April 24, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Is It Sincere? Is It Genuine? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring M. H. Abrams. M. H. Abrams, whose Norton Anthologies have united the bookshelves of English majors across time and space, is dead at 102. His seminal work, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), was that rare thing, a work of criticism that permeated the culture and changed the way we read; it resuscitated the reputation of the British Romantics and launched a new school of thought. “The first test any poem must pass,” Abrams wrote, “is no longer, ‘is it true to nature?’ but a criterion looking in a different direction; namely, ‘Is it sincere? Is it genuine?’ ” Maureen Freely, Orhan Pamuk’s longtime English translator, has come to see Istanbul through his eyes: “The Istanbul of my own childhood had vanished. I was left, instead, with men streaming down badly paved streets in shabby suits and covered women waiting on the roadside for the bus that never arrived; with collapsing Ottoman palaces, and fountains that had ceased working two centuries ago, and mosques whose lead domes were being plundered piece by piece.” Rupert Brooke, who died in 1915 of a mosquito bite, was once of Britain’s most beloved poets—devastatingly handsome, wealthy, and deeply patriotic, he was an ideal poster child for all things English. But today his sonnets on World War I make him look like a “posh idiot nationalist”: “As with the work of many writers whose worlds have so thoroughly vanished and whose lives have sunk into myth, it can be hard to grasp the humor and the lightness in Brooke’s writing.” “Philip Glass has written a memoir. The composer Philip Glass has written a memoir. Philip Glass has written a memoir. It begins in Baltimore. The composer Philip Glass has written a memoir. It begins in Baltimore. The American composer Philip Glass, known for his use of repetition and incremental variation, has written a memoir.” When the scatological meets the diabolical: a history of poop as a weapon. (Oh, like you’ve never tried to kill anyone with it.)
April 23, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent And I Was Like… By Sadie Stein Gert Germeraad, Portrait of a Man, 2010. “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY FACE!” the woman screamed. My companion and I both turned around in alarm as we all mounted the escalator to the movie theater. “Oh, sorry! Not you!” she apologized hurriedly. “I was just telling a story to my friend! That was something I said!” In the week since, I have overheard several such monologues. One was a teen girl, vehement, on her cell. “I was just like, you do not speak to me that way,” she asserted. Then a guy on his lunch break was relating to his friend, “I was all, I am not the guy you want to mess with, pal.” Read More
April 22, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent “Isn’t It Nice?” By Sadie Stein In the age of the List, comparing editions of Lolita has become a national pastime. (That may be overstating the case. But there are at least two such lists in existence.) But I hasten to say: this is not mere hackery! Or, if it is, it is a sort of hackery endorsed by one Vladimir Nabokov himself! In this clip (part of a longer film, well worth watching when you have the time) the author displays all the foreign editions of Lolita with the unself-conscious pride of a greedy baby. (Incidentally, I’m pretty sure the elderly Turkish Lolita he references is this specimen, rivaled in unsexiness only by the somber, vaguely Keene-ish child who graces the 1963 French edition.) Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.
April 21, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Conspiracy Theories By Sadie Stein From the cover of the “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” single. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” topped the charts for seven weeks in the summer of 1957. It was from the sound track to Elvis Presley’s second film, the vaguely autobiographical Loving You, in which the King plays a delivery-guy-turned-singing-sensation who engages the affections of Dolores Hart, better known as the starlet who left Hollywood to become a Benedictine nun. Anyway, everyone knows “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” is kind of odd, with its BDSM undertones and its arbitrary hierarchy of animals—what’s wrong with lions? Plus there’s the one-is-not-like-the-others aspect of it: Elvis sings of a toy teddy bear in a menagerie of otherwise live animals. But the strangest thing about it is the characterization of teddy bears themselves: Read More
April 20, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Jerk Alliance By Sadie Stein Tim Drage, Advice from a Very Angry Man, ca. 2000. It can be exhausting, avoiding collusion. Jerks are always trying to make you complicit in their entitlement. You know what I’m talking about. Someone, say, yells at a bartender. Then he looks around trying to enlist allies. Can you believe this guy?! his eyes say. It’s us against the crazies, right?! This city, right?! People, right?! And even though it’s probably as close to an impulse towards collectivism as this person will ever experience, it is crucial in that moment that you make him feel completely alone. Read More
April 17, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Mental Vacation By Sadie Stein Photo: Olivia Alcock Early in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, the narrator, Charles Arrowby, explains why he never learned to drive and prefers to be a passenger. “Why keep bitches and bark yourself?” he asks, with impeachable logic. In the course of the novel, his veneer of self-assurance crumbles. Arrowby discovers the limits of control, even in isolation. But he also begins to see the lengths we go to in seeking that most elusive pleasure: an escape from ourselves. For the overthinkers of the world, there’s maybe no greater luxury than shutting off your mind. It happens so rarely that you tend to notice it, if you notice it at all, more as a state of absence than anything else. It can happen during a movie, or listening to music, or, perhaps, in the presence of a great cook. And most especially when reading. Read More