September 30, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles, Part 7 By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner’s research into the endless ways we’ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Over the past seven weeks, this chronological crash course has examined the ways humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. This is the final installment. You have to get old. Don’t cry, don’t clasp your hands in prayer, don’t rebel; you have to get old. Repeat the words to yourself, not as a howl of despair but as the boarding call to a necessary departure. —Colette, Les Vrilles de la Vigne In 1927, before Charles Lindbergh set off across the Atlantic Ocean, newspapers described the flight as a guaranteed “rendez-vous with death.” While the Spirit of St. Louis hummed toward France, human-formed phantoms and vapor-like spirits materialized before Lindbergh’s eyes. These “inhabitants of a universe closed to mortal men” spoke to him, reassuring him and helping him find his way. This inner experience, he wrote, seemed to penetrate beyond the finite. It was an epiphany that guided the rest of his life. After his pioneering flight, he received millions of letters, thousands of poems, countless gleaming accolades. Whole cities attended parades in his honor. Wing-walking skywriters spelled HAIL LINDY high in the air. Former secretary of state and later U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes gave a speech in New York heralding “science victorious.” In the euphoria’s wake, having managed one impossibility, Lindbergh wondered if he mightn’t help solve another. Working alongside Nobel Prize–winning cell biologist Alexis Carrel (who claimed, erroneously, that cells divide endlessly and are therefore naturally immortal), Lindbergh came to question whether death is “an inevitable portion of life’s cycle,” musing that perhaps scientific methods could hasten the arrival of bodily immortality. Lindbergh had been raised to believe that “the key to all mystery is science.” The idea that science will allow men to become gods was instilled in him by his grandfather, a well-known surgical dentist. For postflight Lindbergh, solving the basic mystery of death seemed only as challenging as flying across the sea. It just meant doing what people said couldn’t be done. Yet as he aged, and as his experiments didn’t yield the hoped-for results, he began questioning his desire for immortality. He became an environmentalist, spending time in the wilderness and observing cycles of life and death in nature. Read More
September 30, 2013 Quote Unquote Other Voices By Sadie Stein “I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Register. There was a children’s page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I’ve forgotten which, but I wanted it badly. I had been noticing the activities of some neighbors who were up to no good, so I wrote a kind of roman à clef called “Old Mr. Busybody” and entered it in the contest. The first installment appeared one Sunday, under my real name of Truman Streckfus Persons. Only somebody suddenly realized that I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second installment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing.” —Truman Capote, the Art of Fiction No. 17
September 30, 2013 On the Shelf Man with Van of La Mancha, and Other News By Sadie Stein In honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath, playwright Octavio Solis, writer Patricia Wakida, and filmmaker P. J. Palmer will retrace the Oklahoma-to-California journey of the Joad family. Along Route 66, they plan to collect oral histories, documenting the ten-day journey on social media. Meanwhile, photographer Jacob Robinson takes to La Mancha (and Kickstarter) to “capture the spirit of Don Quixote” for the Visual Editions project. Helen Fielding has killed off Mark Darcy, leaving Bridget Jones a widow; readers are in shock. Garrison Keillor has penned his first book of poetry: O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic and Profound.
September 27, 2013 Arts & Culture One Ring to Rule Them All By Ted Scheinman Amid the bustle of this year’s Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), where many attendees sport Regency garb from dawn to dusk, one curious piece of material history is provoking sustained, triumphal glee. Last year, Kelly Clarkson, winner of the first American Idol, in 2002, bought a turquoise-and-gold ring that Austen had bequeathed to her sister, Cassandra. Clarkson is a devotee of the novelist and, by virtue of her fortune, a serious collector who already keeps a first edition of Persuasion in her personal library. Sotheby’s had placed the ring’s reserve price at £30,000; Clarkson paid £152,450. Original Austen totems are hard to come by. Slivers of her library have survived, as have a few likenesses by Cassandra, various small items of jewelry (including a topaz cross that Paula Byrne is especially fond of), and whatever portion of the novelist’s letters Cassandra didn’t burn. The scarcity of such items, and the national importance of the writer Rudyard Kipling once called “England’s Jane,” prompted furrowed brows on at least two continents over the prospect that this ring—perhaps she wore it as she wrote Persuasion!—might find an unceremonious home in southern California. Austen blogs and listservs lit up, as did the Republic of Pemberley. The Jane Austen’s House Museum, in the Hampshire village where Austen spent the last eight years of her life, marshaled this general unease into a pledge-drive campaign. Meanwhile, England’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, enforced a rare “temporary export bar” that kept the ring in the U.K. and gave the museum until the end of December 2013 to match the Clarkson bid. Vaizey’s statement was simple: “Jane Austen’s modest lifestyle and her early death mean that objects associated with her of any kind are extremely rare, so I hope that a UK buyer comes forward so this simple but elegant ring can be saved for the nation.” Read More
September 27, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Connell, Lewis, Cupcakes By The Paris Review Upside-down cupcakes, Sally Bell’s Kitchen. Just as in Evan S. Connell’s The Connoisseur, a pre-Columbian figurine caught my eye—in this case, on the book’s cover. I had enjoyed the understated yet resonant interview with Connell we published earlier this year (the man knew how to change the subject!), and I was equally moved by the book, the story of a Manhattan insurance executive who becomes hopelessly, inextricably obsessed with the aforementioned figurines. There are no frills, plot twists, or explosions: simply a series of small choices that can change a life forever. As the protagonist reflects near the end of the book, “[H]e has acquired a little knowledge, perhaps no deeper than a root trace, which can’t be lost.” —Justin Alvarez I have a terrible feeling that A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps may be a hard sell for some readers. But trust me: Chris West’s cultural history is fast paced and engaging, and the organizing principle takes the narrative in all kinds of unexpected directions. Sure, there’s a little light philately in there, but even those who only communicate electronically will be glad they picked it up. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
September 27, 2013 Look Eudora Welty, Photographer By Sadie Stein The Wiljax Gallery of Cleveland, Mississippi, is featuring a selection of Eudora Welty’s Depression-era photographic portraits, which the young writer developed and printed herself in her Jackson kitchen. It was the first time many of her subjects had been photographed; Welty reportedly tried to give copies to almost all of them. She would pursue photography through the 1950s; pictures she took were inspiration for several of her short stories.