February 13, 2014 From the Archive “Snow Is a Hat Worn By Mountains” By Dan Piepenbring Some might suggest that for a literary blog to feature three snow-related posts in a day is excessive. Well, tough. The weather has always been a great common denominator. And to our credit, we’ve refrained from calling this “Winter Storm Pax” or “the snowpocalypse.” We have standards. Here, then, are seven poems from our archives fit for a snowy night. I won’t claim they’ll warm or comfort you—they’re poems, not pap—but they’re terrific reads, and they will be of some help. Next time you share an elevator with a distant colleague, you’ll use the weather as a conversational crutch, as one does; but instead of saying, “Man, it’s cold out!” you’ll say, “Snow is a hat worn by mountains.” You’ll make a lasting impression. Note, too, that the majority of these poems were published in the spring or summer: a reminder that what’s unendurable now will be desirable in a few months’ time. Debora Greger, “To the Snow” (from The Paris Review No. 154, Spring 2000) Snow, let go. It’s late, You are cornmush. You are cold. Let me cover you with this white sheet. No one will know. Agha Shahid Ali, “Snow on the Desert” (from No. 107, Summer 1988) the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. Read More
February 13, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent A Brief History of the Snowball Fight By Sadie Stein Venceslao Boemo, January, c. 1400. My colleague Stephen sent along this clipping earlier today, from an 1855 issue of the New York Times. Nor is this the only recorded instance of snowball-related violence. January 29, 1863: Confederate troops stationed in the Rappahannock Valley in Northern Virginia begin exchanging friendly snowball fire. This escalates to a nine-thousand-rebel brawl. This is what happens when you put rocks in your snowballs. January 12, 1893: Some rambunctious Princeton sophomores engage in a rock-laced snowball fight. This is the result. The Great Depression: Snowballs (aka snowcones) are known as “hard times sundaes.” August 17, 1945: Animal Farm is published. Summer, 1958: My dad (or rather, the boy who will, decades later, become my dad) and his friends decide it will be the coolest thing ever if they freeze snowballs during the winter so they can have a snowball fight in July. First snowball—now pure ice—results in eight-year-old Joel Bernstein taken to the hospital for stitches. January 7, 2013: A German teacher, hurt in a snowball fight with students, sues the school board and succeeds in getting it classified a work injury. February 13, 2014: A brother and sister, maybe five and three, are having a snowball fight under my window. She repeatedly screams, “WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? TO GO TO THE BATHROOM!” He throws a snowball at her face; she falls down, crying.
February 13, 2014 Arts & Culture The Silent Treatment By Harry Backlund On Art Spiegelman’s new stage show, Wordless! Photo: Robert Kozloff/The University of Chicago In 1970, when Art Spiegelman was twenty-two, he went to a gallery opening in Binghamton, New York, for an exhibition of woodcuts by Lynd Ward. Spiegelman wanted to tell Ward how much he admired the wordless novels the artist had made in the 1930s, but also, and no less importantly, he wanted to ask him what his favorite comic books were. The way Spiegelman tells it, the sixty-five-year-old Ward was gracious but confused: he didn’t know much about comics; his Methodist minister father had forbidden them. Ward’s woodcut novels, which blended Depression-era social realism with a Faustian sense of good and evil, owed more to the biblical engravings of Gustave Doré than they did to the Sunday funnies. Spiegelman didn’t get the comics talk he came for, but he spent some time in the gallery, studying those prints. Two years later, he composed a four-page comic about his guilt over his mother’s suicide. It was just a few panels, but their startling intimacy set the pattern for much of his later work, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus, in which they were later included. Spiegelman titled that short comic “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” and in its stark style and pitch-black outlook, you can see the influence of Ward’s woodcuts. Spiegelman has given Ward’s novels a central role in Wordless!, the new stage show he created with the composer Phillip Johnston, and which the two men presented twice last Saturday to sold-out crowds at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. Wordless! weaves together Spiegelman’s reflections on the history of wordless novels with slide show projections of the genre’s classic works, which Johnston and his sextet accompany with rollicking, klezmer-inflected, vaudeville jazz. The back-and-forth between lecture and performance neatly captured Spiegelman’s ambivalence about his role on stage. On the one hand, he was a comic artist on a mission, there to add a new branch to the family tree of the graphic novel, one that would demonstrate the genre’s deep roots and help solidify its place in the canon of “real literature.” Mostly though, Spiegelman was having fun. He was there to give the crowd what he had sought from Ward: a conversation about some of his favorite comics and a taste of the overwhelming pleasure they give him. “Don’t worry if you get a little lost while you’re watching,” he reassured his listeners between puffs on his e-cigarette. “I’m hoping you will careen between my words and these picture stories until you’re left as breathlessly unbalanced as I am.” Read More
February 13, 2014 Quote Unquote Noodles and Mush By Dan Piepenbring A valiant mascot shovels snow outside the Nissin Cup Noodles Museum in Yokohama. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old lace is that odors stick to it forever. And you can’t deliver smelly lace! So what didn’t smell? Noodles. I’ve eaten basinfuls of noodles. My mother made noodles by the basinful. Boiled noodles, oh, yes, yes, all my youth, noodles and mush. —Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the Art of Fiction No. 33
February 13, 2014 On the Shelf There’s Not an App for That, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Do you really want to write like this guy, anyway? The last thing the world needs is another Hemingway imitator, but a new app purports to help you write like Ernest Hemingway. It lops off adverbs and corrects instances of passive voice, but “it’s pretty tricky to distill instructions into computer code and make a machine into an editor.” Phew. Job security. Why are writers such inveterate procrastinators? “We were too good in English class.” Another question: Why do literary biographers insist on portraying “a positive moral image” of their subjects, many of whom were ethically lax? The Tournament of Cookbooks has begun. There will be blood. And bruised egos. And bold Mediterranean recipes. An 1882 pamphlet—“The Nonsense of It!”—sunders the flimsy arguments against giving women the vote. “‘The polls are not decent places for women at present.’ Then she is certainly needed there to make them decent … the presence of one woman would be worth a dozen policemen.”
February 12, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Common Language By Sadie Stein Photo: Konstmat, via Flickr During my junior year of college, I had the chance to study at a university in London. I flew out of JFK on September 15, 2001, and the flight was so empty I was able to lie down across four seats for the first and last time in my life. In England, many of our fellow students seemed to feel obliged to either ask solicitously about our 9/11 experiences, or express their views on American imperialism. In both capacities, I felt I proved a disappointment. During that year abroad, my American friend Rachel and I became fascinated with a group of fellow literature students who seemed to us unspeakably wonderful. They never said anything in seminar, they always looked glamorously ridiculous, and, best of all, their company was highly exclusive. We came up with names for all of them. There was the seeming leader, “Robert Smith,” who had sculptural, Cure-like hair. “Charles and Camilla Macaulay” looked a bit alike—in fact, the whole crew struck us as very Secret History-esque. We called one tall, severe boy “Adam Bede”; one emaciated fellow was “Schiele”; another, I’m sorry to say, was just “the Balding One.” They moved in a pack, smoked roll-ups in a secretive cluster, exchanged notes and amused eye contact during class, and cohabited, or so we assumed. The clique seemed to us all things not-American. It shamed us to think that they associated us with the Boston girl who was always shouting loud, obvious things about Sylvia Plath or the sleazy Arizona boy who hit on all the prettiest girls. We were desperate to prove our worth to them, but how? The only person outside their circle with whom we’d ever seen them associate was a studious, translucently fair young man named Rupert Davies. Read More