July 3, 2014 On the Shelf Miniature Books by the Brontës, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Stephanie Mitchell / Harvard University, via the Los Angeles Times. When Charlotte Brontë was thirteen and her brother, Branwell, was twelve, they designed and wrote a series of tiny books: “Measuring less than one inch by two inches, the books were made from scraps of paper and constructed by hand. Despite their diminutive size, the books contained big adventures, written in ink in careful script.” Charles Simic is addicted to soccer, though in his youth he wasn’t very good at playing it: “My grandmother once came to watch me play and when she got home told my mother: ‘All the other kids were running around nicely and kicking the ball, except your son, who kept jumping up and down and flailing his arms.’” Later this month, the Guggenheim will host “ANTI-PASTA: A Dinner Inspired by Italian Futurism,” which observes the tenets set forth in Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine.” “Be rid of pasta, that idiotic gastronomic fetish of the Italians,” Marinetti wrote, enumerating eleven requirements for an ideal meal, including “harmony between table setting and food, the invention of food sculptures, and the use of scents, poetry, and music, as well as scientific instruments during preparation.” This may not be a cause for pride, but we’re proud of it nevertheless: two of the books in this “Weird Sex” roundup are by recent Paris Review interviewees Nicholson Baker and Samuel Delany. (On House of Holes: “Amid the bathetic histrionics, Holes asserts a striking degree of tender, if debauched, humanity.”) New York has subways and buses, ferries and trams, but it also has dollar vans, a form of “shadow transit” operating “mostly in peripheral, low-income neighborhoods that contain large immigrant communities and lack robust public transit.”
July 2, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Radical Middle By Sadie Stein John Constable, A View at Hampstead with Stormy Weather, ca. 1930. July 2 is the midpoint of the year—we’re 182 days into 2014 with 182 to go. This is obscurely depressing, although there is something neat about its falling on a Wednesday. It’s all downhill from here, you might say—although sometimes people use that expression as a positive, meaning smooth sailing, so take it as you will. Everyone finds New Year’s Day dreary. But summer, for all its promise of leisure and romance and ease, has an urgency that is sad in its own way. From the moment it starts, it’s on the wane—days ever shorter, relentlessly shifting sands in a Wizard of Oz–style hourglass. Outside my window, someone is actually playing “Summertime” on a saxophone. He’s probably thinking that we are in New York in hot weather, and it is iconic. The pressure is immense. The high-pressure weather is stifling. Ashbery touched on it. “Soonest Mended” is about much more than the mundane, although it conjures the mundane vividly. Amidst the dissection of proverb—and allusions to pressures of art, and youth, and time—he manages to put into words the particular melancholy of the midpoint. Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,A moment and it is gone. And no longerMay we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.Now there is no question even of that, but onlyOf holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown offWith an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies acrossThe upper corner of the window, you brush your hair awayAnd cannot quite see, or a wound will flashAgainst the sweet faces of the others, something like:This is what you wanted to hear, so whyDid you think of listening to something else? We are all talkersIt is true, but underneath the talk liesThe moving and not wanting to be moved, the looseMeaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.
July 2, 2014 World Cup 2014 Hooray for Losers By Jonathan Wilson Tim Howard in the rain, 2013. Photo: Steindy, via Wikimedia Commons. Americans are learning how to lose, and soccer is teaching them how to do it. For the longest time, second place in any competition, domestic or international, has been regarded in the USA as a disaster of unmitigated proportions. (Third was not even worth acknowledging.) While other countries celebrated their silver or bronze medals with parties and parades, American commentators thrust microphones into the faces of the “losers” and asked, sotto voce and with unconcealed disappointment, “What happened?” or “What went wrong?” But this time around, American irreality, with its dangerous admixture of heady confidence—recall that Times poll, which revealed that a majority of fans in only three countries believed their nation would win the World Cup: Brazil, Argentina, and … the USA?—and its obliviousness of “failures,” has not translated into terminal disenchantment with the U.S. team. Okay, they lost to Belgium, the smallest country (in terms of land mass) in the competition, but the goalkeeper, Tim Howard, put on one of the greatest displays in the history of international football. The team fought until the very end, scored a fine goal, and almost forced the game to penalties. Americans may have thought—absurdly? endearingly?—that their team was going to win the whole shebang, but when it didn’t, they were content to take their place among the multitude of also-rans. This is extraordinarily good news, psychologically, philosophically, and maybe even in terms of foreign policy. In a way, it made the front page of most papers this morning. Few journalists reporting on the game, or on President Obama’s supportive tweets, failed to observe the good-spirited way in which the team’s fans, both locally and abroad, took the loss. If the U.S. can come to terms with the fact that it doesn’t have to be No. 1 in everything, who knows how far this new humility will take it? Of course, the loss was made easier to swallow by Howard, who broke the record for saves in a single World Cup match—and they were quality saves, to boot. Howard was by turns brave, acrobatic, positionally astute, commanding, and almost invincible. In Howard, Americans discovered a true hero … and he was a loser. So now that Belgium, in the powerful form of Romelu Lukaku, has turned out the light, is another big switch soon to be flipped? Last night ESPN culled the highest overnight TV rating ever for a World Cup game. There were 25,000 at Soldier Field in Chicago, outdoor screens and crowds all across the country, riveted attention in offices, packed bars. Is the nation so fickle that France vs. Germany and Brazil vs. Colombia will now hold no interest? All the signs point in the other direction—and FIFA is already mooting the possibility of the U.S. hosting the World Cup in 2026, smack in the middle of Chelsea Clinton’s second term. Jonathan Wilson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. He is the author of eight books, including Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. He lives in Massachusetts.
