November 3, 2016 On the Shelf You Can See Through Windows, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Caspar David Friedrich, Window Looking Over the Park, 1810–11. When I wrote a few days ago about baby boomers who want to spend eternity in concrete caskets at the bottom of the ocean, I thought it was a shoo-in for the biggest funeral innovation of the week. Not so. You could also have your ashes scattered at the Metropolitan Opera—though, be warned, people will get all huffy about it, for some reason. A Dallas man named Roger Kaiser has apologized for sprinkling a “white powdery substance” on the Met’s floors during a performance this week. That powder was all that remained of his friend Terry Turner, and he wanted Turner to stay there for good: “I told Terry that if he would like, I would take some of his ashes to opera houses that I visited in the future,” he wrote in his apology. “Trying to lighten the mood, I jokingly told Terry they would never be able to vacuum all of him up. He would be there forever enjoying all the beautiful music.” Here is a brutal reality about windows: they’re transparent. It’s such an obvious statement, and yet, as Edwin Heathcote writes, fewer and fewer people seem to understand it: “You can have a panoramic window, but there will also be a view back in. It is a condition highlighted in recent complaints by residents in the Neo Bankside apartments that visitors to neighboring Tate Modern’s new viewing gallery were using it to look right into their apartments. There have been letters. Sir Nicholas Serota, the outgoing director of the Tate, probably didn’t help when he suggested the residents put up net curtains. Yet the flippant (and also rather brilliant) comment did highlight a contemporary condition … The difficulty stems from a confusion at the heart of contemporary architecture—that is, the difference between a window and a wall.” Read More
November 2, 2016 On the Shelf There’s Our Bernhard, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A still from Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, 1970. Anne Carson prizes brevity, which means, in the abstract, that she should be perfectly suited to these distracted times of ours. And maybe she is, even if she seems permanently ill at ease. In a new interview to support her collection Float, her answers sometimes suggest—and I mean this as a compliment—that she could find lucrative work as a copywriter for Hot Topic T-shirts: “I feel perfectly at home underwater.” “I do not believe in art as therapy.” “Volcanoes are dead easy to paint.” “I never liked Mona Lisa.” But then, every writer, even the real assholes, must call a truce with the great ugly publicity machine. How else to explain why Thomas Bernhard, king of the assholes, consented to make a documentary about himself back in 1970? His books, as Andrew Katzenstein writes, are teeming with curmudgeons who heap vitriol on “hacks—artists who seem more interested in fame and accolades than in the creation of meaningful work.” But he worked productively (kind of) with the Austrian director Ferry Radax: “After Bernhard began to have doubts about the project and threatened to withdraw his participation, he and Radax eventually compromised on strict terms: over the course of three days, Radax would film Bernhard sitting on a park bench as he discussed how he became a writer and his views on writing … Bernhard offers grim assessments of the writing life, suggesting the fanaticism with which he approached his work. A book is ‘nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor’ that has already metastasized and infected the body before it is removed. Writing only intensifies the isolation that all humans suffer, and authors he admires are ‘opponents, or enemies’ who need to be subdued, not inspirations to be emulated.” Read More
November 1, 2016 On the Shelf It’s Never Too Late to Mock Nixon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. “I do nothing professionally, I do everything for fun,” Prince’s character Christopher Tracy says in the serially overlooked Under the Cherry Moon. It’s a line that seems to unlock some of his mystique—his spontaneity, or, as Zadie Smith writes, the constant sense of mirage surrounding him onstage: “Prince’s moves, no matter how many times you may have observed them, have no firm inscription in memory; they never seem quite fixed or preserved. If someone asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the splits, if you’re able. But there won’t appear to be anything especially Prince-like about that. It’s mysterious. How can you dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like a secret only I know? (And isn’t it the case that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?) … His shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest thing you ever saw and yet its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.” When I’m feeling down, really down, about my potential as a shaggy creative type, I find it helps to make fun of Richard Nixon. It’s helped countless writers and artists, among them the Philips Guston and Roth, who met in Woodstock in the summer of ’71 and discovered a mutual muse in our esteemed thirty-seventh president. Charles McGrath writes, “The two men shared a love of books and of what Guston called ‘crapola’—billboards, diners, junk shops, burger joints—and Richard M. Nixon was soon added to the list … Mr. Roth began working on what became Our Gang, his book-length satire, which begins with the president, Trick E. Dixon, hoping to give the vote to the unborn and ends with him in hell, after being assassinated in a hospital where he had gone to have his sweat glands removed … Mr. Roth showed some early chapters to Guston, who in a mood of shared Nixon-loathing exuberance, responded with a flood of satirical drawings. In a couple of them Guston’s Nixon is a hooded Klansman conspiring with his cronies Spiro T. Agnew and John Mitchell, but in most he is a kind of walking gonad, his nose a penis that grows longer with every lie he tells.” Read More
