March 23, 2017 On the Shelf We’ll Always Have Barf Bags, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The barf bag: a comforting cultural constant. These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got an old friend kicking around—the barf bag. In these uncertain times, Hollywood’s horror filmmakers still turn to sick bags as a primo promotional gag. For there is still vomit in this realm, and still a need to contain it in the face of extreme spectacle. Cara Buckley writes: “After a moviegoer apparently vomited during a Los Angeles screening of the French coming-of-age cannibal flick, Raw, the theater began handing out barf bags … The move is a vintage publicity stunt going back some fifty years. Among the standout bags in movie history: The keepsake vomit bag from the 1963 splatter film Blood Feast came with an encouragement, ‘Spill your guts out!’ ‘Guaranteed to upset your stomach!’ proclaimed the bag from the 1981 Italian film Cannibal Ferox. The bag for The Beyond (1981) came with the thoughtfully worded warning, ‘Individuals with sensitive constitutions may experience stomach distress,’ and advised that the bag be used only once and not overfilled.” For a while, Marianne Moore taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a dubious institution in Pennsylvania that aimed to “assimilate” Native American youth basically by flogging their culture out of them. This was not, as one might imagine, a bright spot for Moore’s career. Siobhan Phillips notes that “even at the time Moore taught there, the school’s obvious wrongs were noticed and decried. Moore knew of ‘cruel neglect and abuse,’ as her mother put it in a letter included in [Linda] Leavell’s biography. Moore did not protest. In 1914, federal investigators examined conditions at CIIS and dismissed the superintendent … Congress found financial corruption and mismanagement as well as incidents of wrongful expulsion and physical harm. A student in Moore’s department organized the petition requesting the investigation, which 276 students signed. Moore was accused of supporting insurrection, but she sidestepped the charge, as she reports in a letter to her brother: ‘I crush out disrespect and rancor whenever I see it, and I give the students as thorough a training in political honor as I can.’ When inspectors came to Carlisle, she dodged them. Her brother advised her not to say anything definitive or particular. She took his advice.” Read More
March 22, 2017 On the Shelf We’re a Nation of Smirking Persons, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Walt Whitman, famously unsmirking American. Here’s the problem with America, as Walt Whitman saw it: we’re “a nation of smirking persons” when we should be one “of sane and cleanfleshed men.” For this, we may blame the restive, costive decadence of city life, which has produced “a set of sickly milk-and-water men” who “bloat themselves with quantities of trash.” This was true in 1858, when, under a pseudonym, Whitman wrote a series of columns on “Manly Health.” And it’s still true now, friends. Just last night, I bloated myself with quantities of trash, and I plan to do it again immediately. But fear not. There are a few things we can do, Whitman says, to reclaim our vigor: grow a beard, eat exclusively beef, sleep with the window open. His advice, as I’ve written elsewhere, isn’t always stirring, but it’s hard to look away from the spectacle of masculine insecurity he presents: “Where Leaves of Grass celebrates a man sublimely comfortable in his own skin, Manly Health is more likely to warn that skin is ‘one of the great inlets of disease.’ Whitman’s column warns against potatoes, prostitutes, overthinking, hot beverages, and between-meal snacking, to name a few of his prohibitions. As for condiments: forget about them. Real men abjure catsup.” Christopher Benfey, writing on the German author Paul Scheerbart, has an important reminder: whatever you’re building, build it out of glass. What, you think you’re too good for glass? Get a clue! “To bring our culture to a higher level, Scheerbart argued in Glass Architecture (1914), his marvelous utopian novel in the form of an aesthetic manifesto, the heavy Wilhelmine buildings of brick and stone needed to be replaced with glass, ‘which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of colored glass.’ One of his rhyming aphorisms might be translated: ‘Without a palace of glass / Life is a pain in the ass.’ ” Read More
March 21, 2017 On the Shelf Leave Jane Austen Alone, You Nazi Scum, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Lily James and Bella Heathcote in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. First the white nationalists took that haircut—you know the one, an arty variant on the Marine’s high-and-tight buzz, endemic to white guys in gentrifying neighborhoods circa 2013. Then the white nationalists took Barbour field jackets, depriving a whole generation of the joys of waxed canvas. Now the white nationalists have come for Jane Austen, in whom they mistakenly see a love of tradition, and it is up to us to say: enough. Let them claim some other, lesser Regency writer—an E. T. A. Hoffmann, maybe, or even a Sir Walter Scott—and leave us to read Persuasion in peace, the animals. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Some alt-right admirers hail Austen’s novels as blueprints for a white nationalist ‘ethno-state.’ Others cite her as a rare example of female greatness … A post on the website Counter Currents called ‘The Woman Question in White Nationalism,’ for example, includes a string of comments debating how the vision of marriage in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice fit with the ‘racial dictatorship’ necessary to preserve Western civilization. ‘If traditional marriage à la P&P is going to be imposed, again, in an ethnostate, we must behave like gentlemen,’ one commenter wrote.” Kay Redfield Jamison’s new book, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, aims to rehabilitate our understanding of the poet’s mental illness, which tends to be shrouded in the clichés of the eccentric artist. Dan Chiasson writes, “From his thirties on, Lowell suffered the relentless cycles of bipolar disorder, the ‘irritable enthusiasm’ that lurched him upward before landing him in despair … The poet’s cycles of illness and recovery have been judged in scolding moral terms, or, worse, viewed as a kind of lifelong-mishap GIF, with Lowell stuck in a permanent loop. When he was manic, Lowell smashed wineglasses and schemed to marry near-strangers. In recovery, his depressions were severe, his remorse profound, the work of repairing the relationships he’d damaged unrelenting. But the metaphors that came so quickly to hand could again be tamed and put to use. ‘Gracelessly,’ he wrote, ‘like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon. I am part of my family again.’ ” Read More
