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
March 18, 2020 Arts & Culture On Davenport (Who Also Wrote Well about Art) By Lucas Zwirner Guy Davenport (Photo by Thomas Victor) After leaving high school in tenth grade for Duke, studying at Oxford (where Tolkien’s tutoring bored him to death), and finishing a Ph.D. at Harvard on the incarcerated Ezra Pound, Guy Davenport took a job in Kentucky in 1961, far away from much of the culture he would go on to write about. Years later, when asked why he chose Kentucky, Davenport famously said: The farthest away and the highest pay. From his remote seat in Lexington, Davenport produced some of the most astonishing prose ever written by an American: Hobbits, Picasso, the history of the Mediterranean, spy novels, John Ruskin’s life, and Wittgenstein’s last words all fall under his purview. As with so many of the greatest essayists (Montaigne their progenitor) the anecdotal, historical, factual, and mundane mix easily, lightly even, to reveal the depth of his insight. Davenport’s best-known essay, “The Geography of the Imagination,” introduces us to such a rich and diverse imagination that we are forced to expand the limits of our maps. New countries emerge, spanning centuries and disparate continents. As he puts it at the very beginning of the essay: The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. Read More
March 18, 2020 Look Another Siberia By Sophy Roberts Cold, cruel, impenetrable, abandoned, scored with desperate romance and ill-fated rebellions: modern perceptions of Siberia remain a study in cliché, the everyday bypassed in favor of the sensational. Siberia is a word filled with so many connotations, it is easy to forget about the people who live in its reality. Thirty years after the fall of communism, we are still attached to the dominant images from its past, the mass killing, ecological catastrophes of big industry, and Stalin’s limitless ambitions. Beyond the occasional revolutionary, despotic leader, literary giant, virtuoso pianist, or Bolshoi ballerina, we tend to think of Siberia in general terms rather than specifics. We think of the Soviet collective rather than the individual—as communist ideology always intended. Read More
March 17, 2020 Redux Redux: The Hands Applauded By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. William Gass, teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about hands and handwriting. Read on for William Gass’s Art of Fiction interview, Anne Enright’s short story “Pale Hands I Loved, beside the Shalimar,” and Anne Sexton’s poem “Two Hands.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. William Gass, The Art of Fiction No. 65 Issue no. 70 (Summer 1977) I think it must have been very enjoyable—in the old days—to form letters with your quill or pen and hand. I, for example, still have an old typewriter. An electric takes away from the expressiveness of the key. It was very important for Rilke to send a copy of the finished poem in his beautiful hand to somebody, because that was the poem, not the printed imitation. Read More