January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? By James Frankie Thomas We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses. “Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College. No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it. It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. Read more >>
December 31, 2018 Best of 2018 The Bloody Family History of the Guillotine By Edward White We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! In 1788, a French blacksmith named Mathurin Louschart was killed in his home by a single blow to the head. The act was committed in the blink of an eye, but the feud motivating it had festered for months. Earlier that year, the deeply conservative Mathurin had apparently taken offense at his son Jean’s newfangled ideas about liberty and equality. Jean was vocal about his beliefs, which were stoking the fires of radicalism throughout France. Not content with throwing his son out of the family home, Mathurin attempted to punish him further by arranging to marry Jean’s girlfriend, Helen. Helen’s family was only too pleased to palm off their daughter to a vaunted member of the community, but Helen herself despaired at the prospect of being wrenched from Jean and shackled to a brooding old ogre for the rest of her life. Jean hatched a plan: he arrived one night at his father’s house to rescue Helen and ride off into the egalitarian sunset. But Mathurin interrupted their escape, and a fight ensued. Jean lashed out with a hammer. It struck Mathurin flush on the forehead, and the old man died instantly. Read more >>
December 31, 2018 Best of 2018 The Strange History of the “King-Pine” By Nina-Sophia Miralles We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Recent pineapple decorating trends. “There is no nobler fruit in the universe,” Jean de Léry writes of the pineapple. Charles Lamb loved the fruit erotically: “Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lovers’ kisses she biteth.” Pieter de la Court professes: “One can never be tire’d with looking on it.” How did these men, and so many others, become so enraptured with the pineapple? And how have we forgotten its former grandeur? In 1496, when Christopher Columbus was returning from his second voyage to the Americas, he brought back a consignment of pineapples. Little did he know that this golden gift, nestled among the tame parrots, tomatoes, tobacco, and pumpkins, would be the crowning glory of his cargo. Read more >>
December 31, 2018 Best of 2018 The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints By Chantel Tattoli We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can’t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can’t fingerprint yourself, the sites of the bureau-approved, USA-based channelers stated. Perhaps, I thought, I would gather my smirches—all those wasted on laptop screens, medicine cabinets, and eyeglasses—and dump them on a bureaucrat’s desk, like payment rendered in coin. Instead, I fell on a National Fingerprint Collecting Clearinghouse technician named Eve Humrich. She has built a career on the fingertips of expats. I met her at her office on a mezzanine inside a squash club in Montmartre (though she travels between Paris, London, and Brussels for her clients). “I need to see your ID,” Humrich said. I showed my passport—using one type of identification to badge me into the realm of another. Humrich kissed each digit to a lubricious black pad, then onto an official paper card. With a small magnifying lens, she inspected the results: “These are nice and clear.” Read more >>
December 29, 2018 Best of 2018 The Teddy Bear Effect By Pénélope Bagieu We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Pénélope Bagieu is a French illustrator and cartoonist. Her most recent book, Brazen, is out now from First Second.
December 28, 2018 Best of 2018 Monsieur Bébé: The Brief, Strange Life of Raymond Radiguet By Emma Garman We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau. In the spring of 1923, the young married artists Jean and Valentine Hugo began inviting people to séances at their Paris apartment. A new mood of occultism, influenced by Freud and the early Surrealists, was in the air. And raising the dead was in Jean’s blood: while his great-grandfather, Victor Hugo, was in exile in the 1850s, he presided over frequent “table-rapping” sessions on the Channel Islands. As Victor Hugo recorded in four red notebooks, his “talking table” conducted conversations with such eager spirits as Jesus, Moses, Dante, and Shakespeare—the last of whom, obligingly, concurred with Hugo’s assessment of himself as the greatest writer of all time. Jean and Valentine’s gatherings, however, elicited messages so chilling that the group, spooked, abandoned the practice after only a few tries. It wasn’t an overreaction; before the year’s end, the omens they’d received in their séances were borne out. Read more >>