May 12, 2017 On the Shelf You, Too, Can Be T. S. Eliot’s Child, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “She said she was what now?” Things would be easier if you were the descendant of a famous writer. Doors would open. Carpets would be laid at your feet. I know what you’re thinking: you’re not born of literary royalty, and nothing will ever change that. Except: Did you ever consider lying about it? This is a more effective practice than you might expect. Take Alison Reynolds, for example. Until recently, she was claiming to be T. S. Eliot’s twin daughters, at the same time—even though Eliot had no children. For her troubles, she was rewarded with a few cushy theater gigs and a handsome tax break. And sure, she’s on her way to jail, but maybe it was worth it. Robert Mendick reports, “Alison Reynolds pretended to be both Claire and Chess Eliot, who she claimed were the twin daughters of the poet. In fact, Eliot never had any children. Reynolds, who is remanded in custody and facing a jail sentence, used wigs, stage makeup and a variety of costumes to portray herself as at least eleven different aliases over the course of a decade. Using the fake identities, she posed as a theatre producer and director and falsely claimed VAT credits in the name of bogus dramatic companies. In 2003, she moved to Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire … setting up the Journeyman Theatre Company and writing a play, Desperately Seeking Jake Roverton, to make her scam more compelling … The ruse was rumbled after theatre staff became suspicious that they had never seen Claire and Chess in the same room.” Book clubs are a great way to foster friendships. If you’d prefer to make enemies, they’re good for that, too. Judith Newman has stories of readers’ flaring tempers: “Elizabeth St. Clair, a lawyer … had her Waterloo in a previous club over Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. The group consisted of several couples, including Ms. St. Clair and her boyfriend at the time. In one scene, she explains, ‘the main character is staying in a bunkhouse, and over the course of several nights a gorgeous strange woman comes to his bed and has sex with him. The men in the group thought this was the most romantic thing ever—dark, anonymous sex with no consequences. The women, on the other hand, were guffawing. When they pointed out that this was entirely a male fantasy, that few women would relish the prospect of anonymous sex with a possibly unattractive stranger in a bunk bed, the men felt insulted. Tensions were already high and everything kind of escalated … People walked out.’ ” Read More
May 11, 2017 On the Shelf Make Something Up About Agatha Christie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of A Talent for Murder. In 1926, Agatha Christie went missing—she turned up at a hotel ten days later with a case of amnesia. Her disappearance has never been properly explained, and you know how people are about explanations: they’ve gotta have ’em. In the absence of facts, they’ll just as soon make something up. And so it went with Christie—as Andrew Wilson writes, all sorts of wacky theories about her were aired as “news,” and even today people continue to postulate: “Newspapers were fascinated by the idea that her husband Archie Christie might have killed the author so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele. But those ten days in 1926 were in effect a news vacuum. Despite an extensive search of the Surrey Downs and the dredging of nearby pools, the police discovered precious few clues, let alone a body—so journalists began to manufacture news of their own. The Daily Sketch claimed that it had employed the services of a medium, whose spirit guide was Maisie, a ‘twelve-year-old African girl, tribe unknown.’ ‘As soon as the medium went into a trance Maisie took command,’ the paper reported. ‘Sensational claims were made by the medium, who afterwards described Mrs Christie’s fate as a tragedy almost too terrible to speak about.’ ” Christian Lorentzen weighs in on “Formentera Storyline,” the photo-novella in our Spring issue: “Journals like The Paris Review and NOON have risked their pages on unlisted unknowns (who prove that publicity isn’t the oxygen that keeps fiction alive). It was in one of those magazines that, to my mind, the knockout discovery of 2017 appeared: ‘Formentera Storyline,’ by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva, a ‘photo-novella’ in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, about a Spanish-island group vacation that devolves across 150 pages—most of which feature a banal photo from a Mediterranean villa (e.g., the washing machine) and a deadpan sentence or two—from Pilates and talk therapy into druggy chaos and bad Instagram behavior. All told, a party where everybody stays too long. It’s funny, sly, and very much of the Fyre Festival moment.” Read More
