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 22, 2015 On History Madness and Meaning By Andrew Scull Depictions of insanity through history. Nebuchadnezzar turned into an animal, 1410. Modern psychiatry seems determined to rob madness of its meanings, insisting that its depredations can be reduced to biology and nothing but biology. One must doubt it. The social and cultural dimensions of mental disorders, so indispensable a part of the story of madness and civilization over the centuries, are unlikely to melt away, or to prove no more than an epiphenomenal feature of so universal a feature of human existence. Madness indeed has its meanings, elusive and evanescent as our attempts to capture them have been. Western culture throughout its long and tangled history provides us with a rich array of images, a remarkable set of windows into both popular and latterly professional beliefs about insanity. The sacred books of the Judeo-Christian tradition are shot through with stories of madness caused by possession by devils or divine displeasure. From Saul, the first king of the Israelites (made mad by Yahweh for failing to carry out to the letter the Lord’s command to slay every man, woman, and child of the Amalekite tribe, and all their animals, too), to the man in the country of the Gaderenes “with an unclean spirit” (maddened, naked, and violent, whose demons Christ casts out and causes to enter a herd of swine, who forthwith rush over a cliff into the sea to drown), here are stories recited for centuries by believers, and often transformed into pictorial form. Read More
April 22, 2015 On the Shelf Talk to the Animals, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Henri Matisse, The Horse, the Rider and the Clown, 1947, color pochoir. Larry Kramer, seventy-nine, came of age at a time when being gay was still illegal; his latest opus, The American People, is kind of a novel, kind of not, very long, and very gay: “a history of hate [from] one among the hated.” “Most histories are written by straight people who wouldn’t know, see the signs that a gay person does when they look at a person’s life,” he says. “I mean, how could you write the life of Mark Twain without realizing that he was hugely, hugely gay? The way he lived, who his friends were, and how his relationships began. And what he wrote about! I don’t know how you could avoid the assumption that he’s gay.” An interview with Atticus Lish, who won our Plimpton Prize this year: “Spoken language is primary, and I want it to be primary. Everything should pass the reading-aloud test; that became a real theme with me before I even was aware of it. I said, ‘Don’t write like a writer; write like a talker.’ ” But how do you write like a talker if the person talking is an animal? Fiction is still grappling with animal consciousness, with varying degrees of success: it may be largely impossible, as Thomas Nagel wrote in his 1974 essay “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, reminding us that “acts of sympathetic imagination are fatally restricted by the incalculable difference between human and bat.” In which Kerry Howley follows two boxers: “Sportswriters talk constantly of ‘focus,’ ‘dedication,’ and ‘single-mindedness.’ It is a measure of this cliché’s persistence that, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, men still use these words to describe Manny Pacquiao. This is a boxer who sidelines as a working politician and a low-budget-movie star, a man who leads Bible study on Sundays and moonlights as one of the shortest professional basketball players in the Philippines. He has recorded two platinum albums, and a hit single called ‘Sometimes When We Touch’ …” And Chris Offutt pursues “trash food,” whatever that may be: “The term ‘white trash’ is an epithet of bigotry that equates human worth with garbage. It implies a dismissal of the group as stupid, violent, lazy, and untrustworthy—the same negative descriptors of racial minorities, of anyone outside of the mainstream. At every stage of American history, various groups of people have endured such personal attacks. Language is used as a weapon: divisive, cruel, enciphered. Today is no different. For example, here in Mississippi, the term ‘Democrats’ is code for ‘African Americans.’ Throughout the U.S.A., ‘family values’ is code for ‘no homosexuals.’ The term ‘trash food’ is not about food, it’s coded language for social class. It’s about poor people and what they can afford to eat.”
April 21, 2015 Video & Multimedia Nobuo Okano, Book Repairman By Dan Piepenbring Give him your dog-eared, your tattered, your musty tomes yearning to breathe free, the shelf-worn refugees of your teeming library. He will smooth their pages and mend their binding. For he is Nobuo Okano, book repairman. An episode of the Japanese series Shuri, Misemasu (or The Fascinating Repairmen—would that such programming arrived on these shores) documents his careful conversion of a battered, bruised English–Japanese dictionary to a state of just-published purity. (JAPANESE CRAFTSMEN STRIKE AGAIN, says one headline about his work, as if such people are invading our homes at night with bevel squares and handsaws.) Read More
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 21, 2015 Correspondence Plus Ça Change By Dan Piepenbring A portrait of Charlotte Brontë from The Brontë Sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë, ca. 1834. From Charlotte Brontë’s letter to her friend Ellen Nussey, April 2, 1845. Brontë and Nussey exchanged hundreds of letters; this one, written about two weeks before Brontë turned twenty-nine and two years before the publication of Jane Eyre, finds her in a laudably bitter frame of mind, inveighing against marriage and men. I see plainly it is proved to us that there is scarcely a draught of unmingled happiness to be had in this world. ——’s illness comes with ——’s marriage. Mary T. finds herself free, and on that path to adventure and exertion to which she has so long been seeking admission. Sickness, hardship, danger are her fellow-travellers—her inseparable companions … Yet these real, material dangers, when once past, leave in the mind the satisfaction of having struggled with difficulty, and overcome it. Strength, courage, and experience are their invariable results; whereas, I doubt whether suffering purely mental has any good result, unless it be to make us by comparison less sensitive to physical suffering … Read More