November 17, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Banned Books By Sadie Stein An illustration from Once Upon a Potty. Once Upon a Potty was written in 1975 by the Israeli author and illustrator Alona Frankel to help her son toilet train. (Its Hebrew title is Sir Ha-Sirim, literally “Potty of Potties.”) Since it was translated into English in 1980, it’s never gone out of print, and now it’s regarded as a picture-book classic, a helpful resource for the parents of young children. It was banned in my house. My mother disliked the use of euphemisms she deemed babyish—wee-wee, potty, “a hole to woo-woo from”—and illustrations she found “creepy” and “disgusting.” I can still recall first hearing what would become one of her most oft-repeated phrases: “I don’t care for that at all.” She sniffed at households that owned the book and curled her lip when we saw it on store shelves. As a result, Once Upon a Potty took on the luster of the taboo. Like a nineteenth-century schoolboy with a French postcard, I would read it—or, anyway, look at it—furtively whenever I was unobserved: at other toddlers’ houses, in the children’s room of the library, at the local Y where I did tumbling. Particularly shocking to me was the final illustration: the triumphant coil of tempera feces in a puddle of yellow urine. And the accompanying text! Exuberantly babyish, frankly scatological, my mother’s nightmare incarnate. “Bye-bye wee-wee,” it reads as the excrement disappears down the toilet. “Bye-bye woo-woo.” Read More
November 17, 2014 On the Shelf Painting the Invisible Hippo, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Peter Paul Rubens, Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, 1616. A new book looks at the history of the literary feud—with an abundance of ripe examples, including “the battle between Bevis Hillier and AN Wilson in the 1980s. Wilson had published a devastating review of Hillier’s authorized biography of John Betjeman, calling it ‘a hopeless mishmash.’ When Wilson announced his own biography of Betjeman, he received a letter from a mysterious French woman including the copy of an unpublished letter from Betjeman to Honor Tracy, describing their affair. Wilson could not resist including it in his book, and when the biography came out Hillier gleefully revealed that the letter was an acrostic, spelling out ‘AN Wilson is a shit.’” Today in evolving forms of literacy: Emoji as language. On Twitter, emoji are now used more frequently than hyphens, tildes, and the numeral five. Whither emoji-speak? And does this wordless tongue have any antecedents? (“In 1974, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Transportation, designed a new system of symbols to be used in airports around the world in response to the increase in global travel … the design committee also made the following deduction: ‘We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is strictly limited.’ ”) In 1616, Peter Paul Rubens painted a hippo. Problem: He had never laid eyes on a hippo. How did he do this? A debut, of sorts, for Denis Johnson—as a visual artist. “His sketch is what I like to think of as three-quarters Basquiat, one-quarter ninth-grade geometry class.” Writers and musicians seem to collaborate constantly, and yet it’s seldom a collaboration in the truest sense of the word. “Superficially, these collaborations fit into a pattern of writing and music as natural partners, one—to paraphrase Katharine Hepburn on Astaire and Rogers—providing the other with class, the other giving sex appeal … Perhaps tellingly, however, such liaisons tend to be one-off or short-lived … A novelist, playwright or poet providing words for someone else to turn into music and perform, although it is a model inherited from opera and musicals in earlier eras, is now surprisingly rare.”
November 15, 2014 On Design Shep and Dorothy By Charlotte Strick A husband-and-wife team and their influential midcentury designs. From Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream. Lucky is the designer who can see in both two and three dimensions. Luckier still is she or he to be married to someone with equal gifts—especially if that mate is a collaborator and not a competitor. So appears to have been the case with Dorothy and Otis Shepard, whose enviable creative lives have been captured in the absorbing, moving, and lushly illustrated new book Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream, by Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel. Both Dorothy and Shep (his nickname since childhood) got their start as commercial artists during San Francisco’s billboard boom of the 1920s. The Federal Highway Act, signed in 1921, helped fund the expansion of U.S. roadways, and advertisers took the opportunity to reach audiences beyond the traditional black-and-white pages of mail catalogs by posting colorful advertisements along America’s highways. Shep, a veteran of World War I, was a man of great adventure, with a strong and lasting interest in the theater. He was well regarded as a commercial painter while employed as an art director at Foster & Kleiser Outdoor Advertising Company, a top Bay Area agency of the period. In 1927, he wisely hired the gifted and highly praised Dorothy Van Gorder straight out of the California School of Arts and Crafts, from which she had graduated in only three years, as valedictorian. According to family lore, Dorothy was unabashedly outspoken (and just plain unabashed—she was once evicted from an apartment for sunbathing nude on the roof), and it cost her the Foster & Kleiser job, but almost as soon as she was let go, she was rehired for her prized skills. Hathaway and Nadel write that either in spite of or because of Dorothy’s brashness, Shep, the “raconteur,” soon began courting the “young bon vivant.” And so their joint artistic adventure began—most markedly with a honeymoon in 1929 to Paris, Venice, Zurich, and Vienna. While there, they purchased Bauhaus furniture and had the good fortune to meet the great modernist Joseph Binder, who was a leader in the European abstract graphic style. “Shep and Dorothy already wanted their work to convey meaning through compositional structure—instead of realism,” write Hathaway and Nadel, but Binder’s reduction of “an image to a series of shapes and forms and [integration of] typography into his pictures” helped refine their approach to design and illustration. Both Dorothy and Otis had been following the modernist movement with great interest back home, but seeing this work and the new techniques in person and to scale had a profound and lasting effect on them. Read More
