September 30, 2015 On the Shelf Mourning the Striped Pig, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Time was you could find this fella on newsstands, getting sloshed. Fact: the American newspapers and gazettes of the nineteenth century had names that absolutely trounced their present-day counterparts where liveliness and creativity are concerned (with the exception of the Modesto Bee, which remains a truly great paper title). In simpler times, you could spend your mornings over the Horseneck Truth Teller and Gossip Journal, Estabrook’s Great Public Chowder, Steven H. Branch’s Alligator, and the Striped Pig, among others. For a different kind of nostalgia, contemplate MacGyver, which hit the airwaves thirty years ago and has left in its wake a mess of nerdy white-male heroics and misplaced, quasi-racist adventure: “MacGyver embraces its own insistent loneliness to an absurd degree. And that, in turn, makes the whole show feel distinctly retrograde … MacGyver sags under the weight of its old-school definition of heroism. It glorifies the single man—the single mullet—while treating other people as victims and saps.” Not dissimilarly: in a new book, Lions in the Balance, Craig Packer attempts to careen between the MacGyver-esque machismo of those who hunt lions in the Serengheti and the “communal emotionalism” that so often animates conservation movements. “It is his position, as the story begins, that the lions of the Serengeti need sport hunters to survive; that Cecils must die if prides are to endure … In his quest to restructure incentives, in his willingness to take the long view, in his commitment to numbers over narrative, Packer deems himself ‘ultimately alone.’ ” Trying to build a brand of one? Of course you are! This is the age of the brandividual. Let me tell you a few things you already knew, though: it’s a futile project, authenticity is a myth, and branding strategists are working to make our society a waking nightmare of empty professionalism. “I don’t think it’s possible to appeal to everyone and still be authentic, let alone unique. When [my branding strategist] declared my web-site font ‘almost hippie-dippy,’ I couldn’t help but get a bit defensive. So what if it is? My truest self does not use ‘impact as a verb.’ My truest self likes to be catty about former employers that have done me wrong, not write pleasant summaries of what I was able to achieve while working there. My truest self is sending GIFs to my friends, not cheerfully influencing strangers’ thoughts.” Today in new and novel uses for the black crayon: Richard Serra’s strangely affecting “Ramble Drawings” are seventy-four works on paper, all “variations on Malevich’s square, stretched out and pressed with black lithographic crayons to achieve different textures: oily, streaky, pocked, solid. The pictures, stacked like rows of large, incongruous industrial cement bricks across the gallery walls, are anything but monotonous, however. Black never looked so colorful.”
September 29, 2015 On the Shelf Like, Everything’s Connected, Man, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration from the Rhode Island Historical Society depicting 1815’s Great September Gale. Carmen Balcells, who died earlier this month, was “a literary superagent with a license to kill, like James Bond.” (NB: she never murdered anyone. Some also referred to her, equally outlandishly, as “Big Mama.”) She changed Spanish-language publishing, launching the careers of Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, and Julio Cortázar, among others. “The moment … has been known ever since as the ‘Latin American Literary Boom’ … For writers coming of age during and after the Boom, invoking Balcells became de rigueur, the ultimate literary credential, because it linked them to a special kind of origin story.” A couple centuries ago, in 1815, a real ballbuster of a storm swept through New England. Recollections of the Great September Gale, as it became known, suggest that meteorology then was in some ways a more holistic, if not more sophisticated, discipline than it is today: “Gales and tempests were related, many people thought, to phenomena like lightning, volcanism, and earthquakes … In the 1810s, the idea of an ‘electric fluid’ surrounding and suffusing the world—disturbances in which manifested themselves as earthquakes, waterspouts, hurricanes, and thunderstorms—was quite mainstream … For many New Englanders in 1815, it was intuitively obvious that everything in the sky, and most everything on the ground, was connected somehow to everything else.” Seventy-five years after his apparent suicide, what are we to make of Walter Benjamin—or his strange end? Supposedly he took his own life in 1940, on the Spanish border, where his visa had been refused; he feared that