May 10, 2017 On the Shelf Seduced Yet Again by Colonel Sanders, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Tender Wings of Desire. You know that Borges story, “The Library of Babel,” where he imagines a world containing all possible books? Perforce, one such book would have to be a romance novel in which a Kentucky-born fried-chicken magnate—the very same one whose face and name are emblazoned on fast-food franchises around the world—seduces an errant noblewoman at a dockside bar. And now, I’m happy to report, that book actually exists. True, it was a statistical inevitability. Someday, someone would sit down and string together the letters properly, and a Colonel Sanders romance would come to be. But who would’ve thought we’d have the good fortune to be alive for it? Kate Taylor writes, “To celebrate Mother’s Day—the chicken chain’s best-selling day of the year—KFC published Tender Wings of Desire, a novella following the love affair between Lady Madeline Parker and Colonel Harland Sanders … ‘The only thing better than being swept away by the deliciousness of our Extra Crispy Chicken is being swept away by Harland Sanders himself,’ George Felix, KFC’s U.S. director of advertising, said in a statement.” (As for the novella itself, here’s a representative passage: “They were so consumed that it took every ounce of their restraint not to give into the first right then and there. The flames would continue to rage throughout the night until the fire was too much, and at last they could let it engulf them.”) Speaking of things I’ve always wanted, here’s another one: a museum that gives American writers their due but makes literature seem so anodyne and boring that no visitors get any bright ideas about becoming writers themselves. (I don’t want the competition, you see.) And here, too, my dreams have come true. Witness the American Writers Museum, which makes a protean, deeply expressive art form seem like a neat self-improvement project. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing ‘Word Waterfall,’ in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations … Head from the entrance in one direction into a gallery called ‘A Nation of Writers’ and you get what might be called the logical, left-brain approach to literature, anchored by an eighty-five-foot-long wall that tells the chronological story of American writing through 100 significant writers. (The museum is careful not to say ‘best.’) … Visitors have to dig to get past the overall mood of inspirational uplift and moral progress and find knottier currents. Those who skip [the NPR critic Maureen] Corrigan’s video commentary on literary experimentalism, for example, may not realize that Lolita is more than a novel that ‘hinges on a road trip—a classic American genre—and riffs on motel and teen culture,’ as the brief wall text dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov puts it.” Read More
May 9, 2017 On the Shelf The Politics of the Mosh Pit, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The mosh pit at Endfest, in Washington, D.C., 1991. The mosh pit is a great place to reach a state of pure being. It’s also a great place to break your glasses, your jaw, or your spirit. The pit has been construed alternately as a punk utopia and a Hobbesian state of nature. As the nation immerses itself in a debate about what constitutes a safe space, the politics of moshing—with its questions about who gets to have fun, and at whose expense—make it an ideal bellwether. As Hannah Ewens writes, newer punk bands tend to see the pit as an oppression: “In hardcore and metal scenes, a lively mosh pit is still the real indicator of a successful show. But rock has been changing over the past couple of years—notably by listening to women within its factions. Punk has long claimed to be about community while, at the same time, managing to marginalize minorities. Yet the scene does now seem to be actually changing. DIY punk groups such as PWR BTTM, Diet Cig, and Adult Mom have introduced safe spaces at their shows—and mosh pits have often been the first casualties … The bands bringing in these changes most enthusiastically tend to be those with female and LGBT members. The biggest defenders of mosh pits are usually straight men. Most women I know who go to shows are either agnostic or hate them. Yet, the majority of rock bands want mosh pits to stay … Emotional responses are demonized and feared in modern culture. To the outside world, a mosh pit looks like the nonsensical activity of a Neanderthal—which it is. It appeals to base instincts; a positive thing, surely, in a modern culture where gigs are Snapchatted and documented, and wrapped in self-awareness that takes audiences away from experiences.” Good news for people who love tall red boots: they’re about to be everywhere. If the latest runway shows are accurate, no fewer than four dozen fashion labels will include red boots—I mean red red, fire-engine red, Crimson Tide red, Communist red—among their Fall 2017 offerings. Their sudden ubiquity suggests a nostalgia for post–Cold War style, in which, as Natasha Stagg writes, clothing reflected an uneasy symbiosis between capitalism and communism: “The Russians who embraced Capitalist ideals in the nineties—if they could afford to—faced antagonistic audiences. New iterations of the specific style that emerged from this time period reference a disparity between ideal and real: Ideally, American styles were carefree, but in Russia, they were associated with pornography and prostitution. A tight, red, thigh-high stiletto boot worn under a one-size-fits-all dress easily captures this contradiction of American culture feeling dangerously ostentatious in the context of 1991 Russia … It works in the nineties fascination with the ugly and the beautiful, or the Baba Yaga and the sexy spy Natasha. A sort of undercutting of frumpiness and androgynous Party dressing, this is a styling choice more than it is a direction for the clothing … The choice is especially provocative at a time when Russia is constantly on the front page of the Washington Post. The boots are as smooth and tall as the Red Army’s, and as strangely sexy as jeans were when they were first worn by women.” Read More
