January 6, 2015 Arts & Culture When David Foster Wallace Taught Paul Thomas Anderson By Dan Piepenbring Anderson in 2007. Photo: Jürgen Fauth, via Wikimedia Commons In the fall of 1990, years before he published Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace came on as an adjunct professor at Emerson College, in Boston. As D. T. Max writes in his biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, this wasn’t such a hot time for Wallace. He was mentally unstable in those years, and actively ashamed of his latest collection of stories, Girl with Curious Hair; when the Emerson English department posted an advertisement for it, he tore it down. And teaching offered no reprieve from the problems he had with his writing and the culture at large. In a letter to Jonathan Franzen, he called his students “infants”: “you almost have to cradle their heads to help their necks support the skull’s weight.” Were the youth simply too enamored of TV’s easy charms? Max writes, The students he was teaching made him feel the problem was worse than he had known. They were the Letterman generation he had imagined in [his short story] “My Appearance,” proud of their knowingness. “They’re all ‘television’ majors, whatever that means,” he complained to [David] Markson, adding that he’d had his wrist slapped by his department for “ ‘frustrating’ the students” with a DeLillo novel (he does not say which) by which he meant to wake them up … Wallace knew he did not want to stay at Emerson long. Still, because he was fluent in TV, Wallace found himself popular with the students. And at least one of them came away emboldened by that “frustrating” experience with DeLillo: Paul Thomas Anderson, whose latest film, Inherent Vice, is in wide release this week. Read More
January 6, 2015 On the Shelf Have You Seen This Plaque? And Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Stifehler, via Wikimedia Commons Everyone says television has entered a new golden age, so it follows that books based on television have entered a new golden age, too. In other words, why write a novel when you can write a novelization? “For publishers, tie-in books have become cash cows that offer instant brand recognition and access to huge fan bases for vastly larger media … ‘Sometimes I meet writers who are like, “Why are you doing this?” but I would be betraying who I am if I said I’m never going to do this again because it’s beneath me as an artist … I combat the idea that these can’t be good novels.’ ” Breaking: some hooligan has made off with the bronze plaque that hangs on Mark Twain’s grave marker in Elmira, New York. Authorities have ensured that it’s not on eBay. Our literary critics have become less egotistical over the decades—have they also lost the touch? “Literary critics have become more subdued, adopting methods with less grand speculation, more empirical study, and more use of statistics or other data. They aim to read, describe, and mine data rather than make ‘interventions’ of world-historical importance.” And Vanity Fair has done something of an about-face, too, if you look at its history. “That it has become such a celebratory document of the upper class is one of Vanity Fair’s ironies,” but the early iteration of the magazine, edited by Frank Crowninshield, “sought to break something. Its initial sharpness drove at some kind of point other than the enjoyment of fine food and clothing.” Rediscovered credos on typography from a 1964 issue of Print magazine: “Is the typographer a prophet or a propagator of a new faith? Typography should be allowed individuality … [but] the aim of typography must not be expression, least of all self-expression, but perfect communication achieved by skill … Typography is a servant and nothing more.”
January 5, 2015 The Poem Stuck in My Head Stanisław Barańczak’s “This Is Not a Conversation for the Telephone” By Dan Piepenbring Barańczak in a photo from Ostatni wiersz z Widokówki z tego świata, 1988. I’ve been thinking today of Stanisław Barańczak, the Polish poet and translator who died in 2014 at sixty-eight. He was known for flouting state censors with poems that mocked the euphemistic language of communism, and his work was seditious enough that in the seventies he was barred from publishing in Poland, though he continued to publish underground. By the early eighties, his politics had cost him his job as a professor in Poznan, and he decamped to the U.S. to lecture at Harvard. In a famous speech he likened life as a dissident to breathing underwater, with a nod to a science-fiction story by Stanisław Lem: Bubbling sounds were the only acceptable means of communication, the official propaganda emphasized the advantages of being wet, and occasional breathing above water was considered almost a political offense—although everyone had to do it from time to time … I wonder what Barańczak would’ve made of the new PEN International report, published this morning, on writers and government surveillance. It suggests that free expression around the world—even in the U.S., where what we’ve come to call “content producers” aren’t in the habit of fearing violence from the state—is in some ways more embattled now than it’s been since the Cold War. It’s worth reading the report in full, though it will make you gnash your teeth and hurl invective at various institutions, chiefly the NSA. (And why shouldn’t you? You’ve already got their ear.) PEN International polled 772 writers from fifty countries, with some classified as “free,” some as “partly free,” and some “not free.” But those gradations hardly matter, it seems, when it comes to freedom of expression. Of the respondents, 75 percent in free countries, 84 percent in partly free countries, and 80 percent in not free countries said they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about surveillance. Some were so worried that they were afraid to say how worried they were: As a final indication of the way the current “surveillance crisis” affects and haunts us, I should say that I have had serious misgivings about whether to write the above and include it in this questionnaire. It is clear to me from the information I have given you that my responses to the questionnaire, and presumably also therefore this statement, can be traced back to me. It may be that this information will be hacked by security agencies. Surely anyone who thinks thoughts like these will be in danger—if not today, then (because this is a process) possibly tomorrow. Read More
