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Category Archives: Our Correspondents

January 8, 2020
Our Correspondents

The Village Explainer

By Anthony Madrid

Gertrude Stein said remarks are not literature. But hers are. Wittgenstein’s are.

And the cases are related. Both are perverse. Perverse as anything. She, on purpose; he, not.

They exploit the incongruity between their coolly rational tones and the content of what they’re saying. She has play in view; he, clarity.

His sense of humor was stunted. He thought the British use of the expletive “bloody” was the most amusing thing ever. He sprinkles it in postcards. The effect is chilling.

Yet all his books are laugh-out-loud funny. Not on every page, but often.

Stein had a vast and all-pervading sense of play and pleasure. It touched her every move. She’d say anything, as long as it gave pleasure.

She discovered something. There’s a small set of operating principles that, if followed, result in aphorisms, stanzas, lectures, novels. Anything you like. The author does not have to have a meaning in view; the work will mean something by itself.

It’s like what I tell my students: “Don’t you write the paper. Find the paper that will write itself.” It’s all about finding the angle.

If you find the right angle, anything in the kitchen will do. Put the oven mitts themselves into the magic pot, it’s fine. A glass doorknob, a pretzel, anything. Voilà. But part of the magic is you have to pretend you’re serious while you’re cooking.

Wittgenstein really was serious. Just the same, he tells you to imagine someone searching for something in an empty drawer. The person pulls out the drawer: empty. Closes the drawer. But perhaps the thing has materialized in the drawer now? So the person opens it. Empty. Closes again; considers. Opens again. Empty. And now once more. Forever.

Wittgenstein remarks: “We would say the person has not yet learned to search for something.”

Then he tells you to imagine someone going to the store to buy five red apples. In order to make sure the apples are red, the person takes a color chart. Holds the apples up to the square marked “red.” Counts the apples as they are placed in the bag. “One… two… three…”

That color chart is funny. “One, two, three” is funny. I’m not the first person to say these scenes are straight out of Beckett. Clov at the beginning of Fin de partie. But the remarks are funny. Look at the deadpan ending of this:

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December 11, 2019
Our Correspondents

Nellie Oleson, C’est Moi

By Anthony Madrid

Nellie Oleson, as played by Alison Arngrim

I only have one insight about the Little House TV series, so I’m just gonna get it out of the way up front here. It’s this: Nellie Oleson made that show. I don’t just mean the character is an essential part of the show’s success. I mean Nellie Oleson wrote the original books and most of the scripts for the TV program. She directed most of the episodes, and, for the most part, she was the audience.

I am saying: you and I and Ronald Reagan and possibly Saddam Hussein and definitely Michael Landon—were Nellie Oleson.

Put down that gun. Sorry, put down that frontier rifle. Hear me out. Let’s start on a very basic, noncontroversial level.

The books came out in the thirties and early forties. The woman who wrote them, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was in her midsixties when the first one dropped. Her case is well documented. She did live more or less like she describes in those novels, and so she had the luxury of being able to traffic in billions of authentic details. And the novels were a big hit. For forty or fifty years, everybody read ’em. (Except me—’til a couple months ago.)

In the books, Nellie is not a very important character. She isn’t even introduced ’til the fourth book in the series (On the Banks of Plum Creek, 1937). Read More

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November 20, 2019
Our Correspondents

The Most Famous Coin in Borges

By Anthony Madrid

Jorge Luis Borges at his office, Argentine National Library, 1973

Let me see if I can summarize this famous short story. I’m going from memory.

A guy—Borges—explains that the Zahir is a twenty-centavo coin. If you’re like me, you think, Okay, that’s what Argentines call that coin. Wrong. He goes on to explain that at other times in history the Zahir has been a vein in a piece of marble, a tiger, a brass astrolabe, and many other things. Now if you’re like me, you don’t know what he’s talking about. Welcome to the characteristic Borges beginning: a long first paragraph you know you’re only gonna understand upon a second or third reading.

