March 20, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Demons, Decadence, and Dimes By The Paris Review Ladislav Klíma. Prince Sternenhoch is lovelorn, despite his qualities: “Leaving aside my family and wealth, I may boldly say of myself that I am a beau, in spite of certain inadequacies, for example, that I stand only 150 centimeters and weigh 45 kilograms, and am almost toothless, hairless, and whiskerless, also a little squint-eyed and have a noticeable hobble—well, even the sun has spots.” He meets the silent Helga, whom he instinctively loathes and swiftly marries. She opens up, travels as a brigand, finds her métier as a demon, and starts to murder “like a doctor.” Ladislav Klíma’s (1878–1928) The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, styled as the eponymous noble’s edited journals, is a phantasmagoric freak-out, a work of consummate madness. It is gross and wretched; it is a Tinder date in a pandemic. Sternenhoch lives in a succession of ghoulish castles. He transcribes his titters and cackles and—after he is possessed by the spirit of his defenestrated Saint Bernard, Elephant—his barks. He schemes to make a gorilla cry and invests his fortune in a nut. Helga is killed, gains a swift promotion in hell, and visits to torment. Perhaps they reconcile, when she confesses, “My financial outlook is atrocious, my rabbits all died suddenly, and I have come to realize I lack artistic talent.” The truth is impossible to discern: the tale is all delusion, but for Klíma, delusion is all there is. In A Czech Dreambook, Ludvík Vaculík remarks that “Klíma’s horror stories have no more than a poetic effect on me. I can read them last thing at night and then have a nice peaceful bureaucratic dream.” For Vaculík, Sternenhoch might offer no relief from those anesthetic dreams proscribed by the state, but at present I could do with a good night’s sleep. Besides, I was moved. In Klíma’s “Autobiography,” which is appended to this edition—vividly translated, like Sternenhoch, by Carleton Bulkin—he writes of his life spent in “consistent divergence from all that’s human”: he eats only raw flour and raw horse meat, gobbles mice half eaten by cats, and “would glug down bathwater from people with smallpox.” At that, I put the book down and immediately washed my hands. Then I opened it again. —Chris Littlewood Read More
March 20, 2020 Arts & Culture An Attentive Memoir of Life in Parma By Patricia Hampl © Olga Demchishina / Adobe Stock. How tempting to describe Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue as a page-turner, as it surely was for me more than twenty years ago. But really, it’s a page-pauser. The instantly trustworthy voice invites the reader to slow into its fine focus, its acute parallels and oppositions, the deft leaps from the frustrations of a Renaissance abbess commissioning Correggio to paint her room in Parma, say, to the homely act of buying bread at the corner store in the same city almost five hundred years later. Much underlining, notes and exclamations crammed in the margins. I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years. And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks. Wilde-Menozzi and her husband are “hunkered” (the new verb form of our lives) in Parma, where she continues to take her keen-eyed notes. In an email this week, she reports that the caskets wait in long lines and the nurses weep because they can’t find words to give to those who are frightened. The signal of a reliable reporter—journalist, memoirist, poet, historian—is the capacity to see oppositions and contradictions with unblinking acceptance: this is reality. Finally, she writes: “All in all, though, spring is unstoppable—after all, it, as well as the virus, is part of nature’s ways. Italy is doing a good job, with many people making sacrifices and being selfless.” Just now, in the midst of the growing pandemic, my latest consideration of her book underscores its uncanny immediacy. My enthralled first reading probably had something to do with its moment in modern literary history. Mother Tongue appeared in the early wave of personally voiced books in which the narrator is not a heroine, though she’s the protagonist, the seeking soul. This was nonfiction (wasn’t it?), but also lyric, essayistic, inquiring, thoughtful prose. Yet not dowdy “belles lettres.” Research underlay some of it, but it wasn’t scholarly—just reliable. There was even stealth poetry. A mind was revealing itself—to itself. And I, the reader, got to eavesdrop. Read More
March 20, 2020 The Last Year The Rooms By Jill Talbot Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces in real time the moments before her daughter leaves for college. The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June. It’s the middle of the night, or maybe it’s just dark in my memory. I’ve already put my daughter, Indie, to bed. She’s ten, maybe eleven, and we’re living in northern New York. I’m standing in the living room, hitting my palm against a wall and shouting, “Something has to change. Something has to change.” Not long ago, I asked Indie if she remembers that night. She said she doesn’t. But I can still summon the room, still feel the pinch in my chest. My weariness. At what, I don’t remember, but I can guess it was about a late check in the mail or not finding a permanent university position or maybe it was the snow falling outside the window in April. In our memories, there are rooms we’ll always be standing in, saying one thing or another. Or not saying what we should. In high school, before I had my driver’s license, I snuck my father’s Olds 98 out of the garage. I wanted to borrow an outfit from my friend, Amy, an outfit my mother would never allow. I can still feel the rush of rounding Riggs Circle, the windows down, the radio up. Later, when my parents pulled into the garage in my mother’s Cutlass, my father noticed pens and a notebook on his floorboard. I had forgotten to put the seat back (and turn down 97.1 FM, The Eagle). In the living room, I sat on the brick ledge of the fireplace, watching him yell. At fifteen, I was growing more defiant, more confident in my rebellions. “When you leave this house,” he raised his arms, “you’re going to go wild. Wild!” I stood up, arms by my sides, fists clenched. I yelled back, “I already have!” Read More
