June 30, 2017 On the Shelf It’s Always Never a Good Time for Short Fiction, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Georg Achen, Interior with reading woman, 1896. What is a short story, and who is it for? Is it alive? Is it dead? The answer, after many centuries of heated argument, is this: no one has a fucking clue. The only consensus is that you probably shouldn’t try to write short stories unless you’re independently wealthy, and you shouldn’t try to read them unless you’re a deeply adventurous, ambiguous type. To do otherwise is to risk being poor and confused—a mere rung above the poets. Chris Power offers a survey of the form and its high points, which tend to coincide, depending on whom you ask, with its low points: “At the end of his 1941 study The Modern Short Story, H. E. Bates predicted that short fiction would be the ‘essential medium’ of the war and its aftermath. In a 1962 article he admitted his mistake, and in the preface to a 1972 reissue of The Modern Short Story he wrote: ‘My prophecy as to the probability of a new golden age of the short story, such as we had on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s and 1930s was … dismally unfulfilled’ … Yet that same year Christopher Dolley, in The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories, noted that, ‘far from continuing its supposed decline, the short story is enjoying a revival’ … The number of magazines that paid writers for stories peaked between the 1890s and the 1930s … The short story is and will remain a minority interest. This isn’t a defeatist position: if more weight were given to the work, and less to its popularity, some valuable stability could be established.” Looking at woodblock prints by Utamaro, one of the Edo period’s greats, Ian Buruma traces a history of the Japanese brothel—which so happened to be Utamaro’s most enduring subject. And his art was derived from experience: “Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but ‘Utamaro’ is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints … Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki.” Read More
June 29, 2017 Arts & Culture Blue Shores By Lynne Tillman Stephen Shore, Commercial Avenue, Cairo, Illinois, May 10, 1974, color photograph. Aperture, 2017. I These photographs are, ostensibly, different: a blue, shuttered used-clothing store; a blue car parked on a street and a bank in the background; twenty blue Adirondack chairs scattered on a spacious green lawn; and, a blue-and-white-striped restaurant facade. In each but the photograph with twenty chairs, windows figure inside the frame. The bank and car have windows; both storefronts do. But none is there to see through, as if transparent, none is what a photograph once was called, a window into the world. Instead, the windows are covered, partially blocked, or opaque. Looking at the used-clothing store, I can imagine a story for it: A twenty-four-year-old man standing in front of it. He’s just walked a few miles into the small city, because he needed food for a week, a new pair of Nikes. Maybe he wanted to see people, though the city looked deserted. Weird. He didn’t want to make friends, that would happen, he didn’t want to make things happen, because the right thing would come along. Fate. He relied on chance. An abandoned clothing store sat lonely on a side street, shut down tight and shabby. There was something sad about it. He stood there for a long while. The blue painted storefront kept everything hidden. No interior life. Funny, he thought. Blue is a sad color. A kitten emerged from a hole in the wall, or from nowhere. And he picked her up. Tiny, she meowed. I’ll call her Blue, he thought, and put her on his shoulder. He knocked on the door of the store and then on the window, and waited to hear movement inside. Maybe someone still lived there, and this was her kitten. This isn’t what the photograph represents; still, I could pin the narrative to its surface, like an ornament. There is no inherent story in the photograph, other than its composition. Read More
June 29, 2017 On Music In Stargoon’s Car By Paul Grimstad AI is changing the way we write songs—but music has always embraced machine language. Soon after I’d arrived in New York in the late nineties, I found a job in a vintage synthesizer shop (now gone) where I presided over restored Moog monophonic keyboards and was paid in rubber-banded rolls of twenty-dollar bills. I devised a lunch-break ritual: I’d walk a few blocks up to Gourmet Garage at Broome and West Broadway, where I would get a sourdough baguette and seltzer water. Then I’d head over to the bus shelter around the corner, where I’d sit and write in a spiral notebook. The entry for October 16, 1998, has the title “Franchise a rock band.” Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were—Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore—and perform the material as the band, just as someone with overhead and staff could open a Taco Bell or a Dunkin’ Donuts. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance—surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band—and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on. This wasn’t about trying to get rich; I had no interest in making a profit. It stemmed rather from my desultory toilet reading in Andy Warhol’s POPism and also with my sense of the dreary uniformity of “indie rock”: always the same lanky guys (and the occasional girl) with carefully mussed hair looking identically “authentic,” dispensing more or less indistinguishable chords and melodies. Since my days not working in the Moog shop were spent making nine-minute songs with titles like “The Continuing Adventures of Cardinal Caterpillar” on a cassette multitrack recorder in a tiny room in Brooklyn, subsisting entirely on street-vendor coffee, bagels, SweeTarts, tap water, and Parliament Lights, the Franchised Band idea was a desperately contrived fantasy meant to achieve a conceptual sophistication along the lines of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, but within the constrained format of the rock band. This all strikes me now as completely preposterous—and to some degree it’s been superseded by the hyperefficient Swedish studio wizards that crank out perfect megahits for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, et al. But at the time I thought it was revolutionary. I pitched it to a bunch of label people in New York. As I explained it, every last one of them started to giggle. Read More
