December 19, 2016 On the Shelf An Historic Minivan, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring May we remember it always. In an age of rising income inequality, there’s no real justification for coziness. To sit fireside in a pair of Smartwool socks is to reek of privilege—not even the most exquisite cup of hot cocoa can cover the smell. But fear not: this is why we have the Danes. Their culture comes with a word, hygge, whose venerable, old-world connotations of comfortable conviviality were just waiting to be bankrupted by American consumer culture. It’s okay to relax if the Scandinavians are doing it! As Anna Altman explains, “At least six books about hygge were published in the United States this year, with more to come in 2017 … Helen Russell, a British journalist who wrote The Year of Living Danishly, defines the term as ‘taking pleasure in the presence of gentle, soothing things,’ like a freshly brewed cup of coffee and cashmere socks … The most striking thing about hygge, though, might be how its proponents tend to take prosperity for granted. All the encouragements toward superior handicrafts and Scandinavian design, the accounts of daily fireside gatherings and freshly baked pastries assume a certain level of material wealth and an abundance of leisure time. As a life philosophy, hygge is unabashedly bourgeois … When transferred to the United States, the kind of understated luxury that Danes consider a shared national trait starts to seem like little more than a symbol of economic status—the very thing that Scandinavian countries have sought to jettison.” When it debuted in 1983, Chrysler’s minivan was so cutting edge that the New York Times insisted on dropping a hyphen between mini and van. (Nothing dampens the spirit of neologism quite like a copy department.) Back then, the original minivan—the urtext for the Dodge Caravan and a crucial component in the founding myth of soccer moms—was heralded as “one of the hot cars coming out of Detroit.” Today, it’s on the National Historic Vehicle Register. Nick Kurczewski writes, “Brandt Rosenbusch, an archives manager for more than 300 historic vehicles owned by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, is not shy about extolling the first minivan’s significance: ‘It did change everything. There was nothing like this when it came out in 1983. It was radical for its time, really … It’s a really popular vehicle,’ he said. ‘Whenever we take a minivan to a show, it’s just amazing the amount of stories there are. Everybody remembers their family had one. Everybody relates to the minivan.’ ” Read More
December 16, 2016 On the Shelf Show Me the Money (Over and Over), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s Jerry Maguire Man! It’s Friday! Let’s watch a movie. How about Jerry Maguire? I love Jerry Maguire. I could watch it every day for the rest of my life and I’d be happy as a clam. Oh please can we please watch Jerry Maguire? I have the videocassette. I have dozens, hundreds of copies of the videocassette. Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, a modern classic, please can we please … my walls are lined with copies of the videocassette. And now: “A Los Angeles art gallery will play host early next year to an exhibit in the form of a videotape rental store with nothing but thousands of VHS copies of the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire. ‘Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste and existence as a whole,’ the collective said in a statement. ‘The Jerrys are a beautiful thing’ … The event is merely a precursor to a planned Jerry Maguire pyramid that the collective hopes to build ‘in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.’ ” Reading Samuel Beckett’s last letters, Robert Fay is heartened by the vision of him as a doddering old man, his health failing but his spirit strong: “‘Might have damaged myself beyond repair last night in the bathroom,’ Beckett writes at the age of sixty-nine to his life-long mistress Barbara Bray in 1975. ‘Had got out of the bath & was drying myself with my back to it when my feet slipped & I fell in backward.’ Two years later he writes, ‘I slipped & fell in the street yesterday, but could pick myself up & go on cursing God & man’ … In 1988 Beckett’s life took its most severe turn when he entered a nursing home in Paris. He understood this was his final home. He writes, ‘Still here with the old crocks [Beckett’s slang for old people], it sometimes feels for keeps.’ A year later, during his final year, his letters become shorter, terser, more like e-mails than epistles. In one of the more touching lines, he ends a letter to his friend Rick Cluchey by writing: ‘Silence is my cloister.’ ” Read More
December 15, 2016 On the Shelf Wilfrid Blunt Hates Your Gift, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hope you kept the receipt … Sometimes, when you’re in dear need of advice, and there’s nowhere left to turn, and no shoulder to cry on, and the sky is dark and all your food tastes like ash, and you’re just, like, super, super bummed … you’ve got to read the stoics. Elif Batuman picked up the Enchiridion, Epictetus’s manual of ethical advice, and found herself the better for it: “Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided. Wasn’t it my fault that I lived in such isolation, that meaning continued to elude me, that my love life was a shambles? When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. Epictetus’s advice: when alone, ‘call it peace and liberty, and consider yourself the gods’ equal’; in a crowd, think of yourself as a guest at an enormous party, and celebrate the best you can.” But maybe you don’t need Epictetus. Maybe you don’t need anyone’s advice at all, ever! Maybe you don’t even need people! Because here’s the thing: you could just watch slime videos instead. It oozes, it goops, it does a million things, and most of them are active verbs with oo in them. The Instagram slime-video community is booming, Isabel Slone reports, and its pleasures are myriad: “The origins of the slime community are murky, but the practice appears to have begun in Indonesia and Thailand and then spread to North America, where it’s been growing exponentially since June 2016 … Part of slime’s appeal is that it is endlessly customizable. Slime can resemble a pastel blue puff of cotton candy or a tub of crude oil. There is fairy princess slime containing beads and glitter, frothy slime with a surface covered in bubbles, and crunchy slime called floam, which contains tiny Styrofoam beads … When you watch a slime video, just for a moment, the outside world ceases to exist; when everything feels overwhelmingly bad, it’s good to have something foolproof you can turn to, to soften the blow. Slime yields to the human touch.” Read More
