February 8, 2017 On the Shelf I Hate My Valentine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Oh look at me I’m so cool with the piano”: a Vinegar Valentine. Irwin Corey, the soi-disant “World’s Foremost Authority” who spent much of the twentieth century declaiming on this and that with an inexhaustible reserve of faux pomp, has died at 102, thus bringing an end to one of the greatest fusions of comedy and performance art. T. Rees Shapiro’s obituary recalls Corey’s brightest literary moment—when he served as a stand-in for Thomas Pynchon. “His career reached its peak of absurdity in 1974 when he was called upon to accept the National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive author Thomas Pynchon for the novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Corey gave a wandering acceptance speech on behalf of Pynchon, offering thanks to Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—whom Corey called the ‘acting president of the United States’—and author Truman Capote. Since Pynchon had never made a public appearance, many in the audience assumed the prattling Corey to be the mysterious author. (Corey did not, in fact, know Pynchon, but they had mutual friends who arranged the comedian’s book-award talk.)” Some traditions are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon them. I think the American people should thrust greatness upon vinegar valentines, a once-prospering Victorian tradition in which people sent anonymous, hateful little poems to their enemies on Valentine’s Day. With the country more divided than ever, it falls to us to resurrect this pungent convention—and to bombard those we hate, especially in seats of power, with more vinegar valentines than our fragile postal service can handle. AbeBooks has a primer on them: “Gluttons, drinkers, hen-pecked husbands, braggarts, windbags, spinsters, sharp-tongued wives, unfaithful lovers, cowards, lazy colleagues, uncaring bosses, ugly people, fat and thin people, vain people, and stupid people—they were all fair game to folks who posted vinegar valentines. They could be delivered to enemies, or people who had treated you badly, or someone you thought needed to be brought down a notch or two. The tone of verse ranged from gentle to downright vicious and abusive.” Read More
February 7, 2017 On the Shelf The Man Who Gave Brontë Eyes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A caricature of John Ruskin from Vanity Fair, 1872. Let’s say you had to choose one genre, just one, in which you’d prefer your politicians to write with rigor and fluency. Political theory, you might say. Or biography. Probably not even those of us with a bona-fide death wish for the republic (anarchists, accelerationists, the Joker) would say “Civil War alternate history.” But that’s exactly what we have in Bannon and Gingrich—connoisseurs of the uniquely depraved world of ahistorical warmongering. Paul Mason writes, “Bannon, the White House chief of staff and Donald Trump’s closest aide, believes the next phase of American history should be as catastrophic and traumatic as the conflict of 1861–65 … [Gingrich] took time out from impeaching Bill Clinton to co-author three excruciatingly dire alt-history novels about the Civil War. In Never Call Retreat, the final in the trilogy, written by Gingrich with William Forstchen and Albert Hanser, the Union side wins the war but, by implication, the South wins the peace. With Sherman’s Union army poised to destroy Atlanta, the Confederate commander, Robert E Lee, persuades the South to surrender. ‘The patience of our opponents is at an end,’ this fictional Lee tells the Confederate government. ‘We shall reap a terrible whirlwind that will scar our nation for generations to come.’ ” Anna Aslanyan writes on the exasperating indifference with which the court system treats its interpreters, who are only responsible for, you know, 100 percent of the communication between the state and the accused: “Translation is like rubbish collection: no one notices it until something goes wrong … Much of court interpreting is simultaneous: you sit next to a defendant and whisper in their ear as you listen to the proceedings. You have to be familiar with legal procedures and fluent in legalese as there is no time to decode ‘ABH’ or invent a term for ‘corporate manslaughter’. You also need to be able to temper your language depending on who you are interpreting for: a drug addict going through withdrawal, a graduate with some knowledge of legal arguments, or an emotionally unstable person with a patchy understanding of the situation. These skills require constant practice … As qualified interpreters stop working for the courts, standards keep slipping—yet more evidence, if it were needed, that outsourcing doesn’t improve services.” Read More
February 6, 2017 On the Shelf Celebrating the Everyday, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from an 1870s photograph in the Loewentheil Collection. In June 1941, Stefan Zweig, having fled Austria for England and then New York, sat down to elaborate on the circumstances of Hitler’s rise—a story he feared would be lost to history if it weren’t told often and in great detail. George Prochnik explains, “Zweig set to furious work on his autobiography—laboring like ‘seven devils without a single walk,’ as he put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks. His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote, ‘that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.’ For the benefit of subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings.” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities sprang from a brilliant, contentious speech she gave in 1956—one that defied the doctrines of urban planning before an audience who’d staked their careers on those doctrines. It was also, as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes, a tightrope walk between conservatism and liberalism: “Jacobs was celebrating commerce and condemning government overreach in the form of public housing, and thereby showing some sympathy with the values of the right. Yet she was doing so on behalf of low-income people who, she believed, had been ill served. Like any good leftist, she was defending the underdogs: the mom-and-pop stores as well as the residents of these projects, many of whom hated their bleak housing as much as she did.” Read More
