July 13, 2010 Arts & Culture My 12-Hour Blind Date, With Dostoevsky By Elif Batuman A review in four parts. Photograph by Stephanie Berger. 9:15 A.M. Sitting in a taxi on the FDR Drive, I wonder how life has brought me to this point. I’m headed for a ferry to take me to a warehouse on Governor’s Island to watch a twelve-hour staging of Dostoevsky’s Demons, in Italian. How life brought me to this point is that I recently wrote a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them ($10.20 on Amazon—I’m just saying), which includes a nonfictional retelling of Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons (formerly translated as The Possessed), set in the Stanford comparative literature PhD program, where I was once a graduate student, and where we were all once possessed by a combination of dangerous literary-theoretical ideas and a demonic Nikolai Stavrogin-like classmate. 9:25 A.M. Disembarking at the Maritime Building, I look around for the Lincoln Center publicist, who told me she would be wearing a straw hat. Inconveniently, I forgot my ticket in San Francisco, which is where I live, and where it is currently 6:20 A.M. There are about five hundred women here wearing straw hats. I am both jet-lagged and hung over, having flown in thirty-six hours ago for my college roommate’s wedding. At 4:00 A.M. yesterday morning I was stuck with the bride’s little brother in a broken, vomit-filled elevator in Koreatown, trying to leave a karaoke bar which I believe shared its broken, vomit-filled elevator with a medium-end brothel. 9:27 A.M. Well, the ferry doesn’t actually leave until ten, so I decide I have time for a cigarette. A college-aged Lincoln Center employee in a yellow shirt is holding a yellow sign that says “DEMONS – SLIP 1.” An older man approaches this young person with a paternal chuckle. “That’s excellent, I have to say. Really very good,” he observes. “Thanks,” says the young man with the sign. 9:28 A.M. I have lit a cigarette and am staring at Staten Island, thinking about my problems, when I am approached by a tall, remarkably handsome young man wearing sunglasses, white pants, a polo shirt, trail-runners, and a safari hat. He is carrying a copy of the Times. He asks if I am Elif. I realize that this is my blind date. I had almost forgotten about my blind date! The thing is, a total stranger wrote to me in May, saying that he had bought two of the seven hundred tickets to this coveted performance on the morning they went on sale (“A 12-Hour Play, and Endless Bragging Rights,” read the Times headline), only to discover that none of his friends wanted to join him on Governors Island for a twelve-hour-long performance of The Demons scheduled to coincide with the World Cup finals. So, he thought of me! Needless to say I was enormously flattered, although at that point I already had a ticket from The Paris Review. “Maybe we can hang out on the ferry,” I suggested. After introducing himself (how did he recognize me?), my date announces that his pants have come unbuttoned. “This is not how I wanted to make a first impression,” he observed, buttoning his pants. Read More
July 13, 2010 World Cup 2010 Spain’s Moral Victory By Will Frears Sunday was a moral victory: Spain clearly deserved to win not only the World Cup but also the actual game at hand. The great Johann Cruyff came out today and accused the Dutch of being anti-football and, among other crimes, “hermetic.” He’s right about the anti-football. The Dutch strategy was as predicted: Mark van Bommel and Nigel de Jong set out to kick the Spanish into submission so Robben and Sneidjer would have a chance to win the game for Holland. Spain refused to let this happen and, as with Germany, imposed their methodical game of possession, albeit with more bruises, and won, as they so often did, 1-0. It could be noted that it was Andrés Iniesta, who scored the game-winner, whose theatrics got John Heitnga sent off—a booking which freed up the space for him to score a few moments later—but since Nigel de Jong should have seen red in the first half for putting his studs in Xabi Alonso’s chest, it all evens out in the end. This has been a tournament of teams rather than stars. Messi, Kaka, Rooney, Ronaldo and the rest came and went without leaving any lasting impression. This is why Diego Forlan, who was everywhere for Uruguay, is so deserving of the golden ball award, for player of the tournament. Mostly the games have been controlled by players like Xavi and Schweinsteiger, midfield generals orchestrating their teams to victory. This is obviously all to the good—you only had to witness the idiocy of LeBron James’ recent prime-time special to see what happens when players are put above the game, and to understand why the triumph of Spain—and