March 23, 2015 On the Shelf Glitch Art Goes for Broke, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Max Headroom, which marked glitch art’s entry into the mainstream. Image via Daily Dot The word glitch “may derive from Yiddish words conveying slippage”—and glitch art explores the grating moments of slippage in our technology. It is, depending on whom you ask, new, old, incisive, crass, “beatified violence, “ “the product of an elitist discourse and dogma widely pursued by the naïve victims of a persistent upgrade culture,” or just kind of neat to look at. If the art world is consumed by the effects of the Internet on our synapses, literary fiction is just the opposite: much of it seems unwilling—or unable—to engage with the texture of networked life. Novelists prefer to set their stories in technological vacuums, and it disadvantages them: “I don’t see these elements of contemporary life as destructive of narrative possibilities, but as sources for new. I’ve become something of a collector of fictional moments in which networked life matters. Not the simple inclusion of emails and other ‘found texts’ in a novel, nor casual mentions of characters owning phones and computers, but scenes in which these technologies allow writers to show something distinctly now.” Does a “safe space” have any chance of functioning as a truly intellectual space? “While keeping college-level discussions ‘safe’ may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it.” Readers (or book buyers) in the UK have expressed a seemingly inexhaustible desire for nature writing—it sells well, it gets good reviews, it questions “the values of our current society.” “I know of nature books that are being released this year on the last Thursday in July, when [Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk] was released. It’s now seen as the new magical date in publishing.” Mario Vargas Llosa on the state of literature: “The function of the critic was very important in establishing categories and hierarchies of information, but now critics don’t exist at all. That was one of the important contributions of the novel, once, too. But now the novels that are read are purely entertainment—well done, very polished, with a very effective technique—but not literature, just entertainment.”
March 20, 2015 On the Shelf The Critique of Pure Idiocy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kant’s home, vandalized. Outside Kaliningrad, Immanuel Kant’s home still stands, and now it’s adorned with a loving note in his memory: “Kant is a moron.” Russian police have made it their categorical imperative to find the vandals. “With Arthur Schopenhauer dead for 155 years, however, authorities start off with few strong leads.” The Pittsburgh Tax Review—subscribe now—features a new paper by Arthur Cockfield called “David Foster Wallace on Tax Policy, How to Be an Adult, and Other Mysteries of the Universe,” presumably focusing on The Pale King. “The drudgery of taxes is what attracted Wallace to the subject, Cockfield argues. And, he says, Wallace has helpful advice for those of us bogged down by tax season.” “I hate literature,” Varlam Shalamov wrote in a 1965 letter. Nonetheless, he did well by it. “Between 1954 and 1973, Shalamov wrote 147 stories about Russian prisons, transit camps, the mines of Kolyma, life in the camp hospitals, and the troubled experience of returning home … the more you read, the less documentary-like the experience becomes … particular images and phrases repeat; objects exhibit a strong symbolic power; meanings double, as accounts of daily camp life take on aesthetic and philosophical dimensions.” “The flower’s leaves … serve as bridal beds which the creator has so gloriously arranged … and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much greater solemnity.” Scientists remember Carl Linnaeus today for his binomial system, but his writing on botany was, for the time, frankly sexual. The Encyclopedia Britannica referred to his work as “disgusting strokes of obscenity.” “When the people shall have nothing to eat, they will eat the rich,” Rousseau wrote. But what if intraclass cannibals beat them to it? In Britain, the landed gentry have started hunting themselves for sport.
March 19, 2015 On the Shelf Fraud, Fraud, More Fraud, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration by A. Burnham Shute for Melville’s Typee, 1892. Melville’s first book, Typee, is, like most literary memoirs, a fraud: though he certainly ventured to Polynesia, many of the events in the book are clearly created out of whole cloth—and they suggest how little we really know about the events of Melville’s life. “There is no reason to believe that Melville didn’t witness clothmaking and woodcarving. However, the scene in which his friend Kory-Kory rubs a six-foot pole between his hands, as his back arches and muscles tense, until it bursts into flame, is most likely a metaphoric rendering of a different act (no record exists attesting to whether Thoreau tried this method at Walden).” While we’re talking fraud, Arthur Conan Doyle was set up—by the Staffordshire fuzz, no less. “Newly discovered documents show that the Staffordshire police fabricated evidence to try to discredit Arthur Conan Doyle’s investigation into the curious case of George Edalji, a Birmingham solicitor accused of maiming horses and sending poison-pen letters at the turn of the twentieth century.” Amazon’s Kindle Scout program— a “reader-powered” publishing platform in which authors submit their work and readers vote on it—is perpetrating a kind of fraud, too. It’s become “a murderously deft purveyor of books seemingly designed only to be inhaled like so many bibliographic nachos.” Is it the new center of reading as a camp experience? Or is it just shit? “The bigger problem with so-bad-they’re-good novels is that sometimes they’re just so bad they’re … bad. For every camp triumph on Kindle Scout, every daft splendor of weaponized pit bulls, you’ll find three corresponding duds.” Everyone loves a good art heist. The trick isn’t so much stealing a painting, though, as managing to sell it again when it’s known to have been stolen. “The misappropriation of masterpieces continues to have a distinctive hold on the public imagination, even as it becomes a type of criminal activity that’s both misunderstood and increasingly hard to pull off.” Among the fake self-help books hidden on shelves in an LA Bookstore: The Beginner’s Guide to Human Sacrifice, Learn to … Dress Yourself!, and So Your Son Is a Centaur: Coping with Your Child’s Confusing Life Choices.