March 19, 2020 Comics Krazy Kat Gets the Spanish Flu By George Herriman George Herriman’s Krazy Kat ran in the Sunday papers from 1913 until 1944. The strip’s offbeat poetry and idiosyncratic dialect made it one of the first comics to be taken seriously by intellectuals and praised as high art (e. e. cummings wrote the introduction to the first collection of the comic to be published as a book). The premise is a deceptively simple love triangle: Ignatz the mouse despises sweet, simpleminded Krazy Kat, who nurses an undying love for him. Ignatz hurls bricks at Krazy, who takes each one as a sign of affection (“Li’l dollink, allus f’etful,” he says, as the bricks bounce off his head). Officer Pup, in love with Krazy Kat, attempts to protect him by thwarting Ignatz and jailing him. In the strip below, from 1918, Ignatz and Krazy come down with the Spanish flu, which apparently can be contracted by dreaming of bull fights. Page courtesy of Michael Tisserand, author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White George Herriman was a cartoonist, best known for the influential ‘Krazy Kat.’
March 19, 2020 Arts & Culture And Alexander Wept By Anthony Madrid Alexander the Great, detail of an ancient Roman floor mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii All right, this particular canard has had all its feathers pulled off many times. I claim no originality. People explain it over and over on blogs. Every twenty seconds, somebody asks about it, and the explainers go to work. The “quote” goes like this: And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. “Alexander” is, of course, Alexander the Great, king of Macedon in the fourth century BC. A legend in his own time, et cetera, he died in his early thirties, et cetera, having won many battles. The quote is poetic. It touches a theme dear to everyone’s heart: the Tears of the Monster. However! From time to time, some bright person is forced by the laws of physics to ask: “In what ancient text does that passage appear?” Answer: it appears nowhere. Remember Die Hard? I don’t. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie. Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.” Then he smiles with evil-genius self-satisfaction and says: “Benefits of a classical education.” Yeah. Except that quote would never come up in the context of a classical education, unless the instructor happened to be taking a jolly detour, nose in the air, to attack a piece of legendary crap that no student of his must ever traffic in. And even I, right now, have been forced to attach weights to my own nose to prevent its springing upward. (I can’t stop its sniffing though. There it goes again: sniff.) A few facts. The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. (And let me tell ya something: the people who write the scripts for action movies are literally forbidden to invent anything. Their mandate is to regift whatever is known to have worked in the past. More on this another day.) The quote, I was saying, is very old. It comes up in certain classic English poems from the seventeenth century. For example, here’s Edmund Waller addressing Oliver Cromwell in 1655: Read More
March 19, 2020 Arts & Culture Keeping the Fear at Bay By John Freeman As a child, I lived in a Pennsylvania town where, on hot summer nights, we would be clobbered by thunderstorms. These were not gentle light displays. They were explosions of fury that sizzled the sky. They made me feel like a cartoon character who’d stuck his head in a cannon. The arrival of such a storm always sent my brothers and me into a terror. The air would slow and thicken, coiling in on itself. Far away, near Allentown, the sky would flicker. For a minute or two, the lights would pause, like maybe the storm had skirted the hills around us. Only then would it roll right over the Lehigh Valley, detonating over the roof of our house. I wish I could say it was a delicious pleasure, sitting on our back porch in the blurry darkness, waiting for the first clap and lightning jolt. My parents seemed to think so. They were young, I now realize—not even forty—probably drinking an after-dinner cocktail, enjoying the cozy feel of the family as one, me and my brothers in our pajamas. The dog whimpering. I’ve been reminded of this time a lot lately. I am not making light of this pandemic, one that will kill many thousands of people before it is brought under control, or the economic panic that is now scorching through markets. But the way it has unfolded, the deep variation in who finds it scary and who doesn’t, and how it seems perhaps far enough off—as I type this, that’ll change—it reminds me of those muggy summer nights. If you are reading this and feeling afraid, this is just to say you are not alone. Panic is, of course, one of the great contagions of a contagion. But turning away from information feels, sometimes, equally alarming. What might happen while we’re not looking? Read More