February 27, 2017 On the Shelf Walden: The Video Game, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Finally, a chance to experience the magic of Walden firsthand! I like Walden as much as the next guy. My problem with it—my problem with all books—is that it’s just such a passive experience for the reader. Thoreau does all the talking; I’m just supposed to listen. Thoreau does all the fishing; I’m just supposed to watch. Thoreau plants all the beans; he never asks, Hey, reader, would you like to come out here and give me a hand with the beans sometime? But all that’s about to change with Walden, a Game, the new video-game adaptation of Thoreau’s treatise on solitude that puts you in control of your spiritual self-discovery. Its designers, Robin Pogrebin writes, hope to fuse the thrills of gaming to the joys of quiet contemplation: “The new video game, based on Thoreau’s nineteenth-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal—all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author’s meditations … Should you not leave sufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, the game cautions: ‘Your inspiration has become low, but can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human’ … The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance.” Nell Zink, who tends to greet realist novels with a very formidable eye roll, writes in praise of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which gave her “some rigorous realist fiction to love”: “ ‘Realistic’ novels … generally don’t even try. They want to ‘work,’ to be ‘good reads,’ by manipulating emblems of meaning smoothly in a framework of familiar myth. Many work contemptibly, steering sentimental nodules of canned subjectivity into the cheesiest myths imaginable. Authors hope to inhibit readers’ critical urges entirely for as long as a given book lasts; in essays, interviews, and formats like ‘My Writing Day,’ we hint at the tricks we use to facilitate total audience immersion in our shared dream. Where we do intend readers to exercise critical faculties, those should be directed at something other than the work. They want a trance state, and we want to give it to them. But in that transaction, something vital is lost. That could be the reason so many admirable people read nonfiction instead: You can’t communicate with people you’re trying to hypnotize!” Read More
February 24, 2017 On the Shelf Readability, Schmeadability, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring James Aumonier, Where the Water Lilies Grow, 1870. I’m a man of simple tastes: I take my food edible, my water potable, my words legible. But people can be awfully choosy. Ben Roth has inveighed against the rise of “readable” books—“readability” being an increasingly prevalent form of critical shorthand, a way of telling us which novels go down easy. Roth is advancing the latest variant on an ancient argument about whether lit’rit’cher should be fun, or work, or work that tricks you into thinking it’s fun: He writes, “Readable books are full of familiar characters, familiar plots, and most especially familiar sentences. They are built up out of constituent commonplaces and clichés that one only has to skim in order to process. Nothing slows you down, gives you pause, forces you to think or savor. Not too much description, or abstraction, or style. A little bit literary, perhaps, but not too. To praise a book as readable is really just to say that you won’t have to add it to your shelf with the bookmark having migrated only halfway through its leaves … To praise readability is to embrace the vicious feedback loop that our culture now finds itself in. Short on concentration, we give ourselves over to streams of content that further atrophy our reserves of attention.” But Sarah Perry is having none of it. In Roth’s “entertaining little polemic,” she sees aimless fulminating, and she stands up for readability, because someone had to. (Stay tuned for my think piece, “In Praise [But Gentle, Delicate Praise] of Books That Are Just Readable Enough [While Also Providing a Neat, Salubrious Challenge]).” As Perry notes, very Britishly, “Prose which is ‘readable’ is prose which is skilled. It is quite useless to argue that there is no objective standard for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ where writing is concerned; one need read hardly more than a dozen books before discovering that a bar is set. Readable prose is, generally speaking, diligent in its sentence construction, erring from received rules of grammar only deliberately and to a clear effect. Its figurative language functions so that the reader is not left puzzling over a metaphor which creaks like a well-oiled door (you see, I hope, what I did there); its characterization bears some resemblance to people as you and I know them; it is what one might call ‘ontologically sound,’ creating a world entire from which it does not willfully depart. Yet all these principles the skillful, ‘readable’ book may wickedly flout, and still remain skillful and ‘readable.’ ” Read More
