July 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Six Hundred Thousand Faces By Erik Hinton What Gershom Scholem’s take on Jewish mysticism can teach us now. Gershom Scholem In the wake of so much political turmoil, we’re hungry for books that diagnose our broken world: books that lay out a grand ethical program and claw back some hope for humanity. Online, I’ve noticed a loose reading list coalescing. We’ve called on Hannah Arendt, who cut into the heart of evil and found a weak organ of banality instead of an engine of diabolic creativity; Walter Benjamin and his “weak messianic power,” which inspired us with the latent energy of history’s failed revolutions; the totalitarian gloom of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale; the grim prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. Surely, the thinking goes, we could be saved if we find the proper pattern, fitting our dismal and uncertain present to the prescriptions of history. In Gershom Scholem, the historian who popularized the study of Kabbalistic and Messianic movements in Judaism, I’ve found a refreshing vision of revolutionary change and justice, stimulating the utopian imagination beyond the traditional touchstones of leftist thought. Though he was a friend of Benjamin’s and, more distantly, of Arendt’s, Scholem is the least widely read of the three and arguably the least accessible. A scholar of esoteric Jewish experience who rarely divulged his personal religious and political philosophy, Scholem resists the immediate, quotable relevance enjoyed by his contemporaries. His work features ecstatic stories of men who believed they were the Messiah, and incoherent descriptions of God’s celestial chariot—of limited use to political dissidents, war victims, and alienated workers. When the jackboots of authoritarianism are kicking in doors, Scholem’s apocalyptic religiosity can seem cloying. Why should we need to hallucinate the end of days? It’s here. Read More
July 13, 2017 On the Shelf Time to Brush Up on Your Demonology, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ukobach, a minor oil demon, depicted by M. Jarrault. At this point, there’s no good reason not to become a Satanist. If I’m going to swear an oath of fealty to a demonic, sadistic, megalomaniacal overlord, it may as well be Satan himself, instead of some bush-league rip-off. (The faker has orange skin; the real deal is straight crimson.) Even if you’re on the fence about Lucifer, it’s a fine time to brush up on the basics of Satanism; one never knows when a well-worded appeal to the powers of Hell will come in handy. In a new essay, Eric Grundhauser looks back at Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, which provides a great primer on the cast of demons down below. Also, it has nice drawings: “De Plancy published dozens of titles in his lifetime, but he never surpassed the success (or infamy) of the Dictionnaire Infernal, which first appeared in 1818 and was followed by several updated editions. The full subhead for the 1926 edition describes the book as a ‘universal library on the beings, characters, books, deeds, and causes which pertain to the manifestations and magic of trafficking with Hell; divinations, occult sciences, grimoires, marvels, errors, prejudices, traditions, folktales, the various superstitions, and generally all manner of marvelous, surprising, mysterious, and supernatural beliefs.’ Many of the demonic descriptions in the Dictionnaire Infernal have their roots in earlier demonological texts, such as the sixteenth century Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or the seventeenth century Lesser Key of Solomon. Both of those titles contained hierarchical descriptions of Hell’s many denizens, versions of which de Plancy included in his text. Among the spirits presented in de Plancy’s book are well-known evils such as Lucifer and greedy Mammon, but also more obscure devils such as the lower demon Ukobach, who tends to fireworks and oils, and the bellows-bearing fallen angel Xaphan.” Most people don’t read poetry. Press them about this and they’ll usually say something like, “I don’t ‘get’ it,” or “It’s just so pretentious,” or “The poets have degraded our society’s moral fiber, and they killed my baby.” You should never accept the first two reasons as an excuse. As Matthew Zapruder writes, there’s no reason to believe that poetry isn’t straightforward or that you can’t understand it, even if you regard yourself as a rube: “Like classical music, poetry has an unfortunate reputation for requiring special training and education to appreciate, which takes readers away from its true strangeness, and makes most of us feel as if we haven’t studied enough to read it … The art of reading poetry doesn’t begin with thinking about historical moments or great philosophies. It begins with reading the words of the poems themselves … Good poets do not deliberately complicate something just to make it harder for a reader to understand. Unfortunately, young readers, and young poets too, are taught to think that this is exactly what poets do. This has, in turn, created certain habits in the writing of contemporary poetry. Bad information about poetry in, bad poetry out, a kind of poetic obscurity feedback loop. It often takes poets a long time to unlearn this. Some never do. They continue to write in this way, deliberately obscure and esoteric, because it is a shortcut to being mysterious. The so-called effect of their poems relies on hidden meaning, keeping something away from the reader.” Read More
July 12, 2017 Our Correspondents ’Tis Pity Such a Pretty Maid As I Should Go to Hell By Anthony Madrid From the cover of the NYRB reissue of The Fire Horse. 1 I have just closed Isaac Watts’s once-famous book of children’s poetry, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children. This book came out in 1715 and went through nobody-knows-how-many editions. Billions. Apparently there was a very long period during which it could reasonably be expected that any English-speaker could recite every one of these twenty-eight poems backward, under any conditions, including hanging upside-down drunk on two hits of acid. Today, most people only know of the book’s existence because two of its pieces are parodied in Alice in Wonderland (Watts: “ ’Tis the voice of the sluggard … ” and “How doth the little busy bee … ” versus Carroll: “ ’Tis the voice of the lobster … ” and “How doth the little crocodile … ”). Modern readers usually assume Carroll is cocking a snoot at old Watts for being a moralistic, unfun and quadrilateral prig. It is, of course, possible that Carroll thought that, but I must say I doubt it. After all, Carroll was himself a supreme goody-goody, every bit as much as Watts. Read Carroll’s in-earnest poem on the first page of Alice (“From a Fairy to a Child”). Read his diary. Read More