But to continue. A socialite woman, a model and fashionmonger, has suddenly died. Borges heaps a bunch of satirical prose upon her memory, and then admits he was in love with her. He goes to her wake. He looks at her dead face and has feelings. Then he leaves and wanders the street. On a lark, or rather out of perversity, he goes into a bar, orders a brandy, and gets “the Zahir” in his change. He immediately starts philosophizing about coins. One coin is all coins, et cetera. He goes home and throws himself into bed.

Next day, something really strange starts to set in. His mind keeps returning to the coin. He gets rid of the actual artifact by spending it, but his thoughts keep going back to it … And at this point, I think I’ll interrupt the précis to give you an image of the coin he’s talking about.

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May 14, 2018
Our Correspondents

The Last Pawnshop Treasure

By Jane Stern
There is a pawnshop in Danbury, Connecticut, that I frequent. Like most pawnshops, it is at once depressing and intriguing. I often check out pawnshops out of a foolhardy belief that I will find treasure. I used to scour flea markets with that same optimism, certain I would find a genuine Tiffany lamp amongst the macramé owls and tube socks. The lamp would be five dollars because the seller had no idea what it was really worth.

Of course eBay, Storage Wars, and Antique Roadshow have quashed my dreams. Now everyone knows the exact market value of what they own; you can spend a lifetime going to consignment stores, estate sales, and pawnshops and never find anything that anyone would consider a “treasure”—unless, of course, you have a strange unshared addiction to slightly beaten up Barbie Dreamhouses.

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January 4, 2018
Our Correspondents

The Age of Graffiti

By Jane Stern
An abandoned pier in Philadelphia.

In Danbury, Connecticut, off Interstate 84, there is an overpass festooned with graffiti scribbles. They have been there for three decades. No one has thought to erase them and, as far as I can tell, no one has added to them.

The graffiti is of the basest kind. There is little attempt at artwork, design, or display. It is simply the names of yesterday’s rock-and-roll bands spray painted in black in adolescent calligraphy: the Who, Kiss, Commander Cody, Mountain.

I drive under this overpass at least once a week. This is the route to all the big-box stores, supermarkets, and a dozen places that sell cheap cell-phone plans. Exit 7 is not the autumn-leaf splashed Connecticut seen on calendars. It is where you go to load up on paper towels and laundry detergent.

Decades ago, when I first pondered these scrawled names, the graffiti made me mad: here was more ugliness defacing an already sad stretch of road. Read More
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January 3, 2018
Our Correspondents

The Fuzz

By Anthony Madrid and Coco Picard
A few words about this presentation. The verbal part had a romantic beginning. I was obsessing over the rhythms of Korney Chukovsky’s poem “Telephone.” Suddenly—very suddenly—occurred to me the first rhymes of what I thought might be an existential masterpiece: “Long time ago there was … a fuzz.” Note the Russian accent. A great deal more came to me all at once. I was in the car. I felt frightened. I thought I might forget. So I uncapped a marker and wrote what I could on a box that was conveniently in the passenger seat. This is a true story. I kept writing more at stop lights, all the way to Chipotle. More came out on napkins there, but that stuff was trash and I cut it. Time I got to my office at school, I had “The Fuzz” that you see below, intact. And I was in a sweat to share it with the world. Over the next few days, I developed illustrations. These had no merit, but I sent ’em to people anyway. People all over the world: little kids, infirm persons. Part two of this story is where I turned to a real illustrator. I know her slightly. She is one of the good ones in Chicago. I had just read her graphic novel, Chronicles of Fortune, in transports of delight, on an airplane. I doubted she would be able to find time to do pictures for “The Fuzz,” as she was six or seven months pregnant and had plenty of other things to do, but voilà, she found the time. I should like to direct your attention to the panel where nobody knows why there was a fuzz. That image is a good meme. The whole thing is memes, all the way down. What else shall I tell you? I plan on writing another piece like “The Fuzz,” called “The Slime” (“Once upon a time … was a slime”). ’Til then, wishing everybody a happy 2018.

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