November 14, 2014 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Megg, Mogg, Maxim Maksimich By The Paris Review From the cover of Megahex. Last month, Simon Hanselmann’s comic book Megahex entered the New York Times Graphic Books best-seller list at number 8, both above and below volumes by Neil Gaiman. No small feat, especially when you consider the Times’ droll description of the book: “Meet Megg. She’s a witch and has a black cat named Mogg. She is also depressed and addicted to drugs.” It’s not inaccurate, but it sure misses the point. Megg and Mogg are druggy reprobates who tease and torture their roommate, Owl, who is himself a rather unsavory fellow, but Megg’s depression isn’t your garden-variety Prozac episode. She’s so invariably and subtly disconsolate and experiences such disturbing mood swings that it’s impossible not to feel at least a tinge of that heavy sadness. And because the book is funny, too—they smoke lots of pot—her depression seems that much more real. —Nicole Rudick In recent weeks—when I haven’t been poring over Greif’s Crisis of Man—I’ve been unwinding with classic short stories: Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories, in which the great poet and critic presented an idiosyncratic mix of all-time favorites, from fairy tales, to the Russian masters, to poems by Frost and Brecht. —Lorin Stein Most writers are failures, and C. D. Rose knows that. His Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure is a compendium of fictitious authors, all of whom are spectacularly unsuccessful. Spend an hour with it—ideally not an sober hour—for a bracing, mordant reminder of why almost nothing is really worth bothering with. My personal favorite fake failures: Maxim Maksimich (“he died in 1912, impaled by an icicle, a casualty of the thaw for which he had waited so long”), Belmont Rossiter (“he challenged Dickens to a duel and allegedly tried to poison Wilkie Collins … He told George Eliot she looked like a horse”), and Elise La Rue (“she wrote longhand, naked, voluptuously, lying on her divan, usually covered in the fur of a snow leopard which she claimed she had herself skinned … accompanied by her favorite cocktail of schnapps and Dubonnet”). —Dan Piepenbring I hate to admit this, but I found myself mesmerized by Kickended, a new archive of Kickstarter’s zero-dollar-pledged campaigns created by Silvio Lorusso with the help of Kickspy’s data analysis. Click on the Random Campaign button, and you’ll bring an array of crowdfunding flops to light, from a kid’s book on Occupy Wall Street to the restoration of The Commodores’ 1947 cargo van. It’s easy to poke fun at these projects—especially with campaigns like this and this and this. But it’s more than just an exercise in schadenfreude; it’s a fascinating look at why certain projects succeed and others don’t. Why is there a place in this world for fruit-themed plush toys but not The Amazing Spider-Pig piggy bank? A tool to shotgun beer better but not a bra that doubles as a pocket? Is one better than the other, or is it simply the way the project is presented? Maybe it’s the fact that no one wants to be the first to donate to these “abstract ideas.” Everyone knows you always put a few dollars out of your own pocket into the tip jar. —Justin Alvarez
November 14, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Soul of Wit By Sadie Stein Photo: Carpe Donut NYC While contemplating the purchase of a hot-cider doughnut at the aptly named Carpe Donut truck, one finds oneself thinking about food-truck names. Many have; it is one of the consolations of modernity that we live in the golden age of food-truck nomenclature. Or at least the first age. Anyone who has worked in a business district or watched an episode of Street Eats knows it’s not enough to have a truck and a grill: your name should ideally be gimmicky, fun, and filled with attitude, to underlie the anarchic spirit of the whole enterprise. Sexual innuendo is of course desirable. Puns are a plus. In the words of an academic with whom I once spent a tedious dinner, “Language informs consciousness: we know this.” But did you know that there is a food-truck-name generator? Of course there is. (I have no knack for it; my key words—scampering, spinster, maple—were apparently not sufficiently cheeky, even after I added sullen to the mix for extra attitude.) But then, I didn’t really need it; I already have the perfect name. Ogden Nosh. We’ll sell franks, but of course, they’ll be called Doggerels. The way some fast-food chains give their customers discreet Bible verses on the bottoms of cups, we’ll force-feed our patrons nonsense verses. And, naturally, on the side of the truck will be written the following: “A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.”
November 14, 2014 Books Enlarge and Linger By Joanna Scott On William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. William Gass teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine In the heart of the heart of William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, deep inside the title story, the narrator contemplates his cat, Mr. Tick: “You are a cat—you cannot understand—you are a cat so easily.” The confident Mr. Tick, unlike the narrator, does not worry over his mortality or think about the burden of self-consciousness. He does not care that the past is past. He does not fear possibility or imagine himself as anything other than the cat he is. Mr. Tick spends his time murdering birds and walking across rooftops. Content just to be alive, he moves elegantly, “his long tail rhyming with his paws,” leaving our forlorn narrator to fend off loneliness on his own, with the only weapon he has at his disposal: words. Words are free, there for the taking, and William Gass makes sure we are aware of their infinite potential. Words can be used to command, to describe, to denigrate. They can be strung into sentences and bellowed in a song “in such a way that from a distance it will seem a harmony, a Strindberg play, a friendship ring.” We understand nuance and learn how to prepare for consequence with the help of words. We can make beautiful things with words. Those inclined can dare to treat the medium of language as an inexhaustible source of art. Art is the business of serious writers, Gass insists. A brilliant essayist as well as one of this nation’s most important novelists, he argues in his essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” that the task for a serious writer is twofold: “He must show or exhibit his world, and to do this he must actually make something, not merely describe something that might be made.” In his emphasis on making, Gass, who turned ninety this year, is proposing that the meaning generated by a work of fiction goes beyond its mimetic familiarity. The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn’t to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers “a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language.” A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author’s agile mind. Read More