January 23, 2017 On the Shelf Kaboom, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Stanisław Notariusz, Explosion, 1922. God, I fucking love profanity! Profanity: shit, yes! It sometimes seems to these jaded ears that oaths and cusses are all we have left, the only solace in this vale of fucking tears. Joan Acocella, reviewing two new books about swearing, writes, “The very sound of obscenities—forget their sense—seems to ring a bell in us, as is clear from the fact that many of them sound alike … Consonants sound sharper, more absolute, than vowels. (Compare piss with pee, cunt with pussy.) It may be this tough-talk quality that accounts for certain widely recognized benefits of swearwords. For example, they help us endure pain. In one widely cited experiment, subjects were instructed to plunge a hand into ice-cold water and keep it there as long as they could. Half were told that they could utter a swearword while doing this, if they wanted to; the other half were told to say some harmless word, such as wood. The swearing subjects were able to keep their hands in the water significantly longer than the pure-mouthed group.” Harold Pinter, who knew from obscenity, offered the London Review of Books a fairly salty bit of verse back in 1991, as the U.S. waged the first Gulf War. Inigo Thomas writes, “After the US A-10 tank-buster bombers known as Warthogs had finished off the Iraqi armored brigades on the Basra Road, Harold Pinter, disgusted by the gratuitous carnage, wrote a poem called ‘American Football.’ ” What struck the editors then as a mere novelty is now penetrating, even pungent. Here are the first few lines: Hallelujah! It works. We blew the shit out of them. We blew the shit right back up their own ass And out their fucking ears. Read More
January 20, 2017 On the Shelf I Buy All My Golf Balls at Costco, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Andrea Benetti, Golf, 2010. The man entering the White House today is many dubious things, and here is one: he’s an avid golfer, so much so that he’s just appeared on the cover of Golf Digest as our “golfer-in-chief.” Let me be clear: I don’t trust golfers. They have an almost coagulated aura of excess leisure about them, like pet beds or angina. If your idea of a good time involves puttering around manicured country-club greens in an ill-fitting polo shirt, teeing off with the rich and idle while the hired help lugs your heavy bags of long metal rods, then, brother, you are no friend of mine. The Wall Street Journal has cut to the golfer’s rubberized core with a report on their collective obsession with Kirkland-brand golf balls—you know, from Costco. Such balls are so ideally plotted on the affordability-quality matrix (unit price $1.25) that they’re the envy of every Palm Beach–dwelling retired partner from Deloitte. Brian Costa writes, “What made the balls a hot item among fanatical golfers is the revelation that, by some accounts, they perform like rivals that sell for more than twice as much … That idea sent shock waves through a billion-dollar industry, left Costco out of stock for weeks at a time and caused secondary-market prices for the ball to soar. Its popularity is threatening one of the sport’s long-held consumer beliefs: when it comes to the quality of golf balls, you generally get what you pay for … The ball was such a curiosity to one major equipment company that employees there cut one in half to study its interior, hoping to discern more about its origin and composition.” Relatedly, if you find yourself dwelling, for some reason, on notions of vulgarity these days, seek refuge at the Barbican, where an exhibition called “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined” aims to rehabilitate the concept. Hilary Reid writes, “The show takes shape around eleven categories of vulgarity conceived by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, like ‘Puritan,’ ‘Impossible Ambition,’ and ‘Showing Off.’ Each is explored through clothing, shoes, and texts spanning the eighteenth century through the present … To call something vulgar may say more about oneself than the thing in question, Phillips argues. One employs the word, he writes, to ‘reassure oneself of one’s own good taste’ and to reaffirm ‘the fact that there is such a thing as good taste, and that it protects us’ … Through humor and style, the exhibition hints at what might be gained if we loosen our grip on good taste. Strolling through the rooms of the Barbican, one can’t help but feel a kind of optimism that vulgarity, when carefully applied, can rattle the existing order.” Read More