if he returned to France he’d be handed over to the Nazis. But “there are all sorts of unanswered questions surrounding Benjamin’s death. His traveling companions remembered him carrying a heavy briefcase containing a manuscript he described as ‘more important than I am’. No such manuscript was found after his death … There has been persistent speculation that he was actually murdered, perhaps by a Soviet agent who had infiltrated his escaping party.” In which William Vollmann reads a novelization of Trotsky’s assassination (The Great Prince Died) and begins to mull on grave questions of power: “Do the ends justify the means? This is one of the great questions of any time. We should consider it deeply and provisionally answer it for ourselves … ‘Then it amounts to this,’ says a Mexican official to the dying Rostov’s wife. ‘Those who use all means will win, those who reject some means will lose. There is no remedy …’ Can it be so? Trotsky believed it. Sometimes, so do I. (That is why I prefer to lose.)” Today in recovered Babylonian epics: At last! A new version of the fifth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh has been unearthed, perhaps illegally, from an undisclosed location in what was once Mesopotamia. It contains a whopping twenty new lines of cuneiform, rich with such narrative revelations as “Gilgamesh and Enkidu saw ‘monkeys’ as part of the exotic and noisy fauna of the Cedar Forest” and “Humbaba emerges not as a barbarian ogre but as a foreign ruler entertained with exotic music at court in the manner of Babylonian kings.”
September 28, 2015 On the Shelf A Period Equals Four Commas, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Dvdgmz Today in reading and statecraft: What’s your nation’s official book? Think. There must be one. “Each country chooses, prefers to be represented by a book,” Borges said, “although that book isn’t usually characteristic of the country. For example, one regards Shakespeare as typically English. However, none of the typical characteristics of the English are found in Shakespeare. The English tend to be reserved, reticent, but Shakespeare flows like a great river, he abounds in hyperbole and metaphor—he’s the complete opposite of an English person.” Nothing causes more arguments than punctuation—of all the typographical elements, it’s ended the most marriages and caused the greatest number of bloody noses. But the contentions surrounding it have a rich history. “Scribes started to punctuate in order to make manuscripts easier to read aloud: they were signaling pauses and intonational effects. Grammarians and, later, printers adopted the marks, and tried to systematize them, as aids to semantic understanding on the page … The big four—comma, semicolon, colon and full stop—were for a long time, and insanely, regarded as precise measurements of a pause: a full stop was worth four commas. In praise of the suburban lawn: “Even when you are indoors a lawn makes its presence felt. There is a palette of green hovering in your periphery, just outside the panes; breezes enter through open windows and screen doors, carrying scents of pine and gasoline. I was always dimly aware of being surrounded by a cushion of space, a feeling I never have in the city. Deep in the night, the lawn carries on its own hidden life. Animals stage unheard battles. My father found a cat’s head behind the shed. An unidentified predator dragged a chicken from a coop four backyards away, discarding the carcass, which looked like a crumpled Victorian hat, under my parent’s bedroom window.” In the late nineteenth century, Hugh Mangum began to roam the South with a Penny Picture camera, taking portraits of all comers. “Mangum created an atmosphere—respectful and often playful— in which hundreds of men, women, and children genuinely revealed their spirits … Though the early twentieth-century American South in which he worked was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation, and inequality—between black and white, men and women, rich and poor—Mangum portrayed all of his sitters with candor, humor, and spirit. Above all, he showed them as individuals, and for that, his work—largely unknown—is mesmerizing. Each client appears as valuable as the next, no story less significant.” Let’s talk about hair and its meanings, which are multiple, inscrutable, and, depending on whom you ask, probably sexual: “In his famous 1958 essay ‘Magical Hair,’ the anthropologist Edmund Leach developed a cross-cultural formula: ‘Long hair = unrestrained sexuality; short hair or partially shaved head or tightly bound hair = restricted sexuality; closely shaved head = celibacy.’ Leach was deeply influenced by Freud’s thoughts on phallic heads, although for him hair sometimes played an ejaculatory role as emanating semen.”
