January 31, 2014 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Pragmatism, Professional Consultants, Pubic Crests By The Paris Review Walter Battiss, Wandering Nude 1, 1978, oil on canvas. Pop quiz! Which American philosopher coined the following expressions: pluralism, time-line, healthy-minded, live option, stream of consciousness, and the bitch-goddess success. Hint: he counted among his most devoted students Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roosevelt, and W.E.B. DuBois. Last hint, from a letter he wrote to his little brother Henry, in 1902: “You have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean).” If you guessed William James (correctly), you probably remember him as the main inventor of “pragmatism,” the can-do philosophy that professional philosophers love to hate. But as Robert D. Richardson shows in his 2006 biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, it is hard to imagine a livelier, more lovable mind. As a scientist, James did original work on everything from evolution to spiritualism. As a philosopher, he anticipated everyone from Bergson to Wittgenstein to Austin to Daniel Kahneman. As a person, James is the most appealing kind of genius, continually inspired by his family, by his friendships and romances, and by communion with what he called “the hidden self,” where we are most vulnerable and alive. —Lorin Stein The latest issue of Granta includes “Nudity,” an essay by Norman Rush about his youthful encounters with the body au naturel. Rush’s parents dabbled in a kind of functional nudism, which we might today call “letting it all hang out.” “The nudity of my parents did not assuage my ripening interest, but inflamed it,” he writes. “I wanted to see other naked female humans, and I wanted my father to keep his bathrobe on.” Though the piece mostly chronicles the young Rush’s quest to see live nudes, it takes an astonishing, affecting swerve in its final paragraph, which I won’t spoil here. It also includes, of course, those quintessentially Rushian terms for the female anatomy, “escutcheon” (the pubic crest) and “introitus” (just look it up). —Dan Piepenbring Sunday is Groundhog Day (fingers crossed!), but I’ve been heralding the arrival of spring for days now, however futile my attempts may be. Perhaps that’s why I picked up Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book this week. I’ve read Jansson’s Moomin comics and her children’s books, but I haven’t ever delved into her prose. This book—a series of interrelated vignettes about a girl and her grandmother on a quiet island in the Gulf of Finland—is a treasure. Its stories are miniatures not just in length but in perspective as well: sometimes literally, as when the grandmother lays down near the beach and studies a blade of grass, a fluff of down, and a piece of bark in the sand by her face. Through her examination, their minute details are writ large; the bark, for instance, becomes “a very ancient mountain.” And when she finally gazes past them, to the wider world, it no longer looks so big. —Nicole Rudick The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish is a paean to that now-extinct species, the “dress doctor,” a professional consultant who helped average citizens navigate questions of style and economy in a rapidly changing landscape. How should a working girl look professional on a budget? How might a farm wife stretch a yard of fabric and still be chic? And how to incorporate principles of harmony, proportion, balance, rhythm, emphasis into every aspect of aesthetic life? The author, Linda Przybyszewski, is an academic, and the book serves as an informative cultural history. But more than this, it is a tribute to a time when style—and maybe even life—felt more straightforward, and however arbitrary, there were definitive answers. —Sadie Stein Read More
January 31, 2014 Bulletin We’re Telling You for the Last Time By Dan Piepenbring Photo: eefeewahfah, via Flickr Last call! Our subscription deal with McSweeney’s ends at midnight tonight. As you now probably know by heart, you can get a full year of McSweeney’s and The Paris Review for just $75, a 20 percent savings on all the interviews, fiction, essays, art, poetry, and humor a discerning reader could want. The end of January grows nigh. Has the promise of the new year already lost its luster? Has your resolve faltered vis-à-vis exercise, temperance, or chastity? Don’t fret. With this deal, you still have time—not much, though—to stoke the embers of hope and change in your life. Take it from us: we’ve kept our resolutions. And you can, too—at least until the stroke of midnight, when February begins and our offer vanishes, like so many human ambitions, into the sands of time. Subscribe now! You won’t be sorry.