February 23, 2017 On the Shelf I’m a Macaroni Man, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Richard Cosway, who went by the “Macaroni Painter” or “Billy Dimple”, poses for a portrait. Image via the Public Domain Review. I’ll just come out and say it: I enjoy macaroni. Always have, always will. And I’m fortunate to live in a time when a man can eat his noodles with no fear of reprisal from the squares and fuddy-duddies of the anti-macaroni establishment. It was not always so. As Dominic Janes writes, Britain in the eighteenth century cast a cold eye on young men who dared to devour macaroni in public—they seemed, you know, funny. Soon the very word macaroni “became associated with sodomy … Horace [Walpole], who was not a married man, presented himself as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the existence of a ‘Maccaroni club’ in 1764, which consisted of ‘all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses’ … Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly acquired tastes for Italian cuisine—with a supposed penchant for macaroni pasta in particular … Permeating all these late eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels.” By the next century, not much had changed—the historian Heather Ellis argues that Sir Humphry Davy, a preeminent chemist, was the target of a smear campaign implying that he was too effeminate to be a good scientist. His takedown reinforced the sexism in the sciences that continues to this day: “Popular magazines, like the John Bull, launched vicious personal attacks on the chemist’s flamboyant dress and the charismatic delivery at lectures that had brought him a wide female following … Rivals also spread rumors of closet homosexuality, speculating on not only his dress, but also his close association with the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Coleridge, with the latter once declaring of Davy: ‘Had he not been the first chemist, he would have been the first poet of his age.’” Read More
February 22, 2017 On the Shelf Whitman’s Secret Novel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Whitman, butterfly. Not pictured: secret serialized novel. Look, we all have crappy novels that we’ve anonymously serialized in some small-time regional newspaper. (Mine is about a family of panda bears who vacation at the North Pole, where they befriend some itinerant polar bears.) We go to the grave expecting these novels never to be revealed. But now some hotshot grad student has tracked down Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, a swashbuckling mystery novel by one Walt Whitman, who published it without credit in New York’s Sunday Dispatch circa 1852. The novel, as Jennifer Schuessler writes, boasts “antic twists, goofy names, and suddenly revealed conspiracies,” but it’s at its best when its hero loses the plot and pauses for some Leaves of Grass–style musing: “Jack enters the cemetery at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and the madcap plot grinds to a halt in favor of reveries about nature, immortality and the oneness of being that strikingly echo the imagery of Whitman’s great work. ‘Long, rank grass covered my face,’ says Jack, the first-person narrator. ‘Over me was the verdure, touched with brown, of trees nourished from the decay of the bodies of men.’ Jack wanders among those bodies of men, copying out the inscriptions of the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton, the War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence (of ‘Don’t give up the ship!’ fame) and other lost lives. Then, he exits onto the streets, where ‘onward rolled the broad, bright current’—and quickly and rather indifferently wraps up his own story.” Salamishah Tillet on the power and the glory of black marching bands: “In Jules Allen’s Marching Bands, a stunning collection of social documentary, portraiture, and panoramic photography, he takes us into this behind-the-scenes world of African-American marching bands all over the country. ‘Whenever a marching band would come through, it would take me to pieces,’ Allen has said. ‘In particular, Morgan State. They were just something else: the rhythm, the movement, the precision, the timing. What I call now the pulse and beat of what they were doing. It all seemed so particular to an African-American sensibility’ … In one of my favorite images, we spy a school marching band in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Flanked by a school bus and a parked car, everyone is in motion—they are either preparing for a parade or getting back on the bus. Drums are littered everywhere, even a trumpet on the ground, while one young man holds his arm up, trombone to his side, as if mentally rehearsing either his first notes or remembering his last ones. Behind him a young trombonist looks on, while to his right, a trumpeter in full costume stares. Band members walk in opposite directions, some smiling, some somber, as a mural, ‘The Black Wall Street Community,’ creates a telling backdrop.” Read More