March 20, 2017 On the Shelf He Just Ate a Pastrami Sandwich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ilya Repin, Duel Between Onegin and Lenski, from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 1899. I went to a party this weekend. It was boring. People talked about books all night, and no one threw a punch—or even a low kick to the shins. I wanted to stand on a chair and yell, People, people, we’ve got important work to do! Our forebears would be disappointed in us! In a new profile, Norman Podhoretz, the eighty-seven-year-old former editor of Commentary, sets an example when he remembers the adversarial literary culture of yore. Podhoretz tells John Leland: “It was a really passionate intellectual life. It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements … In the case of The Adventures of Augie March, I was the one who nearly came to blows … [After my review,] Bellow wouldn’t speak to me for years. It was only when he decided he couldn’t stand Alfred Kazin anymore that we became sort of friendly. We were sitting together in a meeting, Saul and I, and Kazin was over there, and he said, ‘Look at him, he looks like he just ate a pastrami sandwich out of a stained brown piece of paper’ … John Berryman, who was a friend of Bellow’s, came up to me—I didn’t know who he was, this drunken guy—and he said, ‘We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years.’ I was twenty-three years old. I go, What?” Alex Abramovich, eulogizing the late Chuck Berry, remembers his way with words: “Smart and systematic, he plugged every possible variable into the equations at hand and wrote anthems that were reverse engineered to appeal to rock and roll’s core constituency of disaffected teenagers. The songs were ‘intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few’, Berry said. But the lyrics were fine-grained and cinematic … Berry is celebrated for his neologisms: ‘botherations’ and ‘coolerators’ (in ‘Memphis, Tennessee,’ tears are ‘hurry home drops’). But his images and similes are just as impressive, and his sense of control is startling: when Berry shouts to the city bus driver—‘Hey conductor, you must … slow down!’—the song slows with him.” Read More
March 17, 2017 On the Shelf A Comma for the Working Man, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This world is full of pointless suffering and unending torment … but at least we’ve got the serial comma. Grammarians are fond of saying things like “the comma improves our way of life” and “proper punctuation is money in the bank”; normally they’re full of shit, but today they’re onto something. As Elena Cresci writes, “In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a U.S. court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous … The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay: ‘The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of (1) agricultural produce; (2) meat and fish products; and (3) perishable foods.’ The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between ‘packing for shipment’ and ‘or distribution,’ the law refers to the single activity of ‘packing,’ not to ‘packing’ and ‘distribution’ as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute—but do not pack—the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.” Rhyme schemers: Anthony Madrid urges you to take the easy way out. “There was nothing wrong in 1592, and there is nothing wrong in 2017, with using the same rhyme pairs over and over and over,” he writes: “You can call {sing|spring} a “rhyme cliché” if you want, but that attitude leads to flushing six sevenths of world literature down the toilet … We have all encountered persons who triumphantly cite the fact that nothing rhymes with orange. It is always orange they point to. Never scissors, never morgue, never geode. Never any of the other thousands of words that have no rhyme partner. Because: the orangists have given the matter no thought. They are quoting. As they always are. The more interesting phenomenon from the researcher’s point of view is the case of rhyme pairs like {fountain|mountain}, where each of the words has a rhyme, but only one. Where either mountain or fountain appears in rhyme position, the other is literally inevitable. Likewise with {only|lonely}. Likewise with {culture|vulture}. And others. There is no essential and inescapable semantic link between the words in those rhyme pairs. Yet, there is, to be sure, an inescapable link.” Read More
March 16, 2017 On the Shelf Hi, I’m Being Sarcastic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just joking around, drinking milk in the sun. How about irony, huh? It’s complicated! On the Internet, any ironic message broadcast beyond certain narrow parameters has the irony sucked out of it like bone marrow: blockheads and buffoons get ahold of your words and are all like, Is that some kind of joke? Do you think that’s funny? We’re a post-joke society, and the situation is dire. Amelia Tait has diagnosed our cultural disease, and she proposes a radical solution: a full-time sarcasm font. “We now live in a time where people are being divided right down the middle on social media into camps called ‘Yes, Enlightened’ and ‘No, Very Bad.’ In the world of woke, one misunderstood joke runs the risk of ruining someone’s reputation. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I must suggest an immediate worldwide implementation of a sarcasm font … I want everything sarcastic to henceforth be written in that one WordArt that is all wavey and blue and great for GCSE Geography projects on the Savanna. Any time a satirical article is written, the whole thing will be bright and blue so that no one need pop over to the Facebook comment section to wish the author would be forcibly taken from their bed at dawn and shot in the face. The future of our fragmented society relies on this, more than anything else.” Maybe it’s best if we just abandon language altogether—certainly it doesn’t seem to help us talk clearly about sex and desire, which means, what’s the point? Grindr, the gay meetup app, is leading the charge to forgo words, in all their uselessness. Guy Trebay writes, “Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji—500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.” But will this allow for unfettered sexual expression, as Grindr claims it would—or are users just trading the shackles of language for the shackles of top-down corporate fascism? Doug Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, told the Times: “ ‘One problem is, you have this common language that’s not being organically created by marginalized people,’ as were secret hankie or hatband codes once used to signal identity in the era of the closet … ‘The corporate element is a new part of this. Having a common corporate language created to benefit a business ends up excluding a lot of people and creating very particular and normative ways of thinking about sex.’ ” Read More