February 16, 2017 On the Shelf Hey, Is That Proust? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Quite possibly Proust. Photo via the Guardian. All those years of watching old wedding footage and searching for dead authors has really paid off: they’ve found Proust! In what’s believed to be his only appearance on film, Marcel races down the stairs, celebrating the 1904 nuptials of Élaine Greffulhe. He’s dapper. He’s alone. He’s Proust: “The black-and-white footage of a wedding cortège filmed in 1904 shows a brief glimpse of a man in his thirties with a neat moustache, wearing a bowler hat and pearl-grey formal suit, descending a flight of stairs on his own. Most of the other guests are in couples … ‘Because we know every detail of Proust’s life, we know from several sources that during those years he wore a bowler hat and pearl grey suit … It’s moving to say to ourselves that we are the first to see Proust since his contemporaries … even if it would be better if he was descending the steps a little less quickly! It’ll be fine when we have slowed the film down.’ ” People say late-night TV is improving in the age of Trump. Man, Colbert really brought it last night, they’ll say; or, Seth Meyers is on fire lately; or, Gee whiz, that Saturday Night Live program sure gave the administration what-for! But make no mistake: the late-night variety show is a pale and desiccated husk of what it once was. For a counterexample, Joan Walsh revisited the one-week stand Harry Belafonte had on the Tonight Show, where he filled in for Johnny Carson in February 1968: “The week featured Belafonte’s searing, in-depth interviews with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., just months before both were assassinated … A few days later, King kibitzed with comedian Nipsey Russell, the blacklisted African-American singer Leon Bibb, and actor Paul Newman, who played his trombone. Another episode featured basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and actor Zero Mostel, who stood on the couch to shake the giant NBA player’s hand. Other guests included singers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, and Robert Goulet; comedians Tom and Dick Smothers; actor Sidney Poitier (Belafonte’s close friend); American poet laureate Marianne Moore; water-skier Ken White; and Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. Fifteen of the twenty-five guests that week were African-American. Only Belafonte could have pulled that off, says TV producer Norman Lear almost fifty years later. ‘He was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him. It is rare to this day.’ ” Read More
February 15, 2017 On the Shelf The Stench of Orwell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Bernd Pohlenz If I had to lodge one complaint against the bulk of literary fiction, I’d say this: not enough smells. Too many writers neglect the olfactory. The fact is this world reeks, and I want to know about it in vivid detail. John Sutherland’s new book Orwell’s Nose makes it clear that the author of 1984—so on trend right now—was always writing with his nostrils. As David Trotter, reviewing the book, explains, “Odor is front and center in Orwell’s work, and Sutherland has provided some helpful ‘smell narratives’ that enable us to follow an oblique path through some of the best-known texts (fiction and documentary) from one hotspot of rankling secretions to another. Unsurprisingly, given the genres Orwell favored, bad smells predominate: ‘sour’ sweat and ‘sweetish’ (or ‘sickly’) excrement top the bill, but there’s an honorable mention, too, for machine-age effluvia such as petroleum vapor. Still, we’re not to suppose that extreme olfaction only ends in nausea. It’s crucial, for example, to the Orientalism of Burmese Days, animating as few other sensations could the embrace in which John Flory wraps his ‘house concubine’, Ma Hla May. ‘A mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil and the jasmine in her hair floated from her. It was a scent that always made his teeth tingle.’ Sutherland devotes considerable attention to the aphrodisiac effect on Orwell of sweet-smelling open spaces. Edenic lovemaking in a ‘golden countryside’ embellished with wild peppermint is George Bowling’s dream in Coming Up for Air; and Winston Smith’s, too, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Singapore reads, but it doesn’t read, you know what I mean? (I mean it has a literacy rate of 98 percent but only 40 percent of its citizens picked up a literary book last year.) Now Singaporean panjandrums hope to persuade more people to read by making tiny books. This will work. People love tiny things. I myself started flossing only when floss was produced in miniscule packages; I started voting only when the ballot shrank and I had to read it through a tiny municipal magnifying glass, which I thought was just the cutest thing. Amanda Erickson writes of Singapore, “Starting this month, public-transportation riders will be able to buy pocket-size tomes for about $10. The ‘ticket books’ are part of a broader campaign to get people reading again. Their launch will coincide with a weekend of book fairs, author meet-and-greets and literature seminars across the city-state … [Reading] will be a hard habit to instill … Student Ang Beng Heng, twenty-four, told Straits Times that he’d rather check his news apps and Facebook feeds in his free time. ‘Current affairs are more often used as a conversation topic,’ he said. ‘It is also more important and related to work and career.’ ” Read More
