December 9, 2016 On the Shelf Giraffes, Despair, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Alfred Edmund Brehm, Giraffes, 1893. The British monarchy is one of those institutions whose endurance serves as its justification—like NASCAR or mall Santas, it’s so deeply entrenched that you can sometimes go for whole years without realizing how ridiculous it is. But Tanya Gold, wandering Buckingham Palace (“There is something pathetic about a fiercely vacuumed throne room”) knows full well what an asinine spectacle the queen is: “She does not make mistakes. We are applauding an absence of something. It is very British to salute a void. Everyone can agree on its merits … The Queen walks a slender line between monotony and the sublime. She has managed this contortion by remaining largely silent for eighty-nine years—a good mirror will grant a reflection to anyone who walks past—and, more important, by giving the impression that she does not want the job … This, though, is the central pillar of Elizabeth II’s myth: the Queen as victim. You can get away with anything if people think you are doing it for their sakes.” In promoting Swing Time, Zadie Smith has found she gets one question over and over: “In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?” Her answer: “I believe in human limitation, not out of any sense of fatalism but out of a learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history. We will never be perfect: that is our limitation. But we can have, and have had, moments in which we can take genuine pride. I took pride in my neighborhood, in my childhood, back in 1999. It was not perfect but it was filled with possibility. If the clouds have rolled in over my fiction it is not because what was perfect has been proved empty but because what was becoming possible—and is still experienced as possible by millions—is now denied as if it never did and never could exist.” Read More
December 8, 2016 On the Shelf This Guy Needs a Lot of Surgery, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A textbook Medieval Wound Man. Image: Wellcome Library, via Public Domain Review. Imagine being a successful writer. Like, one who actually makes enough money to have a large disposable income; one who has so many passionate readers that one’s personal life comes under scrutiny. It’s hard to picture it, isn’t it? If it actually happened to you, would you even know how to spend the money? Or would you do what Sara Gruen, the author of Water for Elephants, did, and buy a bunch of Hatchimals on eBay? Michael Schaub writes, “The writer purchased 156 of the in-demand toys at an average price of $151—spending more than $23,000—with the goal of reselling them at a further marked-up price. She intends to use the proceeds to help fund the defense of a man she says is serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Her plan backfired, though, when eBay wouldn’t let her resell the toys, she wrote in a Facebook post that drew some harsh criticism from readers. One called her move ‘Christmas greed,’ while another wrote, ‘Exploiting families whose children want these toys for Christmas is awful.’ She did have supporters, however, such as the woman who wrote, “Don’t let the haters stop you from doing what you believe is right! (((HUGS)))” Tony Tulathimutte has had it up to here with this whole notion of the “voice of a generation” novel—so don’t ask him if he’s at work on one: “The idea of a one-size-fits-all masterpiece runs squarely against the novel form. Novels can certainly cover plenty of ground, containing hundreds of characters in diverse settings, but they’re still all about specificity. To a novelist, the lowest common denominator of affectations, fashions and consumption patterns evoked by the generational tag are seldom any character’s most interesting qualities, except in novels that are about superficiality itself, like American Psycho. The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality.” Read More
December 7, 2016 On the Shelf Castro the Copy Editor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Pausing to make a correction in a manuscript, no doubt. When he wasn’t oppressing people, standing up to U.S. hegemony, or shopping for new fatigues, Fidel Castro was apparently copyediting—and quite handily, at that. A new report claims that Gabriel García Márquez used to send Castro all his manuscripts, taking advantage of the dictator’s keen attention to detail: “After reading his book The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Fidel had told Gabo there was a mistake in the calculation of the speed of the boat. This led Gabo to ask him to read his manuscripts … Another example of a correction he made later on was in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, where Fidel pointed out an error in the specifications of a hunting rifle.” Attention British people and/or Anglophiles with large quantities of British currency: look at your five-pound notes. A micro-engraver has etched teeny-tiny portraits of Jane Austen onto four of these bills, which substantially increases their value: if you have one, it’s probably worth something on the order of twenty thousand quid. You’ll need a microscope to be sure you have one of the special notes. So go out and buy a microscope already—you keep putting it off, putting it off, all these years you’ve said to yourself, Self, it’s high time you bought that microscope you’re always going on about … Read More
