March 17, 2014 First Person See Me By Emma Cline Adolescence, pen pals, and the Manson girls. When I was thirteen, I had a yearlong correspondence by mail and over the phone with Rodney Bingenheimer. A peculiar icon of the sixties and seventies, Bingenheimer had opened a famous club on the Sunset Strip; he was a live-in publicist to Sonny and Cher, he accompanied David Bowie to London, and through his adjacency, his fandom, and his prescient taste, he eventually achieved fame himself. We had met briefly on the sidewalk of my small hometown when I walked past a café table where he sat with a group of friends. He was a lackluster presence, not even as tall as I was—red hair cut into a chunky bowl, wearing a blazer over a shirt printed with a Red Army star. He was fifty-five then, though to my thirteen-year-old self he looked much older. His voice had the tremulous, feminine quality I would later read about in memoirs of the golden days of Los Angeles, his eyes slightly out of focus. “Tell her she looks like my first love,” he half whispered to the group surrounding him, a group casually dressed, but alert with the nervous air of support people. They repeated his words to me, obediently. “Give us your information,” one of his group said, all brisk business. “He’s very famous,” someone else said. “He invented the Ramones.” Rodney blinked at me like a tired cat. Read More
March 17, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Cat Fancier By Sadie Stein From The Cat and the Devil. “I sent you a little cat filled with sweets a few days ago but perhaps you do not know the story about the cat of Beaugency,” begins James Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil, first published in 1965. If you were lucky enough to get your hands on this book as a child, you know that the illustrations, by Richard Erdoes, haunt your nightmares for years, and that it’s quite impossible ever to think of James Joyce without visualizing the Mephistophilean entity pictured therein. The story is based on an old French folktale: the desperate mayor of Beaugency makes a deal with the devil in order to get a bridge across the Loire. In exchange for the supernatural structure, the devil may claim the soul of whoever crosses it first. In the event, the townspeople foil the plot by sending over a hapless cat instead, and in the grand tradition of diabolical law, the devil is forced to abide by their reading of the contract. Read More
March 17, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 21, or a Middle-Schooler’s Essay By Alexander Aciman This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: how to write a C- five-paragraph essay on canto 21. Gustave Doré, Canto 21 As Dante enters the next ditch, he addresses his reader, saying he and Virgil have encountered things about which his “Comedy does not care to sing.” One has to wonder what Dante is seeing that makes him so overwhelmed. Upon reading the notes in the back of the book, a reader can discover that this area of hell is reserved for those who committed barratry, which, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “sale or purchase of positions in the state.” Because this sin is so similar to simony, which was punished in a recent canto, we can understand that Dante means for the reader to undergo a sequential experience—as our thoughts move from simony to barratry—and that the theme of this canto is motion. Following this theme, we can also see Dante go from a state of confusion and horror as the canto begins, and then to a state of fear as he encounters demons, and finally to a feeling of faith as he learns to trust the demons. Dante spends a lot of time describing a vile lake that surrounds him and Virgil. It is made of boiling pitch—similar to modern-day tar—in which the sinners are forced to swim. The great detail he uses to describe this lake of boiling pitch (nine lines are dedicated to a small story telling the reader how it reminds Dante of Venetian ship makers) shows that he is clearly both captivated and terrified by it. Eventually, Dante sees a demon that further moves him into a mindset of absolute fear. He warns Virgil, who is less concerned. Dante then describes the way the beasts chase down a sinner who has come to the surface of the pitch, and how they rip him apart, because the sinners are supposed to stay below the surface. Already Dante has gone from a foggy notion of his surroundings to a very concrete sense of fear. Read More
March 17, 2014 Look Ireland: Picturesque and Romantic By Dan Piepenbring On St. Patrick’s Day, nineteenth-century illustrations of the Irish countryside. Pause Play Play Prev | Next These remarkable illustrations are from Ireland: Picturesque and Romantic, an 1838 travelogue by Leitch Ritchie, Esq. But don’t be fooled: despite his book’s encouraging title and the meticulousness of these drawings, Ritchie was pretty hard on Ireland. His account, stuffy and imperial, presents a portrait of the Irish psyche scarcely more enlightened than a box of Lucky Charms, shot through with a kind of paternalistic shame: The Irish are not lazy because they are Irish, but because, in the first place, they are only half civilized … their spirit is broken by ages of tyranny. They have crouched so long under the lash that they can hardly stand upright. They are brave from instinct, but cowards from habit; and the peasantry every day of their lives are guilty of as despicable acts of poltroonery, in their intercourse with the quality, as the serfs of the middle ages exhibited in their encounters with the knights. Not, as you can see, ideal reading for St. Paddy’s Day—better to take the pictures and put someone else’s words with them. Here, then, is a more fittingly romantic tribute to Ireland: Patrick Kavanagh’s “Canal Bank Walk,” a sonnet written in 1958. Read More
March 17, 2014 On the Shelf Calling All Princesses, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Bell Telephones debuted the Princess phone in 1959. Image via Attitude Analyst The OED has made its latest update. Among the new words added: wackadoo, toilet-paper (as a verb), cunt lapper, and assisted living. Minneapolis’s Graywolf Press turns forty. Evocative shots of New York’s 1964 World’s Fair recall a time when the future was full of wonder, typefaces were chunkier, and you could ride a giant tire like a Ferris wheel. Why should you major in English? Because Barbara Walters and Mitt Romney did, of course! “It’s little! … It’s lovely! … It lights!” An enlightening history of Bell Telephone’s 1959 “Princess phone,” “the first phone specifically created for teenage girls and women … in its beauty and its place in the home, [it] was the embodiment of perfect womanly qualities of the time.”
March 14, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Paper Moon By Sadie Stein Images via Amusing Planet There is no time that is not hard and complicated. Disaster is never far away. But in the immortal words of Fred Rogers, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” This can be hard for grown-ups to remember when buildings explode or planes vanish out of the sky. One of the true helpers, if you ask me, was Akira Yoshizawa, whose work stopped me in my tracks when someone shared it with me earlier today. “The grandfather of origami” was born on March 14, 1911, in Kaminokawa, Japan. Until his forties, he lived in poverty, choosing to devote himself wholly to the art of paper-folding. He was frequently inspired by nature. Read More