January 24, 2014 On the Shelf The Flatus of Yore, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring What a gas! Image via Beautiful Decay. Japanese scrolls from the Edo period depict—yes—erumpent, competitive flatulence. Back to more dignified fare. Guess the classic novel from its first sentence. Fact: Kurt Vonnegut wrote a made-for-TV movie in 1972. It’s called Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy. Vonnegut later withdrew from the production: “I am not going to have anything more to do with film—for this reason: I don’t like film.” Well. As far as excuses go, that one’s airtight. “I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you’re somehow able to look at him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That’s empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.” A new interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan. As any reader of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity knows, vagueness can be artful, but it’s especially so in Mandarin writing, where ambiguous sentences resemble optical illusions.
January 23, 2014 Bulletin Save Rizzoli By Dan Piepenbring Since 1985, Manhattan’s Rizzoli Bookstore has occupied a spectacular six-story limestone townhouse on Fifty-Seventh Street—their Web site aptly goes in for a bit of self-congratulation, touting the “cast iron chandeliers, ornately decorated vaulting, and a luminous Diocletian window.” You can learn more about the history of the building here. It’s the sort of place that inspires breathless exaltation in book lovers, or even merely book likers; if you were to publish a magazine of bookseller porn, Rizzoli would be the centerfold. Put more baldly, it’s magical. Alas, in a plot turn that seems ripped from a bad movie, realtors have designs on the building—they want to demolish it and build a high-rise. One can only imagine the cackles that issue from their inner sanctum with so many malignant plumes of cigar smoke. But fear not. Citizens have come together, as we are wont to do, to preserve Rizzoli as a landmark. Sign the petition to help save it, and, as a bonus, to ensure that these dastardly realtors are left stomping their finely crafted hats.
January 23, 2014 Look From the Margins By Dan Piepenbring A rainbow-colored beast from the margins of a fifteenth-century text. Image via the Public Domain Review. In college, I was excited to discover a student-produced, fly-by-night zine called “From the Margins.” I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: that I assumed it was devoted to marginalia or that I was seriously juiced about the idea. When I opened its creased, xeroxed pages, though, I found it was devoted not to literal margins but to my school’s “disenfranchised peoples,” most of whom struck me as too well-heeled to feel put out. In any case, this month has granted my wish: it’s seen some great attention paid to margins, the kind on paper. Open Culture featured Dostoevsky’s manuscript doodles, which demonstrate not just his remarkable penmanship but also an affinity for faces and architecture. (The former, to no one’s surprise, are deeply melancholy.) The Public Domain Review resurfaced some rainbow-colored beasts “found in a book of hours attributed to an artist of the Ghent-Bruges school and dating from the late fifteenth century,” and Brain Pickings resurfaced a piece about Edgar Allan Poe, “history’s greatest champion of marginalia.” Poe is indeed unreserved in his praise; he also suggests, “If you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” Oh, that Poe! He’s a regular Mark Twain. Last, Sam Anderson and David Rees have defaced, or, uh, annotated, a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno, much to its benefit. There’s a lot of comfort in seeing—next to such atrocious lines of dialogue as “Don’t let her beauty fool you, she is a dangerous foe”—the red, hateful tendrils of a handwritten EAT SHIT. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to find in “From the Margins.”
January 23, 2014 Fashion & Style, Our Daily Correspondent Customer Service By Sadie Stein Photo: Romley, via Flickr I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, in one of the handful of commuter towns along the Hudson. One of these villages contained a bookstore—a good one, with a fine selection of titles and a section devoted to attractive wrapping paper and greeting cards. However, the owner was so unfailingly nasty and abusive to her customers that my mother and I came to regard it as a challenge to make it in and out of the shop without incurring her wrath. We seldom succeeded. Anything might set her off: an innocuous question, a breach of obscure etiquette, a sneeze. Needless to say, she had a hard time keeping staff. Everyone was scared of her, and the atmosphere of the store was one of silent terror. There was only one occasion on which we saw anyone break through the ice. My mom and I had been compelled to patronize the shop after failing to find Miss Rumphius anywhere else, and we had steeled ourselves for the arctic blast of the proprietor’s contempt. But when we walked in, we met with an amazing scene. A plump, jolly woman was leaning against the counter and thumbing through a novelty book—something about Jewish wit and wisdom, shaped like a large bagel. “Oh, wait—listen to this one!” she was saying. “When the temple was destroyed … the Jews built Loehmann’s!” She went off into gales of laughter. The shop owner remained stony-faced. Then: “It’s true,” she said, matter-of-factly. Read More
January 23, 2014 Arts & Culture “The Past Is a Mist”: Pinter’s Proust By Christopher Richards Photo © 2014 Nancy Crampton Yellow screen. Sound of a garden gate bell. Open countryside, a line of trees, seen from a railway carriage. The train is still. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. The sea, seen from a high window, a towel hanging on a towel rack in foreground. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. Venice. A window in a palazzo, seen from a gondola. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. So begins the wordless sequence of thirty-six shots at the start of The Proust Screenplay, Harold Pinter’s adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu, written in the seventies and never filmed. To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Proust’s Swann’s Way a series of public events have been planned in New York. Part of 92Y’s contribution to the centenary was a staged reading of Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay, which was produced at the National Theatre in London in 2001 but had never been performed in the States before its 92Y debut. Helmed by the same director from the National’s production, the 92Y’s reading was directed by Di Trevis, who collaborated with Pinter to stage his screenplay. Performed by a cast of fourteen—led by Peter Clements, a dead ringer for Proust—the crowded event felt like a staged reading in name only; fully blocked out with lighting cues, set pieces, and props, the presence of the actors’ scripts was the only sign that this wasn’t a complete production. Read More
January 23, 2014 On the Shelf Nudity Defended, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Giovanni Giacometti, Theodora, 1914, oil on canvas. The return of Girls also means the return of prudish, puzzled critics. As a riposte, six reasons (just six?) that female nudity can be powerful when it’s not sexual. What if classic novels were “whorishly titled, optimizing our search engines rather than our imaginations”? (Jane Eyre is a personal favorite: “This Guy Didn’t Tell His Governess About His Secret Ex-Wife in the Attic. What Happened Next Really Burned Him Up.”) Fiction in translation is on the rise. The British Library’s new exhibition of comic books aims to inspire children to be “naughtier and more rebellious.” Embrace obscenity, kids. Do not eat your spinach. Kill all fascists. We live in a time of ever more florid author bios—here are three questions a good bio should answer. (Spoiler: one of them is “Who are you?”) Parsing punctuation in Internet initialisms: Is the semicolon in “tl;dr” ironic?