September 25, 2015 On the Shelf Lost in This Masquerade, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Masquerade. Our new issue features Ben Lerner interviewing Eileen Myles. If you’re of the try-before-you-buy mind-set, you can read a new, long excerpt: “There’s a whole female industry engaged in materially supporting the illusion that the artist doesn’t work directly on his legacy, his immediate success. He’s just a beautiful stoner boy or an intellectual … We should let the writing world and its ways of distributing awards be part of fiction. We should expose the very cultural apparatus that is affecting the reception of the book you’re reading. What’s dirty is that we’re not supposed to talk about how it has sex and reproduces.” And if you’ve been seeing Myles’s name a lot lately, that’s because she is, after nineteen books, getting some belated recognition, especially from younger readers, who envy the way “she seems to have gotten away with precisely the kind of New York life that doesn’t seem possible anymore—living cheaply, maintaining only glancing alliances with major academic institutions, and earning a living by making art pretty much the way she wants. ‘It helps that I was queer, it helps that I grew up working class,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t afraid of being poor. I didn’t want to live in a big house. I’m the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.’ ” In 1979, a puzzle book called Masquerade, by Kit Williams, landed on shelves in the UK. It went on to sell two million copies, and not because of good storytelling or any such hogwash—it promised to lead its most perceptive readers to buried treasure. “Within Masquerade’s covers were clues that pointed the way … an intricately worked golden hare, also made by Williams, in his typically perfect first attempt at goldsmithing. The prize was somewhere in England and the directions to find it encoded in the book, and that was all anyone knew … ” Not to get all clickbaity on you, but you’ll never believe what they found! In a previously unpublished piece, Robert Walser imagines what the rules of seduction were in the days before heating, petroleum lamps, and railroads ruined the game: “Calling someone up on the telephone did not, at the time, occur to anyone, and even the most dignified and important persons in all the land received no telegrams. Upon the seas—this much he knew—sailing ships circulated. India and America were somewhere or other. At the theater, Italian actors put on works that were sometimes operas, sometimes dramas or comedies—he’d only seen one so far. He had no doubt already done a fair bit of kissing, for he was handsome, and the attractive have little difficulty initiating pleasant ensnarements … ” Yogi Berra (pour one out) was renowned and ridiculed for his malapropisms—“You can observe a lot by watching,” “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” and the like—but let’s not send this man into the next life without acknowledging the full scope of his verbal talents. “Some of his best-known quotes go a long way to showing just how well language may be used … And many of them are not mistakes at all.”
September 24, 2015 On the Shelf French Frame Frenzy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via J. Paul Getty Museum / Hyperallergic We’re in the midst of serializing Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special—a book about middle-aged men who meet annually to reenact the 1985 NFL game in which Joe Theismann fractured his leg on live TV—whose whole gestalt I’ve tried in vain to describe to people. Fortunately, in a new interview Bachelder does my work for me: “The play is just five seconds long, but it has extraordinary density and power. It’s like some kind of astronomical event … Even if you know nothing about Lawrence Taylor or Theismann or the NFC East or the 1985 season or what quarter it was or what the score was, you still have this visceral reaction to this gruesome injury. You can still feel the terrible randomness and chaos. It opens up the awful possibility in our minds that any single play—or any single plan or design—could end up like this. All of this interests me, and the play is useful to me as a writer because it’s so contained and discrete. It’s not like trying to write about an entire game or an entire season … So the play itself is circumscribed and dramatic, but the novel is primarily concerned with it as a locus of nostalgia for these middle-aged men. There is something almost primitively spiritual about their desire to reenact this disastrous play.” Real talk from across the pond: “I was the head of the Piers Gaveston Society, which is the society that David Cameron allegedly stuck his dick in a pig for. I never did that … No one, as far as I know, fucked a pig’s head. But if they had it wouldn’t have mattered (provided it was consensual). Fucking a pig’s head is not what makes David Cameron a rubbish prime minister.” In LA, a new opera called Hopscotch is testing the limits of the genre—it’s set in cars, and the audience has to climb into a limousine to start: “Attendees will be told to show up at their start time at an address along one of three colored routes. Once