April 14, 2017 On the Shelf Talking Is Overrated, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Talking has never done much for people. A speech act is a lot of hooey, if you ask me. Singing—that’s where the action is. It’s got all the expressiveness of language, without all that language. In her interview with Ben Lerner, the artist Steffani Jemison discusses—among other things—her interest in musical systems as a potential form of communication, especially among marginalized cultures: “It began with my interest in the work of a nineteenth-century composer named François Sudre who developed Solresol, an artificial universal language designed at a time when individual nation-states were consolidating in Europe. Sudre envisioned ‘speaking’ through the seven pitches of the diatonic scale, or the syllables assigned to those pitches in the solfège singing system, or really any system with seven units … A pre-Esperanto musical Esperanto. Every word is a combination of pitches. So a word might be (sings) do-re, which means ‘you.’ Or it might be [she sings] do-mi-sol-re, which means ‘power.’ Each melody indicates a different word. The symmetrical reversal of the melody has the opposite meaning. So re-sol-mi-do means ‘the opposite of power,’ however one might understand that. Of course, artificial languages don’t work, but I’m interested in why they recur at two extremes: first, in utopian visions of logical, frictionless communication (like Solresol); second, in completely opaque private languages like the kind I invented to write in my diary when I was a kid. Black Americans have a long history of creating and sustaining private and culturally specific languages and codes.” It’s important to sample the cuisines of other nations, especially when those cuisines are mass-produced and cheaply imported as part of the inexorable march of global capital. To that end, Talia Lavin has some great news: Russia’s best fast-food chain has arrived in America. She writes, “Teremok, a low-key purveyor of Russian staples, is almost comically ubiquitous in Moscow; a map of its locations shows a city Dalmatian-spotted with kiosks and restaurants, all boasting the company’s signature red nesting-doll logo … The two New York branches—in Union Square and Chelsea—are the chain’s first forays outside Russia, and are the result of a process years in the making. Why America? In an interview with the Russian magazine Forum Daily, the chain’s founder, Mikhail Goncharov, had a simple answer: ‘It’s the motherland of fast food’ … Buckwheat groats—known in Russia, where they are omnipresent, as grechnevaya kasha—have been repackaged as a ‘superfood’; the familiar Russian beet is touted for its vitamins.” Read More
April 13, 2017 Our Correspondents Clam Down By Anelise Chen Anelise Chen is the Daily’s newest correspondent. Her column will explore the scientific phylum Mollusca. This week, a clam has an identity crisis. James M. Sommerville, Ocean Life. She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened. Last fall, after a rib-bruising bike crash caused by momentary inattentiveness and conditions of reduced visibility (sobbing while cycling) the mollusk had briefly succumbed to an episode of hysteria, during which her mother kept texting her to “clam down.” Clam down, she demanded in that sober, no-nonsense way. At first, the clam looked all around her, like, Who, me? Until she realized that her mother was addressing her. * It made sense. Since the clam’s separation from her partner, she had been consuming a lot of calcium carbonate. This is what clams and other shell-building animals use to make their shells. She kept rolls of them in her bag, and they got whittled down throughout the day with alarming speed. On her desk, beside her usual writing implements—pen, notepad—was a flip-top container that was more fun to feed off of; it rattled percussively when she shook the tabs out into her palm. These tabs were tropically flavored, in delicate pastel colors. Humans were not supposed to ingest more than ten per day, but clams could eat them as needed. Both species possessed a stomach, and hers hurt most of the time. Read More
April 13, 2017 Arts & Culture Salinger’s Nightmare By Bill Barich An unemployed actor tracked down Salinger to get his permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye. J. D. Salinger on November 20, 1952. Photo: San Diego Historical Society In 1953, J. D. Salinger fled Manhattan for rural Cornish, New Hampshire, hoping to protect his privacy and find the solitude he needed for his work. The Catcher in the Rye, which spent thirty weeks on the New York Times’ best-seller list, had generated immeasurable publicity and adulation for Salinger, who wanted none of it. Among his new suitors were such Hollywood bigwigs as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, both vying for the screen rights to Catcher. They failed to secure Salinger’s approval, as did many others, in turn—but that didn’t stop Bill Mahan, an unemployed former child star and devoted fan from Los Angeles, from giving it a shot. In the early sixties, he resolved to claim the film rights himself, even if it meant disturbing Salinger at home. Mahan’s account of his unlikely adventure can be found in his papers at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. On December 1, 1961, he wrote to Salinger by registered mail to share his vision for turning Catcher into an independent feature, with the author retaining “artistic control.” At the age of thirty-one, Mahan had no credits as a producer or a director, and very little money, so he proposed to shoot the film “art-house” style, without changing a word of dialogue. Given the shoestring budget, Salinger would, of course, have to grant him the rights for free. In hopes of sealing the deal, Mahan wrote that he would arrive in Cornish on December 13, whether he’d heard from Salinger or not. Read More
