January 22, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Like the Cat That Got the Cream By Sadie Stein Photo: catsdrivingthings.tumblr.com The girl and the boy stood in the doorway of the crosstown bus as we crossed the park. She was dressed all in black, her lank hair streaked with crimson, eyes circled with heavy kohl, wrists crisscrossed with black rubber bracelets. Her backpack bore an “Emily the Strange” badge. Her companion, plump and pale, in an oversized trench coat, turned toward her with a coy tilt of his head. “Mee-ow,” he purred, extending and then curling his fingers one by one in what was clearly intended to be a cat-like manner. His companion did not respond. “Mee-ow,” he said more loudly. “I’m so fucked on this test. Let’s get some pizza,” she said impatiently, pulling the stop bell. There was a brief silence. Then, “Purrrr-fect,” said the boy. She ignored him. They got off at the next stop, after a very slow old lady.
January 22, 2014 On Poetry W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y By Cynthia Ozick W. H. Auden at the Poetry Center, 1966. Photo: Diane Dorr-Dorynek, courtesy of 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center “75 at 75,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Cynthia Ozick reflects on W. H. Auden, whose readings she remembers attending as a Poetry Center subscriber in the fifties. There must be sorrow if there can be love. —From “Canzone” Ah, the fabled sixties and seventies! Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs! The glorious advent of Howling! Of Getting Stoned! The proliferation of Ginsbergian Exclamation Points! To secure the status of their literary subversion, these revolutionary decades were obliged, like the cadres of every insurrection, to denigrate and despise, and sometimes to blow up, their immediate predecessor, the fifties—the middling middle, the very navel, of the twentieth century. The fifties, after all, were the Eisenhower years, stiff and small like Mamie’s bangs (and just as dated), dully mediocre, constrained, consumerist, car-finned, conformist, forgettable, and stale as modernism itself. Randall Jarrell, one of its leading poets and critics, named this midcentury epoch “The Age of Criticism”—and what, however he intended it, could suggest prosiness more? And what is prosiness if not the negation of the lively, the living, the lasting, the daring, the true and the new? The reality was sublimely opposite. It was, in fact, the Age of Poetry, a pinnacle and an exaltation; there has not been another since. Its poets were more than luminaries—they were colossi, their very names were talismans, and they rose before us under a halo of brilliant lights like figures in a shrine. It was a kind of shrine: the grand oaken hall, the distant stage and its hallowed lectern, the enchanted voices with their variegated intonations, the rapt listeners scarcely breathing, the storied walls themselves in trance—this was the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in the heart of the twentieth century. Read More
January 22, 2014 On the Shelf “The Era of the Word,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A Golden Age for journalism. (Journalism not pictured.) Illustration by Brahma Kumaris. “A strangely democratic and egalitarian Era of the Word has emerged.” Why we may be living in an idyllic age for journalism. “People love stories. The more you see your story as part of a broader narrative, the better.” The six things that make stories go viral will amaze, and maybe infuriate, you. Kudos to The New Yorker for aping Upworthy’s headline style. And since we’re doing sixes: six pieces of advice from successful writers. (Though they’re a touch cliché, right down to the “avoid clichés” apothegm.) It’s the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision. The medium is obsolete; the verdict is not. It’s the basis of a lot of our ideas about copyright, consumer rights, and fair use. #ReadWomen2014: A hashtag becomes a movement.
January 21, 2014 Look Welcome to Wellcome By Dan Piepenbring Thomas Burke after Philipp Reinagle, Cupid inspiring plants with Love, in a tropical landscape, 1805, via Wellcome Images. Enjoy viscera? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: as of yesterday, London’s Wellcome Library, whose specialty is medical history, has opened up more than 100,000 images in its capacious digital archive for free download. Whether your tastes run to the macabre or the beautiful—not to say, of course, that such things are mutually exclusive—the Wellcome galleries have something for you. Conjoined twins wearing swimsuits? They’re here. A man being hit on the head by a falling flowerpot in Rome, circa 1890? Coming right up. Or perhaps—the keystone of any collection—a surgeon letting blood from Thomas Thurlow, Bishop of Durham, but leaving his patient in order to attend to a sick horse. And it’s not all grisly; above, for instance, you’ll see Cupid, slinging arrows so that the flora of the tropics will be inclined to reproduce. (You know, sexually.) Click in good health.
January 21, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Curious Punishments By Sadie Stein A still from Quick Draw McGraw. The other day, my brother called and asked if I would look and see if he had accidentally left his good trousers at my apartment while he was crashing with me; he needed to attend a funeral. I said he had, and that I would press them for him. “I wish he could afford some better clothes,” I said regretfully to my friend. “But it’s not like anyone will be looking. And the lights probably won’t be be very bright.” (While this may seem a trivial concern, anyone who has worn black polyester to a funeral will know what I’m talking about.) “It will be fine,” said my friend. “It’s not as though he’ll be in rags. Or a barrel and suspenders.” This got us thinking about barrels and suspenders—the familiar image of an individual in visibly reduced circumstances. I imagined it had originated in old political cartoons or similar. And then of course we had to look it up. Wikipedia informed us that, indeed, a cartoonist called Will B. Johnstone was known for having created a New York World-Telegram cartoon character known as the Tax Payer, who—presumably having been taxed so exorbitantly that he could no longer afford clothing—was portrayed sporting only a barrel held up by suspenders. But the origin of the trope was most likely the Drunkard’s Cloak, or Newcastle Cloak, a form of pillory in seventeenth-century Germany and England in which the publicly inebriated were placed in a barrel colorfully illustrated with scenes of drunken antics. As one helpful Web site explains, “There were two kinds—the enclosed barrel which forced the victim to kneel in his or her own filth, or the open barrel which allowed the victim to roam about town, open to ridicule and scorn.” A Sophie’s choice, really. Especially as both barrels were likely employed for communal use and, presumably, never cleaned. Read More
January 21, 2014 Events What We’re Doing: Talkin’ Translation By Dan Piepenbring Tonight at seven, brave the snow, the cold, and any other inclemencies the sky may belch on us and come to Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, where our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, is discussing translation with Eliot Weinberger (acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bei Dao), Idra Novey (translator of Clarice Lispector), Daniella Gitlin (translator of Rodolfo Walsh), and Jeffrey Yang (poet, editor, and translator of Liu Xiaobo). It’s all to celebrate the third anniversary of Asymptote, the international literary journal.