July 6, 2017 On the Shelf I Started a Joke Which Started the Whole World Crying, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration of Rabelais’s grotesque Pantagruel by Gustave Doré. Oh, it feels good to laugh! Hot tip: try doing it when there’s nothing to laugh about. Try it in a crowd of stone-faced strangers—just toss your head back and grab your belly, spinning in circles as if you’re dancing to the weary tune of some wheezing carnival organ. It’s the key to fixing our broken society. In a new essay, Robert D. Zaretsky argues that we’ve lost sight of the grotesque—and of the immense floodgates of laughter that it alone can open. Laughter that upends hierarchies and undoes centuries of moral self-seriousness, leaving no one unscathed as it washes over the masses. Looking at Rabelais—whose novel Gargantua and Pantagruel loosed wave upon wave of grotesque laughter in sixteenth-century France—and Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous concept of the carnivalesque, Zaretsky wonders how we lost our way—and why we can no longer mock ourselves along with those in power: “Grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition. More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good—and right kind of—laugh … Laughter is no different than political systems, commercial relations or artistic practices: it evolves over time, the result and cause of material and social transformations. For medieval man, laughter was the great leveler. Preceding Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais’s priesthood of all belly-laughers. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched; no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive. In fact, as Bakhtin notes, late-medieval laughter marked a victory, albeit temporary, not just over the sacred and even over death; it also signaled ‘the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that represses and restricts’. For medieval man, laugh and the whole world laughs with you—or else.” Share a grotesque chuckle with your barista this morning. Lean in close and whisper, You and I and this single-origin cold brew are helping to extinguish the last dying embers of a whole culture of diners and greasy spoons—what a gas! As Adam Platt notes, diners are in decline, but those who mourn their demise are unlikely to support them: “Like most mass-extinction events, the Massive Diner, Coffee Shop, and Greasy Spoon Die-Off has been unfolding slowly around us for decades, in plain sight. According to a much-fretted-over Crain’s report from a couple of years back, the city’s Department of Health lists around 400 restaurants with the words diner and coffee in their name, a number that experts say is down from a thousand restaurants a generation ago. (Many nouveau coffee shops don’t have coffee in the name.) Like the old Automats and cafeterias of the fifties and sixties, and a generation of classic Jewish delis before that, diners are in decline for many reasons: skyrocketing rents and land values; ever-rising food prices; the spread of a more expedient, highbrow and lowbrow coffee culture; the gentle, inexorable aging of a whole generation of neighborhood ‘regulars’; the difficulty of keeping an ancient, sprawling, ten-page menu in tune with the changing tastes of the times; and the challenges of passing on a family business to a new generation of proprietors, many of whom have the benefit of a college education, and might prefer frittering their days away in barista bars to breaking eggs over a hot stove.” Read More
July 5, 2017 On the Shelf Please Destroy My Manuscripts, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Destroy his plays (but not, presumably, his cats): Albee’s last wishes A dead author’s wishes are seldom observed. When I die, for instance, I want my entire oeuvre to go out of print permanently. Only skywriters will be licensed to reproduce my words, in a typeface per my specifications, on beachfront properties throughout America. Finding an executor to comply with these wishes will be hard, but I’m thirty-one and have published zero books, so maybe I can take my time. Other authors, especially those who are already dead, are less fortunate. As Michael Paulson reports, Edward Albee, who died last fall, left very explicit instructions in his will—his works in progress are to be destroyed immediately. But the vagaries of estate law allow for some wiggle room here. Will Albee’s executors follow through on the command, if they haven’t already? “Albee wants two of his friends to destroy any incomplete manuscripts he left behind … Now at stake, at a minimum, are the latest drafts of Albee’s final known project, Laying an Egg, about a middle-aged woman struggling to become pregnant. (Paradoxically, one plot element concerned her father’s will.) The play was twice scheduled for production at Signature Theatre, an Off Broadway nonprofit in New York, and twice withdrawn by Albee, who said it wasn’t ready … James Bundy, dean of the Yale School of Drama, said ‘Edward’s choice strikes me as entirely in keeping with his own exacting standards … It’s no more our business than it would have been if he had made a little bonfire of his work before his death, or shredded some manuscripts one day long ago—perhaps he did … It’s ultimately a good thing for artists to negotiate their own artistic destinies within the framework of the relevant laws: They have no more, and no fewer, rights than would you and I in the same situation.’ ” A writer’s style is critical to his or her success, which is why I’m never seen without my signature garment: a Day-Glo orange safety vest that says to all passersby, When I’m not busy writing, I like to pump your gas in New Jersey. A new book by Terry Newman, Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, argues that even writers who shrug off the importance of fashion are in some way dressing for success. Vanessa Friedman writes, “The sartorial choices authors make are deeply connected to the narrative choices they make—or, as Beckett put it, ‘the fabric of language’ they use … In developing their own idiosyncratic style signatures, they created trends that fashion itself seized on, was inspired by and still finds a fertile source of ideation today … In the same way that pet owners sometimes come to resemble their animals, writers often come to resemble their discourse (or, in the case of John Updike, their main character—which is to say, suburbia). [Molly] Stern refers to it as a ‘stylistic earmark’ … It makes sense: When you spend a fair amount of time thinking about why a character would wear something, or what marks a character—their value system—it would be almost impossible for that same kind of thinking and analysis not to filter down into your own wardrobe, whether or not the effect was deliberate.” Read More
June 30, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Always Never a Good Time for Short Fiction, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Georg Achen, Interior with reading woman, 1896. What is a short story, and who is it for? Is it alive? Is it dead? The answer, after many centuries of heated argument, is this: no one has a fucking clue. The only consensus is that you probably shouldn’t try to write short stories unless you’re independently wealthy, and you shouldn’t try to read them unless you’re a deeply adventurous, ambiguous type. To do otherwise is to risk being poor and confused—a mere rung above the poets. Chris Power offers a survey of the form and its high points, which tend to coincide, depending on whom you ask, with its low points: “At the end of his 1941 study The Modern Short Story, H. E. Bates predicted that short fiction would be the ‘essential medium’ of the war and its aftermath. In a 1962 article he admitted his mistake, and in the preface to a 1972 reissue of The Modern Short Story he wrote: ‘My prophecy as to the probability of a new golden age of the short story, such as we had on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s and 1930s was … dismally unfulfilled’ … Yet that same year Christopher Dolley, in The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories, noted that, ‘far from continuing its supposed decline, the short story is enjoying a revival’ … The number of magazines that paid writers for stories peaked between the 1890s and the 1930s … The short story is and will remain a minority interest. This isn’t a defeatist position: if more weight were given to the work, and less to its popularity, some valuable stability could be established.” Looking at woodblock prints by Utamaro, one of the Edo period’s greats, Ian Buruma traces a history of the Japanese brothel—which so happened to be Utamaro’s most enduring subject. And his art was derived from experience: “Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but ‘Utamaro’ is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints … Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki.” Read More
June 29, 2017 On the Shelf Breaking the Ten Commandments (Literally), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring In 2014, Reed ran his car into a monument at the Oklahoma capitol. Your car can get you from point A to point B, but if you’re willing to destroy it, it can do much more than that: it can serve as a mighty metaphor for the sanctity of the constitution. As the Washington Post reports, a man named Michael Tate Reed is “a serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments.” This week he plowed his car straight into a three-ton granite sculpture of the Commandments outside the Arkansas state capitol in Little Rock; in 2014, he did the same in Oklahoma. Reed, a devout man, seems to believe that it’s his God-given mission to uphold the boundary between church and state. I don’t mean to mock Reed, who is mentally unstable—but there’s something fascinating in his determination to reduce monuments to rubble. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. writes: “He sent a rambling letter to the newspaper apologizing and describing the voices in his head and his attempts to recover from mental health issues. He also detailed one incident where voices told him to crash his car into other vehicles, but instead he wrecked on a highway median. In the past, he’s walked into federal buildings to spit on portraits, made threats against former president Barack Obama and set money on fire … Reed appears to allude to the Oklahoma toppling incident in a Facebook post before the Arkansas statue was rammed. ‘I’m a firm believer that for our salvation we not only have faith in Jesus Christ … But one thing I do not support is the violation of our constitutional right to have the freedom that’s guaranteed to us, that guarantees us the separation of church and state, because no one religion should the government represent.’ Later, he says he’s ‘back at it again,’ and asks for people to donate money to help repair his car.” In Detroit, meanwhile, a new exhibition called “99 Cents or Less” looks at the role of the dollar store in contemporary America. Chris Hampton writes, “The museum’s senior curator at large, Jens Hoffmann, invited participants to consider the dollar store—and its proliferation since the Great Recession—as an emblem of widening economic inequality, globalization, complex supply chains and rampant consumerism … Detroit has an especially high concentration of dollar stores, Mr. Hoffmann pointed out. Products that might once have been made there are now born in South, Southeast and East Asian factories—delivered and sold for less than a buck … Acknowledging ‘it’s where most of America shops,’ the Los Angeles–based artist Sean Raspet sampled surface cleaners available in Detroit dollar stores and mixed them together, turning the resulting solution over to the maintenance staff to use on their regular rounds, emphasizing the sort of labor and goods that are often made invisible … Agnieszka Kurant offered a darker take, likening dollar-store goods to palliatives, painkillers and placebos. She bought items like self-help books, hula hoops, cooking utensils, ramen noodles and had the lot industrially pulverized, then pressed by a compacting company into pills.” Read More
