December 18, 2018 Arts & Culture The Endurance of A Christmas Carol By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Illustration by John Leech. Public domain. On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care: My Dear Sirs, I determined not to thank you for the Turkey until it was quite gone, in order that you might have a becoming idea of its astonishing capabilities. The last remnant of that blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday—the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two. It is a generous letter, fully in keeping with the generosity of the people he is addressing. Still, like many people who write to express their thanks for unexpected or unwanted Christmas gifts, it seems that Dickens could not resist poking gentle fun at the purchasers’ taste, not least by hinting that sending him a turkey the size of a small child was perhaps being generous to a fault. Is there a note of reproach in “My Dear Sirs”? There is certainly more than one sense in which a turkey that hangs around for a week might be thought of as “that blessed bird,” as is clear from Dickens’s decision to pump up “turkey” into “Turkey,” the double insistence on its final reappearance “yesterday—I repeat it, yesterday,” and the drawn-out sentence that describes the many attempts made by the Dickens household to finish it off (“seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two”), like a chorus of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which partridges in pear trees and swans a-swimming have been usurped by this one “blessed bird.” Even the reference to the turkey’s “astonishing capabilities” seems suspended between wonder and worry, as if a turkey that produced so many leftovers came close to being a real-life version of those enchanted objects and creatures—pots overflowing with porridge, or geese laying limitless supplies of golden eggs—that throng the pages of fairy tales. Four years later, Dickens had written something that possessed still more “astonishing capabilities.” A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was first published just before Christmas in 1843, and since then it has never been out of print. Originally written as a tract for the times, this cautionary tale about the ongoing tussle between greed and goodness has been thought of as timely whenever it has been read. Enjoyed by its first readers as a modern expression of the spirit of Christmas—as modern as Christmas cards, which were sent for the first time in the same year as the Carol’s publication—it has since become popular for quite different reasons: the sense of tradition it is thought to embody, a reminder of the simple pleasures that seem to have been lost sight of in the seasonal scrum of shoppers, an annual invitation to the pleasures of nostalgia. Reproduced so often, and in so many different forms, it has become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies or turkey, with the key difference that, as Martin Heidegger argued was true of all classic works, it has never been “used up.” There have been dozens of films, starring everyone from Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson to Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse, operas and ballets, an all-black musical (Comin’ Uptown, which opened on Broadway in 1979), Benjamin Britten’s 1947 Men of Goodwill: Variations on ‘A Christmas Carol,’ even a BBC mime version in 1973 starring Marcel Marceau. So regular are the annual returns of the Carol to our stages and screens, in fact, that it has become something like a secular ritual, an alternative Christmas story to its more obviously religious rival, in which the three wise men are replaced by three instructive spirits, and the pilgrimage to a child in a manger is replaced by a visit to the house of Tiny Tim. Even people who have never read the Carol know the story of Scrooge, the miserable old skinflint who repents after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. So widely and deeply has this story entered the popular imagination that phrases such as Bah! Humbug! have floated free of their original context and acquired the force of common proverbs, while Scrooge himself has entered the language as a piece of cultural shorthand “used allusively to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy” (OED, “Scrooge”). Read More
December 17, 2018 Hue's Hue Chartreuse, the Color of Elixirs, Flappers, and Alternate Realities By Katy Kelleher F. X. Leyendecker, The Flapper. 1922 Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir, and then later became a fashionable green: a color for flappers and Oscars-goers. Some time later, in the minds of many, it mistakenly became red—a deep maroon, the dark color of dried blood. Let me tell you about chartreuse. But first, pour yourself a glass and watch as the liquid, green as the fresh growth on spring trees, drips from the bottle. It doesn’t matter whether you like the taste. You’re not drinking it for that reason. Chartreuse, like other herbal liqueurs, is an elixir of life. A cure-all, good for digestion and headaches, for sleeping like an infant and living until you’re ninety. Even if you haven’t had Chartreuse, you’ve probably tasted something similar. Italy has Fernet (a favorite of American bartenders for sipping on the clock, or so I’ve heard), Poland has Krupnik, Portugal has Beirão, and Hungary has Unicum (syrupy thick, black and bitter—my personal favorite). These strange drinks still taste of strong magic; it’s easy to imagine that Chartreuse could cure you. It’s no absinthe. There’s no sexy fairy on the bottle, no Mucha girl grabbing your arm and asking you to dance. There’s only a sickly acid-green liquid and a monastic stamp. Read More
December 17, 2018 First Person One Missing Piece By Jill Talbot Some places call us back. This past summer, my daughter and I returned to Canton, New York, where we lived five years ago, approximately twenty miles south of the Canadian border. It was her choice—her favorite of all the places we’ve lived. And while she deserved to go where she wanted after our devastating year and a half, I worried how we would feel when we saw the house again, and how I might experience those spots I now associate with absence, with loss. But I knew we needed to get away before another year began, a year neither one of us was ready to face. * Years come and go, regardless. This much we had learned quickly. * We flew from Dallas to Syracuse and drove the hours north through memory—those two lanes bordered by trees—a green tunnel, a secret path, a shadow. After thirty miles on I-81, I pointed out the Pulaski exit and pulled into the parking lot of the motel we had stayed in five years ago. It had been our last stop on a cross-country move from Oklahoma to New York, during which we spent nights in large hotels in Indiana, Ohio, and Buffalo—but up here the