March 18, 2014 On the Shelf How to Photograph the Inside of Your Body, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring If this digestive tract thrills you, imagine what a kick you’ll get out of your own! Image via Beautiful Decay The eccentric poet Bill Knott once faked his own death, but last week he really died. (Unless this is one hell of an elaborate ruse.) He wrote of himself: “my poetic career is nugatory … no editor will countenance my work; i’ve been forced to self-publish my poetry in vanity volumes; i am persona non grata and universally despised or ridiculed by everyone in the poetry world.” The truculent, condescending subtext of the word actually. Checking in with Alejandro Jodorowsky, everyone’s favorite cult filmmaker: “‘Maybe I am a prophet,’ he said in 1973. ‘I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Muhammad, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.’” One way to get a glimpse at the inside of your body: swallow a frame of 35 millimeter film, “folding each piece in a brightly colored capsule that allow[s] for the acids and bodily fluids to process the film with minimal risk of colon damage.” Punishments of the future: “What happens to life sentences if the human lifespan is radically expanded?”
March 17, 2014 On the Shelf Calling All Princesses, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Bell Telephones debuted the Princess phone in 1959. Image via Attitude Analyst The OED has made its latest update. Among the new words added: wackadoo, toilet-paper (as a verb), cunt lapper, and assisted living. Minneapolis’s Graywolf Press turns forty. Evocative shots of New York’s 1964 World’s Fair recall a time when the future was full of wonder, typefaces were chunkier, and you could ride a giant tire like a Ferris wheel. Why should you major in English? Because Barbara Walters and Mitt Romney did, of course! “It’s little! … It’s lovely! … It lights!” An enlightening history of Bell Telephone’s 1959 “Princess phone,” “the first phone specifically created for teenage girls and women … in its beauty and its place in the home, [it] was the embodiment of perfect womanly qualities of the time.”
March 14, 2014 On the Shelf Eudora Welty Knew How to Make a Good Impression, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sobriety pays. Portrait of Welty at the National Portrait Gallery; photo by Billy Hathorn, via Wikimedia Commons Eudora Welty once explained her popularity as a public speaker: “Colleges keep inviting me because I’m so well behaved … I’m always on time, and I don’t get drunk or hole up in a hotel with my lover.” Stanley Kubrick’s estranged daughter, Vivian, joined the Church of Scientology in 1999; some have argued, compellingly, that Eyes Wide Shut is a requiem for her. (Think about it: that strange, elite sex cult …) Now Vivian has released a series of touching photos that show her growing up on the sets of her father’s films. “The first official Scrabble Word Showdown … allows players to nominate a new, officially playable word.” What’s it like being a real private dick in New Yawk City? Neither as fizzy nor as seamy as you’d expect, alas. “Welcome to the world of bouncing cars and velvet interiors at the Torres Family Empire Lowrider Convention in Los Angeles, California.”
March 13, 2014 On the Shelf Opera As It Used to Be, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Lodovico Burnacini, Il Pomo d’Oro, Act I, Scene V, Jupiter and His Court at Banquet with Discord Floating in a Cloud above the Table, hand-colored engraving, 1668. Image via the New York Review of Books. The world’s twenty most stunning libraries. How many have you been shushed in? Bill Cunningham’s early photographs of New York. These illustrations from From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging elucidate the finer points of things you didn’t know you cared about, such as stagecraft and lighting techniques in seventeenth-century opera. The late philosopher Bernard Williams knew what to look for in a role model: “glistening contempt for philosophy … it is only by condescension or to amuse himself that he stays and listens to its arguments at all.” “Hilma af Klint was an old-school spiritualist who believed that she channeled psychic and esoteric messages from the so-called High Masters—who existed in another dimension—into abstract paintings.”
March 12, 2014 On the Shelf Papa’s Risqué Mash Note, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Publicity still of Marlene Dietrich in No Highway. Image via Wikimedia Commons “Drunk and naked I would advance from the rear, or your rear, wearing evening clothes.” A ribald note from Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich is soon to be auctioned—their relationship was, alas, never consummated, but if the price is right, you could own a record of their long flirtation, replete with such swooning phrases as “whore blood,” “foaming at the mouth,” and “Dearest Kraut.” Talking doors, gossip machines, super-duper turntables: here’s what Philip K. Dick, writing from the vantage point of 1966, thought 1992 might have been like. Would that it were. While we’re on sci-fi: the New Museum’s new exhibition, “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module,” plunges you into the old socialist vision of space travel. “Filko has a wall-mounted tablet nearby where, donning a wall-tethered headset that brings your forehead unnaturally close to the screen, you can ponder his ruminations on the fourth dimension.” “Tomorrow starts here.” “One course at a time.” “Be the difference.” The surprisingly vacuous phrases copyrighted by universities. A newly reprinted 1856 essay gives German comedy quite the drubbing: “German humor generally shows no sense of measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come.”
March 11, 2014 On the Shelf Listening to Stonehenge, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: The Stonehenge Stone Circle, via Flickr George Saunders is the first to win the new £40,000 Folio Prize. Joe McGinniss is dead, at seventy-one. Illustrations from international editions of Don Quixote published in the quixotic sixties. “As a teenager, I thought I was the only person who revered Geek Love … Years later, when I was an editor at The Paris Review, I wrote to Dunn, and we became occasional pen pals.” Stonehenge may have been a “prehistoric glockenspiel”; it’s made of “lithophones, or rocks that produce notes when struck.” “His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces.”