November 13, 2014 Look Emma, Cover to Cover By Dan Piepenbring Margaret Sullivan’s book, Jane Austen Cover to Cover, collects dozens of the covers that publishers around the world have concocted for her six major novels; it’s “two hundred years of publication, interpretation, marketing, and misapprehensions.” These six examples of Emma indicate Austen’s singular place in the canon: the covers range from the lurid to the leather bound—highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow, every brow—with Emma Woodhouse taking on a new look and mien to suit every era. The art provides a fascinating glimpse into a variety of publishing cultures, and it reminds that even our classics are mutable, pitched to appeal to any number of sensibilities, their literary status in constant flux per the dictates of the market. Read More
November 13, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Glad Game By Sadie Stein In the immortal words of Winston Churchill, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Pollyanna Whittier would agree. The once popular novelist Eleanor H. Porter wrote the original children’s book Pollyanna in war-ravaged 1913. It concerns a destitute, orphaned young girl who’s taken in by her grim Aunt Polly. The girl wins Polly over with a good attitude—the Glad Game—all the while touching the lives of those around her. It was a best seller, and over the following decades, various authors went on to write thirteen sequels chronicling Pollyanna’s life. Pollyanna grows up, has a family, moves around the world, but is always encountering lost souls and helping them develop a sunnier outlook. The books, while lurid—you may have heard about Pollyanna’s miraculous recovery from paralysis—are less treacly than the 1960 Disney adaptation, and considerably stranger. (Did World War I–era children enjoy seeing characters miraculously rise from their wheelchairs? Hard to know; Downton Abbey fans certainly do.) The books are certainly no more sentimental than most of the escapist titles on current fiction best-seller list, let alone YA. To the extent modern kids know Pollyanna, it’s probably via Hayley Mills in that Disney adaptation, and possibly through the eponymous pejorative. But if by some chance you’re a die-hard fan, you should make your way to Littleton, New Hampshire—Porter’s birthplace—where there’s a bronze Pollyanna statue, erected in 2002, and even an official Glad Day. (Glad Clubs enjoyed a brief popularity all over America.) The Pollyanna mentality kind of works, too. The other day, having just reread Pollyanna in the stacks of the library, I set myself the experimental challenge of casting a rosy light on everything I saw in a five-block New York City street. No mean feat. People rushed past panhandlers, an elderly woman with dementia punched her nurse (feebly, at least), the front page of the paper’s international section recorded nothing but suffering. But then a motorist leaned on his horn, and a bunch of others followed suit, and it became a cacophony. And suddenly, this thought intruded: How inspiring that, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, these drivers still have the idealism to believe their honking will make a difference! When you thought about it that way, it was sort of a triumph of the human spirit. Sort of. I wonder if Churchill—nearly killed by New York City traffic in 1931—would agree.
November 13, 2014 On the Shelf Coming Soon: More Vengeful Deities, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The wrath of God. Everyone’s going nuts for Serial, an impeccably reported (and very self-aware) true-crime podcast spun off from This American Life. But Janet Malcolm was up to something similar many decades ago, wasn’t she? Then again, this should come as no surprise. “Hasn’t it all been done before? Perhaps better than anyone today could ever do it?” Why should any of us bother with the new when so much of the old is out there waiting for us? Actually, why should any of us leave our houses at all? We’re just going to encounter the absurd—a bunch of loony scholars, for instance, tooling around town with a life-size statue of Jane Austen in tow … And even the best literature offers no respite from the absurd and the terrifying. Quite the opposite. “In August a man in the Bronx tied a chain to a pole, wrapped it around his neck, got behind the wheel of his Honda and stepped on the accelerator. The chain severed his head from his body, which crashed through the windscreen and landed on the street when the Honda slammed into a parked car … It put me in mind of a passage early in Donald Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World.” But it’s all right. As the world grows more confused and tempestuous, we’ll at least find ourselves with more righteous, awesome, angry gods. A new study finds that “belief in moralizing high gods is ‘more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological distress’ … In societies that exist in places with violent monsoon seasons or periods of extreme drought, cooperation is more important than it is in temperate areas … And what better way to promote cooperation and fair play than the idea of an all-seeing god who demands it?”