April 13, 2017 On the Shelf If You Must Spy, Do It Silkily, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Emily Hahn. Rarely does a piece of writing combine my two all-time favorite interests: midcentury cryptography and secret silk squares. Today there’s such a piece. It’s about Emily Hahn, who was once, as Taras Grescoe writes, “one of America’s most widely read, and notorious, literary adventurers.” Hahn had an affair with a Chinese aristocrat; she picked up an opium habit, because why not; she held role-playing parties in her apartment and could often be found puffing cigars. And, as Grescoe reveals, the U.S. government once suspected she was a spy: “In a file in Hahn’s papers at the Lilly Library, in Bloomington, Indiana, I’d found a square of white silk, covered from edge to edge with typewritten names, cryptic messages, and several lines of Japanese poetry. The file also contained letters, on F.B.I. stationery, indicating that customs agents had discovered the silk square sewn into a sleeve of her daughter’s dress. Hahn, suspected of spying for the Japanese, was detained and interrogated for several hours. The silk cloth was sent to Washington to be examined for coded messages. In the files, I found a letter from the Treasury Department, sent four months later, acknowledging its return. But I couldn’t be certain what, if anything, the cryptographers had discovered. I was hoping [Hahn’s daughter Carola] Vecchio could explain at least some of the messages to me.” Our editor, Lorin Stein, interviews Richard Price about the role Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn played in his genesis as a writer. Price first read the novel when he was seventeen, on an interminable bus ride to Ithaca: “I’ve always been attracted to what I guess would be loosely called social realism. Sort of urban oriented, cement and working-class and squalling babies … I always found it a little grim. It felt not so much like a novel to take you away but a novel to convince you of a certain point of view about social justice. And I always found that a little leaden. But I liked the subjects. And when I had read Last Exit to Brooklyn as a kid, and specifically the first chapter, ‘Another Day Another Dollar,’ it was like he found a way to write about the same things but in almost incantatory bebop way. He was part of that scene in the late fifties, early sixties where jazz influenced a lot of writers. He had a lyricism to the work … I just felt like, If I’m gonna write about this, if this is the subject that draws me, I wanna have rhythm. I wanna have a little Selby bebop in the way I write.” Read More
April 12, 2017 Fiction … And Other Creatures By Franz Kafka Investigations of a Dog and Other Creatures, a collection of Michael Hofmann’s new translations of Kafka stories, is out next month from New Directions. Below, three of our favorites. Rupert Bunny, Poseidon and Amphitrite, ca. 1913. Poseidon Poseidon was sitting at his desk working. The administration of all the waters was a huge task. He could have had as many assistants as he wanted, and in fact he did have a large staff, but since he took his job very seriously and went through all the calculations himself anyway, assistants were of little use to him. One couldn’t say that the work made him happy either; he only did it because it was his to do. Yes, he had often requested happier work, as he put it, but whenever they came back to him with suggestions, it turned out that nothing appealed to him as much as what he was doing. It was actually very difficult to find anything else for him. It was hardly possible to put him in charge of a particular sea, quite apart from the fact that the calculations involved were no less onerous, just more trivial, since great Poseidon was only ever in line for an executive post. And if he was offered a job in a different department, the very thought of it was enough to turn his stomach, his divine breath became restless, his bronze thorax quaked. Not that they took his complaints all that seriously: if a great power kicks up, then you have to be seen to give into him, even in the most hopeless cause; no one seriously thought of having Poseidon removed from office, he had been god of the seas from the beginning of time, and would have to remain such. Read More
April 12, 2017 Look Between Blossoms By Dan Piepenbring “Between Blossoms,” an exhibition of photographs by Shen Wei, is at Flowers Gallery in New York through April 22. Wei, born in China and now based in New York, focuses on landscapes with a pervasive, ghostly negative space. This series, he says, uses “a touch of melodrama here, a hint of seduction there” to bring out the layer of dream-life hovering just beneath reality; he aims to find “an elusive, enchanting beauty” in the everyday. Shen Wei, Watermelons, 2015, chromogenic print, 13⅜” x 20″. Read More