January 13, 2014 On the Shelf The Anti-Café, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Are its days numbered? Photo: Airair, via Wikimedia Commons. In London, the anti-café has arrived. It’s a place where you pay about a nickel a minute to sit around and drink free coffee. Will the intelligentsia cotton to it? We’ll keep you posted. Golden Globes be damned—yesterday also saw the announcement of the National Book Critics Circle award nominations. If you must transpose real people into fictional avatars, heed Christopher Isherwood’s advice: “You can question their morals, call them liars, expose them as thieves—as long as you describe them as attractive.” Arthur Schopenhauer: post-Kantian metaphysician, notorious curmudgeon, prophetic technofuturist? The Supreme Court is about to argue semantics. Among the prickly issues to be addressed: what does happen mean?
January 11, 2014 First Person A New Year’s Drive By Brian Cullman Photo: Morven, via Wikimedia Commons My father bought me a Swiss watch when I was seven. The strap was too big and needed adjusting, but when I could finally put it on, I felt a surge of electricity pulse through me, as if I’d just been shackled to time’s wrist. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the ticking of the second hand to sync up with the beat of my heart. I stopped wearing it and kept it in my pocket, only later finding the proper use for it: timing the forty-fives I bought and listened to in my room, checking the accuracy of the time on the label to the time on my watch. The Beatles’ singles, I found, all listed the correct times. The Rolling Stones’ singles, not so much. They’d often claim their songs were fifteen or twenty seconds shorter than they really were, hoping to get more airplay from DJs, who would often opt for a song they could run right into the news break. For me, it was the first hint that time was negotiable, that with the right connections no one had to pay full price for an hour. That being the case, what was the point of a watch? I haven’t worn one since. Read More
January 10, 2014 Arts & Culture The Sicilian Defense By Max Ross Photo: Martin Lopatka, via Flickr Dear Mr. Ross, Thank you for sharing with us your review of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound. The piece is colorful and sharp, and it is with regret that we say it does not suit our needs at this time. Too much of the writing reflects back to the writer himself—to you yourself. (And, inexplicably, to your father.) While we certainly don’t mind personal inflection, and even tolerate the insertion of an occasional “I,” a review must be grounded more firmly in the subject or book under consideration. (And less so in the reviewer’s father.) Critiques such as yours are redolent of ego. We say this not as admonishment, but as something of which you may want to be aware as you continue what looks to be a promising writing career. We wish you the best of luck in placing this piece elsewhere, and will be happy to consider your queries in the future. Sincerely,The EditorsThe New York Review of Books The difficulties began when I attempted to write, for The New York Review of Books, a review of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s critical biography of Philip Roth. My intention was simple: to demonstrate that I appreciated Roth’s work with a higher degree of sophistication than Pierpont. But articulating my Sophisticated Appreciation was tough to do. At first this didn’t bother me—an inability to articulate one’s Sophisticated Appreciation, I reasoned, may itself be proof of how complex and nuanced that appreciation is. I’d been invited to submit to NYRB based on the success of an essay I’d written about Philip Roth for The New Yorker’s Web site. (An NYRB editor had e-mailed me to commend its “substantial humorousness,” and asked me to pitch an idea his way.) I wanted badly to be published in NYRB. I had some friends who’d been published in NYRB, and I was jealous of them. Moreover, my father is an avid NYRB reader—“It’s so wonderfully stuffy,” is his line; “the official periodical of leather armchairs and lowballs of Scotch”—and placing an essay in its pages, I believed, would recompense him for having twice paid my tuition to the universities where I’d learned to appreciate things sophisticatedly. (He would be pleased, too, to learn that I’d written something that wasn’t about him, as opposed to everything else I’d published—excepting the Roth piece—since finishing graduate school.) NYRB’s editors expected six thousand words from my desk. Yet for several days I was too nervous to begin. More than anything else, the review would need to establish for NYRB’s readership how intelligent I was—establishing the writer’s intelligence seemed the purpose of most NYRB reviews, and I have always liked to fit neatly into prevailing systems. If it didn’t prove my intelligence, though, my review could only prove my lack thereof, and nothing was more terrifying to me than the idea of being exposed as intellectually inadequate. Read More
