August 1, 2017 Books The Origins of American Noir By Megan Abbott Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “serial killer” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of American noir. Read More
July 31, 2017 In Memoriam Sam Shepard, 1943–2017 By The Paris Review Sam Shepard, 1983. Photo: Steve Ringman, SHN We were sad to learn that Sam Shepard died on Thursday, at age seventy-three. Shepard’s Writers at Work interview was published in the Spring 1997 issue of The Paris Review. In it, he spoke about endings: The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away. You can read more from the Art of Theater No. 12 with Shepard here.
July 31, 2017 Our Correspondents There Is No Safe Place to Hide By Anelise Chen Anelise Chen is the Daily’s “mollusk” correspondent. This week, the mollusk worries about how to maintain barriers in a dissolving world. Camilo Ramirez, Wave. From the series “The Gulf.” Growing up in Los Angeles in the early nineties, the mollusk had worried often about acid rain. Spawned in Taiwan, on an island choked with lush, photosynthetic matter, the mollusk had felt most at home among wet, squishy kin. Rain was not yet something to fear; she would play in it alongside the snails and polliwogs who lived in the shallow puddles by her house. But after she moved to LA, there was nothing but cars and smog, which clung in the air like the toxic atmosphere on Venus. Eventually, the mollusk learned that the smog precipitated into acid rain, which—her fourth-grade science teacher said—could sear the hair right off your head. The rain was just as acidic as lemon juice, and it had the power to corrode a car’s expensive paint job! Her teacher always seemed bitterly emphatic on this point, as though he had suffered personal losses. He told his students to construct rain catchers out of liter soda bottles and hang them outside. One dark afternoon, the mollusk heard pitter-patter on the roof. When the rain ceased, she ran out with her packet of pH strips. She watched in high suspense as the water absorbed into the strip, streaking it a dark, insalubrious yellow, just like Venus: acid rain. Read More
July 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Can a Novel Be a Fugue? By Margot Singer The final page of Contrapunctus XIV. Learning to play the piano as a kid, I was not especially fond of Bach. I loved Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák, Brahms. Bach, on the other hand, hurt my head. Bach had to be practiced slowly, evenly, preferably with a metronome, and neither patience nor evenness was my strong suit. The melody was not predictably given to the right hand but passed from the right to the left and back, split into multiple voices that straddled the staffs, so that at any moment one might simultaneously be playing four or more melodic lines. In the pricey, blue-bound Henle urtext editions she had insisted I buy, my piano teacher marked with brackets the entrance of each voice. I couldn’t do it myself. If Brahms felt like poetry, Bach felt like math. It was a kind of logic puzzle that I couldn’t solve. Read More
July 31, 2017 Look Paleoart: Visions of a Prehistoric Past By Walton Ford Adolphe François Pannemaker, The Primitive World, 1857. Courtesy of Taschen. Next month, Taschen will publish Paleoart: Visions of a Prehistoric Past, an in-depth look at an art form that, by its very nature, imagines—in paintings and engravings, murals and sculptures—the lives of beasts from a bygone age, fusing together fact and fiction, science and whimsy. Culled from private collections, obscure archives, and the collections of natural-history museums, the book’s artwork spans from 1830 to 1990 and was selected by the writer Zoë Lescaze and the artist Walton Ford. In the essay below, which serves as the book’s preface, Ford writes of his own fascination with paleoart and how the idea for the book came about. Like many suburban boys in the sixties, I had a childhood infused with images of prehistory. I was obsessed with the stop-motion dinosaurs in the rarely broadcast 1933 movie King Kong, savoring glimpses of their obscure forms through the bluish haze of our rabbit-eared black-and-white television. I pored over popular-science books such as Time-Life’s Nature Library series and The World We Live In, searching for images of long-extinct animals and early hominids. I collected plastic dinosaurs, carefully razoring away their unsightly seams and painting them with what I thought were more realistic reptilian stripes and spots. I hid from the oppressions of my school, neighborhood, and father behind fragrant boxwoods, and arranged these beloved miniature monsters in jungle tableaux of prehistoric conflict. Desperate to see into the deep past, I was drunk with paleoart. What I didn’t know in 1968 was that such primeval imagery was barely over a hundred years old. Read More
July 28, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cuddy, Boont, Zuzzo By The Paris Review From the cover of Wi the haill voice. Do we need a translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems into Scots? The late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan would certainly say we do. His belief was that Scots is more suited than English to the “ ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit” in Mayakovsky’s verse. And I think I agree. Wi the haill voice, a collection of Morgan’s twenty-five translations originally published forty-five years ago, was reissued last year in the UK, and I’ve just discovered it. Scots reads onomatopoeically, reproducing the verve and jump of Mayakovsky’s verse: “Forcryinoutloud! / The starns licht up—aa richt: / does that prove some loon hud to hae it?” I don’t know the language and so used the book’s glossary to perform a second translation (and learned many wonderful words in the process, including grumphie [“pig”] and collieshangie [“squabble”]). But really, it’s more fun to read without meaning, instead feeling the rhythm and energy of the language, which becomes a zaum-ian exercise: “The cuddy cam clunk, / cloitit doon doup-scud, and wheech / but the muckle-mou’d moochers wena lang / in makin theirsels thrang.” —Nicole Rudick Last week, the podcast Some Noise finished up a three-part series on the Anderson Valley, home to Boonville, the birthplace of the Boontling language. The area is a sort of last stop on a trail to nowhere at the end of America—the stretch of California is sometimes called “the lost coast.” It’s a steep, rugged, isolated country whose industries are logging, hops farming, grape orcharding, and, relatively recently, marijuana growing. Host Najib Aminy learns all this while investigating gentrification in rural America, but he also stumbles upon decades-old feuds between San Francisco’s exiled hippies and local rednecks, and lots more. “Times has changed terribly,” says the old-timer Wes Smoot, also known by his Boont name, Deacon, meaning “looker” (perhaps “seer”). Smoot is one of the last fluent speakers of Boontling, whose words, Aminy finds, exist mostly on wine and beer labels glued to the drinks produced in the area. In 2018, pot will finally be legal for recreational use in California. As the date approaches, residents of the Anderson Valley, located squarely in the state’s notorious Emerald Triangle, are both weary and eager about the next boom. Aminy finds it fitting that one of the latest Boontling words, invented by Smoot is “downstreamer.” “Downstreamers are salmon come up to spawn,” says Smoot. “And when they spawn, their life is done, and then they start back downstream. Well, when they go downstream, they’re all wore out, and, finally, they die, you know?” —Jeffery Gleaves Read More