February 3, 2017 On the Shelf The Ascending Strings, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Augusta Savage presents a model of “The Harp” to Grover Whalen, the organizer of the World’s Fair. Photo: New York Public Library Are you tired of fellow feeling? Have you had it up to here with all this talk about “walking a mile in another person’s shoes” and “understanding the suffering of others”? You probably don’t have many friends, do you? And yet there’s a place in this world for you. A new book by the psychologist Paul Bloom argues so steadfastly against empathy that its title is Against Empathy. And his theory is not so uncaring as that title suggests: “People are bingeing on a sentiment that does not, on balance, make the world a better place. Empathy is ‘sugary soda, tempting and delicious and bad for us.’ In its stead, Mr. Bloom prescribes a nutritious diet of reason, compassion, and self-control … His complaint is with empathy defined as feeling what someone else feels. Though philosophers at least as far back as Adam Smith have held it up as a virtue, Mr. Bloom says it is a dubious moral guide. Empathy is biased: people tend to feel for those who look like themselves. It is limited in scope, often focusing attention on the one at the expense of the many, or on short-term rather than long-term consequences. It can incite hatred and violence … It is innumerate, blind to statistics and to the costs of saccharine indulgence.” Augusta Savage was the most important black woman sculptor of the twentieth century, Keisha N. Blain writes, but she’s tragically uncelebrated now: “Like other key figures of the 1920s such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Savage skillfully challenged negative images and stereotypical depictions of black people. One of her largest commissions, for instance, was a sculpture for the World’s Fair of 1939, inspired by ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ a song often described as the black national anthem. Also known as the ‘The Harp,’ it depicted black singers as the ascending strings of that instrument. Regrettably, it was destroyed when the fairgrounds were torn down … The racial climate at the time hampered wider recognition of her work. Savage won a prestigious scholarship at a summer arts program at the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts outside of Paris in 1923, for instance, but the offer was withdrawn when the school discovered that she was black. Despite her efforts — she filed a complaint with the Ethical Culture Committee — and public outcry from several well-known black leaders at the time, the organizers upheld the decision.” Read More
February 2, 2017 On the Shelf Puppets Are Doing Just Fine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Look at ’em go! One fun thing you can do with art is: use it to tell people what assholes they are. This is easy to try, but hard to master. Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German writer, has the knack for it; his “YOLOCAUST” project publically shames anyone who’s ignorant enough to take a selfie at the Holocaust memorial. Alicia Eler writes, “He simply manipulated the original selfies at the memorial to include actual photos of Nazi crimes, which range from piles of dead bodies to pictures of starving people jailed in concentration camp bunks. The seamless Photoshopping job was what really made this project click. Upon visiting Yolocaust.de, which launched mid-January, you’d find various people’s selfies at the Holocaust memorial. However, if you moved your mouse over them, the once-joyful images transformed into the Photoshopped ones of Nazi death camps. Within one week of launching, the page was visited by 2.5 million people, and all twelve people Shapira featured in the project had taken their photos off of social media and also apologized … The artist invited the people in the pictures to contact him asking that he take their pictures down, simply by e-mailing [email protected].” So many once-thriving art forms are headed for obscurity; so many robust traditions have been lost to the sands of time. But not puppetry. Puppetry is doing great. Laura Collins-Hughes writes, “It’s not so much that puppetry is having an evanescent moment as that it has reached critical mass and settled in, cherished by grown-up audiences raised on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show who have had their hunger stoked by landmark puppet productions on Broadway … Cheryl Henson—a daughter of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson, and the president of the Jim Henson Foundation, a major force in contemporary puppet theater—said that American puppeteers had caught up to the European standard of the craft.” (Or the Russian standard, if we’re talking about Putin the puppeteer—am I right? Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Hold your applause.) Read More
February 1, 2017 On the Shelf Is It Luck? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Albert Guillaume, Au Bac, 1898. Americans are a lottery-playing people, a day-trading people, a people who in the summer of 2013 sent a song called “Get Lucky” soaring to the top of the charts. And yet we’re famously predisposed to underestimate the role of luck in our lives—as anyone who recalls Obama’s “you didn’t build that” brouhaha will know. We walk around in a dumb haze of self-determinism. In a new interview, the economist Robert H. Frank offers a useful corrective to those who would argue that success is merely the result of hard work: “I prefer just to look at how people naturally construct their life histories. We assemble narratives about ourselves routinely and the elements that go into those are the things that we can retrieve most comfortably from memory … When you’re riding a bike into a headwind you’re keenly aware of that. Every 100 yards you travel, you wish that wind would go away. You’re battling against it, it’s at the front of your mind. Then the course changes direction; you’ve got the wind at your back. What a great feeling that is for about twenty seconds, and then it’s completely out of your mind. You’re not even aware that the wind is at your back. You’re not having to battle any enemies in that sense and so it’s out of your mind. So when you think back to your career, what do you remember? You remember the headwinds you faced. You don’t remember all the tailwinds that were pushing you along. So there’s just these natural asymmetries that lead people to either ignore the role of luck entirely or overstate it to a considerable degree.” In a new book, the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner argues that Hieronymus Bosch was really painting from life—it’s just that “everyday life was bound inextricably to what seems its polar opposite: an art of the bizarre, the monstrous, the uncanny.” Reviewing Koerner’s argument, Alexandra Harris writes: “To make us feel the overwhelming fertility of the world, holding us on the vertiginous brink of mesmerized attraction and repulsion, Bosch has to paint the ‘enemy territory’ that is everyday life … Koerner leads us carefully towards The Garden of Earthly Delights, intent both on preparing us for the horror and on deepening our experience of it. In their closed state, the grisaille shutters bear the translucent sphere of a half-made universe, quiet and yet brewing, heavy with giant husks and seedpods, ‘at once fecund and already decaying.’ The doors of the world part to reveal what Koerner calls ‘psychology in painted form.’ There in the middle is the eye of the owl, one of Bosch’s figures for himself, an emblem of the devil, yet all-seeing, like the eye of God.” Read More