January 12, 2017 On the Shelf How to Be Authentic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. With Obama’s last presidential speech behind him—and with churlish inarticulacy personified prepared to take his place—Christian Lorentzen wonders how the literature of the past eight years will be remembered: “What will we mean when someday we refer to Obama Lit? I think we’ll be discussing novels about authenticity, or about ‘problems of authenticity.’ What does that mean? After the Bush years, sheer knowingness and artifice that called attention to itself had come to seem flimsy foundations for the novel. Authenticity succeeded storytelling abundance as the prime value of fiction, which meant that artifice now required plausible deniability. The new problems for the novelist became, therefore, how to be authentic (or how to create an authentic character) and how to achieve ‘authenticity effects’ (or how to make artifice seem as true or truer than the real).” And looking forward, Alexandra Alter asks what the Trump era portends for conservative book imprints, those most maligned redheaded stepchildren of the publishing industry: “Without conservatives filling the role as the voice of opposition, the urgency and potency of right-wing books will almost certainly be diminished. And with the political principles that conservative writers have advocated—the repeal of Obamacare, a crackdown on immigration and the dismantling of environmental regulations—set to become the policy goals of a Republican-led government, the commercial future of conservative publishing looks far more unsettled … Will books that hold Mr. Trump accountable to his campaign pledges alienate his supporters, and will mainstream Republican politicians and pundits appeal to or repel his base? Will voices from more extreme wings of the Republican Party find a bigger foothold in publishing, further cementing their place in mainstream political discourse?” Read More
January 11, 2017 On the Shelf Bad Man Forward Bad Man Pull Up, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Serious Things A Go Happen, a book of Jamaican dancehall flyers. Image via The New Yorker A standardized test creates its own ineluctable logic. The test is the ultimate authority—the test has all the answers—that’s why it’s the test, and you’re merely the test taker. But there are limits to these strong-arm tactics. Asking multiple-choice questions about poetry, for instance, can be like trying to wash your car with a power sander. The poet Sara Holbrook has learned that a standardized test in Texas is asking seventh and eighth graders questions about her work that not even she knew the answers to. Ian Birnbaum writes, “Holbrook started paying attention after a Texas teacher e-mailed her looking for guidance on why she had inserted a line break in one of her poems. The questions asked about the writer’s motivations, but no test writer had ever asked Holbrook why she made her choices. ‘I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there,’ she wrote in a Huffington Post editorial. ‘Note: That is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it … Any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich.’ ” Everyone remembers Casanova as the ultimate hustler—the historical record indicates he once charmed the pants off the pope, or, you know … something like that … but a new biography tells of a time when the hunter became the hunted: “In 1763, Casanova was himself fleeced in a convoluted scam by a young French-Swiss courtesan, Marie Ann Charpillon, and her mother, in London’s Soho. He was deeply shaken by the episode, and apparently on the verge of drowning himself in the Thames, when he bumped into a playboy friend, Sir Wellbore Agar, who lured him away with the promise of drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding. For revenge, Casanova had to satisfy himself with the modest prank of training a parrot to repeat, in French, ‘Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother.’ ” Read More
January 10, 2017 On the Shelf Delivering Packages to the Afterworld, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jizo statues at Zōjō-ji Temple in Tokyo. Photo: Jakub Hałun Mainly writers are paid for cleaning your gutters, vacuuming under the seats in your car, and standing in line for you at the DMV. But sometimes, for reasons that few understand and even fewer are willing to discuss on the record, writers are paid to write. A new book, Scratch, collects essays about this legendary experience. Laura Miller thinks it’s in more urgent need of demystification than anything else in the profession: “Few connections are more mysterious than the one between writing books and making money … For authors, money, however obscurely, is always entangled with legitimacy because writers have for centuries equated publication with professional and artistic anointment. Anyone can call themselves ‘a writer,’ but to be published (by somebody other than yourself) is to be a real writer. It’s indeed a significant testimonial when someone else wants to invest their own money in a writer’s work, so it’s easy to forget that a publisher is actually the writer’s business partner, not a conferrer of literary worth … Publishing isn’t literature: Literature is literature. Publishing is a separate, if related enterprise.” Mark Greif aspires to join the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau—examining the reasons behind our self-presentation and directing readers toward a moral good. Jon Baskin writes of the “new unfreedom” that Greif beliefs has captured us: “In the more privileged parts of the developed West, we have largely emancipated ourselves from biological necessities (hunger, disease) and even from moral ones (God, the old taboos), but, perplexed by our unprecedented liberty, we have fabricated a new set of necessities to take their place. We no longer suffer from food scarcity, so we devise a baroque maze of taboos regarding what we can consume. We no longer prohibit any one form of sex, and yet, in making sex an all-important component of our self-esteem, we bow down to a new set of norms (namely, that we should always want sex, and with different partners) nearly as coercive as the old. We squander our ‘free time,’ a relatively recent gift of history, at the gym, in ridiculous outfits, on primitive machines, in order that we may have a little more free time to spend in a future that perpetually recedes.” Read More