motels spread rather than rise. They are quaint and quiet, small, with one car parked in front of a door over here, another over there. We were not here to stay, only to revisit. It was early August 2013 when I checked us into the one-story motel in Pulaski, a bell on the counter in the lobby (ring once!). We had been living in Oklahoma for four years, the longest we had lived anywhere. I was trading one visiting professor position for another, but instead of teaching four sections of composition at a state university, I would be teaching only three classes each semester, and all of them creative writing workshops at a private liberal arts institution. I remember how my parents, having both lived in Texas their whole lives, feared they’d never see us again when I told them where we were moving. Before checkout the next afternoon, my daughter and I swam in the pool out front, the one with a floor of tiny tiles, a bright-blue mosaic. I knew I wasn’t ready to get back on the road and drive us to our new life. I wanted to linger, to stare into the sunny sky, to stay between, so when my daughter noticed a pizza place across the highway before jumping into the water, I pulled a T-shirt over my suit and headed across the parking lot toward the lobby. I rang the bell. Paid for another night. Read More
December 17, 2018 Literary Cities The Legibility of Fausto Reinaga By Mark Goodale Fausto Reinaga spreading his ideas and his books in Plaza Murillo, in the 90s. File by Hilda Reinaga Fuente In 1957, in a strange twist of political and historical fate, in front of Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig, Fausto Reinaga, the future modern prophet of Indian revolution, reaffirmed his destiny. Reinaga officially had traveled to the old German Democratic Republic from Bolivia in order to participate in an international meeting of trade union confederations. Unofficially, however, Reinaga had left Bolivia at a time in which his books and essays had made him a target of the leaders of the 1952 National Revolution. Unluckily for Reinaga, his second book, published in 1949, had been a scathing and deeply personal attack on Víctor Paz Estenssoro, just on the cusp of a celebrated political career, who soon after would be swept into power at the head of the new revolutionary government. Before leaving for Leipzig, Reinaga had been arrested by state security forces and forced to sign a declaration renouncing his 1949 book as an error-filled distortion. Born to Quechua-speaking peasants in 1906, Reinaga did not learn to read or write in Spanish until he was sixteen. Nevertheless, Reinaga had been marked from the beginning for a world-historical life. According to legend, Reinaga’s mother was a direct descendent of the eighteenth century Indian rebel Tomás Katari, who had been executed by the Spanish in 1781 for organizing Indian resistance to Spanish colonial tributary demands. As Reinaga later explained, when he had finally been sent to public schools by local leaders, it was on the understanding that he would have to learn the intellectual traditions of the West in order to eventually lead Bolivia’s Indians in a final revolution against the oppressive neocolonial order. Reinaga spent his early adulthood as a political activist and writer. His first book, Mitayos y Yanaconas (1941), was a Marxist reinterpretation of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire. During the early 1940s, he had supported the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR)—co-founded by Víctor Paz Estenssoro —and had participated in the MNR’s alliance with the military reformist government of Gualberto Villarroel, until Villarroel was deposed in 1946 by a peculiar coalition of mining oligarchs and urban trade unionists, who stormed the presidential palace in La Paz, killed Villarroel, threw his corpse off the balcony into Plaza Murillo, and then hung it from a lamppost, where it was desecrated, Mussolini-style, by the surging throng. Read More
December 14, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sports, Sontag, and Scheherazade By The Paris Review SLASH. Image courtesy of Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey. Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey’s play SLASH is so enjoyable it’s like having dessert for two hours with no intermission. One advertisement describes it as an “attempt to transcend the banality of identity and the terror of consciousness,” but I prefer the Instagram promo with an image of Camille Paglia in men’s clothing wielding a switchblade in front of a urinal. That’s much closer to the play’s prankish genius. Every dynamic (or adversarial) duo from popular culture whom you’ve probably been obsessed with at some point appears for a romping ten minutes or so, from Spock and Captain Kirk to Lennon and McCartney to Morrissey and Johnny Marr. The hints of homosexuality in these pairings are the source of a great deal of the comedy: it’s the most fun meditation on the collaboration eroticism since Wayne Koestenbaum’s Double Talk. The best bit is probably the one that’s getting the most hype, a reenactment of some shade from the early nineties thrown around by Paglia and Susan Sontag, but take my advice—wait for the real thing and don’t watch the clip of it online from last year. In person, Allan (Paglia) and Hennessey (Sontag) sound so much like their respective muses that if you close your eyes, you’ll have an opinion on The Volcano Lover again. SLASH runs through Thursday, January 31, at MX Gallery in Chinatown. —Ben Shields Read More
December 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Letter to a Stranger By Remedios Varo Fans of the surrealist painter Remedios Varo likely won’t be surprised that her writing is as wide reaching and imaginative as her work on canvas. She crafted uncanny fables and strange recipes intended to conjure dreams, but perhaps her most significant achievements on the page are her letters. Varo had a habit of writing to strangers, a practice immortalized in her friend Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, in which the character Carmella Velasquez “writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own … These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies.” Below, read Varo’s letter to a man whose address she picked at random from the phone book. Albert Edelfelt, Dam som skriver brev (Lady Writing a Letter), 1887. Dear Stranger, I haven’t a clue if you’re a single man or the head of a household, if you’re a shy introvert or a happy extrovert, but whatever the case, perhaps you’re bored and want to dive fearlessly into a group of strangers in hopes of hearing something that will interest or amuse you. What’s more, the fact that you feel curiosity and even some discomfort is already an incentive, and so I’m proposing that you come and spend New Year’s Eve at house No.—— on —— Street. Read More