the related successes of Paraguay and Chile and Slovenia—are all to the glory of the sport. And yet, it’s all a little bit anti-climactic. There is something too-scripted in Spain’s victory: the good guys won, if not too easily then at least too coherently. Spain was a joint favorite from the beginning, and played far and away the most elegant football of the tournament—exactly the kind of football they said they would play. They had not only the courage of their convictions but their conventions too. Only in the first game against the Swiss were they ever threatened, and that took three freak deflections to happen. Other than that, they won the ball, they kept the ball, they knocked it around the middle, they got kicked, complained, won a free kick, passed the ball around the middle some more, and then David Villa would score. It is easy to admire Spain, but not love them. Compare this with World Cups past; Diego Maradona in ’86, Paolo Rossi in ’82, and, most spectacularly of course, Zinedine Zidane winning it all in ’98 and then, to really cement his legend, dragging France to the final and then throwing it all away in 2006. (Italy, the actual winners, ending up only bit-players in Zidane’s grand narrative.) There has been very little of that drama this time around. Instead, we’ve had 4-2-3-1, vuvuzelas, and the inconsistencies of both ball and ref to provide our talking points. I have had more conversations about goal-line technology in the last month than I ever thought I would have in my life. (For the record I am against it, unless it happens to my team, at which point I think it’s completely necessary and an outrage that it hasn’t been already introduced.) It’s still the World Cup, though, and as the poet Ian Hamilton once said, “you should see me watch football. I watch it really hard.” Asamoah Gyan holding his shirt over his head, unable to believe that he has just missed the penalty that would send Ghana to the semi-finals, the U.S. goal against Slovenia, Carlos Tévez against Mexico, and Frank Lampard against Germany—the most memorable moments of the tournament have been the injustices. Tolstoy’s famous dictum about families, it turns out, is also true for football.
July 12, 2010 On Music The Mountain Goats By Jim Fisher Lately I’ll wake in the middle of a conversation and realize I’m evangelizing. Odd thing is I’m always evangelizing the same man, John Darnielle, or rather the same band, The Mountain Goats, who are to its songwriter and primary vocalist as the primeval fauns, or in Darnielle’s case, fans, are to the spring-horned piper with the cloven hooves. Odd, because Darnielle needs no help. From his start as a psychiatric nurse recording songs to cassette on a grinding Panasonic boombox, he’s now a favorite of Stephen Colbert’s, written up in The New Yorker, and interviewed by storyteller Tobias Wolff on stage. He’s the avatar of every college-age artist with a bad attitude and nervy vinyl archives. But poets don’t quote him. Here’s someone releasing album upon album with alarming namechecks like Transmissions to Horace and Songs for Petronius, and the poetry machine figures he’s another guy with an acoustic guitar. “I play an acoustic guitar,” Darnielle advises. “But I am not one of those guys with an acoustic guitar.” So he went electric. This was in 2002, the same year I interviewed him before a show at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill. Read More
July 9, 2010 World Cup 2010 Zero Hour in South Africa By Will Frears There are two games left. The third place playoff takes place on Saturday, Uruguay against Germany in a game often described as one nobody wants to play in. It can be well worth watching though—teams have been known to forget about tactics and play with something approximating wild abandon, which in this World Cup will come as some relief. Then on Sunday, it’s Spain against Holland; one of two favorites going into the tournament against the perennially-highly-fancied World Cup bridesmaids. Neither team has won it before, so whichever way it goes, there will be a new name on the list. It will be the first time a European team has won in another continent, a particular triumph for Old Europe, after the continent as a whole was dismissed following the group round, the commentators agreeing that the new champion would inevitably come from Latin America. Both teams play the same formation, the 4-2-3-1 that uses the holding midfielders to prevent the other team from attacking. But oh, they do it so differently. Holland plays with two thugs there, Mark Van Bommel and Nigel de Jong to break up the attack and to do so by any means necessary or at least invisible. Once they have won possession, their only job — one they do very well — is to give the ball to Wesley Sneidjer, the conductor of the Dutch attack. The leader of the pair is Van Bommel, who has managed to somehow commit 14 fouls, some of them proper horrors, whilst only getting one yellow card for dissent. Over the course of the tournament, Van Bommel’s star has risen in exact relationship to the amount of opprobrium heaped on him by fans. He is nasty, sly, always the first to complain to the ref about some perceived injury done to him—quite often when he was the one dishing out the punishment rather than the other way around. There is something reptilian about him; nasty eyes and an absolutely massive jaw. Without him the Dutch would never have gotten this far; he is a beast. Read More
