March 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Codes, Contracts, Coffee Stains By The Paris Review From Terms and Conditions. In his new book, the pop-conceptual curiosity Terms and Conditions, R. Sikoryak reproduces the styles of more than a hundred other cartoonists—including Marjane Satrapi, Steve Ditko, Raina Telgemeier, Edward Gorey, and Peyo—one per page, to adapt the text of iTunes’ Terms and Conditions, “the contract everyone agrees to but no one reads.” I can’t say I read it in this form either, but it does make the text occasionally more intriguing, if not readable, highlighting certain phrases in the document that would otherwise remain a haze of letters. Given its own caption box, the line “To agree to these terms, click ‘agree.’ If you do not agree to these terms, do not click ‘agree,’ and do not use these services” reads like a middle finger to the (potential) user. A turtlenecked Steve Jobs populates each comic in the style of the page (as Popeye, Homer Simpson, Ziggy, Wolverine); Sikoryak, too, disappears into these other idioms, and though the parody is impressive, each style remains a simulacrum, lacking the soul of the original. But maybe this is partly the point. Even if it were Ernie Bushmiller at the pen, is it still Sluggo if he tells Nancy, “You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, transfer, redistribute, or sublicense the Licensed Application”? Sikoryak hasn’t attempted to match the action in the panels to the language, so the legalese can’t leech significance from the art. The text becomes a lorem ipsum—placeholder copy that is seen but never read. —Nicole Rudick After reading Fleur Jaeggy’s “Agnes” in our current issue, I got ahold of her collection I am the Brother of XX, out in July. Gini Alhadeff, who translates it from the Italian, does a wonderful job binding these twenty-one fictions about family life into a cohesive psychology: each offers a dark, uncompromising perspective on the covenants of mother-, brother-, and sisterhoods. In the title story, a young brother claims his sister’s concern for his academic well-being is the work of obsessive espionage; in “The Heir,” an old woman adopts a homeless girl and redrafts her will so that her daughter will receive her entire estate, only to be burned alive by this new heiress: “She wanted the destruction of that woman who was good to her. To destroy for the blasted glory of it. She doesn’t want money. But to destroy. Should she have to answer to a ridiculous why?” And that’s only the first time we see a daughter burn down her parents’ house in XX. This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over. —Daniel Johnson Read More
March 17, 2017 From the Archive The Light of the World By Dan Piepenbring I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life—about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened—is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy. —Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37, 1986 Derek Walcott has died at eighty-seven. In the days to come, we’ll say more about his life and legacy—for now, I wanted to share the last three stanzas from his poem “The Light of the World,” which appeared in our Winter 1986 issue, and invite you to share in the “ecstasy” of his art, as he describes in his Writers at Work interview. He will be missed. Read More
March 17, 2017 On the Shelf A Comma for the Working Man, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This world is full of pointless suffering and unending torment … but at least we’ve got the serial comma. Grammarians are fond of saying things like “the comma improves our way of life” and “proper punctuation is money in the bank”; normally they’re full of shit, but today they’re onto something. As Elena Cresci writes, “In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a U.S. court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous … The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay: ‘The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of (1) agricultural produce; (2) meat and fish products; and (3) perishable foods.’ The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between ‘packing for shipment’ and ‘or distribution,’ the law refers to the single activity of ‘packing,’ not to ‘packing’ and ‘distribution’ as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute—but do not pack—the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.” Rhyme schemers: Anthony Madrid urges you to take the easy way out. “There was nothing wrong in 1592, and there is nothing wrong in 2017, with using the same rhyme pairs over and over and over,” he writes: “You can call {sing|spring} a “rhyme cliché” if you want, but that attitude leads to flushing six sevenths of world literature down the toilet … We have all encountered persons who triumphantly cite the fact that nothing rhymes with orange. It is always orange they point to. Never scissors, never morgue, never geode. Never any of the other thousands of words that have no rhyme partner. Because: the orangists have given the matter no thought. They are quoting. As they always are. The more interesting phenomenon from the researcher’s point of view is the case of rhyme pairs like {fountain|mountain}, where each of the words has a rhyme, but only one. Where either mountain or fountain appears in rhyme position, the other is literally inevitable. Likewise with {only|lonely}. Likewise with {culture|vulture}. And others. There is no essential and inescapable semantic link between the words in those rhyme pairs. Yet, there is, to be sure, an inescapable link.” Read More