January 5, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Cousin By Sadie Stein Alfred Sisley, La Terrasse à Saint-Germain, Printemps, 1875. One summer, a woman I know worked at a farm in the French countryside. I know this because I rented her Brooklyn apartment while she was gone, a massive space owned by a family of mysterious busybodies in a building filled with unsavory characters. My friend was enrolled in a program that places volunteers on farms around the world in exchange for room and board; the estate where she ended up had vineyards and produced a small amount of wine. The estate was large and beautiful and decrepit, and owned by a titled Englishwoman who claimed to be descended from royalty on the wrong side of the blanket, plus a number of minor literary figures. This woman was tall and imposing and draped in robes, and followed at all times by a pair of wolfhounds. The volunteers did work in the vineyard by day. At night, their hostess demanded entertainment. Each evening brought with it an amateur theatrical, a series of tableaux vivants, a concert. It became clear that no one was there by accident; their hostess had reviewed all the volunteer applications and selected only those guests who had some sort of theatrical or artistic background. My friend, who had attended art school, was made wardrobe mistress. She also had to perform in a production of The Swan. After the end of a long day in the fields, this was the last thing anyone felt like doing, but the hostess would brook no opposition. Read More
January 5, 2015 Arts & Culture No Sale By Ben Mauk In Berlin, art and commerce shake hands—sort of. Photo: Anai Lee Ender, 2014. Courtesy of Friends with Books, Berlin. Despite its homespun name, Friends with Books: Art Book Fair Berlin bills itself as “Europe’s premier festival for contemporary artists’ books and periodicals by artists and art publishers.” I have no reason to doubt them. Last month, more than a hundred publishers—ranging from the large to the very, very small—spent two days squeezed behind tables in the main hall of Café Moskau, a haunted leftover of the German Democratic Republic aristocracy on Karl-Marx-Allee. Outside, the building resembled a modernist cake topped with sans-serif signage and a gleaming silver Sputnik. Inside, bespoke chapbooks abutted objets d’art, free posters, and glossy five-hundred-Euro retrospectives, often at the same table. It seemed a stark contrast to the Miami Beach scene from which some attendees were still recovering: the one that had featured Miley Cyrus, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a veritable fleet of private yachts. Yes, here was a scene more fitting Berlin, the pink-mohawked little sibling of the art world. Some of the usual industry suspects were present, such as the magazines frieze, e-flux, and Texte zur Kunst, along with international art publishers like Valiz, Walther König, and Sternberg. But these were easily outnumbered by the small presses, many of them volunteer-run passion projects. As I entered the long exhibition hall, I had to sidestep embraces meant for friends who’d just flown in from London, Lisbon, or Copenhagen. (The greeter’s country of origin determined the number and directionality of air kisses, and before long I’d witnessed every conceivable variation without once seeing an awkward fumble. Luckily, no one wanted to kiss me.) As I began to browse the publishers’ tables, I felt like I really was walking among a group of friends who’d gathered for a bookshelf-bragging party. Maybe a hundred people were pressed together in the room and talking at the same time, but softly, with the velvet-lined savoir faire that makes dinner parties here such subdued operations. And they were even talking about the books! Somewhat astonishingly for an art fair, art seemed to be the main subject of conversation, rather than the forthcoming after-party or which infamous collector just walked through the door or whose painting sold for how much. The hall was crowded, the mood convivial, the money nowhere to be found. To witness an actual sale was rare, and I almost felt I’d committed a faux pas when I asked a local distributor for a copy of Raphael Rubinstein’s The Miraculous. Then, when I handed the bookseller a twenty, we discovered he had no change. Read More
January 5, 2015 On the Shelf Oo, Those Awful Orcs, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Middle-earth Orc with a face only Edmund Wilson could hate. Illustration: Antoine Glédel, via Wikimedia Commons Ursula K. Le Guin defends genre fiction: “When the characteristics of a genre are controlled, systematized, and insisted upon by publishers, or editors, or critics, they become limitations rather than possibilities … I love to remember Edmund Wilson, king of the realist bigots, squealing ‘Oo, those awful Orcs!’ and believing he’d made a witty and cogent critical point.” The sordid history of the paperback, which democratized and scandalized: “When we look back on the mass-market-paperback phenomenon it’s hard to keep the Emily Brontës separate from the Mickey Spillanes. In the same year that Signet published I, the Jury, it also published reprints of books by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Arthur Koestler. Paperback publishers made no effort to distinguish classics from kitsch.” Where does zero come from? A mathematician traced the earliest-known written representation of the numeral to a seventh-century tablet in Cambodia: “It was important to recover this artifact with the earliest zero … there’s a monument to this great invention of the human mind, the ability to write something down that represents complete nothingness.” A new year, a new occasion to police language. Presenting Lake Superior State University’s fortieth annual list of banished words, including curate, skill set, takeaway, and others you’d sooner cut your ears off than hear again. (It’s worth revisiting the lists from years past—in ’98, for instance, people were sick of da bomb, talk to the hand, and yadda yadda yadda.) And while we’re on words: “What exactly is luxury? The concept is both slippery and divisive … The language associated with it is replete with qualifiers. It can be ‘authentic,’ ‘absolute,’ ‘aspirational’ or ‘affordable’ … The acquisition of luxury is both an attempt at transcendence and an act of appropriation, like the picking of the apple in the garden of Eden. Perhaps that was mankind’s first luxury good.”