January 4, 2017 On the Shelf Celebration’s Invalidation, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Oh, god, run away, run away… It’s a new, new year, and in the face of such rampant newness, the poets are feeling a little insecure. Who can blame them? They ply a very old trade, one that most readers don’t much care for. People are always raising their eyebrows at the poets, shooing them from their porches with brooms, cutting in front of them at the bank. But the poets have nothing to fear, Daniel Halpern writes: “A question I often ask myself is why so many people (and we’re now talking about millions of people) turn to poetry for all important rites of passage—weddings, funerals, toasts, tragedies, eulogies, birthdays … Why? Because the language of poetry avoids the quotidian—but the best poetry simultaneously celebrates the quotidian. Language that’s focused in such a way that true meaning and emotion is redolent in the air … So to the question at hand: Why support poetry? Those of us who engage in the publication and sustenance of the written word do so to insure that language for our future generations remains intact, powerful and ultimately renewed, capable of its role during times of crisis and celebration.” In the fifties, George Plimpton interviewed Ernest Hemingway for this magazine, which was then known as an “apolitical” alternative to critical organs like The Partisan Review. In Cuba, Hemingway donated to the Communist Party and even kissed the Cuban flag—but his Paris Review interview is strikingly silent where politics are concerned. Joel Whitney argues that the Hemingway interview was implicated in a CIA plan to spread anti-Soviet propaganda: “More than a year before it was published, the interview was sought for syndication by at least four CIA magazines … Did Plimpton realize that he was making the defiantly leftist Hemingway into a U.S. propaganda tool, even vaguely? … Did Hemingway know? Though many of the letters between Plimpton and Hemingway are archived, suggesting a near-complete collection of their editorial correspondence, there is no hint in them that Plimpton ever told Hemingway that his interview would be reprinted in covert state lit mags. Amid all their friendly back and forth, in which recreational and editorial endeavors merged, Plimpton never dropped a word that the interview they had worked so hard on together, over which Hemingway toiled against his pain—rewriting it again and again despite health concerns and depression, fighting for time against his paying work in order to finish—could appear in the European and Asian magazines of the CCF.” Read More
January 3, 2017 On the Shelf Lethem’s Puking Cats, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jonathan Lethem’s vomiting-cat collection. Photo: David Brandon Geeting for the New York Times John Berger, whose keen, generous writing changed the way we look at and talk about art, has died at ninety. As the Guardian’s obit puts it, “Art and the wider world seemed to make more sense after watching Berger on the BBC, with his piercing blue eyes, steady delivery and groovy seventies shirt, eloquently explain perspective or the idealization of the nude. Susan Sontag once described Berger as peerless in his ability to make ‘attentiveness to the sensual world’ meet ‘imperatives of conscience.’ ” Berger told Geoff Dyer in 1984, “storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people … At any one moment it is difficult to see what the job your life is because you are so aware of what you lending yourself to. This is perhaps why I use the term ‘being a witness.’ One is a witness of others but not of oneself.” We all dream of hitting the big time—and when you’re a writer, there’s probably no “big time” bigger than selling your papers to a library. (You have to take your pleasures where you can get them.) Jonathan Lethem has just sold his papers to Yale, meaning they’ve laid claim to his ephemera, his diaries, the very essence of his writerly being … including his rich stock of drawings of vomiting cats: “For about fifteen years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about two a.m., I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat … I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers.” Read More
December 23, 2016 On the Shelf So This Is Christmas, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Toni Erdmann. One of my favorite movies of 2016 is Toni Erdmann, which is full of madcap genius and a deep generosity of spirit. It turns a fairly ordinary, even archetypal premise—the reunion of an estranged father and daughter—into a deadpan comedy of embarrassment unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Francine Prose writes of the movie, “It’s rare that a film can have one of its characters pose a question that so baldly states its larger philosophical concerns—What does it mean to be human and how should a human being live?—without seeming overly obvious or sanctimonious. But Toni Erdmann gets away with it, in part because its characters are so complex and precisely drawn (we are fully persuaded that this father would ask his daughter that) and in part because the film is at once so understated, so broad, and so funny; in fact, humor and the ways in which humor expresses our humanity and allows us to get through the day is one of Toni Erdmann’s themes … Nothing in Toni Erdmann is predictable, though, as we gradually realize, we have been prepared for everything that occurs by a minor detail or casual exchange that we recall from earlier in the film.” I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time watching the Instagram videos of Paige Ginn, who specializes in falling over, very publicly, very painfully. Philippa Snow writes, “Ginn films herself not only in a state of collapse, but also while getting there; in the process she’s gone viral, and somehow succeeded in making, by accident or by design, some of this year’s best and most interesting video work … A body count only really matters when the body counts, in purely capitalist terms, which helps to explain why the news cares so deeply about young, white bodies from upper- to middle-class backgrounds, and so very little about others at all. White male bodies have a great value in the sense that the people who inhabit them make the most money, but it’s ultimately female bodies that carry greater value as bodies, aka de facto objects. Blonde American girl-flesh offers, to the pound—up to about 115 of them, at least—which is why Paige Ginn is the KLF of the Instagram stunt. It takes real guts to say, Here is this object of supposed value, this fictionally delicate thing, being messed up, and here I am doing the damage.” Read More