January 10, 2014 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Mouly, Minneapolis, Marié By The Paris Review Purple Snow, by the Numero Group. I’ve been marveling over Jeet Heer’s In Love with Art, a monograph on Françoise Mouly, an editor (The New Yorker, RAW) and publisher whose significance has long been underappreciated. Trust Heer not to make that mistake; he credits Mouly as having had “as massive and transformative an impact on comics as Ezra Pound had on modernist literature, Max Perkins on early-twentieth-century American novels or Gordon Lish on contemporary fiction.” No small claim, but Mouly is truly without peer. She made her way through the male-dominated comics scene by helping to carve out a place for that work in the world. She not only edited and designed and colored the covers of RAW, she manned the presses. In fact, the photographs of Mouly helming the Multilith press she and Spiegelman had in their loft are pretty great. What can’t she do? —Nicole Rudick I was the last of three siblings to move to New York—and was very much a beneficiary, when I finally arrived, of my brother and sister’s having made a familial haunt of B&H, the longstanding East Village diner. (Never been? Brave the cold and treat yourself to a bowl of New York’s very best borscht.) I came upon a brief history of the place this week on Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which features photos from the collection of Florence Bergson Goldberg (the daughter of founder Abie Bergson—the “B” of B&H) and reminiscences from longtime counterman Leo Ratnofsky. Profiled in a Talk of the Town piece in 1978, Ratnofsky had this to say on the last morning of his thirty-eight-year stint: “I don’t feel bad about leaving the place. I’ve got bad feet, my fingernails are being eaten away from squeezing oranges. But to leave all these people—that makes me feel like crying. These actors and actresses, the hippies, the yippies, the beatniks, the bohemians, people who’ve run away from God knows where—I’ve always felt an attraction to them. Especially the starving ones.” —Stephen Hiltner Purple Snow is a four-LP salute to the progenitors of the Minneapolis Sound, a brand of synth-driven R&B that came bounding out of the City of Lakes in the late seventies—it was a flurry of creativity that culminated in the rise of Prince and the propulsive, eminently danceable pop of the eighties. Jon Kirby wrote the compilation’s prodigious liner notes, which come in a handsome clothbound book (purple, of course). Full of photographs and interviews, the notes are smart and disarmingly personal: they tell the story of an ambitious, competitive, and deeply intimate community of musicians who left an indelible mark on music, even if only one of them went on to superstardom. —Dan Piepenbring Read More
January 10, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Big Trouble in Little Poland By Sadie Stein Conspiracy lurks in every bite. Photo: Edsel L., via Flickr. It is pierogi weather. Here in New York, that means going to Greenpoint, or one of the Polish or Ukrainian coffee shops in the East Village, or maybe one of the two warring dairy luncheonettes nearby. Fried or boiled is a matter of heritage and personal inclination; ditto sour cream and fried onions. I will not tell another person how to live his or her life. This is America. But here is what I will tell you: I was walking down First Avenue, hell-bent on pierogis, when my way was blocked by a very short lady in a very voluminous house dress and a fur coat. Her manner was urgent, her gaze intense. “There is something you need to know,” she said, with the air of a fellow undercover operative making contact. We moved toward the curb so as not to block foot traffic, and she delivered her message. She had, she told me, been eating stuffed cabbage at the Little Poland restaurant “for almost thirty years.” And yet, on this day, they had refused to serve her! “They said they didn’t have any,” she said, furious. “I know they were lying. I saw people eating it.” And that is not all. Following this outrage, she had made her way three blocks south, to Veselka, because sometimes you need stuffed cabbage, and no one will argue with that. “But,” she continued ominously, “do you know what?” I did not. She leaned in close and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “The exact same thing happened!” I agreed that this was terrible, and would have been on my way, but she had yet to impart the most important piece of information. “You know who they were serving?” she demanded. There was a moment of charged silence. “Who?” I finally asked. “Attractive gay men!” She looked at me with an air of knowing triumph. “I wanted to tell you especially,” she explained, “so the same thing didn’t happen to you.” And then, “Thank you for your time.” I think we can agree that the gratitude was all mine. I did not attempt to order stuffed cabbage, because, really, life is hard enough.
January 10, 2014 Look Fear and Loathing in Wonderland By Dan Piepenbring From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, 1973. Via Brain Pickings. Ralph Steadman’s febrile and slightly sinister take on Alice in Wonderland, published in 1973 and exhumed today by Brain Pickings, will make you think twice before using the phrase “Cheshire Cat grin.”