March 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Origin Story By Elena Passarello This is Elena Passarello’s final column about famous animals from history, featuring Little John, a coyote who made seventies art-world history. Design by Kristen Radtke. This was a typical performance by Joseph Beuys—mysterious, incomprehensible, in many ways absurd, yet strangely memorable. —London Telegraph I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote. —Joseph Beuys His back was never turned to the people watching from behind the barrier. Maybe he sensed that more danger would come from them than from the man in there with him, or maybe it was simply because he was a splendid showman. —Caroline Tisdall Name: Little John Species: Canis latrans var Years Active: 1974 Distinguishing Features: well-tended sable coat, toothy grin Skills: fetching leather gloves, urinating on newspapers of record, transforming humans into their mythic selves Habitat: 409 West Broadway, New York, NY 10012 Additional Notes: When Joseph Beuys was a teenage pilot stationed in Crimea, his plane was shot down, his copilot incinerated on impact. A band of nomadic Tartars dressed in coarse fur found the injured Beuys on the steppe; they salved his wounds with animal fat and swaddled him in felt. Then they dragged Beuys to their tents, where they healed him. The transforming powers of these natural substances—fur, flesh, and felt—made Beuys an artist. Or that’s the story Beuys told, at least. German military records show Beuys served as a radio operator, and though he was aboard a plane that crashed in 1941, it went down, not in the hinterlands, but on a Crimean airstrip, where a colleague pulled him from the wreckage. Read More
March 16, 2017 Arts & Culture The Library at Grey Gardens By Lesley M.M. Blume Photo: Lesley M. M. Blume A few years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that Grey Gardens was up for rent, I thought it had to be a bizarre joke: What kind of a sick twist would pay to spend time in the notorious cat-and-rot-scented squalor so memorably depicted in the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens? I knew Jackie O had paid to rehabilitate the place after Long Island authorities had nearly condemned it and ousted its inhabitants, Jackie’s aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and cousin Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie). After that embarrassment-driven overhaul, the place seemed briefly, passably pâté-worthy again—but still, it would have to be classified as “for niche tastes only.” It turned out Grey Gardens had long since been renovated back into a glistening private playground for the intelligentsia A-list. (My ignorance of this fact confirmed me as an intelligentsia C-lister, at best.) After the demise of Big Edie, the Washington journalist and social doyenne Sally Quinn bought the house with her husband, Ben Bradlee, the Watergate-era executive editor at the Washington Post. The capital’s quintessential power couple paid a mere $225,000 for the house and grounds, and lovingly restored the estate to its 1930s glory; there, amid the rose bushes and chintz chaise lounges, they entertained the gods and goddesses of the film and political worlds. More recently, they offered to share Grey Gardens by renting it to those willing to pay $150,000 a month for the privilege. (It’s now on the market for nearly $20 million.) Read More
March 16, 2017 On the Shelf Hi, I’m Being Sarcastic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just joking around, drinking milk in the sun. How about irony, huh? It’s complicated! On the Internet, any ironic message broadcast beyond certain narrow parameters has the irony sucked out of it like bone marrow: blockheads and buffoons get ahold of your words and are all like, Is that some kind of joke? Do you think that’s funny? We’re a post-joke society, and the situation is dire. Amelia Tait has diagnosed our cultural disease, and she proposes a radical solution: a full-time sarcasm font. “We now live in a time where people are being divided right down the middle on social media into camps called ‘Yes, Enlightened’ and ‘No, Very Bad.’ In the world of woke, one misunderstood joke runs the risk of ruining someone’s reputation. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I must suggest an immediate worldwide implementation of a sarcasm font … I want everything sarcastic to henceforth be written in that one WordArt that is all wavey and blue and great for GCSE Geography projects on the Savanna. Any time a satirical article is written, the whole thing will be bright and blue so that no one need pop over to the Facebook comment section to wish the author would be forcibly taken from their bed at dawn and shot in the face. The future of our fragmented society relies on this, more than anything else.” Maybe it’s best if we just abandon language altogether—certainly it doesn’t seem to help us talk clearly about sex and desire, which means, what’s the point? Grindr, the gay meetup app, is leading the charge to forgo words, in all their uselessness. Guy Trebay writes, “Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji—500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.” But will this allow for unfettered sexual expression, as Grindr claims it would—or are users just trading the shackles of language for the shackles of top-down corporate fascism? Doug Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, told the Times: “ ‘One problem is, you have this common language that’s not being organically created by marginalized people,’ as were secret hankie or hatband codes once used to signal identity in the era of the closet … ‘The corporate element is a new part of this. Having a common corporate language created to benefit a business ends up excluding a lot of people and creating very particular and normative ways of thinking about sex.’ ” Read More