August 10, 2015 On the Shelf Kafka on the Shore Stage, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Kafka on the Shore. Photo: Takahiro Watanabe “It wasn’t easy to interest glossy magazines in poverty in the 1980s and 90s,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes: “I once spent two hours over an expensive lunch—paid for, of course, by a major publication—trying to pitch to a clearly indifferent editor who finally conceded, over decaf espresso and crème brulee, ‘OK, do your thing on poverty. But can you make it upscale?’ ” That was then. Today, things are even worse: “Now there are fewer journalists on hand at major publications to arouse the conscience of editors and other gatekeepers. Coverage of poverty accounts for less than 1% of American news.” How New York Review Books is perfecting the art of the reissue: “It was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue … We set out to do the whole mix of things that a curious person might be interested in, which would take you back and forth from fiction to certain kinds of history … We were picking low-hanging fruit, only no one knew the fruit was out there, hanging from the branches.” In 2003, the Russian writer Kirill Medvedev lifted the copyright from his publications, putting them all into the public domain worldwide. Twelve years later, he defends his choice: “Do you, as a poet or writer or musician, really want to go the way of prohibitions, fences, barbed wire and guard towers to defend texts and music the way some would defend private cottages, private forests, private fields and private earth?” Nearly a century after it was composed, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains the quintessential adolescent poem: “Eliot himself was barely out of his teens when he wrote it, uncannily in touch with the exquisite torments of hypersensitive youth, and with the peculiar burden of seeing through everything without having experienced much of anything. This was a different species of verse. It exuded cinematic urgency rather than exam-ready ‘messages’ and ‘themes.’ It was full of sudden rhythmic jolts and colliding tones, and could make emotional pirouettes on a vowel. Unapologetic, brash, discontinuous, ‘Prufrock’ taught me the thrill of disorientation in language. No matter how often I returned, it was never tamped down by classroom-style explanations. It grew. It seemed to understand me more than I understood it.” Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore has been adapted for the stage at Lincoln Center by Yukio Ninagawa: the production is “a collage of modern, neon-lit, commercialized, glitzy Japan, haunted by dark, mostly unspoken memories of World War II, including the atom bomb, shown in what looks like a stylized advertising logo … [it’s] still unmistakably Japanese: stylized, poetic, comical, violent, full of spectacular effects, and often exquisitely beautiful to look at.”
August 7, 2015 On the Shelf Drawings from a Prisoner of War, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Frederick Gokliz, Warfare, ca. 1890s. Image via Slate/Newberry Library Mark von Schlegell talks about the paperback revolution and its undoing in the nineties: “I was temping at Ballantine Books in New York … My boss got copies of all the first mass-market editions of Philip K. Dick … She gave them to me free. The books I got were all $1.99 and $2.50 paperbacks in a stack. I read them all in a row, and it opened a door for me. Then they started republishing them, and now they’re $20 each. When those books were $2.50, they had a different meaning … In the paperback revolution, the mainstream was created on a literary base, because if you were Stevie Wonder and made a great album, or if you were some twentieth-century movie star like Clark Gable, or a director like Hitchcock, you always had a paperback book coming out as part of your deal. Paperback books connected everything. They were like the sea of the mainstream, and they had a richness because they were books, unlike all these other artifacts floating around. They had a deeper historical life to live.” Walter Pater’s The Renaissance is one of the cornerstones of Renaissance scholarship, a Victorian-era classic that everyone knows, one of those old tomes so essential that copies of it flood used bookstores throughout the land—except, does anyone really care about it anymore? “I can’t think of a single thing written in the last thirty years that felt the need either to denounce or to celebrate Pater’s account of the Renaissance … Perhaps Pater seemed so unthreatening or so bland that he just slipped out of Renaissance scholarly time … does Pater tell you anything about the Renaissance? Does his account of aestheticism help understand the period?” Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the latest addition to that increasingly relevant subgenre, the office novel: its heroine, Josephine, has a job in data entry. “Josephine’s work steadily chips away at her identity: it is a trudge against time, and its tedium subsumes her. Even when her mind meanders, ‘the moment would pass and the thought would be lost, trapped forever between the horizontal and vertical lines of the Database.’” “Chicago’s Newberry Library has digitized a series of ink and watercolor drawings of Apache life made in the 1890s by Frederick Gokliz. Gokliz, a San Carlos Apache, was first imprisoned along with a group of Chiricahua Apaches at Fort Marion, in Florida, in 1886 … Gokliz’s work eschews much representation of life in captivity in favor of remembered and imagined episodes of community life. His drawings depict hunts, meetings, and ceremonies, using perspective in interesting ways to show motion and conflict.” Don’t feel like reading? I can’t blame you—it’s a Friday in August, and you have the option of watching Lauren Conrad desecrate books in the name of storage. To the dulcet tones of an acoustic guitar, Conrad shreds, rips, and otherwise dismembers works of prose to create … a box, with the “spines of several books glued to one side of it, making it look, to the untrained eye, like a line of books rather than a unique storage space.”
