June 12, 2017 On the Shelf Paper Does the Impossible, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Craig Kaplan, via Nautilus. It’s always nice to discover a new use for paper. Sometimes it seems as if all the good ones have been taken. Writing on it, wrapping fragile objects in it, wiping with it—these are old news. But, as Evelyn Lamb writes, mathematicians have fairly recently begun to use it to make impossible objects. Paper’s “wiggle room” affords it a kind of impossible latitude: “Using stiff paper and transparent tape, Craig Kaplan assembles a beautiful roundish shape that looks like a Buckminster Fuller creation or a fancy new kind of soccer ball. It consists of four regular dodecagons (twelve-sided polygons with all angles and sides the same) and twelve decagons (ten-sided), with twenty-eight little gaps in the shape of equilateral triangles. There’s just one problem. This figure should be impossible. That set of polygons won’t meet at the vertices. The shape can’t close up. Kaplan’s model works only because of the wiggle room you get when you assemble it with paper. The sides can warp a little bit, almost imperceptibly … It is a new example of an unexpected class of mathematical objects that the American mathematician Norman Johnson stumbled upon in the 1960s … Not only does this niggling near-perfection draw the interest of Kaplan and other math enthusiasts today, it is part of a large class of near-miss mathematics.” Andrew Sean Greer has your occasional reminder that the literary-prize racket is an ego parade with no value whatsoever to writing and reading: “There’s a great book by James English, The Economy of Prestige, in which he examines literary prizes and what they are about. Basically: an exchange of prestige for either money or another kind of prestige. Prizes evolve to serve themselves. They have nothing to do with actual writing … It’s like wanting a wedding—that’s not something to want. A wedding? Then what? You want a good relationship. A prize? Then what? You want to write something you’re proud of. Like, today, on the page. It’s easy to forget that’s the only real pleasure that writers have. And yet all the writers I know seethe when they aren’t acknowledged … But what if you knew a masterpiece had been written that year? And was ignored?” Read More
June 9, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Society Wives, Siege Poems, Strippers By The Paris Review From the first edition of Two Serious Ladies. The other day in conversation, a friend compared Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories to the work of Jane Bowles, so out of curiosity I picked up Sadie’s old copy of Two Serious Ladies—and, for the first time, from the first page, felt utterly at home with Jane Bowles. Why had her fiction seemed so strange before? A phobic society wife gets dragged by her husband to Panama and ditches him for life in the red-light district; meanwhile, another rich eccentric drags her hangers-on to a crummy house on Staten Island, and starts haunting the docks … Maybe Moshfegh has opened my mind. Maybe we all go strange sooner or later. For whatever reason, a reason I can’t explain, it all makes perfect sense to me now. —Lorin Stein Late last year, Ugly Duckling Presse published Written in the Dark, a small volume of startling poetry, the first of its kind: a collection of verse written by five men from within the Siege of Leningrad, an event that can be counted among the great horrors of war. “My soul, / to defend itself, pretended / to be wooden. There was no light,” writes Dmitry Maksimov in the epigraph to one of his poems. These “Seige poems” were, with small exception, unknown and unpublished in their authors’ lifetimes: the imagery of “frozen mummies,” of “lying and living, / In the grave with my dead wife,” of eating “Rebecca the girl full of laughter” ran counter to the official history of patriotism, stoicism, and Soviet might. The book’s editor, the poet Polina Barskova, links the poets’ works to those of the OBERIU, to which some of the authors are directly connected. Their trauma verse becomes a modernist salvo, not poems “after or about the Siege,” writes the scholar Ilya Kukulin in his afterword, but “poems through the Siege.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
June 9, 2017 On the Shelf We Deserve a Pink Guggenheim, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring What might have been. Image via the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Name a building that’s whiter than the Guggenheim. I’ll bet you can’t—no matter which sense of white you’re using. But let’s go with the most literal one. The museum used to be a beige, inoffensive, neutral color that probably everyone was fine with except for Robert Moses, who compared it to “jaundiced skin.” And so it was whitewashed. But Frank Lloyd Wright, as Michael Kimmelman notes in a new piece, had toyed with the idea of making it pink or even magenta—one way to make it pop off the sidewalk amid the drab skyline of a city he hated. Kimmelman writes, “In 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright, ninety and still tirelessly hawking himself as America’s greatest architect, sat for a television interview with a young, chain-smoking Mike Wallace. Does New York’s skyline excite him, Wallace asks. ‘It does not,’ Wright says. ‘Because it never was planned—it’s all a race for rent, and it is a great monument I think to the power of money and greed’ … Wright is still, sixty years after his death, a man for our times, image savvy, fighting to stay on top of the architectural heap by mastering a swiftly evolving media landscape … New York was never Wright’s idea of America. Elizabeth Hawley, from City University of New York, digs into archival drawings for Nakoma Country Club, a golf resort in Wisconsin, where Wright appropriated Native American art and artifacts for a decorative scheme as part of his larger project to define and own ‘Americanness’ … Wright was also a man of his own times, in other words, a bundle of competing ideas.” Emily Bloom looks at the influence of BBC Radio on Irish writers, especially Seamus Heaney, who credited the sounds of the radio for launching “his journey into the wideness of the world beyond”: “The ‘gutturals and sibilants’ of the foreign broadcasters initiate Heaney into the diversity and complexity of the spoken word … Earlier generations of Irish writers, including W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and Samuel Beckett, describe similar experiences beginning in the 1930s. For these writers, radio was an important influence, offering a powerful mass medium for the spoken word. For the first time, people could listen to a distant speaker in the privacy of their homes. Writers were especially drawn to the new medium because it created a platform for the spoken word at a time when print culture had all but erased the last vestiges of oral traditions on the British Isles … When I began researching in the BBC archives I was surprised both by the number of Irish writers who turn up and at the ways they credit the radio medium with shaping not only what they write, but how they write.” Read More