February 21, 2017 On the Shelf Cameras Aren’t Magic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Cumming, Quick Shift of the Head Leaves Glowing Stool Afterimage Posited on the Pedestal, 1978. Image via Aperture So you want to learn how to write well: you’re in luck! There are hundreds, maybe thousands of books designed to teach you just that. They’re called “usage guides,” but they’re sometimes not as boring as that designation would suggest. They’ll teach you how to wrangle subordinate clauses, where to put the best commas, how to wield participial phrases with style and grace. They’ll inveigh against weasel words; they’ll deplore indirection. They’ll tell you who’s hot, who not, who rock, who sell out in the stores, tell you who flopped, who copped the blue drop. And they will do all of this with authority and conviction. But how far, Nat Segnit asks, will that get you? More to the point, he writes, “What are these books for? In attempting to straddle the how-to guide and the critical study, they instead fall into the chasm between them, neither offering much in the way of practicable advice nor subjecting the writers they cite to worthwhile textual analysis … Literary style is the difference between a cricket bat and a lump of wood. It is the unapologetic authorial sensibility—‘an absolute way of seeing things,’ in Flaubert’s phrase—rendered in language that matches it as precisely as language ever can. When that sensibility is fine, humane, and receptive, and its owner’s ear sufficiently attuned not to deaden or distort it too greatly … a gifted writer’s style is as irreducible and arbitrarily conferred as any talent; amenable to practice and refinement, sure, but at base as God-given and inimitable as Federer’s touch or Picasso’s hand. Here lies the existential challenge faced by the style guide or writer’s manual: beyond the nuts and bolts of usage and basic writerly manners, they are attempting to teach the unteachable.” In an interview with Caille Millner, Rachel Cusk outlines (thank you) her revised approach to fiction, opening up the novel’s “Victorian construct” and urging it toward reality: “I’ve never treated fiction as a veil or as a thing to hide behind, which perhaps was, not a mistake exactly, but a sort of risky way to live. And I guess I thought about other people’s processes and how even though they constructed something that said ‘this isn’t real,’ you know perhaps they smuggled their reality into this sort of imagined structure—which is something I’ve never done. I always sort of thought that the memoir, the thing that says ‘this is real,’ even if it’s as constructed as a novel, seems to me to do something for the reader that’s very different from a novel. But in the end it is an exhausting enterprise, and you’ll be criticized too much for it, and the criticism is personal even if the writing of it is not personal at all. So I guess it was that, of thinking, okay, maybe I’m going to reexamine the novel as something that can be made to soften the concept of reality, to find something halfway, I suppose, between ‘I’ and ‘Not I.’ ” Read More
February 17, 2017 On the Shelf Mick Jagger Forgot He Wrote a Book, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Oops! From the cover of She’s the Boss, 1985. Memoirs are hot right now. “Lost” books are hot right now. So it stands to reason: if you could write a memoir and then somehow “lose” it—maybe, by, say, failing to remember that you ever wrote it at all—you’re gonna be rolling in the dough. But who, you might ask, could ever forget writing his own memoirs? The answer is simple: Mick Jagger, whose whole life lives under the banner of plausible deniability. Jagger, who’s claimed that he’ll never write an autobiography, has apparently forgotten that he already wrote one, of some seventy-thousand words, in the early eighties. Having expunged any memory of the book, he’s done more than any publicity tour could to enhance its salability. John Blake dishes: “Stuck in a secret hiding place right now I have Mick’s 75,000-word manuscript … Mick was reputedly paid an advance of £1 million, an extraordinary figure for the time. A ghost was appointed and publication scheduled. Only it didn’t work out quite like that … [In the book], Mick tells of buying a historic mansion, Stargroves, while high on acid and of trying out the life of horse-riding country squire. Having never ridden a horse before, he leapt on to a stallion, whereupon it reared and roared off ‘like a Ferrari’. Summoning his wits and some half-remembered horse facts, he gave the stallion a thump on the forehead right between the eyes and slowed it down … I was determined that this book needed to be published. Mick’s delightful manager, Joyce Smyth, responded encouragingly to my letter. Mick could not remember any manuscript.” While we’re failing to remember things—more believably and far more tragically, the culture has failed to canonize Freda DeKnight, a prominent black editor, writer, and cook whose midcentury fame has now completely evaporated. Donna Battle Pierce explains, “Born in 1909, DeKnight spent much of her fifty-four years collecting, protecting and celebrating African-American culture and traditions in the years after World War II up to the civil rights movement. Yet her name has been all but forgotten—she doesn’t even have that most basic of 21st century acknowledgements, a Wikipedia page … As the first food editor for Ebony magazine, DeKnight wrote a photo-driven monthly column that offered her home economist’s tips, as well as regional recipes from the “Negro community” of home cooks, professional chefs, caterers, restaurateurs and celebrities … DeKnight presented a more nuanced and often glamorous image of African-American cooking and culture—not just to African-American readers, but to the broader world.” Read More