April 10, 2017 Bulletin Hilton Als Wins Pulitzer Prize for Criticism By The Paris Review Als in 2005. Photo: Dominique Nabokov, via The New York Review of Books. Congratulations to our advisory editor Hilton Als on his Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In today’s announcement, the committee cited the strength of his work for The New Yorker, where he’s written “bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality, and race.” You can—and must—read those essays here. But say you have hankering for more Hilton… Read More
April 10, 2017 Revisited Beyond the Alps By Jacob Bacharach Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Jacob Bacharach revisits Robert Lowell’s poem “Beyond the Alps.” I think I must have first read Robert Lowell’s poem “Beyond the Alps” the summer before my junior year of high school, when I was at the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia. I know I bought a copy of his Life Studies and For the Union Dead at one of the used bookstores there. I’d read “For the Union Dead” in some anthology or other, and it seemed to me that there was something intensely apropos about rereading this contemplation on a union colonel “and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry,” as depicted in Saint-Gauden’s civil war sculpture, on the Boston Common while living a poetical teenage summer in Charlottesville, surrounded by so much evidence of Jefferson’s cruel, horrible vision of a utopia with slaves. At the time, I gave “Beyond the Alps” very little thought, because it rhymed, and I’d recently learned from my peers that rhyming poetry was extremely silly. I was actually at the workshop as a songwriter, and I was able to smuggle my interest in rhyme past their censorious gaze by writing song lyrics, which existed in a weird zone of exclusion. Otherwise, I took their exaggerated disdain to heart. Read More
April 10, 2017 On Film Worst-Case Scenario By Tom Overton The vision of nuclear holocaust in Threads (1984) remains visceral and urgent. Still from Threads. The audience at the 1984 press screening of Barry Hines and Mick Jackson’s BBC TV film Threads apparently walked out in numbed silence. One of them, the novelist Russell Hoban, concluded in The Listener, This is not a film to be reviewed as a film; its art is that it cancels all aesthetic distance between our unthinking and the unthinkable: here is the death of our life and the birth of a new life for our children, a life … of slow death by radiation sickness and plagues and starvation and quick death by violence. Threads is a virtually faultless film, but as Hoban suggests, its unrelenting bleakness makes it all but impossible to recommend to someone one likes. That said, it has recently won a “Ten Films That Shook Our World” poll, and tonight, April 10, it’s showing at the Barbican Centre, in London. Spoiler alerts are irrelevant; the movie will spoil your day however you see it. In its harrowing vision of Britain after a nuclear war, pretty much everyone dies eventually, while rats, maggots, and the class system endure. As vividly as it defines the experience of living through the Cold War, we no longer have the luxury of viewing it as a historical document: in January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists declared us closer to doomsday than we’ve been since the early eighties. Read More
April 10, 2017 On the Shelf Spin the Historic Book Odor Wheel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring For a book that reeks of pipe tobacco, try smoking a pipe into your book. Take a whiff of a musty old book—isn’t that nice? We all have our favorites. Me, I like the ones that smell like my granddad’s scalp just after a hot-oil treatment, or like a saucepan of raw sheep’s milk left out under the hot noonday sun. As Claire Armitstead writes, scientists are learning more and more about old-book smell every day: “In a paper published this week in the journal Heritage Science, Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič describe how they analyzed samples from an old book, picked up in a second-hand shop, and developed a ‘historic book odor wheel,’ which connects identifiable chemicals with people’s reactions to them. Using fibers from the novel, they produced an ‘extract of historic book,’ which was presented to seventy-nine visitors to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Chocolate, cocoa, or chocolatey were the most frequent words used to describe the smell of a copy of French writer Panait Istrati’s 1928 novel Les chardons du Baragan, followed by coffee, old, wood, and burnt … The researchers believe the historic book odor wheel could become a useful diagnostic tool for conservators across a wide range of areas, helping them to assess the condition of objects through their olfactory profile.” There’s only one thing that smells better than an old book, and that’s a genuine human-hair wig. Very few artisanal wigmakers survive these days. One of them, as Annie Correal reports, lives in Staten Island: “Nicholas Piazza keeps six hundred pounds of hair in his Staten Island garage. He stores it in plastic bins and cardboard boxes, opposite the fishing supplies. ‘Got grays, got browns, got blonds,’ he said. ‘Got everything.’ Inside one bin, shiny brown bundles nestled around one another like snakes. He picked two thick braids and lifted them from the bin. Uncoiled, they were three feet long and nearly reached the ground. ‘This is all Russian hair cut right off people’s heads,’ Mr. Piazza said … Mr. Piazza is one of the last Old World wigmakers making wigs for the public in the city, men and women trained mostly by Italian and Jewish immigrants in the centuries-old trade of hand-tying wigs, a fussy affair that on the patience spectrum falls somewhere between tailoring a jacket and counting the stars.” Read More
April 7, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mediums, Midtown Hotels, McGoorty By The Paris Review Still from Mediums. After our Spring Revel this week, I woke up feeling like garbage’s garbage. To ease the pain, I reached for Robert Byrne’s McGoorty: A Pool Room Hustler, a biography as greasy as a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich and just as good for my hangover. First published in 1972, this profane picaresque does a nice little cradle-to-grave number on Danny McGoorty, a real live Chicago pool shark, earthy and sly and often in extremis. In the twenties, he went from billiard room to billiard room, conning and swindling his way to a small fortune; in the thirties, he was a boxcar hobo; in the forties, he went pro and sobered up long enough to win a pool championship. What else do you need to know? Luc Sante reissued McGoorty some years back as part of his Library of Larceny series, but it seems to have fallen out of print again. Won’t someone please rescue McGoorty? He is unrepentantly ripe. As early as page three, he begins his prurient boasting about “broads”: “I was seventeen years old before I was able to get my finger damp enough to turn a page. Once I got started, though, I became quite the little cocksman.” No doubt, McGoorty. No doubt. —Dan Piepenbring I’ve been reading Sarah Gerard’s new collection, Sunshine State, and trying to figure out why I’m so intrigued by the way she writes about the confident naïveté of youth. There’s little to admire in, say, a blissed-out appreciation of a dubious guy in parachute pants, but Gerard, writing in the essay “Records” about her senior year of high school, sets sections about pursuing vocal performance at her arts magnet school, with an eye toward a professional singing career, against drugged-out nights doing next to nothing. The contrast feels both irreconcilable and credible. Gerard’s prose is unlabored, flatly observational, and the interwoven mini stories are at once tender and cold, exhilarating and regrettable—each undermining the one that precedes it. In the best of these sections, almost a stand-alone story, Gerard travels to New York, from Florida, with her parents to visit colleges. She sneaks out of their midtown hotel at night and falls immediately prey to a pair of questionable older men. Seeing her camera, they tell her they shoot for National Geographic. It’s clear to the reader they do not; Gerard, at seventeen, is wide-eyed. They coerce her into taking a photograph of a couple arguing outside a bar. When she develops the photo home, she feels “afraid and ashamed looking at it, knowing this is not a picture I wanted to take; that I took it only because I was told to.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 7, 2017 The Revel Photos from Our 2017 Spring Revel By Dan Piepenbring Richard Howard, the recipient of this year’s Hadada Award. Our Spring Revel was Tuesday. Did you miss it? Don’t worry: we had the foresight to bring a photographer. Read More