April 3, 2014 On the Shelf Printing Wikipedia, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Printers,” from the Trousset encyclopedia, Paris, 1886–1891. Spotted in the Times: our very own Sadie Stein (and her apartment) paying tribute to Laurie Colwin. A German publisher wants to print Wikipedia—all 4,484,862 articles of it. The omnibus “would fill a bookcase that’s 32 feet long and 8 feet high. But not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.” I can’t imagine why. Have we failed to utilize effective incentivizing techniques to promote greater linguistic clarity? In other words, are we losing the war against jargon? The photographer Nancy Warner takes wistful pictures of abandoned farmhouses on the Great Plains. In 1937, Richard Nixon applied to be a special agent in the FBI. He was not accepted. In a letter of recommendation, the dean of Duke Law School wrote that Nixon was “one of the finest young men, both in character and ability, that I have ever had the opportunity of having in classes.” Want fast Internet? Go to the darkest depths of Norway, where there are more polar bears than people.
April 2, 2014 Bulletin Prized By Dan Piepenbring We’re pleased to announce that two of our stories have been selected by Jennifer Egan for this year’s Best American Short Stories collection: Benjamin Nugent’s “God,” which appeared in issue 206; and “Hover,” by Nell Freudenberger, from issue 207. Their stories will appear in an anthology to be published in October. We also have nine nominees for this year’s Pushcart Prize: David Searcy, “Mad Science,” issue 204 Ottessa Moshfegh, “The Weirdos,” issue 206 Susan Stewart, “Pine,” issue 207 Kevin Young, “Three Poems to Amy Winehouse,” issue 204 Stephen Dunn, “Feathers,” issue 204 Ben Lerner, “False Spring,” issue 205 David Gates, “The Curse of the Davenports,” issue 205 Kate Levin, “Dirty Parts,” from the Daily, July 2013 LuLing Osofky, “Kent Johnson’s / Araki Yasusada’s / Tosa Motokiyu’s “Mad Daughter and Big-Bang,” from the Daily, May 2013 Congratulations to all!
April 2, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Set By Sadie Stein William Evans Burton, comedian. Illustration from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February, 25, 1860. The problem is the beaming. For whatever reason, I frequently boast a huge smile when in public, and as any city-dweller will tell you, this is a bad idea. I may be grinning about a doll, a muffin, a soda label. “She’s mad happy,” a teenager once remarked to another as I passed their school. Yesterday, at the Ninety-Sixth Street subway station, I know exactly what I was smiling about. I had overheard one woman remark to another, “As soon as we get to the baby gym, all he wants to do is take off his pants and get on the trampoline.” It was all I could think about as I prepared to see my psychiatrist—specifically, I was thinking that this was utterly reasonable on the (presumed) baby’s part, and that if I ever found a gym where de-pantsing and jumping on a trampoline was SOP, maybe I would join a gym. And all of which would have been fine, if I had not been the only person grinning while everyone else avoided the eyes of the man strolling down the subway platform. Read More
April 2, 2014 Jolie/Laide Sit on It By Charlotte Druckman The art of sploshing. (Contains mildly NSFW photography.) © Martha Burgess The Friday night before last, on an otherwise abandoned block in Gowanus, I spied a young man and woman; she was carefully carrying a plastic bag that contained a boxy package. “Are you here for the sploshing?” I asked. They were. I followed them to their destination—Trestle Gallery, a nonprofit art organization affiliated with Brooklyn Art Space, on the first floor of a building that once housed factories. Was it their first time sploshing? I wanted to know. It was. And me, would I be participating, too? No. I was only there to watch. I’d learned of artist Martha Burgess’s “Cake Sit” a few months prior, over dinner at Omen, the serene, Zen-like Japanese restaurant on Thompson Street. The novelist Monique Truong, whose Book of Salt I often cite as one of the best examples of food writing, turned to me and asked, with wide-eyed excitement, “Have you heard of cake splooshing?!” Although I spend an inordinate amount of time writing, thinking, and talking about cake, to say nothing of eating it, this splooshing, as Truong called it, was new to me. People, she explained, sit on cakes and get off on it. Read More
April 2, 2014 At Work Heroes of the Civil Service: An Interview with Antonin Baudry By Susannah Hunnewell Antonin Baudry, 2013. Photo: Clarisse Rebotier In 2010, a graphic novel, Quai D’Orsay, was published in France under a pseudonym, causing a quiet sensation. Set in, of all places, the Foreign Ministry, Quai D’Orsay starred a young speechwriter frantically learning on the job—the novel featured recognizable public figures, including the foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who famously said non to the war in Iraq. In France, graphic novels, or comic books (bandes dessinées), are a revered venue for pointed satire. The bestseller’s author, it turned out, was a wunderkind former staffer for Villepin named Antonin Baudry. A man of varied passions—board games, Metallica, Greek philosophy—Baudry is currently the French Cultural Counselor for the U.S. Last fall, he adapted the graphic novel for the big screen. The resulting film, The Minister, became an instant hit in France, earning the rookie screenwriter a nomination for a César, the French Oscar. The Minister is now showing (under the title The French Minister) at select theaters in the U.S., including the IFC Center, in New York; the graphic novel is available in English under the title Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. Sitting in his cavernous office in the French embassy, overlooking Central Park, the informal diplomat says he would love to try another graphic novel “on globalism, set in the Middle Ages.” Both in the graphic novel and the movie, you make it seem as if you hadn’t the slightest qualification to write speeches for the foreign minister. Is that true? Yes. I didn’t have the background that all the people there had at all. I had never met a politician before. I had never met a diplomat. What happened was that Dominique de Villepin was looking for young people from different universes to write for him. He heard through a mutual friend that I had done master’s theses in math and literature, and he wanted to meet me. I totally panicked. I said to my friend, Why did you do this to me? I had to buy a suit. The minister received me at the Quai D’Orsay, and it was just like being hypnotized. He explained a lot of things to me and everything seemed clear, and then when I left, I couldn’t remember a thing. And there was this time pressure. He said I had to answer within twenty-four hours because we were possibly on the eve of a Third World War. I was twenty-six, and I thought, Why not? I’d done academic writing and I knew I wanted to write novels. I accepted the job because I think many writers have no experience of the world. I once worked for the sanitation department in Berlin, cleaning the streets at five in the morning. I loved it for the same reason—it gave me the chance to observe another universe instead of staying in my room, contemplating myself. Read More
April 2, 2014 On the Shelf Poets Want Their Privacy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Smile, you’re on CCTV. “Delicious, unkosher, dark, vague, the Cloud / Of Mexico Pork threatens our borders.” In a new forum, John Ashbery, Cathy Park Hong, Charles Bernstein, Robert Pinsky, Rae Armantrout, and others contribute poems about the surveillance state in the twenty-first century. (Those lines are Pinsky’s.) Good news for grad students reluctant to enter academia: “Humanities Ph.D.s are all around us—and they are not serving coffee.” The Mets blew what now? An unfortunate headline teaches us the everlasting value of commas. Anyone who worships at the altar of user experience will wince at these designs by Katerina Kamprani, who has made it her task to suck the utility out of everyday objects. One man’s strangely inspiring search for a vocation: “He started the Restroom Association of Singapore to clean up the public toilets. People loved it. He then realized there were fifteen toilet associations around the world, in cities in Britain and Germany and Japan and some other places, too, but no world headquarters. So he started the World Toilet Organization … and that is how Jack Sim became the Toilet Man.” A brief history of naked babies in fashion magazines.