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?
January 22, 2014 On Poetry The Leaves’ Leavetaking By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Horia Varlan, via Flickr Howard Moss, the late poet, was born today in 1922. Moss’s Selected Poems won the National Book Award in 1972; he served as The New Yorker’s poetry editor for nearly forty years, from 1948 until his death in 1987. The Paris Review published his poem “A Balcony with Birds” in our fourth issue, circa the winter of 1953; an excerpt follows. The light that hangs in the ailanthus weaves The leaves’ leavetaking overtaking leaves.The actual is real and not imagined,—still, The eye, so learned in disenchantment, seesTwo trees at once, this one of summer’s will, And winter’s one, when no bird will assailThe skyline’s hyaline transparencies, Emptying its architecture by degrees. Roundly in its fury, soon, the sun Feverish with light, goes down, and onCome ambitious stars—the stars that were But this morning dimmed. Somewhere a slowPiano scales the summits of the air And disappears, and dark descends, and thoughThe birds turn off their songs now light is gone, The mind drowned in the dark may dream them on.
January 22, 2014 Arts & Culture A Mountain of Sable Plumes By Dan Piepenbring Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s Gothic revivalist manor, in Twickenham. Earlier this week, to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, Flavorpill found ten Gothic short stories for our delectation, and I must say, they’re really hitting the spot. January is especially well suited to the tint of the Gothic mindset—nothing helps you settle into the winter doldrums like an unceasing parade of bloodied knives, thousand-yard stares, disemboweled corpses, creaking doors, and shrieking virgins. It’s enough to make you want to sunder a frilled shirt and drink rancid port from a tarnished silver chalice, muttering all the while about the gloaming, the gloaming, the gloaming… And let’s not forget the funereal knell of church bells. You’ll want those, too. If you really want to whip yourself into a Gothic froth, I recommend The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, widely regarded as the forebear of the Gothic proper. It’s not “good,” exactly—you won’t find independent booksellers foisting it on you as a forgotten classic—but it packs a lot of senseless murk into a slim volume, and it features one of my favorite opening scenes in all of literature: a homely young man is crushed to death by a giant helmet, which seems to have fallen from the sky. Read More
January 22, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Like the Cat That Got the Cream By Sadie Stein Photo: catsdrivingthings.tumblr.com The girl and the boy stood in the doorway of the crosstown bus as we crossed the park. She was dressed all in black, her lank hair streaked with crimson, eyes circled with heavy kohl, wrists crisscrossed with black rubber bracelets. Her backpack bore an “Emily the Strange” badge. Her companion, plump and pale, in an oversized trench coat, turned toward her with a coy tilt of his head. “Mee-ow,” he purred, extending and then curling his fingers one by one in what was clearly intended to be a cat-like manner. His companion did not respond. “Mee-ow,” he said more loudly. “I’m so fucked on this test. Let’s get some pizza,” she said impatiently, pulling the stop bell. There was a brief silence. Then, “Purrrr-fect,” said the boy. She ignored him. They got off at the next stop, after a very slow old lady.
January 22, 2014 On Poetry W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y By Cynthia Ozick W. H. Auden at the Poetry Center, 1966. Photo: Diane Dorr-Dorynek, courtesy of 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Cynthia Ozick reflects on W. H. Auden, whose readings she remembers attending as a Poetry Center subscriber in the fifties. There must be sorrow if there can be love. —From “Canzone” Ah, the fabled sixties and seventies! Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs! The glorious advent of Howling! Of Getting Stoned! The proliferation of Ginsbergian Exclamation Points! To secure the status of their literary subversion, these revolutionary decades were obliged, like the cadres of every insurrection, to denigrate and despise, and sometimes to blow up, their immediate predecessor, the fifties—the middling middle, the very navel, of the twentieth century. The fifties, after all, were the Eisenhower years, stiff and small like Mamie’s bangs (and just as dated), dully mediocre, constrained, consumerist, car-finned, conformist, forgettable, and stale as modernism itself. Randall Jarrell, one of its leading poets and critics, named this midcentury epoch “The Age of Criticism”—and what, however he intended it, could suggest prosiness more? And what is prosiness if not the negation of the lively, the living, the lasting, the daring, the true and the new? The reality was sublimely opposite. It was, in fact, the Age of Poetry, a pinnacle and an exaltation; there has not been another since. Its poets were more than luminaries—they were colossi, their very names were talismans, and they rose before us under a halo of brilliant lights like figures in a shrine. It was a kind of shrine: the grand oaken hall, the distant stage and its hallowed lectern, the enchanted voices with their variegated intonations, the rapt listeners scarcely breathing, the storied walls themselves in trance—this was the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in the heart of the twentieth century. Read More
January 22, 2014 On the Shelf “The Era of the Word,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Golden Age for journalism. (Journalism not pictured.) Illustration by Brahma Kumaris. “A strangely democratic and egalitarian Era of the Word has emerged.” Why we may be living in an idyllic age for journalism. “People love stories. The more you see your story as part of a broader narrative, the better.” The six things that make stories go viral will amaze, and maybe infuriate, you. Kudos to The New Yorker for aping Upworthy’s headline style. And since we’re doing sixes: six pieces of advice from successful writers. (Though they’re a touch cliché, right down to the “avoid clichés” apothegm.) It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision. The medium is obsolete; the verdict is not. It’s the basis of a lot of our ideas about copyright, consumer rights, and fair use. #ReadWomen2014: A hashtag becomes a movement.