October 31, 2016 On the Shelf These Are the Reasons You’ve Failed, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring So sorry, writer! Image via Open Culture/Slate; full list available via link below. If you opened a bookstore with a section devoted to climate-change fiction, you’d have a pretty shitty shelf on your hands. (You’d also run the risk of attracting those who believe that climate change itself is the ultimate fiction.) Amitav Ghosh wonders why so many “serious” novelists consider the subject beyond their grasp: “Fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel … This discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction … The calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, If this were in a novel, no one would believe it.” A good form rejection letter should be like a good execution: swift, efficient, and demonstrating the kind of brutal indifference that marks true authority. Essanay Studios, a Chicago film company from the silent era, had it down to a science. They would mail prospective screenwriters a stock list of seventeen reasons their screenplays sucked, with a check mark next to the relevant one. E.g.: IDEA HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE, NOT INTERESTING, NOT HUMOROUS, and that old classic, ROBBERY, KIDNAPPING, MURDER, SUICIDE, HARROWING DEATH-BED AND ALL SCENES OF AN UNPLEASANT NATURE SHOULD BE ELIMINATED. Read More
October 28, 2016 On the Shelf Bury Me at the Bottom of the Ocean, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This could be you. (Not the scuba diver.) Last week, Bob Dylan’s silence on the Nobel felt like a roguish prank; this week, it’s a matter of existential import. As Adam Kirsch writes, Dylan has effectively out-Sartred Sartre, who outright refused the prize more than fifty years ago. By ignoring it, Dylan punctures the thin membrane of authenticity that gives the Swedish Academy its cachet: “The Nobel Prize is in fact the ultimate example of bad faith: A small group of Swedish critics pretend to be the voice of God, and the public pretends that the Nobel winner is Literature incarnate. All this pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer. Mr. Dylan may yet accept the prize, but so far, his refusal to accept the authority of the Swedish Academy has been a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like.” Meanwhile, Dylan’s primary audience, baby boomers, have invented a fancy new eco-friendly way to face death: in a concrete casket at the bottom of the ocean. Ask your mortician today about “reef balls,” which are like a mafioso’s cement boots except, you know, consensual: “The idea is part of a niche movement of eco-burials intended to support artificial reefs, which proponents say could help restore sea life and coral … George Frankel, sixty-six, a founder of Eternal Reefs, said the concrete reefs attract fish and other sea life and remain stationary through hurricane-force weather … Turning a human into a reef ball is a process that often stretches over several days, he said. First, what Mr. Frankel’s company calls a ‘pearl’ is cast out of concrete and the cremated remains of the deceased. That pearl is attached to a larger prefabricated reef ball. Family members can add handprints, personal messages and even a memorial plaque on top of the reef ball when a fresh layer of concrete is added. Once those personal touches are embedded into the dried concrete, the ball is lowered into the ocean, with the family watching from a separate vessel nearby.” Read More
October 27, 2016 On the Shelf Roth’s Reading Room, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A postcard of the Newark Public Library. Today in hometown heroism: Philip Roth, having recovered from yet another year without a Nobel, is donating his book collection to the Newark Public Library. Young readers will be able to flip through them and look for the dirty bits—just as he once did—for generations to come. (The library will likely see an uptick in visitors, as well. T-shirt idea: I VISITED THE NEWARK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEFORE PHILIP ROTH’S BOOKS WERE THERE.) “Roth’s library, some 4,000 volumes, is now stored mostly at his house in northwest Connecticut, where it has more or less taken over the premises … The books will be shelved in Newark exactly as they are in Connecticut—not a window into Mr. Roth’s mind exactly, but physical evidence of the eclectic writers who helped shape it … He chose Newark, he added, because like a lot of people of his generation, especially those who had attended Weequahic High School, he retained a singular attachment to his old hometown. ‘It may also be true of people who grew up in Cleveland or Detroit,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I do know that kids who graduated between when Weequahic opened in the ’30s and the great population shift that occurred in the 1960s remain very devoted to their memories and to the school.’ ” Claire Jarvis on reading Sarah Waters—whose latest novel, The Paying Guests, has a graphic abortion scene—while pregnant: “For the past two decades, Sarah Waters has been the best-known contemporary novelist of women’s sexual history. Her novels all develop, in some way, from her earlier work as a researcher focused primarily on lesbian and gay historical fiction. Her first, Tipping the Velvet, which Waters conceived of while writing her Ph.D. thesis, details the hidden-in-plain-sight world of what we would now call queer life in Victorian London. An unexpected success when it was published in 1998, it was followed by two more Victorian pastiches, Affinity and Fingersmith, both bodice-ripping lesbian reworkings of nineteenth-century sensation novels. Waters’s three most recent books, which have been set in the twentieth century, are moodier, and more self-consciously literary, combining the suspense plotting of her earlier work with domestic fiction’s absorption in the details of everyday life. To these genre pastiches, Waters adds graphic descriptions of the bodily experiences of people—particularly women—in the past, making the blood, dirt, and pleasure of those lives as explicit as possible.” Read More