December 6, 2016 On the Shelf Kafka Feared the Clap, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just an average Kafka. There’s nothing wrong with Kafka. You don’t have to look at him like that. He’s just an average Joe, our Kafka, dreaming of erotic love but reacting with complete terror when presented with the act itself. For decades, Kafka scholars have struggled to explain his aversion to sex, especially in light of his evident fondness for women—was he gay? Did he have some kind of body issue? No, his biographer Reiner Stach says: he was just petrified of venereal disease, as were many men in his era. “I read a lot of books on sexuality published in the 1900s, books usually intended for young girls and men. They are just focused on risks, never about sexuality as a source of happiness. It is not about morality or religion—just medical risks … But look at the historical and psychological context—men and women were really separated at the time … They were educated in completely different ways. So when they met for the first time, often in their early twenties, this was often very embarrassing and very frightening … [Kafka was] unable to integrate his own sexuality into his self-image because he regarded it as something both physically and ethically impure, and therefore incapable of developing human intimacy with women who actively drew him into this filth—this anti-sensual and misogynist syndrome was shared by millions of middle-class men, whose upbringing simply did not allow for erotic happiness.” For Edmund Wilson and Nabokov, on the other hand, sex was the rare topic they could agree on—so much so that you wonder why they didn’t just get it over with and sleep together. Their famous feuds, as Alex Beam writes, could be broken only by a little X-rated titillation: “Sex was a subject the two men could talk and joke about. Wilson wrote a clever little limerick about Vladimir ‘stroking a butterfly’s femur,’ and he often brought Nabokov erotic books as house presents. In 1957, for instance, he took the French novel, Histoire d’O along on a visit to the Nabokovs in Ithaca, New York, where the novelist was teaching at Cornell. ‘[Nabokov] agreed with me,’ Wilson recorded in his journal, ‘that, trashy though it is, it exercises a certain hypnotic effect.’ Vera Nabokova frowned on the two men’s tittering enjoyment of nyeprilichnaya literatura (indecent literature) and made sure that Wilson took the book with him when he left: ‘She does not like my bringing him pornographic books,’ Wilson remembered. ‘She said with disgust that we had been giggling like schoolboys.’ ” Read More
December 5, 2016 On the Shelf Only You Can Justify the Humanities, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Reading, 1892. In 2013, two social scientists from the New School announced that reading literary fiction seemed to make people more empathetic, according to their research. The literary community, more desperate than ever for the imprimatur of the sciences, latched on to their study like a thirsty deer tick: here, at last, was proof of our value. But it was not meant to be, friends. New researchers have failed to replicate the results of the original study, leaving the humanities to wander alone again in this cold, dark, fiercely utilitarian nightmare we call “life.” Joseph Frankel writes, “It’s still an open question why psychologists, the media, and laypeople alike are so interested in the possible benefits of reading fiction … Those both in and outside of the humanities have ascribed moral benefits to literature and art as ‘a rescue operation’ for these disciplines at a time when their worth is under scrutiny. It’s hard not to see arguments that literature might make people more empathetic, more moral, or more socially adept as a corrective to the perceived lack of ‘return of investment’ when it comes to the arts. ‘I don’t hope or believe that social psychology is needed to justify the humanities,’ [the social scientist] Kidd told me. But in a culture where science is sometimes treated with more gravity than the humanities, this research can be used to do exactly that.” Linguists, on the other hand, are looking like world-historical heroes right now. I mean, haven’t you seen Arrival? A linguist saves the fucking planet. And Ben Zimmer (a linguist) is pretty excited about that message: “Academic linguists like myself should be overjoyed for this confirmation of what I’ve long suspected: we are absolutely crucial to the survival of humanity … This is the first science-fiction film I have seen that puts a great effort into representing a detailed scientific approach to an alien encounter. With a few caveats, linguists and linguistics were portrayed in a very true to life manner.” Read More
December 2, 2016 On the Shelf At Least We Have Isabelle Huppert, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s December: time to roll out the Best Books of the Year lists, and with them the many perils of list making, with its sting of exclusion and its weird subtexts. Just bear in mind that the earliest book list was intended to ban them: “Books lists are one of the oldest and dodgiest forms of literary criticism. The most famous of them is, after all, probably the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, enforced for centuries, and surviving long enough to take in both The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. The impulse behind the modern, secular, ostensibly more pro-literary version of the book list remains disquieting: don’t read that, it would seem to say. Read this. There is an irresistible appeal in such simplicity—in being able to place your trust in the critical acumen that supposedly lies behind the making of such lists. Although one reader’s acumen often turns out to be another reader’s blind prejudice.” Jim Delligatti, the inventor of the Big Mac, has died at ninety-eight. His sandwich remains arguably America’s all-time greatest export, its calling card around the world; a heaping serving of savory corporate imperialism, smothered in special sauce. It’s fucking delicious. And it might’ve made Delligatti a household name, but Mickey D’s wasn’t about to give him a cut of the profits—or even of the glory: “Delligatti, who opened the first McDonald’s in western Pennsylvania in 1957, owned about a dozen franchises in the Pittsburgh area by the mid-1960s, but he struggled to compete with the Big Boy and Burger King chains. He proposed to company executives that they add a double-patty hamburger to the McDonald’s menu … It was introduced on April 22, 1967, with newspaper ads describing it as ‘made with two freshly ground patties, tangy melted cheese, crisp lettuce, pickle and our own Special Sauce’ … The sales remain huge, leading many to believe that Mr. Delligatti, as its inventor, must have reaped a windfall worth billions. Not so. ‘All I got was a plaque,’ he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2007.” Read More