January 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Simon Says By Sadie Stein Photo: Toy Whirl, via Flickr Not very long ago, family friends got in touch with me. Their son, Luke, was moving to New York for med school; it would be great if I’d see him and told him where to go in the city; he would be in touch. He was. “This is three hours of my life I’ll never get back,” I said bitterly to my boyfriend. “What’s wrong with him?” “Oh, nothing. He’s fine, from what I remember. He’s a perfectly nice guy. But, well, frankly … his parents carry on like he’s some kind of celebrated wit.” “How do they do that?” Read More
January 12, 2015 In Memoriam Robert Stone, 1937–2015 By Dan Piepenbring From our Winter 1985 issue: “A Robert Stone manuscript page, from his most recent novel, Children of Light; an indication of how barren the word processor has made examples of a work-in-progress.” “I like big novels,” Robert Stone said in his 1985 Art of Fiction interview. “I really admire the grand slam.” Stone died last weekend in Florida, at seventy-seven. He leaves behind more than a few grand slams—broad, despairing, powerful books full of searchers, outsiders, and misfits. His work exudes what Jessica Hagedorn calls “exquisite paranoia and apocalyptic dread.” Of course, descriptions like that can make his novels sound too potent—and one of the surprising things about Stone, it must be said, is how little he’s read these days. I hope that will change. As M. H. Miller wrote of him in 2013, He’s a best-selling author whose work has been heaped with critical praise, but because of the long interims between books, he is more heard of than read by a certain generation of readers. Updike had Rabbit, Roth had Zuckerman, Norman Mailer had Gary Gilmore, even Joan Didion, whose novels are the least interesting thing about her, had Maria Wyeth. Among Mr. Stone’s books there is no clear standout, no obvious introduction. His work is best taken in tandem, like one long narrative where you age with the characters. He’s right: among readers my age, Stone’s work has had that enviable air of mystery to it. He was always that major writer lurking in the distance. His books didn’t seem approachable, not because they were long or “difficult” but because, as the New York Times put it, they “resonate with philosophical concerns, the thin divides between life and death, good and evil, God and godlessness.” These were tomes about war and God and postwar tumult, and, uh, we definitely wanted to get to them, yes, but—maybe later? Read More
January 12, 2015 On the Shelf The Power of Suggestion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Daina Beth Solomon, via LA Weekly On Robin Robertson, who writes poems “that are truly, mesmerizingly carnal. I know women and men who have sought out online recordings just to hear him recite, in a low Scottish burr, his twelve-line ode to an artichoke. Whether Robertson is writing about sex, violence or the sea—three subjects he keeps coming back to—he remains a poet of the body, with a fondness for consonant-dense, guttural words that carry an almost physical presence on the page.” An LED sign in downtown Los Angeles was hacked in the name of literacy. Indie booksellers are reporting a noticeable uptick in sales. “In my judgment, there are between twenty and thirty editors and publishers in New York who—along with experienced and discriminating publicists, marketers, and sales reps—have over the decades regularly and successfully combined art and commerce and, in the process, have supported and promulgated art. They are in fact the main curators of our life of letters. They have somehow survived the grinding—tectonic—friction between creativity and business and made a go of both.” Joe Sacco on Charlie Hebdo: “Satire is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target? And why?” Have a look at the formidable geometry in these eighteenth-century forts, which represent “the classic century of military engineering.” “Engineers wanted to create overlapping planes of fire, so that defenders could cover every angle of approach from the walls of the forts.”
January 11, 2015 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Honoré Daumier, Advice to Subscribers, 1840. Michel Houellebecq defends his controversial new novel, Soumission. * How did the future look from the past? Jason Z. Resnikoff sees the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien. * In the early nineties, Paul Thomas Anderson found an inspirational teacher: David Foster Wallace. * Dan Piepenbring on the demise of R&B groups and the promise of D’Angelo’s new album, Black Messiah. * “Being interesting, at a very basic level, is sort of the point of telling a story in the first place.” Thomas Pierce talks to James Yeh. * Michael Thomson on The Evil Within, a horror video game that breaks all the rules. * Five new paintings by Mamma Andersson. * Ben Mauk visits Berlin‘s art book fair. * Plus, Sadie Stein on the history of okay; and a poem by the late Stanislaw Baranczak.
