June 6, 2014 First Person Contaminated By Nick Courage Getting back on the skateboard. Not long ago I went to lunch with a gracious, well-intentioned editor who was not, I quickly realized, interested in publishing my book, the worst possible pitch for which is: “It’s a middle-grade novel about peak oil.” Having tabled my hopes like a used napkin, somewhere between the Lebanese tea and the shaved fennel, the editor asked what I’d rather be doing with my days, “in an ideal world.” I was surrounded by sandwich-eating professionals and suffocating, psychically, at the thought of being one: that’s when I remembered kickflips. I’d given up skateboarding when I was fifteen, after breaking my wrist—I hadn’t been on a board since. When, shortly after graduating high school, an acquaintance of mine went pro, the specter of his early success strengthened my resolve not to skate: Why confront my talentlessness when it was more easily avoided? But at lunch that day I realized I was thirty years old and viscerally hating myself for matching the workaday worst of Lower Manhattan in my light-blue button-up and tan oxfords. So I started to skate again, taking mostly to a ten-block loop in Brooklyn that I call the Greenpoint Skate Lab, a toxic hat-tip to the ecological impact tours that roll through the Lab while I’m there most Saturdays. It’s a deeply unhappy spot, physically and psychically—haunted by the same oil spill (“three times worse than Exxon Valdez”) that, at home, a few blocks away, I only ever remember after having drunk from the bathroom faucet. As a reflective-vested guide explained to a small, inexplicable crowd on one of my first days out, a drunk driver once crashed through the barricade on Apollo Street where it dead ends next to the BP oil refinery. The car dove nose-first into the shallows of Newtown Creek. The water was so contaminated with oil that it was on fire for days. Read More
June 6, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Addendum By Sadie Stein Albert Roosenboom, The Tempting Cake (detail), nineteenth century. On Wednesday, I mentioned to you a certain menu description. This description caused something of an existential crisis. I wept; I ranted; I pondered existence. But life is not just a vale of tears! I might still be lying in bed, paralyzed by the enormity of everything, had I not been saved by yet another piece of food-related writing. This one came courtesy of a slightly outdated gourmet-store catalogue I picked up at the airport last week. I say “outdated” because it contained a number of Easter and Passover treats available for purchase. I always find looking at food relaxing, but when I opened it, I found that this catalogue was much more than just pretty pictures and appetizing captions. It was riveting. The prose was bold, even dashing. Also, bizarre. Here is a description of all-butter croissants: Boasting French connections of the cuisine nature, they immediately bring to mind afternoons on the Seine. Indeed, it is their verity that affords them this intensely delicious recall. On a certain flowering tree, sold in the garden center: Read More
June 6, 2014 On Language The Final Word By Dan Piepenbring Albert Goodwin, Apocalypse, 1902. Late in 2007, a poet and programmer named Adam Parrish started @everyword, a Twitter account dedicated to tweeting all the words in English. The very first tweet, from 6:53 A.M. on September 2, 2007, seems to have been blasphemous, but after that came a, and things settled into a familiar alphabetical rhythm. In the days of the early letters, we felt footloose and fancy-free. It seemed, for a while, that the dictionary and its roughly 109,000 entries would last us for the rest of our natural lives. Years passed. Words came and went at a stately pace. The most retweeted among them were sex and weed, those poles of the human condition. But things took on a sudden urgency earlier this year when x, y, and z came around. None of us felt young anymore—we were living in the twilight of the alphabet, suddenly, acutely aware of our own mortality. @everyword, once a fixture of the Twittersphere, was soon to be snuffed out by Fate, as we all must be. As of this writing, zoril, zounds, and zoysia have just been tweeted, each one a harbinger of doom. The last word is expected to go up this weekend, if not later today. (One never knows exactly when Death’s cold, tenebrous hand will descend upon one’s shoulder.) In an interview earlier this week, Parrish told The Guardian, Whimsy is something that I’m very interested in evoking in people. I don’t like the concept of personalization on the web. When I get on the Internet it’s because I want to have a shared experience. I want to see what other people see. The Internet is a way to find out what life is like for other people. One of the goals of the stuff I make is to produce these experiences, and not sell you something, which is what a lot of the Internet is about these days. Excellent points, but as the end beckons, whimsy is on the wane. (Or not—it was just tweeted a month ago.) Parrish never discussed why he chose to begin his series with blasphemous, but it augurs ill for us, now that we’re in the end-times. Has he been courting Satan with his word spells? Twitter’s eschatologists are predicting the apocalypse. What will happen when the final word goes up? Is there life after zed—or, more accurately, after zyxt?
June 6, 2014 On the Shelf Crazy Heroines Should Stay That Way, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No cures allowed. From the movie poster for I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a YA novel about her time as a schizophrenic teen. “Not long after I Never Promised You a Rose Garden became canonical, it also became a lightning rod … Greenberg claimed full recovery, and many psychiatric professionals worried that this would inspire a false and dangerous hope. Schizophrenics, they said, simply cannot recover.” A new location (and ambiance) for Foyles, “London’s temple of books”: “Light streams down from rooftop windows on to a spacious white-walled atrium catching the edge of a 1930s dancefloor like a spotlight. It’s a huge change of scene for Foyles … which was once famed for dark forbidding bookshelves and a payment system so arcane that many visitors chose to steal rather than buy their favored paperback.” Chester Nez, the last of the original Navajo code-talkers, has died at ninety-three. What if it were your job to deliver bad news all day? You would succumb to a deep and enduring existential malaise, experts say. “The best way to think about the universe is as a multidimensional space-time loaf.”
