January 27, 2014 On the Shelf Life Is One Never-Ending Conference Call, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From ConferenceCall.biz, a gif-art project by Zach Scott. Who needs the titillations of Page Six and entertainment media when we have the fifteen hottest affairs in literature? Who needs a soul deadening nine-to-five when we have the ten worst jobs in literature? … And, for that matter, “a site that perfectly captures the existential despair of the conference call?” Victor Hugo: poet, novelist, playwright, furniture designer. At last, a map that lets you take that dystopian walking tour of Manhattan you’re always going on about. On Goliardia Sapienza’s The Art of Joy, an erotic seven-hundred-page doorstop now available in English: “the novel reads less like a handbook on happiness than like a sadomasochistic Italian novelization of The Joy of Sex.”
January 24, 2014 On the Shelf The Flatus of Yore, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring What a gas! Image via Beautiful Decay. Japanese scrolls from the Edo period depict—yes—erumpent, competitive flatulence. Back to more dignified fare. Guess the classic novel from its first sentence. Fact: Kurt Vonnegut wrote a made-for-TV movie in 1972. It’s called Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy. Vonnegut later withdrew from the production: “I am not going to have anything more to do with film—for this reason: I don’t like film.” Well. As far as excuses go, that one’s airtight. “I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you’re somehow able to look at him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That’s empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.” A new interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan. As any reader of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity knows, vagueness can be artful, but it’s especially so in Mandarin writing, where ambiguous sentences resemble optical illusions.
January 23, 2014 On the Shelf Nudity Defended, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Giovanni Giacometti, Theodora, 1914, oil on canvas. The return of Girls also means the return of prudish, puzzled critics. As a riposte, six reasons (just six?) that female nudity can be powerful when it’s not sexual. What if classic novels were “whorishly titled, optimizing our search engines rather than our imaginations”? (Jane Eyre is a personal favorite: “This Guy Didn’t Tell His Governess About His Secret Ex-Wife in the Attic. What Happened Next Really Burned Him Up.”) Fiction in translation is on the rise. The British Library’s new exhibition of comic books aims to inspire children to be “naughtier and more rebellious.” Embrace obscenity, kids. Do not eat your spinach. Kill all fascists. We live in a time of ever more florid author bios—here are three questions a good bio should answer. (Spoiler: one of them is “Who are you?”) Parsing punctuation in Internet initialisms: Is the semicolon in “tl;dr” ironic?
January 22, 2014 On the Shelf “The Era of the Word,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Golden Age for journalism. (Journalism not pictured.) Illustration by Brahma Kumaris. “A strangely democratic and egalitarian Era of the Word has emerged.” Why we may be living in an idyllic age for journalism. “People love stories. The more you see your story as part of a broader narrative, the better.” The six things that make stories go viral will amaze, and maybe infuriate, you. Kudos to The New Yorker for aping Upworthy’s headline style. And since we’re doing sixes: six pieces of advice from successful writers. (Though they’re a touch cliché, right down to the “avoid clichés” apothegm.) It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision. The medium is obsolete; the verdict is not. It’s the basis of a lot of our ideas about copyright, consumer rights, and fair use. #ReadWomen2014: A hashtag becomes a movement.
January 21, 2014 On the Shelf Being a Tough Guy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A lobby card for The Tough Guy, 1926. Photo via Wikimedia Commons What’s it like to share a name with a Tom Clancy hero and teach at the Naval Academy? “I would be lying if I didn’t say that when I walk out Gate Three of the Academy from time to time—which is the gate that Jack Ryan walks out of during Patriot Games and gets shot—that there’s a sense of surrealness to it.” Speaking of which, masculinity in art is undergoing a transformation. We’re “questioning yesterday’s tough guys.” Condolences, tough guys! In honor of MLK Day, The New Yorker has lifted the pay wall on Renata Adler’s 1965 classic “Letter from Selma.” What New York’s editors want in a good book: “Are you writing a dinosaur erotica novel, or the book that all dinosaur erotica novels will be measured by?” The poet Mamoun Eltlib on writing and reading in Sudan: “You don’t feel it’s a living language; you just feel it’s like a dead language, a bloody language.” Now accepting applications for admission: the Yale Writers’ Conference, a summer program with a formidable faculty including Nathaniel Rich, Je Banach, Teddy Wayne, Trey Ellis, Marian Thurm, Colum McCann, Rick Moody, Chuck Klosterman, and others.
January 20, 2014 On the Shelf Blue Monday, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Edgard Farasijn, Sad News (detail), ca. 1880, oil on canvas. Today is supposedly Blue Monday, the saddest day of the year. And Jude the Obscure, 120 Days of Sodom, Germinal: these are among the fifteen most depressing books in literature. And yet The Day of the Locust lands on a list of comfort reads. Ship first, ask questions later. Amazon’s latest stratagem: “anticipatory shipping,” a program in which the company preemptively sends you products it expects you to buy, “based on previous searches and purchases, wish lists, and how long the user’s cursor hovers over an item online.” Not unrelatedly, here’s a roundup of socially resonant dystopian fiction. “These dystopias, I think, speak to a different kind of anxiety … one of widespread helplessness in an unfathomably complex world.” “Using science to explain art is a good way to butcher both.” A scorched-earth takedown of Jane Austen, Game Theorist. This roundup is looking pretty bleak. In the name of balance, a celebration of literary rule-breakers.