August 6, 2015 On the Shelf At the Hundredth Universal Esperanto Congress, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the 1909 Esperanto Congress. In 1969, Life ran a photo essay called “What it takes to be a lady author anymore,” with predictably outmoded advice: “swim a little,” for starters, “exercise in a bikini,” and be “photographed in bed.” The magazine photographed Jeanne Rejaunier—who was promoting a new novel called, ironically enough, The Beauty Trap—in various titillating poses, and also raking leaves in a Victorian dress. “Just possibly because she smiles so prettily on the book jacket (the back and the front of the book),” Life wrote, “The Beauty Trap is now in its fourth printing.” Today in obscure centennials: “Last week the 100th Universal Congress of Esperanto was held in Lille. The public program included a traditional dance workshop in the Place du Théâtre, an ecumenical service in the Eglise Saint-Maurice and concerts by Esperanto singers. There were also introductory lessons in Esperanto, and an international football match between Esperanto and Western Sahara. (The match was abandoned at half-time with Western Sahara 4–0 up.)” Rock music and fiction haven’t blended terribly well over the years—there’s a Great Jones Street here, a Goon Squad there, and not much between. But 2014 saw no fewer than five entrants in the ongoing contest for Great American Rock Novel, and “interestingly, none of these 2014 titles concerns itself with conveying the over-the-top elements of rock on the page. Rather, they focus on characters dabbling in rock within the larger context of their more domestic pursuits: growing up, falling in love, finding a path, having a family; in short, the arcs that have been part of the novel’s scope since at least Austen. Much of the trouble for these characters comes when their more universal journeys collide with their need to make music, play in band, tour in an airbrushed bus.” Salvador Dalí’s childhood diaries remain untranslated, which is a shame, because they find him witnessing the unrest in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War: “At this point in the journal, the illustrations by Dalí … have become morbid. An old man hangs from a noose with his tongue lolling out. On the facing page, a warrior with sword in hand extends the severed head of a long-haired man toward the viewer.” On the literary scene in Ukraine, which has a strange emphasis on finality: “Ukrainian literature—or Ukrainian culture more broadly—employs the words last quite often: last territory, last bastion, the last issue of a magazine, the last books of a bankrupt publisher, the last Ukrainian-speaking readers, writers, translators. There is a well-known contemporary classic, a collection of essays by one of Ukraine’s best-known authors, Yuri Andrukhovych, called My Last Territory; there is an art management agency called Last Bastion.”
August 5, 2015 On the Shelf Disappearing Doo-wop, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Mark Havens, Untitled (Sweetbriar & Atlantic), 2006. Image via T Magazine Anxiety has always been a fixture of the human experience—who doesn’t enjoy a good bout of angst and fear now and again? But the word worry is, in its current sense, a fairly new addition to the English language: “Although it was used in the sixteenth century, in all of Shakespeare’s works worry appears just once—as a transitive verb denoting strangling or choking. Only in the Victorian era did its contemporary meaning come into widespread use. The advent of literary modernism in the twentieth century placed the personal inner world center stage. From James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom to Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay, worriers came to abound in the modernist canon.” August Kleinzahler is in Montreal and trying to speak French: “In general, Quebecers seem to like Americans, in approximate measure to their dislike of Anglophone Canadians. Insofar as no other nationality that immediately comes to mind ‘likes’ Americans (even the Irish seem to have gone off us during the George W. Bush era), I find being in Montreal again a most genial circumstance. ‘You must find yourself a French lover and learn the language on the pillow,’ the fromagier told me.” So you’re looking for a literary agent? Here’s a cool publishing hack: pretend you’re a man. It is, evidence suggests, dramatically easier to find representation that way, as Catherine Nichols learned when she sent out her query letter under a pseudonym: “George sent out fifty queries, and had his manuscript requested seventeen times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in twenty-five … I imagined him as a sort of reptilian Michael Fassbender–looking guy, drinking whiskey and walking around train yards at night while I did the work. Most of the agents only heard from one or the other of us, but I did overlap a little. One who sent me a form rejection as Catherine not only wanted to read George’s book, but instead of rejecting it asked if he could send it along to a more senior agent … George’s work was ‘clever,’ ‘well-constructed,’ and ‘exciting.’ No one mentioned his sentences being lyrical or whether his main characters were feisty.” In fact, even if you prefer simpler hobbies, such as coloring books, the world is determined to rain on your parade: “The bizarre thing about the new adult coloring books is they are virtually impossible to complete. They have to be difficult, because adults are still embarrassed to be seen working away at infant activities … But the main thing making coloring ‘socially acceptable’ is the link to mental health. The mindfulness industry has planted its flag on the business and many books are being sold as an offshoot of meditation … The new mindful coloring books are mindless. You should be drawing your own pictures!” “Flashy neon lights, kidney-shaped pools, asymmetrical design elements, and a plethora of plastic palm trees”: these are the “Doo Wop” motels of the Wildwoods, “the three kitschy southern New Jersey shore towns that are home to the largest concentration of midcentury motels in the nation.” A new series of photos by Mark Havens documents “the interplay of an idealized past and its inexorable disappearance.”
