November 26, 2013 Arts & Culture What We Talk About When We Talk About Ill-Fitting Doll Suits By Sadie Stein Male dolls in a range of ill-fitting costumes. For all humanity’s technological achievements, no one in the history of the world has ever succeeded in producing a realistic-looking miniature suit for a male doll. Any father doll who works a white-collar job looks instantly ridiculous: lumpen, clownish, stripped of all authority. The only play scenarios in which a miniature male doll’s suits make any sense is that in which he has just gotten out of prison and hasn’t had a chance to get new clothes, or if the dollhouse paterfamilias is David Byrne. I need not say that neither plotline is popular. In his 1913 essay “On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel,” Rilke wrote, “Sexless as the dolls of childhood were, [the doll-souls] can find no decease in their stagnant ecstasy, which has neither inflow nor outflow.” Which is all very well, but seriously, doll men have terrible-looking suits. Read More
November 26, 2013 Quote Unquote Seeing Is Believing By Sadie Stein Sandpoint, Idaho. ROBINSON No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision. INTERVIEWER How would one learn to see ordinary things this way? ROBINSON It’s not an acquired skill. It’s a skill that we’re born with that we lose. We learn not to do it. —Marilynne Robinson, the Art of Fiction No. 198
November 26, 2013 On the Shelf On Not Thinking Like a Writer, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The artist must avoid thinking like a writer.” The letters of Cézanne. “It isn’t only about droll or absurd situations, it’s about the language used to describe those situations.” Paul Auster on Samuel Beckett. In honor of Umberto Eco’s Legendary Lands, maps of imaginary lands. “Last December, on a Sunday like so many Boston Sundays, one that began in sunshine but gave way to snow showers, three hundred members of Old South Church gathered for a congregational meeting. After hours of debate following weeks of discussion, they voted to sell one of their two copies of the Bay Psalm Book.” Casey N. Cep on America’s first book.
November 25, 2013 Bulletin What We’re Doing By Sadie Stein New Yorkers! Tomorrow night, head to McNally Jackson Booksellers to see Geoff Dyer and Ben Lerner discuss how to write about looking (among other things). Moderated by our very own EIC, Lorin Stein.
November 25, 2013 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 8, or High Drama By Alexander Aciman Crossing the Styx, illustration by Gustave Doré, 1861. This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! Canto 8 is perhaps the most exciting we have encountered so far. The story alone is a harrowing prelude to a great adventure: it’s like the first few minutes of a Bond movie, right before the theme song and titles start rolling. Canto 8 ends just as Dante and Virgil arrive at the edge of the Styx, where the wrathful are punished. Dante spots two towers (not to be confused with those from Lord of the Rings). These towers appear to be communicating with one another—as one launches a flame into the air, the other responds. A curious Dante asks Virgil what this signifies, and Virgil doesn’t really address his question. By now Dante has learned not to press such an issue, and knows that if he allows himself to get derailed by a mystery like two flaming towers, he’ll never get anywhere. Phlegyas, who operates the little stygian skiff, arrives at the bank of the river. As noted in canto 7, the wrathful sinners are here hurled into the muddy Styx and are left to bob there as punishment; indeed, the Hollanders point out that Phlegyas’s job probably isn’t to carry sinners from one side to the other—like Charon—but rather to keep the sinners in the mud. As he arrives and greets Dante and Virgil, Phlegyas seems thrilled to have a fresh pair of sinners to toy with, but Virgil takes particular pleasure in announcing that he and Dante are, in fact, on a quest and as such are exempt from the punishments of hell. Phlegyas is as disappointed as “one who learns of a deceitful plot.” Read More