March 11, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Disgusting Lives By Sadie Stein From the cover of Goops and How to Be Them, 1900. The other day I visited with a four-year-old friend; we read a book called Manners. As the title implies, this is a guide to basic children’s etiquette, with an emphasis on consideration for others, and it was cute and instructive. But I couldn’t help thinking that it didn’t have quite the élan of The Goops. Created by the humorist Gelett Burgess (also inventor of “the blurb”) in the late nineteenth century, the Goops were humanoid characters with enormous round heads who behaved disgracefully—children could profit from their example and get an illicit thrill from their antics. “The Goops” comic strip was a recurring feature in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas. The book, Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants Inculcating Many Juvenile Virtues Both by Precept and Example, with Ninety Drawings, came out in 1900 to instant acclaim. I can still remember the opening lines: The Goops, they lick their fingers,and the Goops, they lick their knives;They spill their broth on the tablecloth,Oh, they lead disgusting lives! Read More
March 11, 2014 Arts & Culture Growing Up Together By Chris Knapp Love through the lens of Fellini. Fellini and Masina on the set of La Strada, 1954. Photo: Studio Patellani Among the central occupations of Fellini’s work is what he wants from the women in his life. Near the end of 8½, his alter ego speaks of a kind of Ideal Woman: “She’s beautiful … young, yet ancient … child, yet already woman. Authentic, complete. It’s obvious she could be his salvation.” Between the breathy declaiming and 8½’s famous layers of metafiction, you get the idea that even Fellini sees this isn’t exactly a healthy attitude. Still, throughout his work, the search for an ideal of womanhood is represented in a series of large and buxom temptresses: Anita Ekberg, Sandra Milo, Eddra Gale in an especially memorable dance sequence as La Saraghina. But pulling his films off the shelf one by one, my wife and I agreed the problem was most nearly solved, onscreen and in life, by his wife and best collaborator, the tiny and brilliant Guilietta Masina. For any of this to make sense I’ll have to say a little about what Lola, the woman in my life, is like. To start, she’s French. She’s small and she likes to refer to herself as my little wife, but she’s solid too, and fit, with strong legs: in the WNFL she’d be a halfback. When she gets excited she bounces on her toes and hugs me around the waist, looking up at me. She’s far from graceless but she sometimes moves with a child’s gracelessness, like Masina—that physicality, impetuosity of expression and utterance, a mischievous delight in small wonders and small triumphs. On the other hand, when she has to enter or pass through a dark room, she stands for a moment at the threshold looking in with narrowed eyes. Anyway, I’m guessing the comparison to Masina will please her; she’s herself an actress, the kind whose outsize physical presence lends to rather than diminishes the subtlety of her performances. She comes from a family of film people, and all manner of moving image can transfix her: Tarkovsky, or Ozu, or Maya Deren. She sleeps deeply, dreams bodily, and uses cuddle as a transitive verb, one of the few early solecisms she’s done me the kindness of preserving. She cuddles me. Read More
March 11, 2014 Several Men He Was My Closest Friend By David Mamet The second of five vignettes. Photo: Larry Moyer He lived alone in various houses, and moved from one to the next in response to no discernible stimulus. I assumed that, at some point, he felt it was just “time to move.” He had lost his first wife, and their young daughter to cancer. And he told me that the terrible thing was not that they were dead, but that they stayed dead. I thought of it often, and think of it oftener since his death. I’d had a cold and was sleeping in the little guest cubby in the eaves of the attic, and I woke up with an intolerable pain in my chest. I knew I was dying, and thought, Well, this is a heart attack. It subsided, and I went back to sleep, only to be struck, again, some time later. The next morning a mutual friend called to tell me that Shel had died the night before of a heart attack—in fact, of two heart attacks, some minutes apart. My wife sent me to have my heart checked out, and its only defect was that it was broken. Read More
March 11, 2014 On the Shelf Listening to Stonehenge, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: The Stonehenge Stone Circle, via Flickr George Saunders is the first to win the new £40,000 Folio Prize. Joe McGinniss is dead, at seventy-one. Illustrations from international editions of Don Quixote published in the quixotic sixties. “As a teenager, I thought I was the only person who revered Geek Love … Years later, when I was an editor at The Paris Review, I wrote to Dunn, and we became occasional pen pals.” Stonehenge may have been a “prehistoric glockenspiel”; it’s made of “lithophones, or rocks that produce notes when struck.” “His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces.”
