October 17, 2013 Fashion & Style Alienation By Sadie Stein I spent far too long staring at this T-shirt, number thirty-seven in BuzzFeed’s gallery of literary paraphernalia. I mean, I understand the basic concept: the wearer is reading, and would prefer not to be bothered. The garment is in the grand tradition of hostile tees, alongside such classics as “Do I LOOK like a fucking people person?” “Fuck You You Fucking Fuck,” and “You read my T-shirt. That’s enough social interaction for one day.” The genre is itself inherently tragic, combining as it does a desperate desire for human connection with a self-protecting defensiveness. This shirt adds to these the element of cognitive dissonance. Save in rare instances when the wearer is, indeed, engaged in reading—and which fact would presumably be self-evident—it’s simply not true. Or maybe they mean reading in a metaphorical, or psychic, sense. If you encounter this shirt in the wild, you will want to know; your brain will teem with questions, your instinct will be to get to the bottom of the mystery. But of course, per the shirt, you can’t. You’ll walk away. And you’ll both be lonely and confused and left without closure. But maybe the richer for it.
October 17, 2013 Arts & Culture In Praise of the Flâneur By Bijan Stephen Little things in life supplant the “great events.” —Peter Altenberg, as translated by Peter Wortsman The figure of the flâneur—the stroller, the passionate wanderer emblematic of nineteenth-century French literary culture—has always been essentially timeless; he removes himself from the world while he stands astride its heart. When Walter Benjamin brought Baudelaire’s conception of the flâneur into the academy, he marked the idea as an essential part of our ideas of modernism and urbanism. For Benjamin, in his critical examinations of Baudelaire’s work, the flâneur heralded an incisive analysis of modernity, perhaps because of his connotations: “[the flâneur] was a figure of the modern artist-poet, a figure keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism,” as a 2004 article in the American Historical Review put it. Since Benjamin, the academic establishment has used the flâneur as a vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity—urban life, alienation, class tensions, and the like. In the ensuing decades, however, the idea of flânerie as a desirable lifetsyle has fallen out of favor, due to some arcane combination of increasing productivity—hello, fruits of the Industrial Revolution!—and the modern horror at the thought of doing absolutely nothing. (See: Michael Jordan’s “retirements.”) But as we grow inexorably busier—due in large part to the influence of technology—might flânerie be due for a revival? If contemporary literature is any indication, the answer is a soft yes. Take Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City. Cole’s narrator, Julius, wanders up and down Manhattan, across the Atlantic to Brussels and back again, while off-handedly delivering bits of wisdom and historical insight. It’s not just that Open City is beautifully written, though that’s certainly true. Cole’s skill manifests itself in depicting the dreamy psychogeographic landscape—and accompanying amorality and solipsism—of Julius’s mind. Riding behind his eyes is a trip; even though we’re in his head, the tone of his thoughts still sets us at a distance. Tao Lin’s recently released Taipei achieves something similar. As Ian Sansom wrote in the Guardian, “Passage after passage in the novel dwells on the meaning of disassociation and self-exile.” Read More
October 17, 2013 Quote Unquote History Boys By Sadie Stein “Being a playwright was always the maximum idea. I’d always felt that the theater was the most exciting and the most demanding form one could try to master. When I began to write, one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about twenty-five hundred years of playwriting. There are so few masterpieces in the theater, as opposed to the other arts, that one can pretty well encompass all of them by the age of nineteen. Today, I don’t think playwrights care about history. I think they feel that it has no relevance.” —Arthur Miller, the Art of Theater No. 2
October 17, 2013 On the Shelf Click-Bait, and Other News By Sadie Stein College Humor improves bestsellers with click-bait titles (although we would have said Eat, Pray, Love was doing okay already). The rough guide to why Penguin Classics is publishing Morrissey’s autobiography. The most specific niche calendar ever created: “Tattooed Librarians of the Ocean State.” Herewith, famous books from every state. One in ten Icelanders will publish a book. As one young author tells the BBC, it can indeed get competitive. “Especially as I live with my mother and partner, who are also full-time writers. But we try to publish in alternate years so we do not compete too much.”
October 16, 2013 First Person Sex and Sensibility By Diane Mehta Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, detail, 1768, oil on canvas. National Gallery, London, UK. Vivian Gornick describes the journey to self-possession as one of unimaginable pain and loneliness. “It is the re-creation in women of the experiencing self that is the business of contemporary feminism: the absence of that self is the slave that must be squeezed out drop by drop,” she says, quoting Chekhov, in “Toward a Definition of the Female Sensibility,” from her 1978 collection Essays in Feminism. The journey, Gornick observes, is “one in which the same inch of emotional ground must be fought for over and over again, alone and without allies, the only soldier in the army, the struggling self. But on the other side lies freedom: self-possession.” Last July, three years to the month that my marriage ended, I also ended my first serious postdivorce relationship, on the eve of the twelfth anniversary of my mother’s death. It was the first year I had forgotten my mother’s anniversary and one month after my divorce became official. My ex-husband, who had vowed to become a better friend the day we told my father we were splitting up, showed up when others were too fed up with my ramblings and hand-wringing over a man who had made me astoundingly unhappy for months. For some, it was not easy to understand that the sexual content of being loved, after so much loss, was simply gripping. Read More
October 16, 2013 Quote Unquote Book Smart By Sadie Stein “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” ―Oscar Wilde