December 10, 2015 On the Shelf Lighting Up the Greed Decade, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sandy Skoglund, Sound of Food, 2005. Image via Slate/Ryan Lee Gallery Eve Sedgwick, the groundbreaking queer theorist, died in 2009. Since then, her husband, Hal, has maintained her apartment—they lived in separate ones—as an archive, amassing all her work, her belongings, and even her cat. Jane Hsu spoke with him: “ ‘The idea of having one love in your life was not an aspiration for us,’ Hal said, when I ask him what it was like to be the primary love object of a queer theorist who wrote so prolifically about the complexities of desire and relationships. Later, Hal referenced D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘holding environment,’ in which the mother creates a safe space for the child that allows the child to then look out into the world, to think about something else beyond the mother’s care. Eve used this idea in her work. Hal offered it as a way of thinking about what they both did for one another.” Do you know a sad professor of English? Sure you do—they’re everywhere. And their sadness is justified: “Socialization to the discipline,” Lisa Ruddick explains, “has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss … The progressive fervor of the humanities, while it reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction … These days nothing in English is ‘cool’ in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole … We will find scholars using theory—or simply attitude—to burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation. Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the engulfing collective.” In the eighties, Sandy Skoglund was struck by a disparity she saw throughout New York, where Wall Street and crime rates were soaring side by side. She began to photograph the city, and now she’s made a series of collages, “True Fiction,” that try to capture the aura of that decade with stark contrasts and bright colors. “I never saw a particular implied narrative other than astonishment, which was a mirror really of my own experience of the contradictions of New York City and living in the 1980s … I hope they have a kind of transcendent quality that does allow a kind of open interpretation and not just an ahistorical document.” Whither the black detective novel? In 1950, Hughes Allison wrote the first black detective story, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And there was John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night, from 1965, with its iconic Mister Tibbs, who’s more a construction of blackness than a realization of it. And after him? “It would take another two and a half decades after In the Heat of the Night for the next iconic black detective character to emerge, Easy Rawlins, from Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). Mosley didn’t just live in the skin of Rawlins, a post-World War II private eye, he breathed his entire experience of America, contemporary and the past, into the character … For a moment in the 1990s, after Walter Mosley and Devil in a Blue Dress, crime fiction made room for more black writers. But then writers like Eleanor Taylor Bland, Penny Mickelbury, Paula Woods, Charlotte Carter, and others perhaps fell away in the relentless turnover of the publishing industry: canceled contracts, merged companies, and shifting editorial priorities. In recent years, few black crime-genre writers have reached Mosley’s level of popularity.” Next year, the SAT’s verbal section will do away with a lot of treasured vocabulary: recalcitrant, accretion, grandiloquent, plenitude, diaphonous. There’s only one way to see these words off—to use them all in one short story. Ann Wroe gave it a try: “Joe’s hour had come. Impetuous, redoubtable and sanguine (though fully cognizant of looming disaster), he seized the damsel’s hand. Exit was exigent. She was not apathetic, or obdurate, or truculent, but surprisingly amenable. Together they raced down the nearest conduit to the street. Behind them, a maelstrom of flame became a conflagration. Ubiquitous gray ash poured from the sky. But as they paused, at last, to recover their breath, all that seemed quite tangential.”