August 4, 2015 On the Shelf Without Need of Makeup, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An 1889 poster for Sissieretta Jones, who sang opera but gave recitals, because she was never hired by opera houses. Some writers take years to finish their novels. These people are fools: writing a novel takes only seventy-five minutes, if you crowdsource it effectively. This Saturday, the sci-fi author Chris Farnell will prove it at a “Geekfest” panel in Heathrow: “the fifty or so attendees of the panel will spend about forty-five minutes collaboratively hammering out a plot, characters and structure. Then, for the next half an hour, each of them will be given one chapter to write, and the results will be collected together, lightly edited, and published as a free ebook.” The book stands little chance of being good—but the same could be said of those that take years to limp their ways to the finish line. Opera has a long and vexed tradition of blackface—and the Met, this season, has finally put an end to their use of “dark makeup,” prompting a reconsideration of the role of African Americans in the opera. “Too many Black artists have devoted their lives to opera, working inside and outside the establishment, sharing their insights, pleasure, and critiques, to allow their art to be sidestepped in this way. Besides more opportunities for Black singers on stage, says Dr. Gregory Hopkins, artistic director of Harlem Opera Theater, there needs to be recognition of works in which Black artists can ‘tell our own stories, without need of makeup, where we’re not being dressed up to look like someone else.’ ” Why is everyone still obsessed with the Bloomsbury Group, a century later? Because it was elitist: “Paradoxically, the idea of the Bloomsbury Group as socially, intellectually and artistically exclusive is bound up with its wider appeal. Close the door and people come knocking … Establishing an explicitly exclusive and anti-populist club is, of course, a long-established route to long-term popularity.” Charles Simic interviews his brother about New York’s jazz scene in the sixties: “[Jackie McLean] told me about his first time playing at Birdland. It was 1952 or something, with Miles Davis. The very first solo he took that night, he was so nervous he stopped, turned around and went back through the curtain at the back of the stage and into the dressing room behind it and threw up. Oscar Goodstein, the Birdland manager, ran in and yelled at him, ‘Get back on stage!’ Jackie goes back out, finishes his solo and gets a big round of applause from the audience. Miles turns to him and says, ‘Man, I’ve never seen that one before!’ ” Today in walking metaphors: hitchBOT, a Canadian robot attempting to hitchhike to San Francisco, was found brutally dismembered in Philadelphia. “We know that many of hitchBOT’s fans will be disappointed, but we want them to be assured that this great experiment is not over,” its creators said in a statement. “For now, we will focus on the question: ‘What can be learned from this?’ and explore future adventures for robots and humans.”
August 3, 2015 On the Shelf Crunching Christie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The poster for Murder Most Foul. Data analysts have descended on the corpus of Agatha Christie—to celebrate the 125th anniversary of her birth, they’ve crunched some numbers and honed a formula “that they claim will enable the reader to identify the killer before the likes of Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple have managed the feat,” thus taking the fun out of what had been formerly known as “reading.” The formula examines factors like setting, gender of culprit, number of culprit mentions per chapter, and sentiment of culprit mentions; in some cases its findings are surprising. “They found that if the victim was strangled, the killer was more likely to be male … if the setting was a country house—not uncommon for a Christie novel—there was a 75% chance the killer would be female. Female culprits were usually discovered thanks to a domestic item, while males were normally found out through information or logic.” At Stanford, meanwhile, new software called ePADD will change the way researchers process e-mail collections. Archivists who’d been “grappling with more than 150,000 e-mails in the archive of poet and author Robert Creeley” used ePADD to separate the wheat from the chaff: e-mails “accumulate like dust … A mountain of ‘See you at eight o’clock.’ Every now and then, there must be significant ones but the sheer volume is very great.” An old lecture by Shirley Jackson looks at two of a writer’s most necessary tools—memory and delusion: “The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing.” This is your periodic reminder that it’s okay, or even laudable, to pursue “difficult” fiction: “Think back on our country’s rich literary traditions in fiction: from Hawthorne to Melville, through Poe to James, Stein, Ellison, and Faulkner, just to cite a few. Their books make use of circularity, fragmentation, and elision, and at their most extreme reject coherence in an effort to produce new meaning. Their wildness has played an important defining role in our culture’s literary identity … If we want to make sure this important tradition continues, we have to sustain the curiosity to care about work that, at first glance, might seem difficult … Let’s not give up on the intricacies of ambitious fiction. Let’s not stop reading the kind of books that keep teaching us to read.” Marie Darrieussecq’s first book, Pig Tales, published in 1996, is “narrated by an unnamed young white woman who aspires to a higher class, but in turn, is becoming a pig. As her body undergoes this great metamorphosis, she attracts increasing acts of sexual violence … The narrator, who works at Perfumes Plus as a perfume seller and prostitute, doesn’t seem to know that she is abused, let alone deceived about her pay.” But in all its grotesquerie, the book’s formalism offers an effective way of depicting violence against women: “Darrieussecq, in Pig Tales, rigorously insists on visibility—form is light. Her formal rigor, her careful and caring arrangement, her tactic, bares her comment. I want all writers, if they want to take the female body out of their tool kit, and hurt it, to work hard. Mostly, so hard they don’t bother.”