February 14, 2017 On the Shelf He’s a Giant Gorilla, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Nicholas Monro’s King Kong, Manzoni Gardens, Birmingham, England, 1972. Photo: Arnolfini Archive at Bristol Record Office/Courtesy the artist, via NYRB. Growing up near Baltimore, I remember when, in 2004, a massive aluminum sculpture called Male/Female was installed outside the city’s beautiful Beaux Arts train station. Passions were inflamed. I recall a pair of women walking by the sculpture and one saying to the other, I hate that fuckin’ thing, and the other saying, Well, duh. What I’m trying to say is, it’s rough being a public sculpture. People shit on you. Birds shit on you. And it’s always been rough: looking back to the seventies, Jon Day has revisited England’s “City Sculpture Project,” in which sixteen sculptors received grant money to liven up the nation’s public space. One of the few surviving works is Michael Monro’s King Kong, which is, you guessed it, a massive fiberglass gorilla first installed outside a brutalist shopping mall in Birmingham. Day writes, “Monro thought obviousness was what the people wanted. ‘In this case they will like him won’t they?’ he said at the time. ‘Because they can understand it and appreciate it. He’s a giant gorilla’ … Though children enjoyed playing on King Kong, and a pair of disgruntled builders climbed it as part of a protest for better compensation and working conditions a few months after it was installed (placing a trowel in its hand and a hardhat on its head), the public didn’t seem to warm to it particularly. At the end of the six months there was a half-hearted campaign and public collection to keep King Kong in Birmingham, but only one person, a crossing guard named Nellie Shannon, gave any money to the cause. Her £1 donation was later returned.” Tim Parks got an e-mail from J. K. Rowling. Can you believe it? The J. K. Rowling! She was full of stirring words about the value of a free and open society, and she told him, “We will not go quietly and we are Louder Together!” But she’d sent that e-mail to thousands of people through PEN; it was a plea for donations. And for Parks, it’s the symptom of a confused culture, one that conflates the most honest art-making with the high dudgeon of political protest: “I have been drawn, almost against my will, to notice the intensifying politicization of the literary world and, hand in hand with that, a predilection for melodrama, for prose that stimulates extreme emotions—in good causes of course. The cause justifies the melodrama. The melodrama serves the cause … In the months ahead this debate will heat up. Both as readers and as writers, each of us will react in a way congenial to our temperament … My own position is this: Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.” Read More
February 13, 2017 On the Shelf Buy Yourself Some Old Seeds, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A vintage ad for a seed catalog. All writers are spies, but some of them, not unreasonably, want to do it full-time: it’s generally more lucrative than the “authorship” game, and it gets you out of the house, often armed. Few would be totally surprised, then, to learn that Ernest Hemingway had a yen to practice espionage. Nicholas Reynolds, a military historian, alleges in his book Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (see what he did there?) that Papa was a double agent, snooping around on behalf of the Commies and Uncle Sam: another lost soul in that vast miasma we call the twentieth century. Andrew O’Hagan writes of the new book: “Reynolds looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before, a man out of control and out of focus, a man in bits … What is Hemingway alleged to have done as a spy? We know that, in 1937, at another hotel in Madrid, he had a drink—vodka and Spanish brandy—with that ‘representative of the diabolical Russia’, the NKVD chief Alexander Orlov. (Politics didn’t come up but they talked about their shared interest in guns.) Other evidence? That during the Second World War he set up a counterintelligence bureau in Havana. The American diplomat Robert Joyce told Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker that Hemingway was willing to pay for it himself. It is further alleged that he set up the Crook Factory, to keep an eye on enemy aliens in Cuba, and put his beloved, thirty-eight-foot fishing vessel Pilar out to sea as a scout for German U-boats. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway wrote that he aimed to be ‘a secret agent of my government’ but when it comes to the Soviets, there’s a lot of ‘reaching out’ and alleged meetings, but facts about him actually engaging in operations are thin on the ground.” The author is just a single person, and you know how single people are: writhing with subconscious prejudices, pacing this earth with ever-larger blind spots, accumulating more ignorance by the day. The most well-intentioned writers, especially of fiction for young people, have begun to concede that their work can’t be done alone if it’s to be done properly; hence the rise of the “sensitivity reader,” a kind of paid shoulder angel, poring over your manuscript to disabuse you of your tone-deafness. Katy Waldman writes, “Hired by individual authors or by publishing houses, sensitivity readers are members of a minority group tasked specifically with examining manuscripts for hurtful, inaccurate, or inappropriate depictions of that group … Some sensitivity readers draw distinctions between offensive descriptions and offensive descriptions that appear to enjoy the blessing of the author … Still, it’s a messy project for one reader to suss out authorial intent. While sensitivity remains a positive value in most literature, and perhaps one of the greatest priorities for young adult literature, enforcing it at the expense of other merits, including invention, humor, or shock, might come at a cost. Cultural sensitivities fluctuate over time. What will the readers of the future make of ours?” Read More
February 10, 2017 On the Shelf The True Face of Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Look away, look away! Listen, before I break the bad news, I want to say something: we all love hunks. No one is saying that hunks are bad, or that you don’t deserve a hunk in your life, let alone your fantasies. It’s just … are you sitting down? … Mr. Darcy was probably not a hunk, if we’re being honest. I know, I know, you’ve been turning the pages of Pride and Prejudice imagining Colin Firth for years now—we all have—that guy’s cut from fucking marble. But two professors have generated “the first historically accurate portrait” of Mr. Darcy and—think about it—why would he be a hunk? He was a gentleman, not a laborer! Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura writes, “The ‘real’ Mr. Darcy would have been pale and pointy-chinned, and would have had a long nose on an oval, beardless face. His hair, strangely, would have been white. And he would have been slightly undernourished, with sloping shoulders—‘more ballet dancer than beefcake,’ according to one of the authors … A real-life Mr. Darcy in that era would have been a ‘far cry from muscular modern-day television representations’ portrayed by actors such as Mr. Firth, Elliot Cowan and Matthew Macfadyen, the study concluded.” Alexander Nazaryan stopped by our office to talk about literature in the age of Trump, and to go spelunking in our back issues: “Diving into the digital archive, as I did, is a bracing reminder of the artist’s duty in times of national crisis—and there were very few times in the Review’s first two decades when the nation wasn’t in crisis … Thus you have William Styron publishing an excerpt from his hotly debated The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel of racial violence for a nation fighting over race anew; Edward Hoagland’s short story “The Witness” (1967), written from the perspective of a young man in New York ‘full of minority sympathy’; the poet Ted Berrigan, writing in 1968, in the bleakest days of Vietnam: ‘The War goes on & / war is Shit’; David Lehman admitting in 1995 that he’d never liked the towers of the World Trade Center, but after they were bombed in 1993, he suddenly came to appreciate “the way the tops / of the towers dissolve into white skies / in the east when you cross the Hudson”; the violent silhouettes of slavery life by artist Kara Walker, published in the Review in 1999, seven years before her career-making solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.” Read More
February 9, 2017 On the Shelf Touch Someone with a Camera, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ed van der Elsken, Vali Myers dancing at La Scala, Paris, 1950. Photo via The New Yorker/Nederlands Fotomuseum So there’s this guy, Zoltan Istvan? He ran for president as a kind of single-issue candidate: he wanted to make America live forever. Literally. Steering his coffin-shaped “Immortality Bus” around the States, he laid out a transhumanist platform advocating for the abolition of death. He attracted a small but plucky band of volunteers, one of whom, Roen Horn, turned out to be especially fervent. Mark O’Connell talked to Horn about the promises of eternal life on Earth: “ ‘You know one really cool thing about being alive in the future?’ [Horn] asked. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Sexbots … You know, like A.I. robots that are built for having sex with.’ ‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard of sexbots. It’s a nice-enough idea. You really think that’s going to happen, though?’ ‘For sure,’ Horn said, closing his eyes and nodding beatifically, in momentary reflection upon some distant exaltation. ‘It’s something I’m very much looking forward to.’ ” Nan Goldin remembers discovering Ed van der Elsken’s photography when she was nineteen: “When I first saw Ed van der Elsken’s book Love on the Left Bank, I realized I had just met my predecessor. My real predecessor … In my own life, I have been obsessed with photographing the people who were my lovers, had been my lovers, or whom I wanted as lovers. Like Ed, I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically. It is this notion—of being obsessed with someone, and, through photographs, making that person iconic—that resonated with me in his work.” Read More