June 26, 2017 On the Shelf The Prince’s Perfect Poo, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François. Every era has its fads and fashions. When the dust settles, will cultural historians look kindly on 2017, in which the citizens of Western metropolises roam the streets looking like we could go camping at any moment? I cannot say. But I think we should give ourselves some credit—even the most lamentable style of the past ten years, the red #MAGA baseball cap, looks sensible in comparison to the sins of the past. During Marie Antoinette’s time, for instance, there was a brief craze for caca-dauphin, a shade of brown that resembled the color of the new prince Louis-Joseph’s soiled diapers. In the most fashionable circles, people dressed to celebrate the royal bowel movements. As Michael Taube writes in a review of Carolyn Purnell’s new book The Sensational Past, this was but one example of eccentric Enlightenment-era trends: “This awakening of our senses led to some astonishing results, from sensible to senseless … The citronella-based drink Water of Carmes, which supposedly ‘stimulated memory and got rid of unpleasant fantasies,’ was popular for a time … A few relatively harmless drinks aside, the senses of the Enlightenment occasionally ventured into some strange territory. Take the brief rise of ‘prince poo.’ During the time of Marie Antoinette in France, wealthy individuals ‘spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars to wear the clothing the color of baby poop.’ This grotesque fashion choice was done ‘as a way to show their support for the monarchy and to demonstrate how fashionable they could be.’ There was also the cat piano. As the story goes, King Philip II of Spain brought his father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, a ridiculous contraption in 1549 ‘with twenty rather narrow boxes, each of which contained a cat’ that would produce a ‘lamentable meowing’ when a key was pressed.” Corporations love to infantilize consumers, and they’re always looking for new and novel ways to do so. Take the new Kmart shopping bag, for instance—Vinson Cunningham has seen it, and he is afraid: “The bag, pristinely white, its surface marked by forgiving wrinkles, is set against a subtle gradient-blue background that looks like the sky. It might have been tossed away and carried upward by the wind. ‘Life is ridiculously awesome,’ it says, in two bubbly, bright-red fonts: a juicy cursive and a blocky, all-caps sans serif … Kmart adopted this slogan just last March, after several years of market share lost to Walmart, in order to attract a rising generation of millennial shoppers. The hope was to convince them (or, I guess, remind them) that consumption, retail-style, could, in the corporation’s words, be ‘fun,’ even ‘awesome’ … The hint of self-consciously campy nostalgia in its new ‘look and feel’ seems connected to the steady decay of the shopping experience that once helped to define, and to bolster, a wide swath of working- and lower-middle-class life in America.” Saeed Kamali Dehghan on the profusions and confusions of the Iranian publishing industry, whose cavalier approach to copyright makes for an abundance of shoddy translations: “If J. D. Salinger could see what was on the shelves in Iranian bookshops, he would turn in his grave. The Inverted Forest, a 1947 novella that he refused to republish in the U.S. for more than half a century, is widely available in Farsi in most Iranian bookshops … just one example of Iran’s messy, complicated, yet fascinating translation scene, which has long been undermined by the country’s failure to join the Berne convention on copyright … The popularity of foreign fiction and the difficulties of obtaining permission have exacerbated the problem of multiple translations of the same book popping up, with some translators exploiting the copyright vacuum—particularly so for bestsellers. Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, for instance, has been translated into Persian by at least sixteen different people … In 2008, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee asked me to pass on a statement to the Iranian news agencies, one that reflected his belief that copyright protection was not just about money. ‘It does upset writers, justifiably, when their books are taken over without permission, translated by amateurs and sold without their knowledge,’ he wrote.” The English invented English, but Americans have perfected it. Or so we might assume, to judge by the number of Americanisms and loanwords that have infiltrated the once-impenetrable walls of British English. And the Brits are pissed about this—many of them would prefer their tongues unsullied by such American poisons as “no-brainer” and “elevator.” Reviewing Matthew Engel’s That’s the Way It Crumbles, John Sutherland writes, “We talk, think and probably dream American. It’s semantic colonialism … One of the charms of this book is Engel hunting down his prey like a linguistic witchfinder-general. He is especially vexed by the barbarous locution ‘wake-up call.’ The first use he finds is ‘in an ice hockey report in the New York Times in 1975’ … Another bee in Engel’s bonnet is the compound ‘from the get-go.’ He tracks it down to a 1958 Hank Mobley tune called ‘Git-Go Blues.’ And where is that putrid locution now? Michael Gove, then Britain’s education secretary, used it in a 2010 interview on Radio 4. Unclean! Unclean! … Britain in 2017 is, to borrow an Americanism, ‘brainwashed,’ and doesn’t know it or, worse, doesn’t care. How was American slavery enforced? Not only with the whip and chain but by taking away the slaves’ native language. It works.” In an interview with Ann Friedman, Chris Kraus explains how her novel I Love Dick emerged from an antipathy toward the relentless you-go-girl positivity that characterized the feminism of the nineties: “I never bought into any of the sort of positivity. I was of an era where New Age came along, and I found that so deeply repugnant, and I wrote about it. When I wrote I Love Dick, it’s not as if—I mean, I’ve never put myself forward as any kind of political leader or cultural critic or even cultural theorist. I was just writing a book … I felt like my goal was to put everything on the table that was transacted under the table. There’s this kind of gender romantic comedy on the surface of it, but really it’s about power. And not even personal dynamic power; more like economic power and cultural-politics power, and how things are transacted. I think the book asks literally in the middle, ‘Who gets to speak and why is the only question.’ ”
June 23, 2017 On the Shelf Corporations Can Teach You How to Fail, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A bad idea. What can we learn from Crystal Pepsi? What does green ketchup teach us? That corporations, our gods, are as fallible as we are; that no amount of market research can prepare you for the brutal realities of the marketplace; that it’s okay to fail sometimes, as long as you can explain it to your shareholders. Above all, every expensive, high-stakes commercial failure carries in it the germ of our collective death, of whatever defect in our society will lead to our undoing. In Sweden, Dr. Samuel West, a clinical psychologist, has opened a museum of failure, where visitors can worship at the altar of every dumb letdown that’s ever graced the shelves of Walmart. It’s not about laughing, he says. It’s about reckoning with disaster. Alexander Smith reports, “They saw marvels such as the Rejuvenique Electric Facial Mask, a harrowing Jason Voorhees–style invention that promises in just ninety days to make you as beautiful as Linda Evans from Dynasty, who features on the box. The Harley-Davidson eau de toilette was rejected by bikers who felt it damaged the brand, the female-branded Bic pens crashed and burned for obvious reasons, and while the plastic bike didn’t rust, it also wobbled alarmingly while in motion … Other exhibits include potato chips made with the fat substitute olestra, which has the benefit of helping weight loss but unfortunate side effect of diarrhea … Tech giant Apple features in the museum with its 1993 personal assistant, the Newton MessagePad, whose poor handwriting recognition has earned it almost mythical status among the history of bad gadgets … ‘The media like to cover the museum because they get to show some funny stuff and write a clickbait headline,’ [Dr. West] said. ‘But the underlying message is definitely not a gimmick.’ ” Poor Mikhail Bulgakov. He worked and worked and got nothing for it. Boris Dralyuk writes, “A central tragedy of Bulgakov’s life: almost all his efforts to win official acceptance, if not approval, were stymied by his inability to produce—and at times even deduce—what was asked of him … We get a keen sense of this ambition from Bulgakov’s letter to his cousin, sent in 1921 from Vladikavkaz, where he first began to regard himself as a professional writer: ‘At night I sometimes read over the stories I’ve published previously (in newspapers! in newspapers!), and I think: where is my volume of collected works? Where is my reputation? Where are the wasted years?’ It is painful to consider how little he would be able to boast of after another nineteen years of back-breaking literary labor: one volume of fiction; journal clippings of feuilletons, short stories, novellas, and part of his novel White Guard (1925); as well as a handful of staged plays—many of which were quickly banned … Toward the end of his life he knew that his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, was doomed to ‘the darkness of a drawer.’ ” Read More
June 22, 2017 On the Shelf Your Art’s Not Instagrammable Enough, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Yayoi Kusama, The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Aspiring artists should judge their work by one criterion and one criterion only: Do people want to take selfies in front of this thing? If the answer is no, then it’s back to the drawing board, friend. You’d do well to make something immersive, something participatory, something that’s such an experience that it acts as a magnet on the surrounding population, much as a Six Flags or a new Shake Shack might. To make anything quieter or less immediately spectacular is to risk irrelevance. When Sarah Boxer went to see Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” exhibition, she realized that she’d found the quintessential art show of our time—one whose value is directly correlated to its Instagramability. Boxer writes, “The fact that some folks have managed to make the scene while others get left out in the cold is integral to the excitement of participatory art. The thrill is akin to exotic travel, or getting to see Hamilton. Because not everyone who wants the experience actually gets the experience, these works, even if their intentions and messages are democratic, tend to become exclusive affairs … Why has the apprehension of art become so like theater? And why is Kusama, who never received as much attention in the 1960s as many of her contemporaries did, finally in the spotlight now? I was given a one-word answer to that question—Instagram!