January 29, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent One Human Family By Sadie Stein Photo: Serge Melki, via Flickr I have never been one to moon over resort collections or sigh enviously over my friends’ sun-drenched Instagram photos. The truth is, I dislike the beach and sort of enjoy the misery of living through an unrelieved winter; it makes spring that much sweeter and, as the Byrds told us, for everything there is a season, etcetera, etcetera. Nevertheless, lured by cheap rates and the promise of a haunted local doll named Robert, a few winters ago, my best friend and I decided to take a brief trip to Key West. We rented bicycles, visited the six-toed cats at the Hemingway House, posed with the Sponge Man, avoided Duval Street and the Parrot-heads eager to show female visitors around the “Conch republic,” and took a “fruit tour.” This involved having to pedal away really fast whenever a property owner approached, and culminated in our guide playing “Strangers in the Night” on, yes, a conch shell. A gentleman in a bar band told us that the island’s official philosophy is “One Human Family.” At a bookstore near our guesthouse, I picked up a book from the “Local Interest” section called Undying Love: The True Story of a Passion That Defied Death, by Ben Harrison. And I read it obsessively. When I think of Key West, it’s not of sunsets or Margaritaville or Tennessee Williams. It’s of Carl Tanzler and his obsession with a dead woman. Read More
January 29, 2014 Arts & Culture The Pram in the Hall By Shane Jones Photo: Silver Cross UK, via Wikimedia Commons One of the most popular quotations about creativity and parenthood is Cyril Connolly’s: “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” This aphorism, snobbish in its dismissal of human distraction, has been passed down through generations of artists as a black warning banner—Have Children, Be Creatively Screwed Forever. Having a child isn’t easy, of course. When my son, Julian, was born sixteen months ago, I became intimately acquainted with sleep deprivation and time constraints. The third night after we’d brought him home, I remember being in bed, so mentally and physically exhausted that when I looked up at where the ceiling and the wall met, I saw the seam crack open, revealing a horizon of white light and red lava. I slept in naps, and although I found the first several months to be brutal and strange and basically a new realm of reality, my role as a father worked as a kind of energizer. The pram in the hall was no “somber enemy”—rather, because I was baggy-eyed, vein-drenched in coffee, and blindly stepping into the new world of fatherhood, producing work had never felt more important to me. I was creatively explosive, if a little loose and wild. I can’t remember showering or looking in the mirror for weeks. Given the sudden constrains on my time, the pockets in which I could work were like mines where I hacked away with a speed I’ve never experienced before, discovering and polishing work. What’s been most difficult, really, is balancing the weird mix of father and writer online, where the community I know is mostly childless. This online world, which I love and cherish, is also detached and ironic and so image-based that being a dad doesn’t seem to fit. To age out, a writer must pass through three stages: First, you turn thirty, thus becoming “online old.” Second, you get married. Third, you have a child. I’ve done all three, and now I’m having to define myself online: Am I a writer or a dad or a husband? Can I be all three? Read More
January 29, 2014 On the Shelf We’re Olfactory Failures, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Crepe de Chine perfume ad, 1937 A woman has been sentenced to read Malcolm Gladwell. Speakers of English may be unusually ill-equipped to describe smells. Our language lacks, for instance, a word meaning “to have a bloody smell which attracts tigers.” At the intersection of art and commerce, poets sell potato chips. Poets sell iPads. Poets sell jeans and family vacations. “We will likely make great selfies—but not until we get rid of the stupid-sounding, juvenile, treacly name. It rankles and grates every time one reads, hears, or even thinks it. We can’t have a Rembrandt of selfies with a word like selfie.” Live like your forebears. Adhering to Ben Franklin’s rigorous schedule allowed this young man to “pick out a pretty fly outfit,” among other efficiencies.
January 28, 2014 Quote Unquote Strawberries and Cream and Spinal Injuries By Dan Piepenbring Yeats at age fifty-eight, via Wikimedia Commons Today marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of W. B. Yeats’s death. Ottoline had what she called her Thursday parties, at which you met a lot of writers. Yeats was often there. He loosened up a great deal if he could tell malicious stories, and so he talked about George Moore. Yeats particularly disliked George Moore because of what he wrote in his book Hail and Farewell, which is in three volumes, and which describes Yeats in a rather absurd way. Moore thought Yeats looked very much like a black crow or a rook as he walked by the lake on Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole. He also told how Yeats would spend the whole morning writing five lines of poetry and then he’d be sent up strawberries and cream by Lady Gregory, and so Yeats would have to get his own back on George Moore. Another thing that amused Yeats very much for some reason was Robert Graves and the whole saga of his life with Laura Riding. He told how Laura Riding threw herself out of a window without breaking her spine, or breaking it but being cured very rapidly. All that pleased Yeats tremendously. —Stephen Spender, the Art of Poetry No. 25
January 28, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Characters Get Together By Sadie Stein Wilshire Boulevard ca. 1959. Photo: Roger Wollstadt, via Flickr There were extenuating circumstances. I was in LA for work, and I had known, intellectually, that it would be warm in California—hot, even. But when you’re deep in a New York winter, who really thinks to pack a sundress? The lightest thing I had was a pair of jeans. So on a particularly Saharan afternoon, I ducked into a thrift store and grabbed a cotton dress off the rack without trying it on. When I got back to my room and changed, I noticed that the dress was brief. It wasn’t until I had donned my sandals that I realized the dress was in fact too small for me. Oh well, I thought. Better to look silly than to burn, as Saint Paul would most certainly not have said. The bus let me off some distance from my destination. I didn’t mind; I like to walk. But I was the only pedestrian on that stretch of Santa Monica. Then, as the wind whipped my flimsy skirt up around my thighs, motorists started honking. One car slowed so the driver could catcall me. If you think this is flattering—and no woman reading this does—think again. Read More
January 28, 2014 On Language Beware Usen’t To By Dan Piepenbring This is what happens when you use usen’t to. Constance Charpentier, Melancholy, 1801, oil on canvas. At ten every morning, Garner’s Usage Tip lands in my inbox—I’m sure Garner could suggest a less clunky formulation for “in my inbox”—providing a quick bit of unfussy, eminently sensible grammatical advice. There are worse things to look forward to. Yesterday’s installment was the third in a scintillating four-part series on used to, which gets pretty spicy, as far as grammar goes. Fun fact: the contracted form of used not to is usen’t to, which has been, despite its pleasant lilt, almost wholly displaced by didn’t use to. You could try to bring it back into style, but apart from sounding pretentious—which you would—you’d run the risk of becoming very miserable. Take a look at usen’t to as it appears throughout literature and you’ll see: it’s almost always used in the context of a total bummer. See below for examples from Forster, Trollope, Beckett, et al., none of which make the sun shine any brighter. Please, if you can find any positive instance of usen’t to, direct me to it. Otherwise I’m inclined to offer a warning: abstain from this phrase, or you’re liable to be plunged into cafard, parochialism, censoriousness, or just sort of a downer mood. Read More