July 12, 2017 First Person Peter Matthiessen’s Notebook By Terry McDonell A way to talk about work and friendship. Peter Matthiessen. Before I became friends with Peter Matthiessen, I was his editor. We talked on the phone and our conversations, when I’d reach him driving one of his numerous loops through the deep West, never started with where he was but rather where he was going. All the travel, all the reporting, were central to his work. “I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land my characters inhabit,” he said, when he talked about writing. “I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.” And they did, I think, because his great discipline allowed him to write well from wherever he went, from however deep he got. Read More
July 12, 2017 On the Shelf Those Jazzy Ironworks, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Rose Iron Works, Muse with Violin Screen (detail), 1930. (Image via Hyperallergic, courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art, on Loan from the Rose Iron Works Collections. © Rose Iron Works Collections. Photo by Howard Agriesti.) When we think of the Jazz Age, we think of the hairstyles, the fashions, the … jazz. You’d think the world was nothing but highball glasses and long, langorous cigarette holders. But who among us pauses to remember the zoning regulations of the Jazz Age? Who dares to stop and consider the period’s sideboards, bookcases, coffee services, and ironworks? I will tell you who: the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum. Their new exhibition, “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” aims to transcend the clichés of flapperdom by focusing on less celebrated objects and designs. At last, the vases and daybeds of the 1920s will get their fifteen minutes of fame. Allison Meier writes, “Many of the featured designers were immigrating from Europe, or having their creations imported to the United States. Others were Americans who went abroad to study and train, picking up tubular metal techniques at the Bauhaus in Germany or ideas for bold hues from De Stijl in the Netherlands … British designer Wells Coates’s green, circular Bakelite radio, one of the manufacturing innovations being spread to the new middle class, rests on German designer Kem Weber’s sage-hued, streamlined sideboard, which was also intended for serial production. Russian-born craftsman Samuel Yellin’s curling wrought iron fire screen mingles with Lorentz Kleiser’s monumental tapestry showing Newark’s transformation from an indigenous village to an orderly town, both pieces demonstrating the endurance of historical European aesthetics. A towering ‘Skyscraper Bookcase’ of California redwood with black lacquer, all designed by Austrian émigré Paul Frankl, incorporates the zoning-enforced architectural setbacks of the new skyscrapers, something which Erik Magnussen’s Cubic coffee service with its silver angles does on a smaller scale.” Not unrelatedly: the Bloomsbury Group’s Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once designed a lavish, 140-piece dinner set, and now you can see it. (You cannot eat off of it, unless you buy it.) As Francesca Wade writes, the set emerged from a deep depression; Kenneth and Jane Clark had visited Grant in 1932, and found him in the dumps. “ ‘In an attempt to revive his interest in decorative art,’ [Kenneth] writes in his autobiography, ‘we asked him and Vanessa to paint us a dinner service.’ Two years later, Bell and Grant presented Clark with 140 pieces, including 50 Wedgwood plates illustrated with portraits of famous women from history—twelve writers, twelve queens, twelve beauties, and twelve dancers or actresses, and one of each of the artists, painted by the other. ‘It ought to please the feminists,’ Bell wrote, offhandedly, to Roger Fry. The service vanished in the 1980s, last seen in the Normandy home of Clark’s second wife, who was presumed to have sold it. Anyone interested in it has had to make do with black-and-white photographs in which many of the plates are stacked up, their faces hidden. But it recently resurfaced in the collection of an undisclosed European collector, who has now put it up for sale. It was displayed by Piano Nobile at the Masterpiece fair this month, and will be shown in the autumn at their London gallery.” Read More
July 11, 2017 Arts & Culture Dragons and Deprivation: Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma in Conversation By Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma Akhil Sharma, left, and Gabe Hudson. On the face of it, Gabe Hudson’s debut novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon has little in common with A Life of Adventure and Delight, the new collection of stories by Akhil Sharma. Gork follows a dragon at WarWings Military Academy who must, as his graduation day approaches, ask a female dragon to be his queen, even though he’s the nerdiest dragon in the class. (If she declines, he’ll becomes a slave.) The eight stories in Adventure of Delight, meanwhile, are all set on Earth as we know it. They focus on Indian families at home and abroad, all of them navigating the vagaries of morality and love—a wife in an arranged marriage is shocked to find that she’s in love with her husband; a divorcé reads women’s magazines in an effort to become an ideal partner. You’d think two such writers would have little to say to each other. But Sharma and Hudson are longtime friends, and fate has dictated that their new books be published on the same day—today, in fact, July 11. To celebrate, the pair convened at a Park Slope apartment belonging to neither of them, where, over lasagna and cashews, they discussed the terrifying prospect of releasing their work into the world; enduring fallow periods of more than a decade between books; and the pleasures of imagining life on planet Blegwethia. —Ed. SHARMA It seems very special to have written something so artful and yet accessible. Gork, the Teenage Dragon has to be one of the more original novels that Knopf has published. HUDSON I think it’s safe to say that this is Knopf’s first space dragon. When I first started writing Gork, people would ask me, What are you working on? I would describe the book a bit, and it would sound absurd—for the longest time it was just me believing in this dragon, this space dragon. So now, to hear people reference Gork like he’s an actual entity has been the great pleasure. Gork has started to take on a life of his own, at this point. My goal was to write something that any type of reader would be able to commune with. I always think of myself as a kid—like, a fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old trying to make sense of the chaos of the world. Back then I was so grateful for Kurt Vonnegut, whose books sent a signal out to me, saying it’s okay to be kind of crazy, or, actually, this whole “life” thing you’ve been born into is kind of a lie, so let me tell you some even more outrageous lies to get at the truth. I was hoping, in writing this book, to send that signal out to anyone who might be in that position. Read More