—and surely that is right. The Kusama show has just about everything the Happenings once had—the chance to see something extraordinary, the chance to participate, and the chance to photograph (or be photographed). But the ‘Infinity Mirrors’ exhibition has added one key ingredient to the mix—the chance to capture the lonely existential experience of infinity and send it to others in the form of a selfie.” Speaking of spectacle: in the eighties, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) put a glam, femme spin on WrestleMania, creating a show that fused daredevil feats of strength to campy dance routines. Now Netflix is resurrecting the show—but as a sitcom, and with little input from the original cast. Gendy Alimurung caught up with that cast and found that their lives are equally tragic and exhilarating, shaped in every way by their years as wrestlers: “If the women feel proprietary about GLOW, it’s only because they gave so much of themselves to it. It was brutal work. The pay was measly, the material was campy and racist. For many, however, it was the best job they ever had … Professional wrestling is fake. But the pain was real. Virtually none of them started out as trained wrestlers. They were actors, dancers and models who answered casting calls for ‘a new sports entertainment show.’ Dee Booher, who played German villainess Matilda the Hun, recalls that after a match, ‘these girls sometimes came out with handfuls of hair.’ At her apartment in Seal Beach, Calif., in Orange County, she flips through an old photo album while sitting in a motorized wheelchair—the result of wrestling-related spinal deterioration. ‘I’d beat ’em up. Eat ’em up! It was beautiful!’ she says. ‘Here’s Spanish Red. Look at this girl. Look at how she moves. She was a dancer. Here’s Ashley. Look at those ta-tas on her’ … ‘I hope you’re getting paid enough for this,’ she recalls one of the medics telling her … The women made between $300 and $700 a week. No dental. No medical.” Read More
June 21, 2017 On the Shelf Go Stand in the Corner, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A lot to take in here. Prepositions matter. If you’re standing on the corner, you could be having the time of your life; if you’re standing in the corner, you’re probably not having much fun at all. The corner of a room is a site of inwardness and anxiety, a repository for social insecurities. It’s also just not very exciting to look at. For these reasons and more, as Will Wiles writes in a ranging new essay, writers as various as H. P. Lovecraft and J. G. Ballard are united in their fixation on corners, the locus of so many psychic burdens: “Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject … They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares—and in doing so, they reveal its secret history … The Lovecraftian corner could drive men mad, whisk them to terrible other places, and sometimes kill them outright. And the corner of a room is a place of power—uncanny, unwelcome power. ‘That most sordid of all havens, the corner, deserves to be examined,’ writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard saw the corner as a shameful intellectual bolthole, in which we are silent and immobile, negating the universe, constructing imaginary rooms around us … In 1967 Ballard made four conceptual advertisements and placed them in the pages of the literary magazine Ambit. One asked: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ ” JFK talked a big game about art—“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist,” he said, and he seemed to believe that nurturing U.S. artists was a great way to kick Commie ass. But now that the dust has settled, Philip Kennicott writes, we should be honest—the guy didn’t really like art that much: “Kennedy was never an art lover, and to the extent that he respected art, it was in the same way he respected accomplishment in science and sports. Nor was Kennedy moved by music or opera, or susceptible to the introspection offered by paintings or sculpture. He was, however, passionate about winning the Cold War on all fronts, including culture … Kennedy no doubt believed everything he said about art, at least in an abstract way. But notice the words that got cut … ‘Art reminds us that man’s hunger for beauty, and truth and self-fulfillment, knows no national boundaries.’ That cut, eliminating reference to how individuals actually engage with art—the hunger for deeper things and self-fulfillment—is significant … He was mocked even in his own time for being more an enthusiast than a deep connoisseur. In 1965, the Kenyon Review wrote that one of his most engaging statements on the arts, an article he wrote for Look Magazine, was written ‘in a vein better suited to a high school commencement address.’ ” Read More
June 20, 2017 On the Shelf Still Baffled by the Brain, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A reproduction of a portrait of Charcot holding a brain, 1898. It’s time for our annual check-in on the mystery of human consciousness—have the scientists figured it out yet? Reader: No. No, they have not. The upper echelons of neuroscience remain baffled; the philosophers, also baffled; the unkempt man at the train station holding a cardboard sign that says MICROWAVES ARE BRAINWAVES, perhaps less baffled but still not terribly convincing. As the neuroscientist Robert A. Burton writes, every era gets the theory of consciousness it deserves—by using science to explain what philosophy and religion could not, we’re essentially just passing the buck, and soon it will pass again: “As an intellectual challenge, there is no equal to wondering how subatomic particles, mindless cells, synapses, and