January 31, 2014 Arts & Culture It Lurks By Ben Flake The creature in question, ostensibly terrifying. Today is the Chinese New Year, and as you prepare to celebrate, I entreat you to remember the reason for the season. It’s a tale of not inconsiderable woe, and for this reason children are cautioned against reading it, though they’re also, paradoxically, commanded to heed it. In the land called China, during a period called the shànggǔ—which translates roughly to “a very long time ago”—a fearsome creature-beast once roamed the land. It was known as the Nian, because rather than howling or roaring like your more conventional monster types, it emitted a cry that sounds like the Chinese word nián. Accounts of the beast’s appearance vary, but in many depictions, it resembles the stone lions sometimes seen outside Chinese restaurants: flat faced, with a dog’s body, prominent incisors, and a barrister’s powdered wig. Some have even described it as a lion with the heart of a bull. All of which suggests that it’s fairly effete and underwhelming, with very high blood pressure. And yet it struck terror into the hearts of men. Every year on the night of the second full moon after the winter solstice, the Nian would come down from its home in the mountains to harass people and eat their chickens and children. In order to escape its wrath, the villagers would evacuate their homes and flee into the forest. This went on for centuries, presumably, until one year the people devised a plan. They sent an emissary up through the mountains into the Nian’s lair. Quaking with fear, he approached it and he said, “Nian, if you think you’re so big, go and kill all the other monsters in the world.” And so it was that the Nian killed all the other monsters in the world. Read More
January 31, 2014 On the Shelf When People Movers Were the Future, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the September 10, 1972, edition of Our New Age, drawn by Gene Fawcette. Via Paleofuture A legible—and quite informative—map of the Internet. Would-be circumnavigators may find themselves buffeted by the trade winds of Spam Ocean. And shame on you if you’re only seeking a passage to the Continent of Porn. For the transit wonks of the seventies, the dream of the day was people movers: the “car-like pods” on rails still seen occasionally at airports. Behold their squandered promise, their sleek mobility, their Velveeta-orange color. Two new poems by Sappho were discovered on ancient papyrus. One of them mentions Sappho’s brothers; “it’s very exciting to have a new Sappho poem that isn’t about erotic love or beauty.” Agree to disagree. “Growth is a greater mystery than death … Not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.” Norman Mailer on the pursuit of prestige. In 1983, Aramco Oil hired someone to photograph oil rigs and gas-oil separation plants. He also kept an affecting photo diary.
January 30, 2014 Arts & Culture O, Youth! By Dan Piepenbring From letters published in the February 1, 1881, edition of Harper’s Young People, a spinoff of Harper’s for readers six to sixteen. Will Mary R., of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, please oblige me by giving her method of cultivating heliotrope, as it is one of my favorites, and I can never succeed in raising it. I have over two hundred plants in my parlor and sitting-room windows, and not one heliotrope. I have a beautiful black goat named Dan, and a complete set of silver-plated harness … Dan will not allow any boy to come near him, but he loves me dearly, and I love him. I am eleven years old. I and my brother used to have such good times fishing on these lakes in our canoes, and hunting deer in the woods, but now I am so lonely, for my only brother is dead. He went out in the woods to hunt deer, and got lost, and froze to death. I am a subscriber to Young People, and although I am not one of the “little folks,” I find the Post-office Box very interesting, as I am very fond of children and of pets. I have a bright, intelligent pony, a Mexican dog four years old that does not weigh more than two pounds, a mocking-bird, canaries, and a lot of fancy pigeons, and two aquaria filled with fish. In my letter printed in Young People No. 62 I intended to say that I would exchange postmarks, not for other postmarks, but for stamps and minerals. I regret that I made the mistake. I am very much interested in “Toby Tyler” and “Mildred’s Bargain.” I spent one summer at Cape May, and there I found a turtle that was so tame it would eat out of my hand, and drink out of a tea-spoon. I fed it on raw meat, soaked bread, and worms, but it ran away.
January 30, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Chocolate: A Confession By Sadie Stein A still from Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005. Even at my loneliest and most cynical, I have always liked Valentine’s Day. The commercialized romance bothers me not a whit—I like watching couples being romantic, or awkward, or goofy. But this I will say: for those of us who don’t love chocolate, the onset of February is, well, disheartening. Nowadays, scientists like to point to the fact that eating chocolate somehow mimics the physiological characteristics of female arousal, but one doubts that science is behind the ubiquity of the heart-shaped variety box. After all, the whole connection between chocolate and courtship goes back to the nineteenth century. I’m no historian, but I’d imagine it’s more a “sweets for the sweet” bit of marketing that struck an immediate chord. If we are going to talk about amateur modern chocolate historians, Roald Dahl cannot be ignored. As anyone familiar with his oeuvre knows, the man loved chocolate. But the full extent of his feelings cannot be understood until one has read the manifesto “Chocolate,” in his highly idiosyncratic Roald Dahl’s Cookbook. Talking of what he terms the “Chocolate Revolution” of 1930–37, Dahl declares, The dates themselves should be taught in school to every child. Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one’s life. But 1932 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers, and 1937 the Kit Kat—these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the mind of every child in the country. If I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them. (Not that one imagines he went in much for Valentine’s Day.) Read More