June 8, 2017 Revisited They’re from Here, and They’re Great By Michael Chabon Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Michael Chabon recalls discovering the Pittsburgh band Carsickness. Carsickness. I saw Carsickness play for the first time in the fall of 1980, somewhere on campus at Carnegie-Mellon University, where I was a freshman. I’d listened to their self-released EP, Police Dog, about a hundred and seven times by then, and I found their live show unaccountably stirring, because there was nothing that seemed likely to cause a stir about the five guys who made up the band. They had on jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of them wore a cardigan. A couple of the guys verged, particularly when it came to the way they wore their hair, on the unkempt, but most of them looked, frankly, a lot like CMU engineering students. None looked even remotely, in the fall of 1980, like punks. This came very much as a relief to me, I remember. I was kind of afraid of punks, or at any rate I was going to be afraid of them, I believed, if I ever actually met any. They did not have punks in the suburban Maryland town where I’d grown up and bought my first Clash, Blondie, and The Jam records. Read More
June 8, 2017 First Person Where I Wasn’t When Manchester Bled By Tom Benn The Manchester worker bee, as depicted in a mosaic on the floor of Manchester Town Hall. Like a nightmare from the past To the sound of splintered glass … What kind of times are these? They drive you to your knees —“A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days,” by the Chameleons, a Manchester band I was eight and watching Saturday Westerns with my maternal nana in her Moss Side maisonette when the IRA bombed central Manchester in ’96. My nana had a color TV, but she preferred to watch the world in black and white. I’d helped her drain the settings. She had a budgie called Bluey and an Alsatian called Blacky and a serpent tattoo on her thigh. We were eating grapes. But my mother is convinced we weren’t. Not when the bomb went off. Years later she told me she’d heard the news before we left the burbs; she’d taken me to see my paternal nana in Wythenshawe that day instead, avoiding town. Read More
June 8, 2017 On the Shelf Heavy Objects Are Lighter When You’re Drunk, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I’ve worked candy-ass office jobs my whole life, and so have never known true pain. That I still manage to complain constantly is a testament to my indefatigably sunny worldview and all the privilege backing it up. Finn Murphy, by contrast, made a career as a long-haul truck driver, as his new book explains, and he hardly ever complains. He got his start in an even less glamorous career: moving. He was one of the guys who picked up your heavy shit and put it somewhere else. This is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. If you’ve ever wondered how teams of broad-backed movers persist, day after day, no matter how many four-hundred-pound filing cabinets they have to carry down the stairs, the answer might be simpler than you think: they drink. Recalling his moving days, Murphy writes, “Moving companies like Callahan’s perform four categories of moving work: local, commercial, long-distance, and international. Callahan’s work was mostly local moving, which entails loading up someone’s house in the morning and then unloading in the afternoon at the new house. It takes the greatest toll on the body because you are handling stuff every working day. Long-haul drivers get plenty of days when they’re just sitting and driving; international moves are almost never time-sensitive, so the pace is easier; and commercial jobs—moving offices around—are mostly done with dollies and elevators. It’s the local stuff that eventually kills you or drives you to drink; more commonly, both … On particularly tough jobs, John Callahan himself was known to show up late in the day with a case of beer for the crew. On road trips, it was the job of the guy in the shotgun seat to prepare a thermos of cocktails for the driver. At the end of a move, the shipper always offered us beer. Often our work would take us into New York City, which required a seven A.M. start. At seven twenty we’d get off I-95 in Pelham and stop at Arthur’s Bar and drink a couple or three screwdrivers before heading into Manhattan. As far as I could tell, the moving business floated on an ocean of alcohol.” Now let’s depart the world of work and men—actually, let’s depart reality entirely—here’s Fredric Jameson, wondering why One Hundred Years of Solitude has so captured the literary imagination all these years: “What is it, then, that García Márquez did to the readers and writers of a still relatively conventional postwar world? … Not ‘magic,’ then, but something else must be evoked to account for the undeniable singularity of García Márquez’s narrative invention and the form that allows it to come into being. I think it is his uncanny, rapt concentration on his immediate narrative object … it isn’t really appropriate to credit some exceptional storytelling genius to a fictive entity called García Márquez’s ‘imagination.’ Rather, it is an equally indescribable or unformulatable intensity of concentration which produces the successive materials of each chapter, which then, in their accumulation, result in the appearance of unforeseeable loops and repetitions, ‘themes’ (to name another literary-critical fiction), finally exhausting their momentum and beginning to reproduce themselves in static numerical patterns … We have no ready-made literary-technical terms with which to approach the strange mode of active contemplation that lies at the heart of this compositional process (and of reading too).” Read More