September 1, 2017 Arts & Culture What’s Better? By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. (The Idle Meditations of Shtyck-Junker Krokodilov) Both adults and children may go to pubs, but only children can go to school. Alcohol relaxes the metabolism, aids fat deposits, gladdens a man’s heart. School isn’t capable of all that. Lomonosov said: “Science nourishes youth, glee to elders grants.” But Vladimir the Great often said: “Drinking is the joy of Rus.” Which of the two to believe? Surely the older one. Tax revenues certainly don’t come from schools. Read More
September 1, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Annabelle: A Ghost Story By Sadie Stein The other day, I went to see a movie. It was two P.M.; I was alone. The theater nearest our apartment is extremely comfortable, with large, fluffy, fully reclining seats and swinging armrests for easy canoodling. Yet the movies on the screen are never romantic. Most are big-budget fare full of CGI and superheroes and emoji. There’s rarely something I’d pay almost twenty dollars to see. On this day, however, they were showing the latest film about the demonic doll. In fact, this latest is the prequel to the other Annabelle films; it tells the backstory of the doll’s possession. To my disappointment, it did nothing to address the question of why Annabelle resembles an especially grotesque Charlie McCarthy marionette in a Carol Burnett wig. Doll horror movies are rarely scary, which is strange given how uncanny many people find dolls themselves. Still, they have become a tired trope. As with clowns, the idea of the doll is at this point scarier than any on-screen reality. (Besides, if you do finds dolls inherently frightening, there’s not much narrative tension to be gained from their turning evil.) But I always go to see any movie in which a doll plays the part of a murderous villain. And although I am a great defender of doll life and have never found my own dolls the least bit sinister, I will admit that one of the scariest ghost stories I’ve ever heard revolved around a doll. Read More
August 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Two in One By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. Don’t trust those Judas Iscariots, those chameleons! In our day, faith is easier to lose than an old glove—and I’ve lost it! It was evening. I was taking the horsecar. It isn’t right that I, as a high-ranking official, take the horsecar, but on this occasion I wore a fur greatcoat and could conceal my face in its marten collar. It’s cheaper, you know … Despite the cold and late hour, the car was crammed full. Nobody recognized me. The marten collar allowed me to travel incognito. Riding, I dozed and studied the little ones … Read More
August 31, 2017 On History Finding Home After the Vietnam War By Zachary Watterson “The San Luis Valley resembled in magnitude nothing so much as the ocean.” “I hated being over there,” Ron Sitts said. He looked at his hands. Freckles and blond hair circled his knuckles. On his index finger a scarred-over, decades-old gash. Over six feet tall, he had a thin nose, large ears, deeply tanned skin, and a shock of silver-white hair. A man who was once a Kansas boy plowing his father’s fields; planting, cultivating, and harvesting barley, wheat, corn, and sorghum; mowing and baling alfalfa. He rocked gently, his slippers on the tiled floor. We were sitting in the house he had built in a small town in South-Central Colorado. “The massive destruction and human suffering caused a depression in me. I felt guilt that I was unharmed.” From the time I was eight years old until I left home at eighteen, I lived with Ron and my mother in New Jersey. At twelve, I was the best man at their wedding. They separated shortly after I left home but I have kept in close touch with Ron. His stories of flying a rescue helicopter over the Gulf of Tonkin in the late 1960s had kept me rapt at the dinner table when I lived with him, but this was the first time in years that he had spoken to me about the war. “I felt guilt,” he went on, “that my job was to rescue, not to kill. I was prepared to do whatever I was ordered to do. Even if it was against my principles. Later I began to feel glad it wasn’t my job to kill.” “I try to imagine,” I said, but I had other impressions of the war drumming in my brain—the Rolling Stones’ percussion in “Paint It Black” as fires burned in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, his film about Marine recruits who endure basic training and later face the Vietcong during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Sergeant Hartman tells his recruits the “free world will conquer Communism.” And here comes Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin.” Private Joker, played by a bespectacled Matthew Modine, wears a helmet bearing the words BORN TO KILL and a peace-symbol button on his uniform. He attempts to explain the contradictory emblems by saying he’s “trying to suggest something about the duality of man, the Jungian thing.” I try to forget Hollywood. Read More
August 31, 2017 Contests Emoji Poetry Contest, Part 2 By Nadja Spiegelman and Rosa Rankin-Gee “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful,” said Rita Dove, though we’d like to argue that it could be distilled even further, into Emojis. Yes, it’s time for another round of our translations of celebrated poems into pictograms. Can you guess the following famous verses? The first ten people to name all three poems correctly will win a copy of our Summer issue (no. 221)—you can submit your answers here. We’ve included the answers to the first round below. 1. Read More
August 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Some Thoughts About the Soul By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. In the opinion of well-read governesses and educated governors’ wives, the soul is an indeterminable entity of psychological substance. I have no reason to disagree with this. One scholar writes: “To discover the soul, take a man just given a dressing-down by management and tie off his foot with a belt. Make an incision in the heel and you’ll find what’s sought.” I believe in the transmigration of souls … I’ve come to this belief through experience. My own soul, in all the time of my earthly suffering, has traversed many animals and plants, and endured all the stages and realms spoken of by the Buddha … I was a pup when I was born, and a goose when I entered public life. Starting in government service, I became small potatoes. My boss dubbed me a brick, friends—a jackass, freethinkers—a sheep. Traveling along the railroads, I was a rabbit; living in a village among peasants, I felt myself a leech. After one instance of embezzlement I was for some time a scapegoat. Marrying, I became horned cattle. Embarking, finally, on the one true path, I acquired a belly and became a triumphant swine.1 1. A reference to “The Triumphant Swine, or The Swine’s Conversation with the Truth,” an 1881 dramatic scene by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, in which the truth chats with a pig, and by the end gets eaten. Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter. Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Look for her translations of Chekhov sketches each day this week on the Daily.