November 12, 2014 Look Security Guard By Dan Piepenbring Duane Hanson, Security Guard, 1990, autobody filler, polychromed in oil, mixed media, with accessories, 71″ x 26″ x 13″. © The Estate of Duane Hanson. Photography by Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Duane Hanson’s Security Guard is on display at Gagosian Gallery’s Park and Seventy-fifth Street location through December 3. Hanson, who died in 1996, is known for his doggedly realistic sculptures of Joe and Jane Sixpack: the paunchy, unremarkable janitors, shoppers, joggers, tourists, and deliverymen of the world. Hanson’s working-class men and women are always in some form of repose, wearing expressions that range from the melancholic to the merely phlegmatic. These are people with whom the world has had its way—people used to being seen through. They have body hair. They have hangnails and bruises, varicose veins. Hanson’s sculptures, given the commonness of their subjects, are almost suspiciously accessible, and so the temptation is to dismiss them as condescending or facile—or just tacky, a bid for the same kind of gee-whiz mimesis on display at Madame Tussaud’s. They are, after all, uncanny likenesses, and it’s easy to get tripped up on that, or to marvel at the painstaking craftsmanship. Hanson made casts from real people, and for maintenance he’d send envelopes of human hair to museums with instructions on how to attach it properly; he went to great lengths to produce convincing skin tones. All that’s very impressive, but it’d have you think the sculptures are just workmanlike forays into photorealism. And in the wrong setting, they may well be. I could imagine how a roomful of Hanson’s work might register as taunting rather than haunting—in aggregate, the statues could lose their subtlety, all but daring you to appreciate their lifelikeness. But Gagosian Gallery has done a shrewd thing with Security Guard: they’ve put him on his own. He’s leaning against the wall of an otherwise empty space, patrolling nothing, alone. You can see him in there from the street. “My art is not about fooling people,” Hanson once said. “It’s the human attitudes I’m after—fatigue, a bit of frustration, rejection. To me, there is a kind of beauty in all this.” By himself, hand in pocket, walkie-talkie at the ready, surrounded by white walls and looking at none of them, Security Guard evokes the whole spectrum of Weltschmerz. Stare at him for sixty seconds and you see a bored, stoical man, an intimate of blankness, maybe solving a Rubik’s Cube in his head or thinking about supper. Stare at him for three minutes and you think, Maybe a widower. Stare at him for five minutes and you want to jot down the number of a suicide hotline, press it into his breast pocket. Take lunch, you want to say with a clap on his shoulder, Go out and get some air. But he won’t move. As the critic Sebastian Smee wrote of another Hanson piece, “He is not waiting for death, exactly. But death sure is what his life has in mind for him. And for us.”
November 12, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Food for Thought By Sadie Stein From the jacket of the first hardcover edition of The Supper of the Lamb. Recently, I was putting together a list of good food writers for a group of students. I didn’t have Robert Farrar Capon on the list, then I added him, then I removed him again. He seemed not just too religious, but too—specific, somehow. Capon, who died last year, was an Episcopal priest, and he wrote a lot about his high-church beliefs, but you don’t need to be devout to read him. Believe me: the sum total of my theological training took place ten years ago, when I attended the introductory session for a Christian education class at a large Manhattan church. It was held by the parish theologian in a halogen-lit room that bore very little resemblance to the Gothic house of worship. It contained a circle of music-class folding chairs, an industrial coffee urn, a handful of engaged couples, and at least one mentally-ill person. I was doing a little half-assed spiritual seeking at the time, trying to redress what I then saw as my parents’ joint educational neglect. (It was the same impulse that had led me, several months prior, to become the class dunce in Introduction to Yiddish at the 92nd Street Y.) I don’t know what I expected, although I’m sure my fantasy involved no actual religion; I was probably hoping for Barbara Pym–like busybodies, homemade cake, and very possibly a secret religious awakening that didn’t actually infringe on my life or challenge anything I already thought. I’m sure I wore some kind of demure costume. In actual fact, a man wandered in, took a large handful of animal crackers, and left. Another woman in a faux fur rested her chin on her bosom and promptly fell asleep. One guy asked a lot of really stupid questions. The teacher did a good job fielding them, actually, and I told myself I’d come back and knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t. I still get e-mails announcing lectures on Ecclesiastes or C. S. Lewis, and I can’t bring myself to get off the mailing list. I mean, no one made me go there. Read More
November 12, 2014 Bulletin A Necessary Novel By Dan Piepenbring Atticus Lish. Photo: Shelton Walsmith Our current issue features Atticus Lish’s story “Jimmy,” an excerpt from his new novel, Preparation for the Next Life. The novel is out this week, and we’re elated to report that it’s just received a rave review from Dwight Garner in the New York Times: This is an intense book with a low, flyspecked center of gravity. It’s about blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food, bad options. At its knotty core, amazingly, is perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade … Atticus Lish has written a necessary novel, one with echoes of early Ken Kesey, of William T. Vollmann’s best writing and of Thom Jones’s pulverizing short stories. Many congratulations to Atticus on the well-deserved praise. Read a brief excerpt from “Jimmy” here, and pick up a copy of Preparation for the Next Life here.