January 9, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Birthdays, Bluegrass, Baked Alaska By The Paris Review From the first-edition cover of Appointment in Samarra. Cold, biting January made me reach for Simon Van Booy’s The Illusion of Separateness. This deceptively slim novel transcends time and geography to explore the lives of six unwittingly connected strangers, each rendered with stunning incisiveness and warmth. (If Raymond Chandler had swapped gin for chamomile tea he might have written some of Van Booy’s sentences.) However, the prose is so rich—so resonant—it’s easy to miss the real treat on offer: an exceptionally compassionate lens through which to view the world. Search no more. This is that book, the one you carry through the midwinter doldrums toward spring. —Emilia Murphy Over Christmas I read Is He Popenjoy?, Anthony Trollope’s tale of a rich girl who marries an impoverished Lord and finds herself in the middle of a battle over his inheritance. This is late, minor Trollope (he wrote forty-seven novels altogether), but Trollope is one of those writers in whom minorness and greatness are hard to tell apart. He makes everything look so easy. His experiments are hidden in plain view. So is his special brand of moral skepticism. For Trollope, every character is the hero of his own story, or the heroine; every character thinks he or she has to deal with villains (sociopaths, we’d say). From time to time every character is right. Or may be. But the most powerful force in Trollope’s fiction is not good or evil, but group dynamics, the ever-shifting relations between family members and friends. Among other things, Is He Popenjoy? is the best novel I have ever read about in-laws and how to get along with them. For the moment, I’m so deep under its spell I wouldn’t trade it for Anna Karenina. —Lorin Stein Every year around the holidays, I try to fill in one of the gaps in my knowledge of the canon. When you’re revisiting classics, I’ve found, it’s always good to seek out the ones that people hated when they were first published—so I took up John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, which Sinclair Lewis called “nothing but infantilism—the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.” And what visions they are! Sex and class are O’Hara’s great subjects, and in Appointment—wherein a rich, high-society guy ruins himself for no good reason, really, except that the straitjacket of Depression-era life demands it—he treats them with a candor that most novelists still can’t muster eighty years later. He’s known, rightly, for his dialogue, but there’s a kind of O’Hara sentence, precise but faintly ostentatious, that sounds utterly American to me. “The festive board now groaned under the Baked Alaska,” for instance. Or: “Frank Gorman, Georgetown, and Dwight Ross, Yale, had fought, cried, and kissed after an argument about what the team Gorman had not made would have done to the team Ross was substitute halfback on.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
January 9, 2015 On Film HAL, Mother, and Father By Jason Z. Resnikoff Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien. It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain that what he was seeing wasn’t just a movie but the future. When it ended, he got up and walked out into Times Square, with its peep-show glitz and sleazy, flashing advertisements; he found the uptown subway beneath the yellow marquees for dirty movies like The Filthy 5; and through all of it, he thought that when humanity hurls itself into the depths of the cosmos, this is how we will do it. In the film’s iconic final shot, the space baby looks down at the planet to which it is no longer bound. Freedom, this shot says, is imminent. My father was twenty-four then, and perhaps at his most world-historical: he was becoming an expert in computers. He’d worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, a corporate labyrinth of beige cubicles and epochal breakthroughs; a world of punch cards and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, where at least some of the employees were deadly serious about making sure to wear the company tie clip and then, once they were off duty, to switch to their own personal tie clips. When 2001 premiered, he was working at Columbia University’s Computer Center, in the academic computing branch. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the movie summed up everything my father was in April 1968. It became something of a talisman for him, a semisacred object invested with all the crazy hopefulness of his youth. For as long as I can remember, my father had talked about 2001. He told me often of HAL, of the monolith of evolution, of how glorious the future would be. Of course, when I finally saw the movie, well after the actual year 2001, it bored me out of my mind. Too slow, too bizarre. Ah, my father told me, that’s because evolution is slow, evolution is bizarre. It wasn’t until much later that I started to understand the movie—and, maybe, to understand my father. Read More