May 21, 2014 Look Books from the Met, Unsorted By Dan Piepenbring Pause Play Play Prev | Next Yesterday, the Met released nearly four-hundred thousand images—394,253, if you’re counting—into the public domain. Verily this is a horn of digital plenty, and the museum has made it easy, even fun, to peruse: users can sort the images by artist, maker, culture, method, material, geographical location, date, era, or department. To give you a sense of the collection’s scope, I sorted it, not especially imaginatively, to show only books, which left me with an unwieldy 2,701 results—and then I dove in. Above are a few of the more striking images I found, all of them deeply miscellaneous. There’s something enjoyable in a stochastic approach to browsing, though you’d be right to call it dilettantish. The pieces I found have nothing in common—no cultural background, no thematic unity, no philosophy or aesthetic, no chronology, not even a shared mode of production—except that they all come from books, and they were all created by, you know, the people of Earth. Imagine wandering a library in complete disarray, with no organizing principle and no particular ambition: all the context disappears, along with most notions of the cumulative, but it’s hard not to come away feeling humbled by the vastness of artistic accomplishment. If this is a cheap kind of awe, it doesn’t feel that way; a few minutes of randomized images did wonders for my sense of humanism, and I saw only an infinitesimal fraction of the collection. You can peruse the Met’s online collection here, as purposely or as arbitrarily as you’d like. Bookmark it and return whenever you’re feeling misanthropic.
May 21, 2014 On the Shelf A Gadget for Lonely Hearts, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From “Slot Machine Sweethearts,“ in the May 1, 1955 issue of American Weekly; image via Gizmodo Yesterday Dracula’s castle was for sale; today it’s Ray Bradbury’s house in Los Angeles, which is on the market for a comparatively reasonable $1.5 million. “His three-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot house, built in 1937, is painted a cheery yellow. It has three bathrooms, hardwood floors, and sits on a generously sized 9,500-square-foot lot.” This concludes today’s edition of Literary Real Estate. The history of Red Lobster, which was recently sold to a capital equity group by its parent company, tells a hopeful but ultimately tragic tale of casual dining in postwar America. The short story is “having a moment,” even in the UK: “In Britain we don’t have a culture of literary magazines that routinely publish short fiction. There are dozens in the US and this has helped the form to flourish.” Curious new archeological discoveries in the British Virgin Islands: a witch’s bottle and some iron ammunition “magically used to stop violence.” Whether or not it succeeded is another story. The 1955 equivalent of online dating: “Women would approach a machine that looked a bit like an old-school automat. The machine had photos of different men, each with a short description. She would put her coins in a slot and out would pop a more detailed note, describing just what kind of guy her potential suitor was. The woman would then take her letter to a love-agent who was able to make an introduction.”
May 20, 2014 Books The Physiology of Marriage By Dan Piepenbring This man could save your marriage—or ruin it. A portrait of Balzac, based on an 1842 daguerreotype It’s Honoré de Balzac’s birthday, making this as good an occasion as any to investigate one of his stranger works, 1829’s The Physiology of Marriage—an extraordinary kind of precursor to the self-help manual. Balzac was thirty when it was published, and already he felt he knew enough about the institution of marriage to advise others on the matter. And maybe he did: though he hadn’t married yet, he’d already perfected the art of the aphorism. This book is full of them. “To saunter is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.” “A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.” And “Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.” The Physiology of Marriage is a series of meditations on the more quotidian aspects of loving and living with another—many of which arrive at the rather contemporary conclusion that marriage is exceedingly difficult, liable to end in adultery. The book has moments of surprising candor about men and women, and Balzac clearly knows a thing or two about, you know, the Human Comedy. But he’s also full of lousy counsel, and he loves playing power games. Here, for instance, are some excerpts from Meditation XII, “On the Hygiene of Marriage”: Read More
May 20, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Wildlife, or Nor Woman Neither By Sadie Stein A Chihuahua with a member of ordinary size. Photo: Abuk Sabuk, via Wikimedia Commons What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. The text came up on my phone at 5:34 P.M. “Just saw chihuahua with human-sized penis 🙁 ” I tried to think of something comforting to say. “Don’t worry,” I wrote back. “He can mate with bigger dogs!!” “:( ” came the response. In conference with another friend, Dan, later the same day, I mentioned this anomaly. “It’s at times like this one wonders how self-aware dogs are,” he wrote. Then: “I hope he knows” Then: “He must know.” Read More
May 20, 2014 On Design Catch the Bus By Dan Piepenbring BUS:STOP, Sou Fujimoto; image © Adolf Bereuter; via DesignBoom Krumbach is an Austrian market town with a population of about one thousand—it has a handsome eleventh-century castle and, as of this year, seven of the most arresting bus stops in the world. As part of a new project, BUS:STOP, seven international architects have designed Buswartehüsle—small shelters—“in a dialogue with the people, landscape, and local culture, building upon the traditions of skilled trade in the area.” Sou Fujimoto calls his stop, pictured above, “a transparent forest of columns,” and emphasizes its variousness as a public space: “Both bus passengers and non–bus users can use this bus stop as a meeting point,” he writes, and though maybe no human alive has ever actively identified as a “non–bus user,” his larger point rings true: “Everyone may climb the tower-like bus stop to enjoy panoramic views of Krumbach.” The other contributing architects hail from Belgium, Chile, Russia, Norway, Spain, and China, and given the impressive designs they’ve brought, it’s hard to fault Krumbach’s official culture site for a bit of characteristically Teutonic rhetoric: “People from the Bregenzerwald are generally seen as proud of their roots and open to new ideas. This has shaped our region down to the present day: the collaboration between humankind and nature, tradition and modernism, handcraft and the culture of building.” DesignBoom has a gallery of photographs worth viewing in full. One might object to the primacy of form over function here. It’s hard to picture someone comfortably waiting at Fujimoto’s shelter, for instance, especially if it’s raining. But none of these stops are entirely without utility: they are all, however tenuously, places where you go to catch a bus. I’ve tried in vain to find statistics on public transit in Krumbach—how many of its thousand citizens use the bus system, anyway?—but even if these shelters are seldom used, it’s still a pleasure to imagine them out there, flecking the Austrian countryside. Greyhound: take notes. BUS:STOP, Ensamble Studio; image © Adolf Bereuter; via DesignBoom
May 20, 2014 Bulletin Reminder: Subscribe Now, Get a Vintage Issue from 1959 By Dan Piepenbring To celebrate American Masters’s Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself—a documentary about our late, great founder George Plimpton—The Paris Review is giving all new subscribers a copy of our twenty-first issue, published in the spring of 1959. This remarkable issue includes an interview with T. S. Eliot, the very first in our Art of Poetry series; fiction from Plimpton pals Alexander Trocchi and Terry Southern; poems by Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, and Louis Simpson; and a special portfolio of “Artists on Long Island” including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers. Subscribe now and we’ll send you a copy of your own—but hurry, because this offer only lasts through Friday. U.S. residents can watch Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself in its entirety online, courtesy of PBS.