January 14, 2014 Look Author of Tender Is the Bite By Timothy Leo Taranto This week, we’re presenting Timothy Leo Taranto’s illustrated author puns. Today: F. Scott Spitzgerald
January 14, 2014 On the Shelf Critics with Sharp Objects, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Preparing to take down an author. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. It’s that time again: the annual Hatchet Job of the Year is coming, and critics have honed their wits all year in anticipation. On the shortlist you’ll find eviscerations of John le Carré, Donna Tartt, and Morrissey, among others. While we’re doing things we do every year, let’s mourn the slow disappearance of successful midlist authors. When did it become popular to call people losers? Google knows. At the MLA conference—regularly touted, no doubt, as the sexiest gathering in academe—a titillating ad for a “mock-interview make-out session” has everyone buzzing and, with luck, making out. “I sometimes think of social media as being like the terrible apparatus at the center of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony.’”
January 13, 2014 Bulletin Congratulations to Jonathan Franzen By Dan Piepenbring Oskar Kokoschka’s 1925 portrait of Karl Kraus. Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen’s translation of three essays by the late Austrian writer Karl Kraus, has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. An excerpt from the book, “Against Heine,” appeared in our Fall 2013 issue, and several excerpts of that excerpt—meta-excerpts, if you will—made their way here to the Daily. Winners will be announced on March 13; until then, to prevent the suspense from killing, maiming, or even laying a finger on you, breathe deeply and read Franzen’s expansive notes on “the anal-retentive preciousness” of John Updike’s prose; the externalities of Salinger’s appeal to young readers; the difficulties of translating German travel humor; and the proper way to inflect harsh. And keep your fingers crossed!
January 13, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Only Connect By Sadie Stein Photo: David, Bergin, Emmett, and Elliot, via Flickr Many years ago, when Missed Connections, the creepy/romantic online personal ads, still felt like a big deal, one friend of mine claimed he had received not one, not two, but three such Craigslist missives from enamored young ladies. The guy in question was attractive enough, but even by the notoriously unequal standards of New York City mating culture, this did seem excessive. What’s more, as I pointed out, he was obviously poring over “New York City/W4M” every day in hopes of said ego boosts. “Not at all,” he said. “Every time, I’d had a hunch.” He went on a date with one of them—a girl with whom he’d made intense eye contact on the F train following a Cyclones game—and it didn’t really go anywhere. But that’s okay because now he’s happily married to a lovely woman, and they have two adorable children. Read More
January 13, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 13, or Please Refrain from Touching the Shrubbery By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, The Inferno: Canto XIII. This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! Once again we find ourselves lost in a dark wood. Dante notes that in this forest there is no actual greenery. (This is hell, after all. Where does he think he is, the New York Botanical Garden?) As Dante and Virgil pass through the woods, the Roman tells his disciple that what they are about to witness is unthinkable. Virgil, seeing that Dante can hear screaming but cannot tell where the sounds are coming from, tells him to tear a twig from one of the thorny bushes; the moment in which Dante finally removes the twig is one of the most memorable in all of literature. Blood pours from the tree, and a pained, hissing voice cries: Perché mi schiante? Perché mi scerpi? Why do you break me, why do you tear me? The voice belongs to Pier delle Vigne, chancellor to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Virgil asks Pier to tell his story so that Dante can “revive his fame” up in the living world. Pier’s story is as tragic as the moment in which he loses one of his twigs. He was loyal to Frederick, and was later accused of stealing from him. Not long after his imprisonment, Pier killed himself. This ring in which Dante finds himself is the realm of the suicides, who, ungrateful for their bodies on earth, are deprived of flesh in hell. Read More
January 13, 2014 Look Author of Henderson the Fire King By Timothy Leo Taranto This week, we’re presenting Timothy Leo Taranto’s author puns. Today: Saul Bellows