June 5, 2014 Arts & Culture A Thing That Ends in Dying By Dan Piepenbring Ivy Compton-Burnett Happy birthday to Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, who wrote dialogue so witty, lively, and fluent it makes Aaron Sorkin look like—uh—well, you get the idea—I’m sure one of them would be savvy enough to fill in the blank. “She was very, very clever,” Rebecca West said of Compton-Burnett in her 1981 Art of Fiction interview. “You’d have to be very tasteless not to see she had something unique to give her age.” Here, in the way of proof positive, is the beginning of The Present and the Past, her 1953 novel, which starts with a lot of winsome talk about poultry, death, and cake. “Oh, dear, oh, dear!” said Henry Clare. His sister glanced in his direction. “They are pecking the sick one. They are angry because it is ill.” “Perhaps it is because they are anxious,” said Megan, looking at the hens in the hope of discerning this feeling. “It will soon be dead,” said Henry, sitting on a log with his hands on his knees. “It must be having death-pangs now.” Another member of the family was giving his attention to the fowls. He was earnestly thrusting cake through the wire for their entertainment. When he dropped a piece he picked it up and put it into his own mouth, as though it had been rendered unfit for poultry’s consumption. His elders appeared to view his attitude either in indifference or sympathy. “What are death-pangs like?” said Henry, in another tone. “I don’t know,” said his sister, keeping her eyes from the sufferer of them. “And I don’t think the hen is having them. It seems not to know anything.” Henry was a tall, solid boy of eight, with rough, dark hair, pale, wide eyes, formless, infantine features, and something vulnerable about him that seemed inconsistent with himself. His sister, a year younger and smaller for her age, had narrower, deeper eyes, a regular, oval face, sudden, nervous movements, and something resistant in her that was again at variance with what was beneath. Tobias at three had small, dark, busy eyes, a fluffy, colourless head, a face that changed with the weeks and evinced an uncertain charm, and a withdrawn expression consistent with his absorption in his own interests. He was still pushing crumbs through the wire when his shoulder was grasped by a hand above him. “Wasting your cake on the hens! You know you were to eat it yourself.” Toby continued his task as though unaware of interruption. “Couldn’t one of you others have stopped him?” The latter also seemed unaware of any break. “Don’t do that,” said the nursemaid, seizing Toby’s arm so that he dropped the cake. “Didn’t you hear me speak?” Toby still seemed not to do so. He retrieved the cake, took a bite himself and resumed his work. “Don’t eat it now,” said Eliza. “Give it all to the hens.” Toby followed the injunction, and she waited until the cake was gone. “Now if I give you another piece, will you eat it?” “Can we have another piece too?” said the other children, appearing to notice her for the first time. She distributed the cake, and Toby turned to the wire, but when she pulled him away, stood eating contentedly. “Soon be better now,” he said, with reference to the hen and his dealings with it. “It didn’t get any cake,” said Henry. “The others had it all. They took it and then pecked the sick one. Oh, dear, oh, dear!” Read More
June 5, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Unknown Ajax By Sadie Stein Georgette Heyer Like most families, mine makes frequent use of shorthand. In the case of me and my mother, much of the talk derives from the work of Georgette Heyer, the prolific author who created the genre of Regency Romance in the first half of the twentieth century. As my mother had, I read all of the books in my early teens, and even today, our exchanges are liberally peppered with the idiosyncratic language of Heyer’s novels—or, as she might put it, “Regency cant.” Something popular is “all the crack.” Exaggeration becomes “doing it much too brown.” A young relative fresh from the sticks “needs a little town bronze.” A snob is “high in the instep.” And our favorite, of course, is “impervious to the most brutal snubs,” a phrase which one finds applicable with dismaying frequency. Heyer was a famously scrupulous researcher with a vast archive of materials and detailed notes on all aspects of the eras she portrayed. (In addition to the Regency, Heyer set books in the Georgian and Medieval periods; she also wrote modern mysteries.) Her files contained subject headings like “Beauty, Colours, Dress, Hats, Household, Prices, and Shops.” While devotees will argue passionately for their favorite Heyers (mine, not that you asked, are Cotillion, Devil’s Cub, and, of course, The Grand Sophy—I don’t like the May-December jaded-rakes ones) it can’t be denied that there are certain recurring tropes in her work. One biographer defined these as the “saturnine male lead, the marriage in danger, the extravagant wife, and the group of idle, entertaining young men.” To this I would add a mad chase at the book’s end, which oftentimes brings together disparate characters at a remote and random inn. But all are characterized by their real wit, fully realized characters, and utterly satisfying conclusions. (Okay, A Civil Contract, not so much.) Read More