January 19, 2017 On the Shelf Works of Simple Witnessing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An 1861 lithograph of the Great Fire of London. The “Art Under Trump” essays have been coming fast and loose all week. Today, Margaret Atwood weighs in, sounding a bit leery, a bit tired of wondering what will come of it all. Even as she endorses certain creative forms over others (sorry, satirists), Atwood suggests that artists might be powerless to curb their own suppression. Keep your eyes open, write down what you see, and maybe take out a safe-deposit box: “Some will produce ‘witness art,’ like those artists who have responded to great catastrophes: wars, earthquakes, genocides. Surely the journal-keepers are already at work, inscribing events and their responses to them, like those who kept accounts of the Black Death until they themselves succumbed to it; or like Anne Frank, writing her diary from her attic hiding place; or like Samuel Pepys, who wrote down what happened during the Great Fire of London. Works of simple witnessing can be intensely powerful … American artists and writers have seldom been shy about exploring the fissures and cracks in their own country. Let’s hope that if democracy implodes and free speech is suppressed, someone will record the process as it unfolds.” The fourth and final volume of Beckett’s letters is here, covering 1966 to 1989, which means it contains Beckett’s musings on 1968 (“was ever such rightness joined to such foolishness?”), surviving tragedy (“don’t give up that bottle, whatever you do”) and, naturally, death. David Wheatley writes, “As the light dwindles, however, the real pleasure lies in the ‘black diamonds of pessimism,’ to borrow a phrase from the early work Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in which much that is moving and memorable about these letters crystallizes. ‘Dans vos ruines je me sens à mon aise,’ he tells Cioran in 1969, acknowledging receipt of Le mauvais démiurge. To Lawrence Shainberg in 1979, Beckett confesses the ‘preposterous conviction’ that ‘here in the end is the last & by far best chance for the writer.’ ‘I work on, with failing mind, in other words improved possibilities,’ he tells Herbert Myron in 1980, relishing his receding prospects. ‘I try to think,’ he writes in Watt-like cadences to Franz Wurm, also in 1980, ‘with what mind remains, that now is the time at last, the chance at last, in these remains, with those remains, though think is not the word, at last not the word.’ ” Read More
January 18, 2017 On the Shelf Crave the Conflict, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring As Inauguration Day beckons with its plump, vulgar middle finger, writers are struggling to articulate their role in the resistance: How do we undo our nation’s descent into mediocrity and bigotry? Surely it won’t hurt to brush up on our occultist spell-writing, which may have gotten rusty since the Bush years. But Aleksandar Hemon—who knows more than a little about the way societies can crumble into cesspools of violence and hate—has a better idea. He urges writers to pursue a “split-mind” literature, one that eschews the assumptions of bourgeois culture: “In America, a comfortable entitlement additionally blunts and deactivates imagination—it is hard to imagine that this American life is not the only life possible, that there could be any reason to undo it, because it just makes sense as it is, everything is going fine. One of the roles literature often serves in a bourgeois culture is to make a case for this life as endless and universal, as making perfect, if pleasingly complicated, sense, as containing all that is required for the ever comforting processes of our understanding ourselves. Literature becomes ontological propaganda, a machinery for making reality appear unalterable. The vast majority of Anglo-American literary production serves that purpose, confirming what is already agreed upon as knowable … What I call for is a literature that craves the conflict and owns the destruction, a split-mind literature that features fear and handles shock, that keeps self-evident ‘reality’ safely within the quotation marks. Never should we assume the sun will rise tomorrow, that America cannot be a fascist state, or that the nice-guy neighbor will not be a murderer because he gives out candy at Halloween.” Marina Warner doesn’t speak Russian, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying a performance of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry at the Gogol Centre: “Unintelligibility has become interesting to me as a far more common state—with its own benefits—than has been recognized. Some of the most involving and passionate moments of a reading life can be baffling. In my first encounters with Rebecca, The Waste Land, Waiting for Godot, Dante’s Paradiso, I could grasp very little of what was being said, either at the level of the words or in the larger picture of narrative and thought. Yet these works absorbed me utterly, and their feel has remained vivid in memory; they felt intense and alive and their power is and was contagious—they made me feel intense and alive too. There’s something about attending to a work beyond lucidity that’s like learning a language when young, or finding your way around a neighborhood.” Read More