June 29, 2017 On the Shelf Breaking the Ten Commandments (Literally), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring In 2014, Reed ran his car into a monument at the Oklahoma capitol. Your car can get you from point A to point B, but if you’re willing to destroy it, it can do much more than that: it can serve as a mighty metaphor for the sanctity of the constitution. As the Washington Post reports, a man named Michael Tate Reed is “a serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments.” This week he plowed his car straight into a three-ton granite sculpture of the Commandments outside the Arkansas state capitol in Little Rock; in 2014, he did the same in Oklahoma. Reed, a devout man, seems to believe that it’s his God-given mission to uphold the boundary between church and state. I don’t mean to mock Reed, who is mentally unstable—but there’s something fascinating in his determination to reduce monuments to rubble. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. writes: “He sent a rambling letter to the newspaper apologizing and describing the voices in his head and his attempts to recover from mental health issues. He also detailed one incident where voices told him to crash his car into other vehicles, but instead he wrecked on a highway median. In the past, he’s walked into federal buildings to spit on portraits, made threats against former president Barack Obama and set money on fire … Reed appears to allude to the Oklahoma toppling incident in a Facebook post before the Arkansas statue was rammed. ‘I’m a firm believer that for our salvation we not only have faith in Jesus Christ … But one thing I do not support is the violation of our constitutional right to have the freedom that’s guaranteed to us, that guarantees us the separation of church and state, because no one religion should the government represent.’ Later, he says he’s ‘back at it again,’ and asks for people to donate money to help repair his car.” In Detroit, meanwhile, a new exhibition called “99 Cents or Less” looks at the role of the dollar store in contemporary America. Chris Hampton writes, “The museum’s senior curator at large, Jens Hoffmann, invited participants to consider the dollar store—and its proliferation since the Great Recession—as an emblem of widening economic inequality, globalization, complex supply chains and rampant consumerism … Detroit has an especially high concentration of dollar stores, Mr. Hoffmann pointed out. Products that might once have been made there are now born in South, Southeast and East Asian factories—delivered and sold for less than a buck … Acknowledging ‘it’s where most of America shops,’ the Los Angeles–based artist Sean Raspet sampled surface cleaners available in Detroit dollar stores and mixed them together, turning the resulting solution over to the maintenance staff to use on their regular rounds, emphasizing the sort of labor and goods that are often made invisible … Agnieszka Kurant offered a darker take, likening dollar-store goods to palliatives, painkillers and placebos. She bought items like self-help books, hula hoops, cooking utensils, ramen noodles and had the lot industrially pulverized, then pressed by a compacting company into pills.” Read More
June 28, 2017 Our Correspondents Carrying Away His Last Sheep By Anthony Madrid An illustration of Leopardi by Tullio Pericoli. It’s Leopardi’s birthday tomorrow. Happy 219, Giacomo. In remembrance of the occasion, I think we’d all better have a look at the following short poem by James Wright. I’ve never seen it in any anthology. It’s from Shall We Gather at the River (1968). Read More
June 28, 2017 Notes from a Biographer A Friendship Hiding in the Archives By Scott Schomburg Joseph Mitchell and Ralph Ellison at a New York Public Library Literary Lions event in 1990. Photo: Star Black Workers wheel Ralph Ellison’s coffin to a vault at the Trinity Church Cemetery on 153rd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan: “There’s no room in the ground to be buried.” His mourners follow the pallbearers out of a small, unadorned chapel. Classical music plays faintly from a cassette player. The vaults, about fifteen feet high, look like “oversized pink marble post office boxes in the sunlight.” The George Washington Bridge is visible in the distance, darkly present in the afternoon haze, like a bridge to a world beyond our own. I’m reading an account of Ralph Ellison’s funeral, nine pages typed, hiding in a folder among the 127 boxes of Joseph Mitchell’s extant papers, at the New York Public Library. There is no byline, and it isn’t Mitchell’s prose. I stumble on it during my third day in the archives, sitting under lamplight at a corner desk in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. Mitchell and Ellison’s friendship has never been documented, as far as I know, but here in the preserved debris of Mitchell’s life, Ellison fills an entire folder. Four, in fact. I keep reading: “The ceremony is perfunctory, and except for watching Joe Mitchell comfort Mrs. Ellison, his arms encircling her small body, his sorrowful face bent toward hers, you almost forget someone has died.” Read More