neurotransmitters create the experience of red, the beauty of a sunset, the euphoria of lust, the transcendence of music, or in this case, intractable paranoia … It’s dawned on me that the pursuit of the nature of consciousness, no matter how cleverly couched in scientific language, is more like metaphysics and theology. It is driven by the same urges that made us dream up gods and demons, souls and afterlife. The human urge to understand ourselves is eternal, and how we frame our musings always depends upon prevailing cultural mythology. In a scientific era, we should expect philosophical and theological ruminations to be couched in the language of physical processes. We argue by inference and analogy, dragging explanations from other areas of science such as quantum physics, complexity, information theory, and math into a subjective domain. Theories of consciousness are how we wish to see ourselves in the world, and how we wish the world might be.” Danuta Kean explores one of the lesser-discussed joys of reading: discovering typos. In a survey of literature’s biggest typographical blunders, she writes, “One of the best literary malapropisms in print appears in Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 classic, An American Tragedy … Two characters dance ‘harmoniously abandoning themselves to the rhythm of the music—like two small chips being tossed about on a rough but friendly sea’ … But the king of all typo-riddled books is Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom. HarperCollins wound up pulping the entire first print run of 80,000 copies after it emerged that an early version of the book was sent to the printers by mistake. As a result, the book teemed with hundreds of mistakes in grammar, spelling and even characterization … The Corrections author discovered the catastrophe surrounding his eagerly anticipated book in a brutally public way. Recording a reading for the BBC current affairs show Newsnight, Franzen came to an abrupt halt and said: ‘Sorry, I’m realizing to my horror that there’s a mistake here that was corrected early in the galleys and it’s still in the fucking hardcover of the book.’ ” Read More
June 19, 2017 On the Shelf Leave Willy Alone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Why you gotta be so mean? As a thought experiment, Virginia Woolf once imagined the life of Judith Shakespeare, William’s hypothetical sister—just as artistically gifted, but constrained, as a woman, by every form of harassment and prejudice. A creative person in Judith’s position, Woolf thought, would’ve suffered ‘nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her.’ Rachel Bowlby argues that times have changed: Woolf’s reputation has grown by such leaps and bounds since her death that she is, now, essentially Judith Shakespeare, sitting beside the bard in the pantheon of English letters. Bowlby writes, “Woolf acquired a prime position, becoming something like a queen in the widening world of women and literature. There had been a more doubtful period when her writings were sometimes disparaged or downgraded, and her Bloomsbury associations might detract from her status as a thinker. But by the time she came out of copyright for the first time in 1992, she was all set for the long canonical haul: ripe for instant endowment with the footnotes of scholarly and studently editions. She could be called on at any time and in most contexts for a challenging, memorable quotation—not just about women or literature, but about any topic of current or universal interest, from war to love to money to colonialism to class. Alongside Shakespeare, Woolf is a literary celebrity, to be found in every corner of cultural consciousness and public or private space: from mugs to T-shirts to films and plays … No other non-male writer has received anything like this degree of recognition and attention. It is not clear whether this is more of a consummation or an irony, but without a doubt Woolf has herself become Shakespeare’s sister.” But it’s actually a shitty time to be Shakespeare, let alone Shakespeare’s sister, I’m sad to say. In the wake of the Trumped-up Julius Caesar debacle, protestors have attempted to interrupt Shakespeare in the Park’s production—and other, even more ignorant people have revealed an antipathy for Shakespeare that runs deeper than I’d ever thought possible. Many of them don’t seem to know who the playwright is at all; others may believe he’s still alive; all of them have a disdain for his entire canon. Whatever the case, as Malcolm Gay writes, Shakespeare troupes around the nation—all of whom have nothing to do whatsoever with the disputed Caesar production—are getting loads of hate mail from Trump supporters. Like: “Hope you all who did this play about Trump are the first do [sic] die when ISIS COMES TO YOU [expletive] sumbags [sic].” Another writer wished the thespians “the worst possible life you could have and hope you all get sick and die.” Gay reports, “At Shakespeare Dallas, executive and artistic director Raphael Parry says his company has received about eighty messages, including threats of rape, death, and wishes that the theater’s staff is ‘sent to ISIS to be killed with real knives’ … ‘You have to understand, we work primarily with a 400-year-old playwright: There’s been a lot of water over the dam,’ said Shakespeare & Company artistic director Allyn Burrows. ‘I don’t know that it’s ever been this acute’ … ‘What might be gurgling up for them is their ire around having to do Shakespeare in high school,’ he quipped. ‘They’re like, you know what? I never realized I hated my English teacher as much as I did.’ ” Read More