inside the limo, they will be driven, along with a handful of musicians, for about ten minutes. Throughout this approximately ten-minute ‘scene,’ which, yes, takes place inside a car, a vocalist may sing along with a prerecorded track playing on the car’s stereo, or there could be two singers and an alto saxophone, or the car may drive by a quartet on the street and the sound will be piped into the limousine as it passes … The car will arrive at a location where the group will disembark to witness the next scene, which will take place in a public space. Once that concludes, the group will be ushered into a different limousine, inside which the next scene will unfold.” Today in thoughtful remarks on largely forgotten Portuguese modernist classics about existential despair: pause to remember Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which is “much more philosophical quandary than it is a novel, and retroactively engineered at that, where various editors and translators arranged the hundreds of fragments and diary-type entries. As a result, no two editions are truly the same in order or content (my edition by the British publisher Serpent Tail Classics was on the slender side, only 272 pages, whereas the Penguin edition is 544 pages). Throughout the course of the ‘novel,’ Soares documents his days as a bookkeeper on Rua Douradores and the heavy ontological and existential musings that weigh down his hours, particularly the disconnect between the vivid world of the mind and the monotony of a daily, work-driven existence.” Art history’s all well and good, but what’s really instructive is the history of the French frame: “Louis XIII was fond of an Italian influence in his frames, while Louis XIV, being ostentatious in all corners of life, preferred the gilding and carving to be as elaborate as possible. Later Louis XV honed it down for more stately, but still very sculptural shapes, and finally Louis XVI favored an even more subdued aesthetic, although it all came crashing down with the French Revolution. Nevertheless, this frenzy for frames had an impact on the exhibition of art across the continent.”
September 23, 2015 On the Shelf Everyone Loves a Good Citation Scandal, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring How an early twentieth-century French artist thought women firefighters would look. Today in the thrill-a-minute world of annotation: well before Genius began its quest to annotate the world (or at least the internet), scholarly annotations of modern books for popular audiences delighted the readers of the 1960s. “The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, for instance, produced annotated versions of Don Juan, Paradise Lost, and Gulliver’s Travels in the 1970s and eighties … The list of books that have been annotated for a popular audience is now in the high dozens … Annotation is a form of literary lingering: It allows us to prolong our experience with a favorite book, to hang around the world of a beloved text a bit longer. But it can also serve as a gateway, for younger readers, to the pleasures of scholarship, by pointing to a larger universe of knowledge beyond.” And there’s news, too, of annotation’s sexy, scandalous cousin, citation. The venerable Journal of Criminal Justice decided to boost its “impact factor”—calculated by the average number of citations a journal receives—by citing itself over and over and over again. It’s thus managed to be both number one in its field and widely suspected of malfeasance. “In the most eyebrow-raising instance, one four-paragraph editorial, published in 2014, didn’t take up even a single page yet managed to have forty-seven citations, all to the Journal of Criminal Justice.” No one knows if Pynchon wrote the novel Cow Country, but people are pretty sure—roughly 100 percent sure—that he wrote this haunting 1966 essay on the aftermath of the Watts riots, which is, given its author’s caginess and flights of fancy, exceptionally well reported: “Except for the use of the words ‘Negro’ and ‘Caucasian,’ Pynchon’s essay reads as if it could have been written this past summer, almost a half-century later. Its downbeat premise, delivered in the voice of a young disciple of Malcolm X, is no less contemporary.” In 1902, the French artist Albert Bergeret designed Women of the Future, a series of trading cards depicting women at work in professions typically reserved for men: your doctor types, your lawyer types, your military-fencing master types. His feminist ambition is laudable; his insistence on skimpy outfits for the female generals and sergeants of the future, less so … “This is all work by local artists and craftspeople … We have yoga classes on Wednesdays and Fridays. It’s just a really great community space … All of our parenthetical duck bidets are ethically sourced in Nicaragua. The lettering on our storefront was painted with sea foam scraped lovingly from the back of a nursing beluga whale combined with a special dye extracted from Welsh nuns. Extracting dye from nuns is, contrary to popular belief, completely painless.” The cynical, no-bullshit New Yorker has been replaced with the humorless, self-serious, astrology-obsessed post-hipster, and now we all must suffer.