January 23, 2014 Look From the Margins By Dan Piepenbring A rainbow-colored beast from the margins of a fifteenth-century text. Image via the Public Domain Review. In college, I was excited to discover a student-produced, fly-by-night zine called “From the Margins.” I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: that I assumed it was devoted to marginalia or that I was seriously juiced about the idea. When I opened its creased, xeroxed pages, though, I found it was devoted not to literal margins but to my school’s “disenfranchised peoples,” most of whom struck me as too well-heeled to feel put out. In any case, this month has granted my wish: it’s seen some great attention paid to margins, the kind on paper. Open Culture featured Dostoevsky’s manuscript doodles, which demonstrate not just his remarkable penmanship but also an affinity for faces and architecture. (The former, to no one’s surprise, are deeply melancholy.) The Public Domain Review resurfaced some rainbow-colored beasts “found in a book of hours attributed to an artist of the Ghent-Bruges school and dating from the late fifteenth century,” and Brain Pickings resurfaced a piece about Edgar Allan Poe, “history’s greatest champion of marginalia.” Poe is indeed unreserved in his praise; he also suggests, “If you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” Oh, that Poe! He’s a regular Mark Twain. Last, Sam Anderson and David Rees have defaced, or, uh, annotated, a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno, much to its benefit. There’s a lot of comfort in seeing—next to such atrocious lines of dialogue as “Don’t let her beauty fool you, she is a dangerous foe”—the red, hateful tendrils of a handwritten EAT SHIT. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to find in “From the Margins.”
January 23, 2014 Fashion & Style, Our Daily Correspondent Customer Service By Sadie Stein Photo: Romley, via Flickr I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, in one of the handful of commuter towns along the Hudson. One of these villages contained a bookstore—a good one, with a fine selection of titles and a section devoted to attractive wrapping paper and greeting cards. However, the owner was so unfailingly nasty and abusive to her customers that my mother and I came to regard it as a challenge to make it in and out of the shop without incurring her wrath. We seldom succeeded. Anything might set her off: an innocuous question, a breach of obscure etiquette, a sneeze. Needless to say, she had a hard time keeping staff. Everyone was scared of her, and the atmosphere of the store was one of silent terror. There was only one occasion on which we saw anyone break through the ice. My mom and I had been compelled to patronize the shop after failing to find Miss Rumphius anywhere else, and we had steeled ourselves for the arctic blast of the proprietor’s contempt. But when we walked in, we met with an amazing scene. A plump, jolly woman was leaning against the counter and thumbing through a novelty book—something about Jewish wit and wisdom, shaped like a large bagel. “Oh, wait—listen to this one!” she was saying. “When the temple was destroyed … the Jews built Loehmann’s!” She went off into gales of laughter. The shop owner remained stony-faced. Then: “It’s true,” she said, matter-of-factly. Read More
January 23, 2014 Arts & Culture “The Past Is a Mist”: Pinter’s Proust By Christopher Richards Photo © 2014 Nancy Crampton Yellow screen. Sound of a garden gate bell. Open countryside, a line of trees, seen from a railway carriage. The train is still. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. The sea, seen from a high window, a towel hanging on a towel rack in foreground. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. Venice. A window in a palazzo, seen from a gondola. No sound. Quick fade out. Momentary yellow screen. So begins the wordless sequence of thirty-six shots at the start of The Proust Screenplay, Harold Pinter’s adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu, written in the seventies and never filmed. To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Proust’s Swann’s Way a series of public events have been planned in New York. Part of 92Y’s contribution to the centenary was a staged reading of Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay, which was produced at the National Theatre in London in 2001 but had never been performed in the States before its 92Y debut. Helmed by the same director from the National’s production, the 92Y’s reading was directed by Di Trevis, who collaborated with Pinter to stage his screenplay. Performed by a cast of fourteen—led by Peter Clements, a dead ringer for Proust—the crowded event felt like a staged reading in name only; fully blocked out with lighting cues, set pieces, and props, the presence of the actors’ scripts was the only sign that this wasn’t a complete production. Read More
January 23, 2014 On the Shelf Nudity Defended, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Giovanni Giacometti, Theodora, 1914, oil on canvas. The return of Girls also means the return of prudish, puzzled critics. As a riposte, six reasons (just six?) that female nudity can be powerful when it’s not sexual. What if classic novels were “whorishly titled, optimizing our search engines rather than our imaginations”? (Jane Eyre is a personal favorite: “This Guy Didn’t Tell His Governess About His Secret Ex-Wife in the Attic. What Happened Next Really Burned Him Up.”) Fiction in translation is on the rise. The British Library’s new exhibition of comic books aims to inspire children to be “naughtier and more rebellious.” Embrace obscenity, kids. Do not eat your spinach. Kill all fascists. We live in a time of ever more florid author bios—here are three questions a good bio should answer. (Spoiler: one of them is “Who are you?”) Parsing punctuation in Internet initialisms: Is the semicolon in “tl;dr” ironic?
January 22, 2014 On Poetry The Leaves’ Leavetaking By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Horia Varlan, via Flickr Howard Moss, the late poet, was born today in 1922. Moss’s Selected Poems won the National Book Award in 1972; he served as The New Yorker’s poetry editor for nearly forty years, from 1948 until his death in 1987. The Paris Review published his poem “A Balcony with Birds” in our fourth issue, circa the winter of 1953; an excerpt follows. The light that hangs in the ailanthus weaves The leaves’ leavetaking overtaking leaves.The actual is real and not imagined,—still, The eye, so learned in disenchantment, seesTwo trees at once, this one of summer’s will, And winter’s one, when no bird will assailThe skyline’s hyaline transparencies, Emptying its architecture by degrees. Roundly in its fury, soon, the sun Feverish with light, goes down, and onCome ambitious stars—the stars that were But this morning dimmed. Somewhere a slowPiano scales the summits of the air And disappears, and dark descends, and thoughThe birds turn off their songs now light is gone, The mind drowned in the dark may dream them on.
January 22, 2014 Arts & Culture A Mountain of Sable Plumes By Dan Piepenbring Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s Gothic revivalist manor, in Twickenham. Earlier this week, to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, Flavorpill found ten Gothic short stories for our delectation, and I must say, they’re really hitting the spot. January is especially well suited to the tint of the Gothic mindset—nothing helps you settle into the winter doldrums like an unceasing parade of bloodied knives, thousand-yard stares, disemboweled corpses, creaking doors, and shrieking virgins. It’s enough to make you want to sunder a frilled shirt and drink rancid port from a tarnished silver chalice, muttering all the while about the gloaming, the gloaming, the gloaming… And let’s not forget the funereal knell of church bells. You’ll want those, too. If you really want to whip yourself into a Gothic froth, I recommend The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, widely regarded as the forebear of the Gothic proper. It’s not “good,” exactly—you won’t find independent booksellers foisting it on you as a forgotten classic—but it packs a lot of senseless murk into a slim volume, and it features one of my favorite opening scenes in all of literature: a homely young man is crushed to death by a giant helmet, which seems to have fallen from the sky. Read More