December 14, 2016 On the Shelf Democracy Sausage, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Wilhelm Trübner, Great Dane with Sausages, 1877. Shirley Hazzard has died at eighty-five: “Hazzard’s fiction is dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming: A shipwreck tears away the parents of tiny children. A man who has waited a lifetime for a woman loses her at the last moment. A disease slowly saps the life from a beloved brother … Her childhood in Australia was filled with reading—she said of poems that she ‘ate and drank them up as nourishment’—but also with family discord, alcoholism, mental illness (her mother’s), infidelity (her father’s) and ultimately the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. She recalled seeing maimed veterans of World War I still haunting Australia years later, and she had felt the effects of the Depression.” Speaking of Australia—their word of the year is democracy sausage. Yes: where the Oxford English Dictionary went for post-trust, our comrades in the Antipodes have opted for democracy sausage. Elle Hunt explains, “The barbecued snag, bought at a polling booth sausage sizzle on election day, beat out smashed avo and census fail to define the year, following a mammoth eight-week election campaign … Amanda Laugesen, the director of the [Australian National Dictionary Centre], said democracy sausage had first been recorded in 2012 but had risen to prominence in 2016. ‘There certainly seem to be plenty of terms—sausage sizzle itself is an Australianism, snag is an Australianism. We seem to be quite fond of our sausages here in Australia.’ ” Read More
December 13, 2016 On the Shelf Pretty Pain Pills, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Peter Juzak, via Wired. The thing I do most with Tylenol pills is orally ingest them to relieve pain—that’s just my personal preference. There are other things you can do. You can make a necklace out of them, I guess. Or you can smash them and look at them under a microscope, which is what the photographer Peter Juzak does. And his work—which reveals the candy-colored paradise hiding inside every little nugget of acetaminophen—suggests that this is a good thing to do. Laura Mallonee writes, “He started shooting acetaminophen four years ago. He grinds each tablet and pours the powder on a slide, which he heats on a hot plate to melt so the acetaminophen crystalizes. It can take anywhere from a few hours to sometimes a week or more … A single slide can yield hundreds of images, each exploding with phantasmic colors in shapes that resemble splintered glass.” The seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi is remembered, when she’s discussed at all, as a victim—she was raped by another painter, Agostino Tassi, and testified against him in a protracted trial, all of which has led scholars to see her work as a kind of revenge. But Sylvia Poggioli gives us another angle: “While she was testifying against her abuser, Artemisia’s fingers were subjected to sibille—metal rings that were increasingly tightened, a courtroom practice at the time to ensure the witness was telling the truth … Every word of the court case was transcribed, and Artemisia’s testimony under torture was brutally graphic, as she described every detail of the sexual assault. Tassi was found guilty, but he never served his sentence … Art historian [Judith] Mann, however, sees Artemisia more as a champion of strong women rather than a woman obsessed with violence and revenge. Mann points to a canvas painted the year after the rape trial, Judith and Her Maidservant. Here, the head of Holofernes lies in a basket, and Judith, with serene expression and sword resting on her shoulder, is portrayed proudly as victor. ‘That is not a characteristic Judith pose,’ says Mann. ‘That is something we expect of a male hero, so it is a very powerful representation; there is drama and she’s got it. It’s just a masterful treatment.’ ” Read More
December 12, 2016 On the Shelf Self-Care Ain’t What It Used to Be, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jean-Léon Gérôme, La grande piscine de Brousse, 1885. It’s always a good time to suck the marrow out of language. Just ask advertisers: in recent years they’ve laid claim to the word minimalism, evacuating its political-aesthetic lineage and rebranding it to sell sleek, Instagrammable housewares. And now they’ve captured self-care, which, as Marisa Meltzer writes, has seen a spike in usage that divorces it from its original radicalism, binding it forevermore to conspicuous consumption: “The current usage is often traced back to the self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ Audre Lorde, who wrote in an essay published in her 1988 book, A Burst of Light, that ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’ … Gabrielle Moss, author of the Goop parody book, Glop, thinks that self-care is starting to (surprise, surprise) lose its meaning and become a marketing tool. ‘Things that get branded as self-care now have nothing to do with taking care of yourself, like detoxes and juice fasts,’ Ms. Moss said. ‘I do them because I hate myself, not because I’m taking care of myself. It’s poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.’ ” If you want to read something about Russia that doesn’t contain the words hacking, Putin, or clandestine plan to undermine American democracy by propping up demagoguery, you might try this, by Adam Weiner—it’s about Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, a work of far-fetched political fiction from which Ayn Rand, of all people, borrowed liberally (or libertarianally): “The novel, once published, did not merely arouse spasms of sarcastic mirth; it also established a bizarre new paradigm of behavior in Russia. Rational egoism, though actually built on an immovable foundation of determinism, indulged its followers with the idea of endless personal freedom, depicting again and again an almost miraculous process of transformation by which socially inept people became like aristocrats, prostitutes became honest workers, hack writers became literary giants. For decades after the novel’s publication, in imitation of Chernyshevsky’s fictional heroes, young men would enter into fictitious marriages with young women in order to liberate them from their oppressive families. The nominal husband and wife would obey Chernyshevsky’s rules of communal living, with private rooms for man and wife. In imitation of the sewing cooperative in Chernyshevsky’s novel, communes began sprouting all over the place. As an example, the famous revolutionary Vera Zasulich was, within two years of the publications the novel, working for a communal book bindery, while her sisters and mother joined a sewing cooperative—all of this directly caused by What Is to Be Done?.” Read More