June 28, 2017 On the Shelf Return of the Zombie McMansion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It lives. We thought we’d solved this problem. This time, we hoped, it was gone for good. But it’s back. Drive into the suburbs and you’ll see it, something out of the nightmares you have when you eat a big meal just before bed. Risen from the dead to stoke our deepest fears, it is: the Zombie McMansion. Okay, maybe its foam-filled, non-load-bearing Doric columns are showing their age a bit; maybe a few of the quoins are starting to peel off, and some of the two-dozen dormer windows no longer open. But it still stands, and worse still, young people are still willing to buy it. As Ana Swanson reports, the improved housing market means a return of architectural crimes against humanity: “Today, McMansions are not exactly cool, especially compared with the exposed-brick urban lofts young people today will pay exorbitant prices for. But with the recent recovery of the housing market, they are coming back anyway. As Americans have started building and flipping houses again, they are once again buying McMansions. Since 2009, construction of these homes has steadily trended upward, data from Zillow, a real-estate website, shows. The median home value of McMansions is also rising, at a pace that eclipses the value of the median American home … Many casual onlookers have forecast the death of the suburbs in recent years, especially as younger renters and buyers turn an eye to city centers … Yet younger people who are starting families are still moving to the suburbs for more room, she says. About half of all millennials that purchased a home last year did so in the suburbs, according to Zillow data.” While we’re looking at things that refuse to die, here’s Kyle Chayka on Monocle, that shiny symbol of the global elite—a magazine for the late aughts that persists, somehow, into the late teens: “Over the years, Monocle has become as much a status symbol as reading material. Its editor is one of the world’s foremost lifestyle auteurs, a tastemaker of late capitalism … While Monocle projects confidence in the march of globalization, it barely hints at the growing threats to the world of open borders and free-flowing capital it depicts. The magazine’s globalist chic contrasts sharply with the nationalist movements in the United States and Europe … Monocle views the world as a single, utopian marketplace, linked by digital technology and first-class air travel, bestridden by compelling brands and their executives. Diversity is part of the vision—the magazine’s subjects are from all over the world, and its fashion models come in every skin color—but this diversity is presented, in a vaguely colonialist way, more as a cool look to buy into than a tangible social ideal. Cities and countries are written up as commodities and investment opportunities rather than real places with intractable problems that require more than a subsidy to resolve.” Read More
June 27, 2017 On the Shelf Pour One Out for Branwell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Give the guy a little love. Poor Branwell Brontë. He had three brilliant, literary sisters. He had a way of courting misfortune. And, worst of all, he had a first name that sounds like an off-brand cereal from the health-food store. But now that Branwell’s siblings have ascended into the highest reaches of the canon, Emma Butcher argues that we’ve failed to give him his due: “We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of thirty-one from the long-term effects of substance abuse … Life threw repeated punches at Branwell, but within this series of unfortunate events there was happiness and worth. We must not forget that the Brontë brother grew up in the same literature-charged environment as his three siblings … Although his influence was not always positive, Branwell remained a primary muse for his sisters, and we should remember him as a major cog in the Brontë writing machine—even if his own work was always ‘minor.’ And the story of a young, talented fantasist failing to make his way in the world resonates with our experiences of hardship and lost dreams.” Are you an unconventional male artist who intends to go to the grave with many illegitimate children just waiting to come out of the woodwork? Boy, do I have an idea for you: on your deathbed, make a big show out of preserving some of your DNA as your final artwork. Send it to a museum or something, I don’t know. Not only will this earn you plaudits for your striking comment on the artist’s body as the ultimate artwork—it will save your descendants a little trouble down the road. As Raphael Minder reports, a Spanish court has ordered the exhumation of Salvador Dalí’s corpse for DNA testing; a young woman claims to be his daughter. If he’d just taken the time to put a little of his DNA aside for safekeeping, they wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble, but … “Pilar Abel, a Tarot card reader, wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a ‘clandestine love affair’ that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house … Dalí died in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship, which included Gala’s moving to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and only granting Dalí the right to visit her there by written invitation. In his will, Dalí left paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Spanish state.” Read More