December 22, 2016 On the Shelf Champagne Is for Chumps, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “It looks like sparkling urine, but I promise it tastes good.” Champagne has become so synonymous with luxury that you’d think it was produced in an elaborate, secret ritual involving bolts of crushed velvet and diamond-tipped drill bits and the blood of rosy-cheeked virgins from spa towns in the Swiss Alps. But it’s just wine, Tim Crane reminds us: “It is worth reflecting on how extraordinary the champagne phenomenon is. The winemakers and merchants of Champagne—the Champenois—have somehow managed to persuade people who would not dream of spending £15 on a bottle of wine to spend more than twice that for champagne—especially at Christmas, weddings and other celebrations … More depressing than supermarket champagne (for the oenophiles, at least) is the champagne houses’ attempt to secure more luxury status for their cuvées, greedily hiking up the price of an already expensive product, when it is not obvious that the quality justifies it. This is one way in which the champagne business balances precariously between courting the vulgarity of the super-rich, and desiring to make genuinely exquisite, age-worthy wines of the standard of those made a few miles away in Burgundy.” Fiona Pitt-Kethley had a booming career in the eighties, writing travel books and the especially successful Literary Companion to Sex. Now she struggles to get agents to return her calls. Her story of the publishing industry should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who thinks the business is essentially fair-minded: “I started to apply for an agent and after being turned down by several did the cheeky thing of advertising for one. Giles Gordon of Sheil Land was amused enough to take me on. Under his wing my income improved greatly … A few years later, Giles decided to move to Edinburgh … For a while I was with his assistant, Robert Kirby, who was pleasant enough but never had the same kind of enthusiasm for my work. When I made a minor criticism of his inability to sell my project on the red light districts of the world he showed a desire to shed me and we went our separate ways. At this stage I was still relatively well-known and I assumed I would be able to acquire another agent. I still bumped into Giles occasionally at literary parties but he said he thought I would be better with a London-based agent. Soon after this, he died in an accident falling downstairs. This is why I sometimes sum the whole story up as ‘I had an agent but he died.’ ” Read More
December 21, 2016 On the Shelf How to Build Your Evil Headquarters, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Pyramids, in Indianapolis. Photo: jikatu Science fiction’s evil megacorporations all seem to hire the same architect—it’s as if they’re so focused on turning the world into a bleak, ashen dystopia that they don’t even have the time to design a truly unique headquarters. Or maybe they just know what they like. Kate Wagner looks at a few examples: “What’s fascinating about the evil megacorporation is that its architectural aesthetic has remained virtually unchanged throughout its history: brooding Late Modernist (AKA High-tech or Structural Expressionist) buildings have become a well-worn trope, reaching a peak during the sci-fi smorgasbord of the eighties … Modern architecture from its inception has always been associated with the coming of the machine. The movement’s founders in Europe believed that the architecture of the time laid in the hands of industry—factories, concrete silos, and other functional, rational buildings. New technology like steel and reinforced concrete enabled architects to come up with dramatic and powerful forms.” Thinking of how best to fight Trumpism, Jedediah Purdy takes some cues from Thoreau, of all people: “Thoreau took solitude as well as social life with utter seriousness because he believed both were at once necessary and impossible. Alone, you were in the company of received ideas, condescending self-judgment, anxiety that you were not doing your part; in company, you were alone in your strange mind—and everyone’s mind is strange—throwing words like stones into the pools of other people’s minds, disturbing their smooth surfaces … Thoreau’s responses to nature are not naïve, but they do not reject what is alive and instructive in the naïve response. We might find, in the next four years, that we need to recapture the living kernel in those ideas that seem to be clichéd husks. In my world of academic lawyers, only schemers even pretend to believe that the Constitution simply means what it says, or that we could stand to live by it if it did. But it will soon be time to defend constitutional limits on the President’s power, or limits on the power of the police, as if they were divine commandments (as if there were divine commandments).” Read More
December 20, 2016 On the Shelf I Got You This Dead Bird, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Americans just hate it when you sleep on the job. I learned this the hard way when I installed a Murphy bed in my last office. Boy, was the management steamed! I thought their issue was that I was spending too much time alone—not being a team player and such—so I invited my colleagues to watch me sleep, or even to join me in the Murphy bed if they were so inclined. (It was a queen.) But that only made them fire me! Imagine the joy, then, with which I greeted Bryant Rousseau’s reporting from Japan, where napping in public is not just allowed, but celebrated: “The word for it is inemuri. It is often translated as ‘sleeping on duty,’ but Dr. Brigitte Steger, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at Downing College, Cambridge, who has written a book on the topic, says it would be more accurate to render it as ‘sleeping while present’ … Sleeping in social situations can even enhance your reputation. Dr. Steger recalled a group dinner at a restaurant where the male guest of a female colleague fell asleep at the table. The other guests complimented his ‘gentlemanly behavior’—that he chose to stay present and sleep, rather than excuse himself.” Not dissimilarly, I went through a phrase where the only Christmas gifts I could think to give were dead birds. Not birds of prey or anything gauche like that—just cute, deceased little songbirds, sometimes on dry ice, wrapped in little parcels of tissue and tied with twine. Well, people weren’t having it. My best friend spit in my face. Even my mom asked if I kept the receipt. I was born in the wrong time, I guess, because in Victorian England, people just loved dead birds for the holidays. Allison Meier writes, “The image of a dead bird in the snow is similar to the popular ‘Babe in the Woods’ motif of children who are in their mortal sleep in the forest, and may have likewise been a call to empathy for the less fortunate. John Grossman, author of Christmas Curiosities, told Tea Tree Library that the cards were ‘bound to elicit Victorian sympathy and may reference common stories of poor children freezing to death at Christmas’ … Hunter Oatman-Stanford at Collectors Weekly noted that the birds are often robins and wrens, and that ‘killing a wren or robin was once a good-luck ritual performed in late December.’” Read More