to having a New Jersey Turnpike rest area named after you. The world’s most expensive musical instrument: “a Stradivari viola, whose asking price will start at $45 million when it is offered for sale this spring.” If one loses the ability to speak, a prosthetic voice offers the chance to restore one’s vocal identity. What was on French television in the sixties? Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou discussing philosophy. Obviously. If you’ve got two left feet, scientists have done you a solid: they now know exactly which dance moves catch a lady’s eye. The Electric Slide is not among them, experts say.
March 25, 2014 On the Shelf All Your Favorite Shipwrecks in One Convenient Place, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Johan Christian Dahl, Shipwreck on the Norwegian Coast (detail), 1831. If you woke up this morning and wondered, Will today finally be the day that the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) puts together an interactive map of all known shipwrecks that have occurred off the treacherous Scottish coastline?, congratulations: the answer is yes. Shut up the surly teenager in your life—remind him of how viciously teens were treated in medieval Europe. “A lord’s huntsman is advised to choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight: one who is physically active and keen sighted. This boy should be beaten until he had a proper dread of failing to carry out his master’s orders.” Vis-à-vis cruelty: in Britain, it’s now illegal to send books to prisoners. Authors are protesting. Back in the day, Orson Welles performed ten Shakespeare plays on the radio. You can listen to them. “Not since the heyday of Dickens, Dumas, and Henry James has serialized fiction been this big.” Behind Wattpad, a new storytelling app. What if classic writers wrote erotica? (Hats off to Camus’ Sutra, which is especially inspired.)
March 24, 2014 On the Shelf Your Aura Is Orange and Squiggly, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, “The Intention to Know,” a synesthetic illustration from Thought-Forms (1901). That wild pope of ours—what’s he up to this time? Why, he’s hiring a Japanese tech firm to digitize the whole of the Vatican Library’s archives, of course! It’s almost as if this pontiff wants to make the world a better place. Victorian occultists believed in a kind of synesthesia, “the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras.” Fortunately for all of us, they made many terrific illustrations to support this theory, too. A landfill in New Mexico may contain truckload upon truckload of the worst video game of all time: Atari’s 1982 E.T. tie-in. After years of trying to sweep him under the rug, atheists are finally talking about Nietzsche again. Turkey’s Twitter ban has spawned a new Web site, Mwitter, which is semantically pretty fascinating. (Look for Elif Batuman in the comments section.)
March 21, 2014 On the Shelf Fake Locales with Real Visitors, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Timberline Lodge, in Mount Hood, Oregon—more often taken for the Overlook Hotel, which it portrayed in 1980’s The Shining. Photo: mthoodterritory.com It’s World Poetry Day. Take time to remember the dissident poets in your life. Today in simulacrum news: fictional places that attract real tourists. (The Most Photographed Barn in America is not here, alas, though arguably that’s a real place which was then fictionalized, thus becoming more real.) “The national discussion of grammar and language is stuck in half-remembered dictates and daft shibboleths.” “I was curious about changes in the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which I hadn’t visited for two decades … the room was silent save for a single whispered comment I heard from one museumgoer to another, ‘I didn’t know he was so poor.’” Mark Twain’s deep, abiding history with the Mississippi River. International Corporate Translation Goof of the Day: “Of all the available Chinese translations for ‘oracle’ as the name of one of the world’s largest and most advanced computer technology corporations, jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 (‘oracle bone script’) is probably the least appropriate.”
March 20, 2014 On the Shelf The Self Resides in the Chest, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Descartes thought the seat of the soul was in the pineal gland. He was so wrong. “Revenge should have no bounds,” the Bard wrote in Hamlet, and one man, at least, vigorously agrees: when a graphic designer in Bristol failed to receive the gaming console he’d bought online, he sought retribution by sending the scammer the complete works of Shakespeare via text message. An early photo of Jason Segel portraying David Foster Wallace indicates that Jason Segel does not very much resemble David Foster Wallace. Where are you? You are in your chest. Researchers “asked ten blindfolded adults to use a metal pointer to motion at ‘themselves.’ Most people indicated their upper torso area … ‘the torso is, so to speak, the great continent of the body, relative to which all other body parts are mere peninsulas. Where the torso goes, the body follows.’” In a new interview, Ralph Steadman discusses, among other things, his old pet sheep: “It was a mutant sheep, but a local farmer was taking it to slaughter. I adopted her, named her Zeno, or him perhaps—does it really matter? It’s a sheep, after all … I would go to her in the morning for wisdom, for a philosophic message of what to do with the day.” John Banville’s new novel resurrects Raymond Chandler’s beloved private eye, Philip Marlowe, raising the question: “At what point does a work of supposed literary merit simply become fan fiction?”
March 19, 2014 On the Shelf Youth, Eternal Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Garuda, the “vahana” of Vishnu, returning with a vase of Amrita, a nectar thought to bestow immortality. A drawing by an unknown artist, ca. 1825. Some writers—the white male ones, mostly—expect to attain immortality through their work. Others simply write about eternal life. And others still must wait for the afterlife for their work to get the attention it deserves. Walter Benjamin, for instance, was “all but forgotten in the years leading up to his death … his name had been kept alive by a small number of friends and colleagues, the kind of trickle of a readership that hardly suggested he would one day be counted among the most significant and far-ranging critics, essayists, and thinkers of the past 100 years.” But the ebb and flow of critical reputation is almost a given these days, when we’re always developing provocative new rubrics with which to classify our writers. E.g.: “As novelists spend much of their day watching the grass grow, it is only logical that they can be defined according to their landscaping technique. Thus Donald Antrim is a push-mower novelist, while Rachel Kushner is a ride-mower novelist.” There were not always “teenagers.” A new documentary examines the peculiar history of the concept, which was “the result and invention of adolescent girls … There is a kind of sexist quality to it as well, a crucifixion of the young female figure.” As Ukraine becomes the nexus of geopolitics, pickup artists worry about the implications for getting laid. Would EU membership make Ukrainian women more independent, and thus more difficult to seduce? “Kiev’s pussy paradise potential has been permanently damaged … It’s very sad.”