March 18, 2015 On the Shelf North to the Past, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The whaling steamer Belvedere, Cape Lisburne, Arctic Ocean, ca. 1886. Pictured in Steaming to the North. Photo via NYRB Ian Frazier on Steaming to the North, a new book of photographs that “provides another of the poignant rear-view-mirror visions of ourselves and our environment in which Americans specialize.” The book charts the journey of “the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear, a 198-foot, reinforced-hull vessel powered by both steam and sail.” The Bear patrolled the seas of Alaska circa 1886, when it was a new American territory. These photos of it were “rediscovered in the 1970s under a porch in New Hampshire.” Cicero may have been a master orator—but no rhetoric could rescue his lame advice for how to spend your twilight years. “He comes over as a humorless and self-satisfied bore when he writes that ‘the fruit of old age is the remembering and amassing of fine accomplishments’ … Besides being unduly platitudinous, it makes generally for unhappy reading … Apart from sitting on the sofa thinking smugly about all your great achievements, Cicero recommends taking up agriculture.” Last week we featured Ron Arad’s crushed cars. Now there’s a video that demonstrates how he crushes them, exactly. (Spoiler: it involves force.) Geoff Dyer on Raymond Williams, “a hero of the 1968 generation”: “Williams’s legacy and influence, which had once seemed assured, have gradually shrunk … it is necessary to do two things that might appear contradictory: to concede that, with the exception of Border Country, the fiction to which he devoted so much energy was dull; and to free the rest of his work from the once-modish tundra of cultural studies, let alone the pack ice of theory. Perhaps then he will be read with the same passion and adoration that still attends the discovery of John Berger.” On the intellectual character (or lack thereof) of conspiracy theorists: “The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the U.S. legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal … this is fundamentally a question of the way they are.”
March 17, 2015 On the Shelf Bolaño Hits the Powerball Jackpot, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration by Hache Holguin Chicago’s Goodman Theater is mounting a five-hour adaptation of Bolaño’s 2666. The production is underwritten by a grant from “an actor and stage manager turned Episcopal monk who pledged last year to give away much of his $153 million Powerball jackpot” to support the arts. Are you tired of suffering through novels rife with profanity and cussing? Try Clean Reader, “the only e-reader that gives you the power to hide swear words”—it’ll change bastard to jerk, damn to darn, and presumably render most David Mamet plays unreadable. And here’s a winning slice of the Clean Reader philosophy: “Will some authors be offended that some of their consumers use Clean Reader to pick out most of the profanity in their books? Perhaps. Should the reader feel bad about it? Nope. They’ve paid good money for the book, they can consume it how they want.” For the literary critic F. R. Leavis—who was, by the time of his death in 1978, totally out of fashion—great books were judgments about life, and “when a great novel or poem is used to support some generalization about culture, the qualities which make it worth reading tend to be ignored.” Leavis abstained, dogmatically, from the pleasures of pop: “Leavis declined ‘intellectual slumming’ of any sort. If he got winded, he put Schubert on the gramophone or read a neglected classic.” How music hijacks our sense of time: “In 2004, the Royal Automobile Club Foundation for Motoring deemed Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie the most dangerous music to listen to while driving. It is not so much the distraction, but the substitution of the frenzied tempo of the music that challenges drivers’ normal sense of speed—and the objective cue of the speedometer—and causes them to speed.” On getting a start as a critic: “I drew on a quality—a resource, a tool—that is very dear to me, and, I’d venture to say, very dear to most people who write reviews: arrogance … There’s good arrogance, too, just like there’s good cholesterol: arrogance that bolsters you, that allows you to feel that your judgment might be sound, that it might—and this is when the reviewer’s mind starts warming up, starts humming—be even better than sound.”
March 16, 2015 On the Shelf Systems Bigger Than Ourselves, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From SimCity, 1989. On SimCity and the value of games that dared to make complex systems their protagonists: “SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors … the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment. This was a radical way of thinking about video games: as non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves. It changed games forever—or it could have … ” Philip Roth’s misogyny is treated as a given these days; “the women are monstrous because for Philip Roth women are monstrous,” Vivian Gornick once wrote. But: “Maybe Philip Roth loves women? Maybe he, who offers a three-page description of female masturbation, is in fact an advocate for female desire? … While misogynists try to shame women, Roth celebrates women’s sexual power. It’s the men he is out to get.” “That sentence is shit. It’s got to be better. You asshole.” Matt Sumell on writing and doubt. Today in German words that dearly need English equivalents: verschlimmbessert, which can be roughly translated as “ ‘ver-worsebettered.’ In essence, it’s a combination of verbessern (‘to improve’) and verschlimmern (‘to make worse’). Here, then, is a verb that is able to express the idea of something simultaneously improving and worsening.” In which Benjamin Percy attends the dreadfully named Man Camp and enjoys a surprisingly rousing encounter with masculinity: “When men get together, they tend to speak with irony or rough-throated braggadocio, but [here] there was an uncommon sincerity to everyone’s tone. It caught me off guard.”