December 9, 2015 On the Shelf What’s Your Sign? And Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Aztec zodiac man,” a facsimile of the original painting or codex, 1831. For the cultural critic, astrology is low-hanging fruit: a gimmicky, pervasive pseudoscience that preys on our superstitions, our solipsism, our need to make sense of the unknown. It’s easy to ask people, How can you buy into that shit? But the editors of n+1 point out that “a better question might be why people like it, or whether it’s a problem to subscribe to something in which you don’t believe.” They point to astrology’s redemptive features: “We trust it because it corresponds to nothing; it doesn’t pretend to be true, or demand our belief. Unlike the pernicious pseudosciences of the past, or the scientism and pop neurology of the present, astrology poses little threat of getting serious … As a supplement to other points of view—what’s visible on first impression, say, or what you know of someone from experience—it adds another dimension, pulling some features into the foreground and pushing others to the back, reminding you of a person’s complexity … To consider that the shy person is sometimes wild, the considerate person sometimes duplicitous, is to practice something rather like empathy.” At business schools, meanwhile, they’re teaching something much more treacherous than astrology: literature. At Columbia, aspiring executives can take a three-hour weekly course called Leadership Through Fiction, taught by Bruce Craven: “A four-minute promotional video posted online alongside Craven’s syllabus outlines the rationale for repurposing literature as management shibboleth … These novels, he explains, are ‘narratives about characters in many different professions’ who must find a ‘balance between their professional obligations, their personal expectations, and goals.’ Like real people, fictional characters stumble, and it is ‘through their stumbling,’ Craven promises, ‘that we will learn how to prepare ourselves for the future.’ ” In her Nobel Lecture, Svetlana Alexievich—who will not, one suspects, be auditing Craven’s class—puts forth a more nuanced purpose for literature: “Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think—how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. We haven’t been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don’t appreciate it, we aren’t surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk … I love the lone human voice … It always troubled me that the truth doesn’t fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There’s a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I’m interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.” If you really want to steep yourself in “the everyday life of feelings,” look at 108 years of high school yearbook photos reduced to a minute-long video. Researchers at UC Berkeley compiled the images to study the changing face of the American teen: “The regular nature of yearbook photos—schools have been asking students to face forward and be recorded for posterity since the early twentieth century—made them a good candidate for this kind of machine-driven visual analysis, which can catch small variations in repetitive images … The final data set is made up of 37,921 forward-facing portraits. The population represented in the dataset is from 115 high schools, in twenty-six states … The researchers created a delightfully named ‘lip curvature metric’ to measure smile intensity, finding that while everyone smiled more as time went on, girls always smiled more than boys.” As our nation’s smile intensity has changed, so has the valence of its slang. Take the word badass: in the mid-1950s, as Hermione Hoby explains, it was “used for the kind of men whose posturing invited mockery. To call someone a badass was to seek to puncture puffed-up masculine pride.” Today, though, it’s become perhaps the single most nauseating faux compliment: “the phrase ‘badass women’ peaked in 2015. This, in other words, was the year in which badass underwent such a regendering that it became understood as the foremost battlecry of feel-good feminism … If female badassery, as we understand and value it, comes down to maleness in the most basic and anatomical sense, if virtual dicks are now the yardstick for female power, then we have a problem. Because beneath the feel-good female bravura of badass is a decidedly feel-bad notion, namely that the only way a woman can exercise power is to submit herself to the drag (in both senses) of ‘behaving like a man.’ ”
December 8, 2015 On the Shelf The Greatest Literary Impostor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Emile Ajar’s La Vie Devant Soi. Sam Sacks opens his review of our anthology The Unprofessionals with a litany of all that’s been co-opted by careerism in literature: “Consider the extraliterary responsibilities expected of authors who have had their novels accepted for publication: Develop an active presence on Facebook and Twitter (and, for the truly motivated, on Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest); create an accompanying web site, video trailer, and soundtrack; go on a book tour, naturally, but also participate in a variety of reading series in anticipation of and well after the publication date; take part in panels and signings at book expos; give interviews to blogs and podcasts and write personal essays about your background, your development as a writer, and your process of creation; not only review other books but join the great merry-go-round of blurbing … ” (He also calls The Unprofessionals “a showcase for serious literature.”) The tropes and psychology of anorexia have always been embedded in literature, Katy Waldman tells us: “Anorexia mirabilis—the saintly loss of appetite—signaled an embrace of Christ-like abnegation and suffering … And guess what? The archetype of the fasting mystic had a daughter. Equally lovely, equally slender—in her the delicacy of spirit won out once more over the coarseness of tissue. She rebelled against her mother by applying her native rigor not to prayer, but to an artistic sort of femininity. Think Jane Eyre, ‘delicate and aerial,’ or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, ‘little’ and ‘beautiful lithe.’ Consider Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, her ‘hand and wrist … so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.’ That Mary reference is not coincidental—like her mom, the new anorexic was pure and asexual. Yet she was also a creator, driven and intense … The economic and social realities of nineteenth-century England conspired to idealize female slenderness.” Not unrelatedly: Upon first publication, the Brontë sisters’ novels were reviewed variously as “vulgar,” “brutalizing,” “pernicious,” “godless,” and “venial”—probably because critics believed the authors were men. For Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, as they chose to be known, male pseudonyms meant freedom: “It allowed their imaginations to trespass in the darkest crevices of the psyche and return with tormented monsters like Heathcliff, the Ahab of the moors, and dynamos like Miss Eyre. Their pseudonyms strengthened their moral resolve, emboldening them to speak truth to that most tyrannical seat of power: ordinary society.” For Charlotte, the revelation of her true identity came at a steep cost, and she did her best to forestall it: “Charlotte insisted on the charade of separating Currer Bell from Charlotte Brontë in public, as Thackeray found out to his cost. He hosted a party for her at his house, and as he was leading her to dinner on his arm (she came up to his elbow), he addressed her as Currer Bell. ‘I believe there are books being published by a person named Currer Bell,’ she snapped back, ‘but the person you address is Miss Brontë—and I see no connection between the two.’ After dinner she sat in a corner and refused to mingle; Thackeray fled to his club.” From the annals of good old-fashioned fraudulence: In 1974, a little-known writer named Émile Ajar won the Prix Goncourt. Ajar was actually “the Lithuanian-born Free French aviator, onetime French consul general in Los Angeles, and award-winning novelist Romain Gary … Gary’s novels are autobiographical, and much of what he claims to be memoir is made up, complicating any attempt at unraveling the true from the false … In France, which celebrated the centennial of Gary’s birth last year with conferences, exhibits, and the publication of his last interview, Le sens de ma vie, none of his thirty-plus novels, memoirs, and essays have ever gone out of print. In the United States, few of them still are … He was far more successful as a storyteller than as a stylist. But his propensities make it difficult to find a place for him in French literary history, where he does not fit into that story that others have told.” Tired of bookstores where only some of the books are recommended by the staff? Head to Aaron Hicklin’s shop, One Grand, in Narrowsburg, New York, where everything comes with institutional approval. “His concept was to present collections of volumes handpicked by various creatives—including Tilda Swinton, Michael Stipe, Lena Dunham, and Edmund White—in response to the question, ‘If you were stranded on a desert island, which ten books could you not do without?’ … Hicklin aims to make bookselling more selective and personal—in other words, everything that Amazon is not—by attaching familiar names to titles and having them explain why those books have shaped them.”
December 7, 2015 On the Shelf You and Your Fantastic Hopes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kurt Vonnegut with his wife Jane and their three children, Mark, Edie, and Nanette, in 1955. Photo: Edie Vonnegut Our new Winter issue, out now, features an interview with Gordon Lish, the editor whose drastic emendation of Raymond Carver’s work remains contentious even now, decades after the fact. In an excerpt of the interview in the Guardian, Lish talks about his reasoning with Carver: “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with. There was a prospect there, certainly. The germ of the thing, in Ray’s stuff, was revealed in the catalogue of his experience. It had that promise in it, something I could fool with and make something new-seeming … But Carver’s were not the only ones I’d worked on to that extent. Not the only ones by a long shot. There were many. I’ve been decried for a heinous act. Was it that? Me, I think I made something enduring. For its being durable, and, in many instances, beautiful.” Subscribe now to read the whole interview. Kobe Bryant’s versified retirement announcement is only the latest example (and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, not an especially sublime one) of the sports poem, a venerated form whose proponents include Randall Jarrell (“Say Goodbye to Big Daddy”) William Carlos Williams (“The Crowd at the Ball Game”) and Marianne Moore (“Baseball and Writing”). But how to tell which is the most accomplished of all time? With a March Madness–style tournament, of course, conducted by Daily contributor Adrienne Raphel: “In honor of Bryant, I’ve pitted sixteen sports poems against one another—with both ‘sports’ and ‘poems’ arbitrarily defined … to determine which sports poem should be crowned victorious. The four regions: Basketball, Baseball, Football, and Running.” Zadie Smith argued in 2008 that literature was too dominated by lyrical realism. In a new interview with The White Review, she refines her thinking: “The fashionable argument against ‘realism’ has become a bit simple-minded … In fact I think we are rather sophisticated in our understanding of the limits and illusions of language, and that this is again largely due to our familiarity with the literary uses of language in everyday life. When you hear, for example, two girls at a bus stop and one is telling the other a ‘story’—‘and she was like … and I was like … and they were like’—the storytelling girl is not doing this because she imagines that with this act of mimesis, with this ‘realistic’ re-telling, she has fooled her listener into believing that what she is presenting is ‘authentic’ or an unvarnished truth, in some sense essentially ‘real’—no. She is performing a speech act in which both parties understand, at least to some degree, that what is happening is a form of ‘performance’, a bracketed and partial reality. The problem with the argument that all realism is naïve is that it assigns to both parties in the literary exchange—the reader and the writer—an almost childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice.” Kurt Vonnegut’s wife Jane played a critical role in her husband’s career—it was she who convinced him that he should write at all. “Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Jane, and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text … Her faith sometimes baffled him. ‘I can only hope, and this on your instigation, that I’ve not reached my full stature,’ he wrote. ‘I’m willing to work like a dog to attain it.’ And he did … ‘I don’t want to let you and your fantastic hopes down with a thump.’ ” Did you know? This thing called Art Basel happened in Miami: a bunch of overblown parties that may or may not have been art-related. Kaitlin Phillips was there, watching the arrivistes: “Christopher Bollen playful-seriously accused all artists of the Dunning-Kruger effect, ‘a psychological term for people who highly exaggerate their skill sets. I feel like all artists have to be sufferers of it. What you are trying to achieve, like, outweighs even your own experience of what it is’ … Aesthetically, I’m more willing to diagnose the suits from last night with Dunning-Kruger; the men without so much as a Wikipedia entry, or even a personality, let alone charisma or looks, god forbid politesse, trying to talk their way into clubs. But I’m being morbid. ‘What is your criteria? I just want to learn,’ said a man, angrily. ‘There’s no criteria,’ said the doorman, a real cool customer. And there were women too: ‘You don’t understand the culture,’ lisped (or rasped) a thickly beautiful woman in a thick Italian accent. ‘You don’t understand the culture.’ Neither, apparently, did she, not that I don’t sympathize with the trials of a chunky-junky-jewelry woman. It’s a postlapsarian scene, baby—you can’t just walk in on the Louboutins you never learned to walk in.”
December 4, 2015 On the Shelf Let’s Do Some Fictional Drugs, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Possible side effects include double lives. The drugs in the real world are okay. But fictional drugs—those are some drugs. A tour of drugs in fiction suggests, among other things, that we’ve been disappointingly unimaginative in choosing names for actual drugs: Where can we find the likes of “moloko plus” or “The Diabolical Drug” in day-to-day life? And where, in fiction, can we find a drug that isn’t a metaphor for our dumb ambition? “We all want to be stronger, sexier, more formidable; taking a synthetic shortcut, in drug fiction, is rarely a good idea … That’s the commonality throughout all of our mind-warping fictions: they’re mostly depictions of our hubris. They skewer our persistent belief that there is some pill, some plant, some substance that could cure everything for us, fix things.” Meanwhile, the explosion of narrative food writing seems to have helped everyone but the service staff: there are no signs of labor to be found. “Contemporary cookbooks devote as much energy to their narrative or expository content as they do to providing recipes; they tell stories, that is, rather than merely instruct. Despite this impressive reach, however, you have to read hard, and most often in vain, to catch glimpses of waiters, dishwashers, or line cooks … If one were to do the impossible, and take food criticism seriously, we would have to imagine a restaurant as a kind of lively phantasmagoria, where food and beverage enter the purview of the critic as if of their own volition. It is the staging ground for the most classic forms of commodity fetishism.” Today in TV nostalgia: from 1947 to 1957, a live TV show called Kukla, Fran and Ollie attracted some four million viewers each night, in prime time. Its secret: puppets. “It revolved around the antics of the Kuklapolitan Players, a theater company made up of one human—radio actress and vocalist Fran Allison—and a dozen puppets, all of which were animated by the show’s creator, Burr Tillstrom. The puppets talked and danced and sang on a small stage while Allison stood in front of it and talked and danced and sang with them … Kukla, Fran and Ollie created a new, gentle intimacy with its audience, one shaped by routine but not bound by formula, in which it was always possible to be delighted or moved. Perhaps it’s less that it’s strange for adults to feel strongly about children’s television and more that we’ve coded such qualities as childlike.” Mary-Kay Wilmers on Marianne Moore: “In place of a diary she kept a notebook … She didn’t use it to write about her feelings or about herself. She was interested in the fate of her poems, not in the mood she was in. Her mother had warned against introspection; consciously or unconsciously, she’d taken the lesson to heart. Or perhaps she didn’t need a lesson. Ideas, attitudes to this and that were more rewarding, and more fun to think about and make fun of, even her own. But words principally gave her pleasure. Sentences, metaphors, tropes, her own—she worked constantly at them—and other people’s, including her mother’s, were noted down and reappear in the poems, which borrow many of Mary’s mannerisms as well as those of the home language more generally: not its sentimentality but its histrionic tone and nursery décor and its tendency to metonymise and otherwise play the figures of speech. Like Wallace Stevens, whom she much admired, she made jokes, and even more than in Stevens’s case, the jokes were sly, hardly perceptible, there for her own pleasure. Yet for all the ironies, visible and invisible, some of the poems even have a moral.” The artist Ana Mendieta, a Cuban émigré who died thirty years ago, is at last getting her due: “The young and promising Cuban-American artist fell to her death in September 1985 from the 34th-floor window of her Greenwich Village apartment; her newlywed husband, legendary sculptor Carl Andre, was indicted, tried, and eventually acquitted of her murder … [Mendieta] used her own body as a major component of her artwork. Her films and photos often used her sometimes naked form as subject and many had deep, earthy, bold colors and natural but stark shapes and elements. She used sticks and blood and dirt and plants—her work has the feeling of a pagan ritual. It is somehow both haunting and life-affirming.”
