June 25, 2013 Listen Ben Lerner’s “False Spring” By Justin Alvarez “Would I be thought of as the biological father, just a donor, not at all?” “What is the effect of sildenafil citrate on stout-bodied passerines?” “What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?” Ben Lerner’s “False Spring” is full of many questions, but not many answers. Blame it on his being a poet; he prefers ambiguity to resolution. “False Spring,” just like his novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, can be read as a Künstlerroman of sorts. Who knew a visit to the Park Slope Food Coop could be so transformative?
June 25, 2013 In Memoriam Richard Matheson, 1926–2013 By Sadie Stein Richard Matheson, the screenwriter and author of (among others) I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, and What Dreams May Come, has died, at eighty-seven. Below, watch a pre-Kirk William Shatner in the Matheson-penned Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”
June 25, 2013 On Sports Bergtraum v. Beacon By Mark Chiusano Image via Flickr. The visiting team is already waiting at the fence when Murry Bergtraum High School coach Nick Pizza arrives on Cherry Street to open the gates to his field, which are kept locked. His players haven’t arrived yet, though the visiting team, Beacon High School, has already dressed on the sidewalk, a cluster of parents standing a few feet away, averting their eyes. No metal cleats are allowed in the complex, because the turf and dirt are that nice. The backstop opens up toward the Manhattan Bridge, and right field ends at the FDR Drive. The Brooklyn Bridge unspools to the south. The field is well dragged, and a custodian walks around its edges, using a leafblower to blow stray baseball dirt off the surrounding track. Back in October, the field looked different: after Hurricane Sandy, for almost a week, it was under three feet of water. By the time Coach Pizza (“Brooklyn born and raised”) has changed into his uniform, his players are beginning to arrive, some of them on rollerblades, from Murry Bergtraum proper, a jail-like facility wedged between the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall. “I got a good bunch of kids,” Coach Pizza says. “Gotta find that balance, get the classroom stuff out of the way.” Bergtraum, with a record of 3-10, is a perennial underachiever in Manhattan A West, while Beacon, 10-3, has won the division the past two years. One problem for Pizza’s team: eligibility. Too many players have failed too many classes to play. Hurricane Sandy didn’t help—early games had to be rescheduled, and Bergtraum didn’t have use of their field until mid-April, well into the season: after trucks of clay were redeposited over the infield, the locker rooms dug free of sand by the custodians. Bergtraum High School, a once-proud jewel of the city education system that prepared students for practical careers in business, is now perhaps more famous for hallway riots and the fact that it’s one of the few large schools that the DOE hasn’t broken up (more positively, too, for its phenomenal girls’ basketball team). The student body, predominantly black and Hispanic, comes from all the far reaches of the boroughs, along the stretch of the J, M, Z, and L lines, necessitating commutes of over an hour in some cases. Read More
June 25, 2013 On the Shelf Map Your Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Café Kafka, Barcelona. A new app, Placing Literature, lets you find literary landmarks and bookstores wherever your travels take you. For your delectation: ten bookish restaurants. (We want to go to Café Kafka.) Everyone knows the original Little Mermaid—walking on knives, sea foam, and all—is anything but cute. At the LA Review of Books, scholars weigh in on the implications of Andersen’s grim tale. A tribute to that publisher’s friend, the subtitle. “The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times.” Verlyn Klinkenborg on the rise and fall of the American English major.
June 24, 2013 At Work Object Lessons: A Conversation with Christian Patterson By Rebecca Bengal Sissy Spacek in Badlands, 1973. By permission of Criterion Collection. Lovers on the run tend to travel light. Generally speaking, in our collective imagination, accoutrements tend to be limited to car (probably stolen), gun (also stolen), clothes on their backs. Yet Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (captured in 1958 after a violent shooting spree in Nebraska and Wyoming that left eleven dead) become legend in part by leaving behind a physical trail. Of the multiple films inspired by the Starkweather-Fugate killings, Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands (newly released by the Criterion Collection), is the one that—even as it takes dramatic liberties—most explicitly focuses on these tangible objects. Kit and Holly (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) cart along a birdcage, a copy of Kon-Tiki, and a Maxfield Parrish painting; the film’s art director, Jack Fisk, filled one character’s house with $100 worth of random pieces—a jar of black widows, a giant ball of twine—he’d bought from the relatives of a dead man. Just prior to their capture, Kit buries a few of their belongings, described in deadpan voice-over: “He said no one else would know where we put ’em, and that we’d come back some day, maybe, and they’d still be sitting here just the same, but we’d be different, and if we never got back, well, somebody might dig ’em up a thousand years from now and wouldn’t they wonder.” Nearly forty years later, Christian Patterson’s 2011 book of photographs, Redheaded Peckerwood, continues down a similar path. Already in its third edition, with a thoughtful introduction by Luc Sante and curator Karen Irvine, Patterson’s is a work that defies the easy definition of photo book, approaching as it does the Starkweather narrative from a number of vantage points: newspaper clippings, interviews, ephemera. The photographs of bits of evidence, or of things belonging to the killers and victim—a hood ornament from the getaway car, the teenage Fugate’s stuffed toy poodle—have the aura of a saint’s relics. Tucked into the binding of the book are more souvenirs, reproductions of documents related to Starkweather (a store receipt with a poem printed on its reverse side; a typed list of dirty aphorisms). Even those things that are not directly related to Starkweather and Fugate take on the air of authenticity; the effect of seeing all these effects, in the context of the photographer’s present-day mapping of their journey, is transcendent and shocking, the objects themselves acting as witnesses. What struck you most about Badlands when you first saw the film? I was taken with the film in every way. Visually, it was just so damn beautiful, with its big, painterly skies and endless, romantic landscapes. And thematically, well … it was one hell of a crazy story. Sheen and Spacek were great too. It’s a great film. What were some of the first pictures you made that appear in the book? And when you arrived in Nebraska, what were some of your early impressions? House at Night and Ray of Light stand out in my mind. The former is the first of my photographs that appears in Redheaded Peckerwood and the latter is one of the last. Read More
June 24, 2013 Arts & Culture The Strange Mystery of Ambrose Bierce By Sadie Stein On this day in 1843, the cynic, journalist, and satirist Ambrose Bierce was born in Ohio. It’s his death that’s in question; in 1913 the seventy-one-year-old writer disappeared without a trace (probably) somewhere in Mexico, while (possibly) traveling with Pancho Villa’s army. Nearly everything about Bierce’s final days is subject to speculation, rumor, and debate. While some claim he ended his final letter with “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” others debate the validity of the prophetic pronouncement. Some claim he was killed by firing squad; others, that he committed suicide; and still others, that he disappeared into another dimension. In any event, his continued existence seems unlikely, and his legend assured by the mystery. As he himself put it, “Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him.”