July 9, 2010 World Cup 2010 And Then We Came to the End By David Wallace-Wells In the World Cup, as in any tournament, half of the field is eliminated in the first round, and half again in each succeeding round—a method of crowning a champion devised by Zeno and guaranteed to bring the whole thrilling spectacle to a buyer’s-remorse anticlimax. (You can see the diminishing interest in the now-trickling coverage in outlets both mainstream and semi-pro.) Whichever second-rate European nation triumphs on Sunday—if they can control the midfield as smugly as they did against Germany in Wednesday’s semifinal it will surely be Spain—will look a lot less truly top-dog than simply last-man-standing. In his Winner-Take-All Society, the academic Robert Frank famously described the American economy as such a tournament, devoted to the production of champions at the expense of the welfare of many many losers; in South Africa this summer we will have thirty-one of them to one likely-uninspiring winner, a fairly devastating ratio. But it’s not only the partisans of those thirty-one countries that’ll be left bewildered, wondering what might have been, all the rest of us will, too, indeed anyone who paid any attention to the opening of the tournament and its round-the-clock stream of giddy action and deluded, infinite-horizon expectation. The games played in those early days were often stilted by deliberative tactics, player caution, and coaching prudence, and their outcomes were rarely decisive. But they embodied what another academic, Barry Schwartz, might’ve called the paradox of chance—we want each game to contain all the possibilities and promise of the entire cup, to unfold as though the shape and character of the whole month-long tournament hangs completely on its outcome, but we don’t want any particular result to disclose the possibility of any other. On this score a tournament is designed to disappoint. But those early games offer, always, the best of both worlds, yielding perhaps less quality of play than the contests that follow but making up for it, many times over, in volume. Or, as I like to call it, abundance.
July 9, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Girl Crazy, Lame Book Blurbing By Lorin Stein Girls. I’m girl crazy. It’s ’cause it’s summer. I’d like to calm myself down. What should I do? —Ronnie Oh, Ronnie. One feels you. I take it you’ve tried self-love and cold showers? If all else fails and you hear the first garbage trucks and all you want is a moment of oblivion—of surcease—what you need is boring books. I keep a stash for just such occasions: A History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Adams. My intellectual friends tell me it’s a masterpiece. I have never got past page six. The Education of a Gardener, by Russell Page: “Were I working out a rectangular theme, for instance, I would not hesitate to introduce diagonals or curves if these were justified by expediency, or if their introduction contributed to reinforce that same theme by contrast. On the contrary, a composition all curves and irregular forms might well demand certain rigidities, certain angularities in detail are you listening to me ronnie no you are not because you are fast asleep.” The Complete Guide to Furniture Styles, by Louise Ade Boger. This one is new to my collection. I got it off the two-dollar cart at the Strand last week and already I have found it an indispensible settler of the mind. I know what you’re thinking: for a diseased one-track Bonobo like yourself, it’s only the tiniest baby-step from furniture to sex. Trust me. Ms. Boger is an artist. She was bored writing the thing, bored shitless from sentence one, and she manages to communicate that feeling to the reader in real time. To say The Complete Guide to Furniture Styles is 427 pages long is to say nothing. The pages are giant; the text bicolumniar; the black-and-white plates, for all intents and purposes, useless. Reading The Complete Guide is like popping six Ambien and hitting yourself on the head with a brick. Read More