January 9, 2017 On the Shelf Zola Is Not Impressed, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring London was not the town for him. One nice thing about exile is the novelty. Oh, the places you’ll go, the people you’ll meet … as you’re forced out of your way of life and into a strange, foreign land! In 1898, amid the Dreyfus affair and that famous J’accuse fiasco, Émile Zola thought it might be wise to leave Paris for a while. So he exiled himself to London, where he found many wondrous new things to complain about: “At the age of fifty-seven, equipped only with a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper, Zola made his way to the coast and boarded a boat to England … [He] devoted himself to brooding on all the elements of English life that mystified and upset him. Shirts were ‘too short.’ Roads weren’t ‘as good as French ones.’ Houses were disgracefully lacking in shutters and featured windows that didn’t close properly. Food got ‘more and more revolting’ by the day. English women were guilty of ‘carelessness’ (witness the number of hairpins to be found on the city’s streets); of spending too much time cycling; and of being insufficiently enthusiastic about breastfeeding (‘that is hardly my conception of a mother’s duty towards her infant, whatever be her station in life’).” If you’re going to put yourself through the technocratic hell that is the Consumer Electronics Show, you should at least make sure you’re not compos mentis beforehand. Erin Gloria Ryan found this the perfect occasion to try LSD for the first time: “Five or six androids on tiny wheels, maybe three feet tall, turned and blinked in unison on a smooth white surface. On their chests were screens displaying a cartoon heart, like a child’s drawing of a heart. The hearts were beating. Shitty pop music thrummed. One robot, separated from the dance crew, turned and blinked alone. I felt strongly that the robot on the outside was ostracized because she was too fat, or because she’d hit on one of the dance team robot’s boyfriends. Either way, she was not sitting with the cool robots at lunch. I felt really bad for her. I couldn’t look her in the plastic eyes.” Read More
January 6, 2017 On the Shelf The Tomboy’s Malaise, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Lego ad from the eighties, featuring a tomboy. The Anglophone world treats homophony like a fun parlor trick—two words sound alike, so let’s make some puns and call it a day. But Chinese culture has a profound respect for, even a fear of, the mystery of homophones. Julie Sedivy explains: “Chinese practices take punning to a whole new level—one that reaches deep into a culture where good fortune is persistently courted through positive words and deeds, and misfortune repelled by banishing the negative. The number four is tainted because of its homophony with the word for death—many Chinese people would never consider buying a house whose address contained that number. In visual designs, fish and bats figure prominently because they are sound twins of the words for surplus and fortune. Gift-giving is fraught with homophonic taboos; it is all right to give apples, because their name sounds like peace, but not pears, whose name overlaps with separation … Chinese speakers are more likely to take pains to clarify the intended meaning of an ambiguous word, even when its meaning should be obvious from the context.” Rachel Cusk, whose outstanding novel Transit is out this month, explains what makes for a good memoir: “The memoirist must have complete ownership of their own fate, to the extent that they can create the illusion of friendship with the reader. But their responsibility is actually more like that of the parent: They are highly visible, especially in their mistakes. Likewise the memoirist occupies an intensely subjective world, while creating a template for, or version of, living in which objectivity is everything. A parent can create a complex and instructive ‘self’ for the child, and it can be distressing when the ‘real,’ flawed self breaks through. The really good memoirist can incorporate these losses of control into the picture.” Read More
January 5, 2017 On the Shelf Cool Manifesto, Bro, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Cate Blanchett in Manifesto. Everyone loves a manifesto—in theory, anyway. Throwing down the gauntlet, beating one’s chest, issuing a reverberating cri de coeur about the one path of the true artist … it’s a time-honored way for young people to pass a Friday night. But most manifestoes make for boring reading, their vim notwithstanding. They’re full of pretensions and straw men and hollow self-congratulation. Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, a series of thirteen videos featuring Cate Blanchett, asks us to reconsider the self-serving ambitions of such texts. Blanchett inhabits various rhetorical stereotypes—a conservative mom, a homeless person, a eulogizer—to perform some of the greatest hits of the manifesto canon, including the futurists, the situationists, and the minimalists. Liza Batkin writes, “Having each of the manifestos spoken by a female character … serves to remind us that almost all of the manifestos cited in the exhibition catalogue were written by men (forty-three out of the fifty); they are, as Rosefeldt observes, ‘just bursting with testosterone. Art historians,’ he says, ‘tend to regard everything created and written by artists with reverence and respect, as if, from day one, the artists themselves intended their work to become part of art history. But we shouldn’t forget that these texts were usually written by very young men who had barely left their parents’ house when they reached for the pen.’ ” So let’s not call this next bit a manifesto: In 1960, Denise Levertov contributed a piece about the power and responsibility of poetry to an anthology, The New American Poetry. Maria Popova has just rediscovered Levertov’s words: “I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more ‘in their stride’—the hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” Read More