December 3, 2015 On the Shelf Just Say Said, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration from Debate and Oratory, 1909. Our new Winter issue features an interview with Jane and Michael Stern, “the original culinary road warriors.” A new profile in Eater captures what Norman Rush would call their “idioverse,” i.e., a “private patois made up of shared references and sayings, occasional neologisms, and common words that have taken on new meanings”: “the dyad of Jane and Michael—some four decades in, now—almost surpasses idioverse, and forms a hovering mushroom cloud of collective memory. Spending time with them, I realized that there’s a voyeuristic pleasure in finding yourself submerged in the intimacies of a couple with a complex history. Watching the deepest, strangest way two people communicate made me feel like an intellectual Peeping Tom—one who wanted to stay … They go at it tit for tat, with the rapid-fire speed of David Mamet dialogue, but they’ll linger to enjoy language more when discussing their Roadfood glory days. At times, listening to them talk, it seems that alone neither one can remember an entire story, and that together neither one can remember it the same way. There are tales about botched attempts to donate leftovers that ended in an undercover police sting, and casual references to a strange commune-like group of former Barnum & Bailey performers who live in Bethel and call themselves the ‘frog people.’ ” This is a public service announcement. If you, like me, were taught growing up to deploy synonyms for said whenever you wrote dialogue, please stop immediately. To stick to said is to improve the world of prose for all of us. Gabriel Roth agrees: “Replacing the word said with ‘colorful’ or ‘lively’ synonyms is a ubiquitous symptom of bad writing. Individual instances are usually redundancies: ‘I’ll never cheat again!’ is recognizable as a promise without ‘he vowed’ after it. But a procession of she explained and he chuckled and I expostulated—the reporting verbs that clog your dialogue when you follow the ‘never say said’ rule—is worse, because they force the reader’s attention away from the content of the writing and onto the writer’s hunt for synonyms.” “Nabisco. Nabisco! / Oreos! Right? / Oreos! I love Oreos! // I’ll never eat them again. OK? / I’ll never eat them again. // No … Nabisco.” This poem, a masterwork of compression and a ludic comment on commodity fetishism, comes courtesy of Donald Trump, whose speeches have been anthologized in a “treasury of oral poetry” called Bard of the Deal. Some are calling “Freedom Tower,” in particular, the most vital and intriguingly cross-disciplinary work of our young century: “Worst pile of crap / Architecture / I’ve ever seen.” Hey there, young person: Do you wish to be as successful and as verbally acrobatic as bona-fide geniuses like Trump? Gay Talese has some advice for you: “I don’t think this new generation has the patience or even knowledge of how to get things … You have to get off your ass. Make something happen with your personality, with your goddamn style, your charm, your beautiful clothes, your reassurance, your salesman huckster-ist licorice. Know how to get something and not break hearts or be offensive.” Before he embarked on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville paid an inspiring visit to London: “Late at night, he ‘turned flukes’ down Oxford Street as if he were being followed by a great whale, and thought he saw ‘blubber rooms’ in the butcheries of the Fleet Market … Perhaps most importantly, it was here that Melville saw the work of J M W Turner, a clear visual influence on his book-to-be. Turner had painted a series of whaling scenes for Elhanan Bicknell, whose British whaling company was based in the Elephant and Castle; parts of Moby-Dick would read like commentaries to those tempestuous, brutally poetic canvases, not least the painting that greets Ishmael at the Spouter-Inn, ‘a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture’ of ‘a black mass … floating in a nameless yeast … an exasperated whale.’ It is all the more intriguing to note how Melville’s Anglophilia was the yeast out of which this great American novel emerged.”