November 11, 2016 On the Shelf Poetry Is the Evidence of Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Leonard Cohen in 1988. Leonard Cohen has died at eighty-two. Less than a month ago, David Remnick profiled him for The New Yorker, and Cohen knew his time was near: “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.” There’s so much to be said for this: he was ready. “Poetry is just the evidence of life,” Cohen said once. “If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” Meanwhile, Shirley Collins, one of the stars of traditional British folk music, has started singing again in her eighties, after decades away from music. “It was only as Ms. Collins was approaching her eightieth birthday in 2014 that she started to seriously test the waters of performing again. ‘I was a singer,’ she said in a phone interview from her cottage in the English countryside. ‘I couldn’t bear to leave this world without giving it one more go.’ The results can be heard in the new album Lodestar, her first recording since 1979. The road to its creation snakes back twenty years, to when a younger friend of hers, the cult musician David Tibet, beseeched her to try and sing again. She demurred, repeatedly. But every few years, he’d nudge her again. Finally, two years ago, Ms. Collins said yes to a guest appearance at one of Mr. Tibet’s shows in Islington, a north London neighborhood. ‘That surprised me as much as anyone,’ she said.” Read More
November 10, 2016 On the Shelf Even Sandwiches Are Real Estate, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No joy to be had here. In times of hardship, where can we turn to find even one morsel of pleasure, one solitary crumb of joie de vivre? Well: there are sandwiches. Except, no, today even sandwiches are compromised. The chopped cheese sandwich, for instance—ground beef, onions, melted cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes on a hero roll—is a bodega classic, cheap and delicious. Now it’s gone fancy, with bougie versions popping up in New York and London at much higher prices. “This is a classic story,” said Michael W. Twitty, a culinary historian. “You create something in a state of want, a state of necessity, and then it becomes prime real estate in someone else’s hands.” There is thus no solace to be found in sandwiches, for even they are real estate. At the Lefferts Historic House, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, stands the “Monument to the Unelected,” a lawn full of fifty-eight signs for losing presidential candidates. The artist Nina Khatchadourian, who runs the monument, has just added one more. Amanda Petrusich writes, “Neither the designs nor the signs themselves are archival; Katchadourian fabricated each one anew from corrugated plastic sheets. ‘Of course, it’s a project about politics and history, but it doesn’t take a position on who should win any given election,’ she told me. The monument, rather, is ‘a statement of fact—it’s what we have collectively done, up until now’ … Campaign-sanctioned political signs, Katchadourian pointed out—the ones you can order from a local field office—are often purposefully simple, a blunt visual instrument that, like blunt rhetoric, arouses emotions more than ideas. Read More
November 9, 2016 On the Shelf Writers, Start Writing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Knowledge will break the chains of slavery,” a propaganda poster from 1920s Russia. This site is dedicated to literature, arts, and culture. Electoral politics are usually beyond our remit. On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless. But I don’t want to add to the chorus of despair, because I do believe there’s a role for art at a time like this, and I don’t say that lightly—words like these don’t come easily to me. I would rather make fun of things, and I’m struggling against an inborn fatalism. (My iPhone just reminded me to water my plants, and I thought, why bother?) The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay. Read More
November 8, 2016 On the Shelf Teens Are Forever, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Samara Scott, Lonely Planet II, Frieze London, 2015, stainless steel, water, mixed media. Image via Sunday Painter/Frieze This year’s Nobel and Booker winners have destabilized the literary prize scene—it was only a matter of time until the aftershocks spread to other awards. Op-Ed writers have helped it along: there’s never been a better time to stroke your chin and ruminate pseudo-controversially about the purpose of prizes. How should a literary award be? What is “prestige”? Shouldn’t I be voting right now instead of asking rhetorical questions? Anyway, now Tom LeClair has the National Book Award in his crosshairs: “Some months ago … I identified a trend I called ‘commercialit,’ craft fiction, like craft beer, for popular consumption produced by young M.F.A.-holding novelists whom one might expect to be artists rather than artisans. In attempting to reach what the National Book Foundation calls ‘new communities’ of book buyers and to please its corporate sponsors, the National Book Award for Fiction—once more prestigious than the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award—has turned toward commercialit and artisanal creations. In my judgment, this year only two books of ten have any reasonable claim on the award.” Today in good reasons not to do things: Tim Parks thought he might set out to retranslate The Decameron. Then he read the original English translation and thought, why bother? “Are new translations always better, or always feasible, even? … I suspect what it suggests is the importance of finding the right translator for the first translation of a literary work, one who has a genuine affinity with the style of the original, and, above all, can root it into our own literature in a moment when it makes sense, when the culture can really receive it in its own idiom. In Italy, with the lapse of copyright on Faulkner’s writing, there have been a number of new Faulkner translations that are doubtless more semantically accurate than those made back in the Forties and Fifties. And yet those old translations—made when a modernist work was still a matter of excitement, rather than an aesthetic museum piece—seem more aware of the energy and spirit of the original and certainly a better read than more recent, academic efforts.” Read More
November 7, 2016 On the Shelf When Bulletin Boards Were Cool, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A golden-age BBS. Instagrammers: think before you geotag. Are you really just “announcing your location” to your “e-pals” for “fun”? No. You’re bragging. Worse, you’re setting into motion a creaky, elaborate machine that despoils everything in its path, loosing hordes of tourists into the wild. It’s probably, if we’re being honest, just another form of colonialism. Molly McHugh writes, “Social media and Instagram did not invent discovery of beautiful outdoor spaces — but they have become a curator-friendly guide to collecting them … Manifest Destiny is defined by the nation’s westward territorial expansion, but it’s also a philosophy about the need to conquer, to discover. What happens when social media increases the rate of outdoor discovery? How long until every corner of the planet has been Instagrammed and geotagged?” Time was, you could stay home and explore the world from your living room—no geotagging required. Before the Internet came around and made modems boring, there were Bulletin Board Systems, an early form of PC-to-PC communication with all the thrill and adventure of ham radio. Benj Edwards writes, “BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ’90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code … To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. BBS hosts had converted a PC—often their only PC—into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement.” Read More
November 4, 2016 On the Shelf All Roads Lead to Death, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Manchester by the Sea. After the trials of Margaret—a brilliant movie written in 2003, filmed in ’05, released in compromised form in 2011, and rereleased in less compromised form in 2012—Kenneth Lonergan is back with a new film, Manchester by the Sea. Rebecca Mead spoke with him, and boy, is he looking on the bright side: “It’s good to have a forward-thinking attitude—and I wish I had more of one—but I don’t think it’s so bad that some people can’t. ‘Oh, well, my mom’s dead. She was nice, that’s O.K.’—it just makes me sick … ‘It’s fine, I’m dying.’ ‘It’s fine, your mother’s dying, it’s no problem, it’s just life. It’s just a circle of life.’ What fucking circle of life? It all goes in one direction—toward death.” … Or does it? Wang Deshun, an eighty-year-old runway model known as “China’s hottest grandpa,” has such vim and vitality that he seems, on the catwalk, to defy death itself: “Determined to avoid mental and physical stagnation, Mr. Wang has explored new skills and ideas while devoting ample time to daily exercise. Last year, he walked the runway for the first time, his physique causing a national sensation. He takes obvious joy in subverting China’s image of what it means to be old … Mr. Wang has not escaped being called grandpa—he has two children and a two-year-old granddaughter—but the honorific is accompanied by accolades for his vigor and his embrace of the new.” Read More