February 4, 2014 On the Shelf Los Angeles Will Never Look the Same in Movies, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting A strange but urgent side effect of LA’s switch from sodium-vapor to LED streetlights: in night shots, the city will look strikingly different on film. One last item about the Super Bowl, before it goes graciously into the night—the art of Super Bowl ticket design. As a postscript to yesterday’s Tulipomania post: Dennis O’Driscoll’s “Tulipomania,” a poem from the April 2002 edition of Poetry. Relatedly: “Each day we are faced with sound bites and catchphrases deadening and trivializing our language … poetry is the corrective.” In defense of poetry’s cultural sway. Against grammar, or its ruthless enforcers: “Blind adherence and conformity … pave the way for fascism.” Now everybody get out there and split some infinitives. To the literary bachelors of New York: Housing Works’ Literary Speed Dating event needs more gentlemen seeking ladies. (Ladies’ tickets are sold out. They’re waiting for you, you, you!) The event is on February 10; use the discount code QUEEQUEG for three dollars off the fifteen-dollar admission.
February 3, 2014 On the Shelf A Day in the Sun for Beleaguered Librarians, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Bill Branson Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman. Who are Joyce’s modern heirs? Rivka Galchen and Pankaj Mishra discuss. No longer shall they toil in obscurity: Lemony Snicket has launched the Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. The Hardy Boys face what are undeniably their strangest mysteries yet. Is Eurostile Bold Extended the most popular typeface in science fiction? A look at the typography in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
January 31, 2014 On the Shelf When People Movers Were the Future, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the September 10, 1972, edition of Our New Age, drawn by Gene Fawcette. Via Paleofuture A legible—and quite informative—map of the Internet. Would-be circumnavigators may find themselves buffeted by the trade winds of Spam Ocean. And shame on you if you’re only seeking a passage to the Continent of Porn. For the transit wonks of the seventies, the dream of the day was people movers: the “car-like pods” on rails still seen occasionally at airports. Behold their squandered promise, their sleek mobility, their Velveeta-orange color. Two new poems by Sappho were discovered on ancient papyrus. One of them mentions Sappho’s brothers; “it’s very exciting to have a new Sappho poem that isn’t about erotic love or beauty.” Agree to disagree. “Growth is a greater mystery than death … Not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.” Norman Mailer on the pursuit of prestige. In 1983, Aramco Oil hired someone to photograph oil rigs and gas-oil separation plants. He also kept an affecting photo diary.
January 30, 2014 On the Shelf The Tragic Diary of a Lunar Rover, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a NASA presentation slide, 1963. Image via Wikimedia Commons “My masters discovered something abnormal with my mechanical control system … I might not survive this lunar night … I am not fearful … Goodnight, Earth … Goodnight, humanity.” In the heartrending tradition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a Chinese lunar rover has live-blogged its own death. Meanwhile, in Russia, a man was stabbed to death for having declared, to a very fervid admirer of verse, that “the only real literature is prose.” There now exists a digital version of the Gough map, “one of the earliest maps to show Britain in a geographically recognizable form.” It dates between 1355 and 1366, when roads were a novelty. (Not that they aren’t today.) If you’d planned on watching the Super Bowl “just for the ads,” you might be able to skip the game entirely: you can watch many of the ads ahead of time, because Capitalism Cares™. Now get out there and shop! Under the cobblestones, the beach. Under Versailles, some magnificent subterranean reservoirs.
January 29, 2014 On the Shelf We’re Olfactory Failures, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Crepe de Chine perfume ad, 1937 A woman has been sentenced to read Malcolm Gladwell. Speakers of English may be unusually ill-equipped to describe smells. Our language lacks, for instance, a word meaning “to have a bloody smell which attracts tigers.” At the intersection of art and commerce, poets sell potato chips. Poets sell iPads. Poets sell jeans and family vacations. “We will likely make great selfies—but not until we get rid of the stupid-sounding, juvenile, treacly name. It rankles and grates every time one reads, hears, or even thinks it. We can’t have a Rembrandt of selfies with a word like selfie.” Live like your forebears. Adhering to Ben Franklin’s rigorous schedule allowed this young man to “pick out a pretty fly outfit,” among other efficiencies.
January 28, 2014 On the Shelf Your Likeness in Cheese, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Vincenzo Campi, The Ricotta Eaters, 1580. Via Wikimedia Commons. Gift idea: cheese portraits. The medium is the message here—this cheese is made with bacteria cultivated from your mouth or toes. It’s you, indubitably, microbially. The artist adds, “The bacteria that you find in-between the toes is actually very similar to the bacteria that makes cheese smell like toes.” You don’t say. Amazon has purchased another block of Seattle. A technofortress, no doubt, soon to be swarming with drones. The Sims is the bestselling PC game of all time. It also has—no mean feat—the most poetic, surreal software-update notifications of all time. “Sims will no longer walk on water to view paintings placed on swimming pool walls.” Presenting the Daphne, an award for the best book to have been published fifty years ago. Melville the prognosticator: Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and modern-day imperialism.