March 10, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Typewriter Tip-Tip-Tip By Sadie Stein Photo: Dake, via Wikimedia Commons Sometimes I like to think about what kind of sounds the people of a hundred or seventy-five years ago might have taken for granted, and those that are new—like the rattle of that stiff cereal bag, or a waking computer, of course—and those that will be extinct in our lifetime. When you play this game, you can catalog all the small elements of the sound track of a moment, and, because our knowledge is historical, place yourself in the larger context of all human existence. Or something. Anyway, it’s fun. The Pop Chart Lab has just released a new chart, this one titled A Visual Compendium of Typewriters. It features sixty hand-drawn machines, ranging from the 1870 Hammond to ornate Triumphs to the sleek Smith-Coronas of the 1960s. I thought of sending it to my dad, who is a typewriter enthusiast—although he recently lent out the bulk of his collection to the Paris Review offices. He is trying to divest himself of stuff; both my parents are. But there are still a few typewriters here, at their house, and I spent a little while typing on them this morning. A few years ago, my father gave me a very beautiful typewriter—an olive-hued second-model Royal Portable. At the time, he sent me the following note: Sades,I forgot to ask how you like the typewriter. I thought it was the best in my collection; not just the most attractive, but the one with the crispest action and, hardly to be underestimated, the most satisfying sound. In fact, all of this was confirmed by my just-concluded visit with the gentlemanly proprietor of Gramercy Office Equipment, apparently the last old-time typewriter repair shop in the city. (I went to him with my Olivetti Valentine, a machine so gorgeous it is in MoMA’s permanent collection, but one with a tendency to fall apart even when less harshly treated than was mine.) In any case, he had two Royals like yours on display, only in brown and blue. I told the guy and his son (his only employee) that we had a green one and they were suitably impressed, going on about its merits. I also procured from them a ribbon for the machine, and they said that if you had any difficulty installing it, you should bring it by. You might wish to do so anyway, because the place is the last of a dying breed, and should you be so inclined, they’ll talk old typewriters forever. They’re right across from your old stomping grounds at the Flatiron, at 174 Fifth Ave, between 22nd and 23rd, 4th floor.Love,P If you go to that typewriter repair shop my dad recommended, you will hear a cacophony of typewriter sounds—a living anachronism. It’s not for effect, or to create the illusion of age like the ersatz sepia patina on a highball-slinging new bar, but because the machines are being serviced, and oiled, and tested, and tweaked, and there is nowhere else for them to go. Somehow, those sounds give me a greater chill than they would if the typewriters were being used in some attempt to evoke an earlier time; the functionality and utility of the sound is what is transporting. “At the typewriter you find out who you are,” said that seriocomic sage of Washington State, Tom Robbins. Maybe; I hope not. But I recommend pecking away as a form of therapy if you are feeling overwhelmed. There is a reason the mechanism of the keys is called “action”—and sometimes taking action, however small, is very comforting. Even if, like me, you cannot really type.
March 10, 2014 Several Men The Man with the Companion Animal By David Mamet This week, we’re presenting five vignettes by David Mamet. Detail from Ivan Makarov’s Unknown Man, c. 1880s. The fellow down in the front row of the auditorium was around my age. He was massively obese, and he was overdressed in many layers of wool. He held an oversized pet carrier which, one presumed, held a large dog. He was permitted to carry the dog to the concert, then, as it was designated his “companion animal.” What did this mean? That his mental state was such that he could never be without his dog. The dog was his security totem. But it was in a bag. And his look was furtive. He glanced right and left, never making eye contact, as he settled himself into his seat. What was he looking for? He was looking for nothing. He was merely drawing focus. It was a performance. He was performing exemption. The pet carrier was his badge, and it indicated he had been certified as exempt, and so, beyond criticism. But one saw that he felt he had also been certified as pathetic. He had traded his self-respect for a societal indulgence, and he loathed himself for the choice. He was caught, for the daunting price he thought he had evaded in adolescence—that of matriculation into the mature world—was still being paid at age sixty. He was a man without friends. How do I know? He was at the concert accompanied by a dog in a bag. He loathed his life. He had, perhaps, at some point, been “injured,” who has not? And he suffered as he’d never found someone or some idea from which he could take courage. I felt I was looking at myself. David Mamet is a stage and film director as well as the author of numerous acclaimed plays, books, and screenplays. His latest book is Three War Stories.