January 17, 2017 On the Shelf That Ship Has Sailed, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a foreign edition of Zama. One of my favorite reissues last year was Zama, a 1956 novel by the Argentinean writer Antonio Di Benedetto. It opens with a description of a dead monkey, “still undecomposed,” drifting aimlessly in a “writhing patch of water”—and the fun doesn’t let up from there! As Benjamin Kunkel writes, Zama depicts frontier life as a leap into an abysmal chasm of anxiety and unknowing: “Here is a white man whose whiteness fails to yield any providential good fortune, and a sojourner in the wilderness of himself confronting the cipher of the universe with religious dread. Americans—in the sense of the word that covers Alaska and Tierra del Fuego alike—live in a hemisphere that was conquered and settled by people who saw it as a place in which to realize their dreams. Zama is, among other things, a ringing statement of this hemispheric condition, in an unaccustomed key of defeat: ‘Here was I in the midst of a vast continent that was invisible to me though I felt it all around, a desolate paradise, far too immense for my legs,’ Zama tells us. ‘America existed for no one if not for me, but it existed only in my needs, my desires, and my fears.’ ” And reader, you’re in luck: the notes of existential alarm in Zama have seldom resonated as they do this week, with the coronation of America’s first orange president just days away. It’s a great time to ponder the connection between being and suffering. But don’t lose hope, and don’t stop reading. Adam Kirsch makes a compelling argument for the relevance of fiction at a time when almost nothing and no one feels relevant: “From its beginning, the novel has tested the distinction between truth, fiction and lie; now the collapse of those distinctions has given us the age of Trump. We are entering a period in which the very idea of literature may come to seem a luxury, a distraction from political struggle. But the opposite is true: No matter how irrelevant hardheaded people may believe it to be, literature continually proves itself a sensitive instrument, a leading indicator of changes that will manifest themselves in society and culture. Today as always, the imagination is our best guide to what reality has in store.” Read More
January 13, 2017 On the Shelf Every Day Is Friday the Thirteenth, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the theatrical release poster of Friday the 13th. Today is Friday the thirteenth—but then, hasn’t every day been, since November 9? New horrors greet us each morning and tuck us in each night. Rebecca Solnit runs a long, thorough postmortem on the election that got us here, imploring us to remember the sexism that coursed through it from start to finish: “In the spring, Trump retweeted a supporter who asked: ‘If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?’ Perhaps the president is married to the nation in some mystical way; if so America is about to become a battered woman, badgered, lied to, threatened, gaslighted, betrayed and robbed by a grifter with attention-deficit disorder … Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours, and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld from her because she did not deserve it or did not attract them. They did not blame themselves or the electorate or the system for failing to stop Trump.” While we’re pressing our noses to the cold, clear glass of reality, we might as well ask—just to be prepared—how our society could practice cannibalism without hating ourselves for it. It just seems like it might be a valuable skill in the not-too-distant future, I don’t know. Bill Schutt’s new book Cannibalism offers some guidance. Libby Copeland writes in her review: “What does cannibalism look like in a culture that doesn’t attach as much stigma to it? Like many other peoples, the Chinese practiced survival cannibalism during wars and famines; an imperial edict in 205 B.C. even made it permissible for ‘starving Chinese’ to exchange ‘one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives.’ But, according to historical sources cited by Schutt, the Chinese also practiced ‘learned cannibalism.’ In Chinese books written during Europe’s Middle Ages, human flesh was occasionally cited as an exotic delicacy. In times of great hunger or when a relative was sick, children would sometimes cut off their flesh and prepare it in a soup for their elders. One researcher found ‘766 documented cases of filial piety’ spanning more than 2,000 years. ‘The most commonly consumed body part was the thigh, followed by the upper arm;’ the eyeball was banned by edict in 1261.” Read More