July 2, 2014 On History Passional Affinities By Adee Braun The free-love couple who pissed off nineteenth-century America. A lithograph against polygamy from an 1850 book. In the summer of 1853, the Tribune of New York published a pointed letter directed at the proprietors of the American Hydropathic Institute, a “health institute” in Port Chester, denouncing the establishment for spreading “free and easy notions respecting Love and Marriage.” Its reputation locally was as a bawdy place, a breeding ground for anarchy, free love, and other dubious socialist practices. Shortly after this public cudgeling, enrollment dropped, the institute closed, and its proprietors disbanded, taking their unsavory ideas with them to Long Island. On one hundred acres of wooded land, they rebuilt the institute with the modest aim of rectifying society’s ills. The institute was, at least nominally, a school for hydrotherapy, or water-cure, a popular nineteenth-century health movement that rejected drugs in favor of precise bathing regimens and an ascetic lifestyle aimed at keeping the body, mind, and spirit in careful order. The school was the vision and creation of Dr. Thomas Low Nichols and his wife, Mrs. Mary Gove Nichols. She was a freethinking novelist, an early feminist, and a health reformer; he was a physician, a progressive journalist, and a social agitator. Together they amassed fervent followers and passionate detractors, synonymizing the name “Nichols” with licentiousness and radicalism. In the years before the Civil War, America was inundated with reformist ideologies—a response to societal shifts brought on by rapid social and economic changes. The Nicholses embodied this anxiety: they embraced a smorgasbord of nineteenth-century reform movements, sampling generously from socialism, free love, spiritualism, mesmerism, phrenology, hydrotherapy, and other progressive health and social ideologies. Few radical figures were as devoted to the twin causes of individualism and love. Their ideal union was one in which plurality of love was openly embraced and each individually sovereign man and woman was “drawn together solely by the charm of a mutual attraction,” as they jointly wrote in Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results in 1854. “Such a union seems to us to constitute the true marriage of mutual love in perfect freedom.” Read More
July 2, 2014 Bulletin Both Sides of Your Brain, Both Sides of the Pond By The Paris Review The Paris Review is where America goes for the best in new fiction; The London Review of Books is where Europe goes for bold critical essays. Now, for a limited time only, you can receive a year of The London Review of Books and The Paris Review for $60. Bring your hemispheres together: subscribe today.
July 2, 2014 On the Shelf Elizabethan Warts and All, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from “Treatment for lachrimal fistula performed on a nun,” an illustration from a seventeenth-century surgical guide. Via Wellcome Library. A report by British dermatologists makes the audacious claim that Shakespeare is responsible for Western society’s obsession with clear skin. “Shakespeare’s works have survived the intervening centuries; has his success led to the perpetuation of Elizabethan negativity toward skin disease?” Apparently, too many of his plays feature insults about skin disease—poxes, boils, carbuncles, moles, blots, blemishes, plagues—an excess of abscesses, a sebaceous surfeit. “One of the most intriguing questions I get from readers of my movie reviews is: ‘But did you like the film?’ … The binary scale of good and bad, like and dislike, is essentially pointless. Movies are complex experiences—even those that are simplistic or clumsily made are rich in substance—and sometimes criticism is like the science of medicine, with advances coming from diagnoses of some dread disease that you wouldn’t want to have.” A linguist’s cri de coeur: death to Whorfianism! “What Whorfianism claims, in its strongest form, is that our thoughts are limited and shaped by the specific words and grammar we use”—but linguists have found only “fairly negligible differences … between language speakers.” These hand-painted posters from Russian cinemas make movies like Shrek 2 and 50 First Dates look like surrealist masterworks. You can live in the house from Twin Peaks. (Leland Palmer not included. Or is he?)