May 8, 2017 On the Shelf Witchcraft Is Still a Fine Idea, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, 1579. Say you’re an uptight God-fearing Christian type, and it’s your job to stamp out the sinful specter of witchcraft wherever it may rise. Your central problem will be this: witchcraft is fun, it’s always been fun, it always will be fun, and by depicting it in any form whatsoever you’re probably just going to prove how fun it is. This is not a new dilemma for the antiwitchcraft set. As Jon Crabb writes, early sixteenth-century witchcraft pamphlets relied on a variety of woodcuts to plead their case, and these woodcuts made for perhaps overly exciting storytelling: “One of the earliest and most notorious British witchcraft pamphlets was published in 1579: A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Deuell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches. Stile was a sixty-five-year-old widow and beggar accused of bewitching an innkeeper. The pamphlet describes her association with three other old women … as well as a man named Father Rosimunde, who could transform himself ‘into the shape and likenesse of any beaste whatsoever he will.’ Woodcuts show these old women and several animal familiars, which they reportedly fed on their own blood. The folkloric image of the crone was established through these images and repeated in similar pamphlets over the next century. These witches were usually bitter old women, who lived on their own, and kept cats or other animals as pets … Whether the authors intended it or not, they managed to make witchcraft seem rather exciting and attractive. The stories are easy, compelling reads and the images feature young men and women doing extraordinary things.” Kent Russell is watching the NHL playoffs and hymning the poetry of ice hockey: “Part of what makes the in-person experience of hockey so absorbing is the sound of the game. The shush of skates, the click-click-clack of sticks and puck (which sounds, to me, like an illicit substance being lined up). In-person hockey is orchestral in that the range of its sound is so wide, so rich: from the basso profundo of an errant slap shot booming against the endboards; to the jarring, early-days-of-electronica BARK! of a clearing attempt whipped against the glass; to the tantalizing, cherry-red ping! of puck off post; to the awesome flatulence of the goal horn—ice hockey is set to the best score in sports … You can hit people, hold them; you can use your body (and the tool in your hands) to obstruct or otherwise make difficult the progress of the other guy. You can physically enact the ressentiment of the lesser-skilled, is what I’m saying. You can (and are encouraged to) heave your body, wrench-like, into the gears of artistry.” Read More
May 5, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Not Really Porn Until There’s Modern Furniture in It, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here. Last week, it came to light that the Eames lounge chair, that sleek mainstay of midcentury design, is for sale at select Costco locations. I was all set to force my way, stark raving mad, through doorbuster-style hordes of Eames fanatics. Then I saw the price tag: $3,900—apparently a handsome discount, but still too dear for me. So I had to settle instead for We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here, a photo book featuring a different, but equally iconic, chaise longue, the venerable Le Corbusier LC4. But this book, compiled by Augustine and Josephine Rockebrune, doesn’t just have pictures of furniture. That would be boring. Instead, as Claire Voon explains, it features stills from adult films in which people are fucking on the LC4: “Designed in 1928 and now attributed to Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, the LC4 champions relaxation, with a frame capable of reclining at any angle. This, perhaps, is what may make it a popular prop for sex, along with the fact that you can customize an order in buttery full-grain leather, seductive pony or cow skin, or luscious beige canvas upholstery … [The book] is over 200 pages of twenty-first-century nude or scantily clad women kneeling on the chaise in black pleather stilettos, chained and roped to it, or bent over its innovative, chromed tubular steel frame. At times, no one’s on the chair at all; it is but a humble emblem of refinement lurking in a corner amidst the wild, hold-no-bars action unfolding around its approximately $4,000 frame. But set in this context—where it’s difficult to ignore for its bold, undulating form—it embodies the power dynamics between men and women, and it stands as an enduring reminder of Le Corbusier’s privilege and gendered dismissal of a mind stirring with as much creativity as his own.” While we’re looking at porn, here’s Frederick McKindra on his desire for white guys—which may or may not be, he writes, a viable form of protest against whiteness. Porn bears him out on this: “I just went and sulked by looking at Rogan Hardy videos on HarlemHooksup.net. Hardy is the undisputed King of Race-Baiting Black Bottoms; when his white tops call him ‘nigger,’ he just grins through his glazed lips. Videos like these shored up what I knew: that my own sexual desire for white men was born of a drive to destabilize power. I hoped my willing submission as a black man would challenge what white lovers thought they knew about me, and undermine the assumptions they had about black men’s innate aggression. Processing what it meant to abdicate to power, to survive it, to transfigure it, was useful to me. I’ve never had a relationship with a white person, friendship or otherwise, innocent of this dynamic. I feel affirmed, sometimes haughty, at how adroitly I look at whiteness. The complaints from white guys in my life—that I shouldn’t racialize things all the time, that they never look at themselves this way—only compounds my glee.” Read More