March 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Muscle, Smoke, Mirrors By Oliver Lee Bateman What self-truths are bodybuilders hiding under all that muscle? A scrawny teenage boy sat on the beach with a girl. They were friends, but he wanted more: to hold her hand, to go steady. Then a bully, 220 pounds of brawny masculinity, appeared on the scene. He behaved as any toxic alpha male would: he walked past them and kicked sand in their faces. The boy stood to challenge him, but he grabbed the boy’s thin forearm and squeezed. “I’d smash your face … only you’re so skinny, you might dry up and blow away,” the bully said. By now, the girl had sidled up to the bully, and the boy was shaking with anger. “Oh, don’t let it bother you, little boy,” she told him, her voice dripping with contempt. The chastened boy went home, gambled a stamp on a free pamphlet about isometric exercise, and waited. After the pamphlet arrived, he performed the exercises, each push-up and handstand bringing him closer to precious manhood. Read More
March 20, 2017 On the Shelf He Just Ate a Pastrami Sandwich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ilya Repin, Duel Between Onegin and Lenski, from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 1899. I went to a party this weekend. It was boring. People talked about books all night, and no one threw a punch—or even a low kick to the shins. I wanted to stand on a chair and yell, People, people, we’ve got important work to do! Our forebears would be disappointed in us! In a new profile, Norman Podhoretz, the eighty-seven-year-old former editor of Commentary, sets an example when he remembers the adversarial literary culture of yore. Podhoretz tells John Leland: “It was a really passionate intellectual life. It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements … In the case of The Adventures of Augie March, I was the one who nearly came to blows … [After my review,] Bellow wouldn’t speak to me for years. It was only when he decided he couldn’t stand Alfred Kazin anymore that we became sort of friendly. We were sitting together in a meeting, Saul and I, and Kazin was over there, and he said, ‘Look at him, he looks like he just ate a pastrami sandwich out of a stained brown piece of paper’ … John Berryman, who was a friend of Bellow’s, came up to me—I didn’t know who he was, this drunken guy—and he said, ‘We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years.’ I was twenty-three years old. I go, What?” Alex Abramovich, eulogizing the late Chuck Berry, remembers his way with words: “Smart and systematic, he plugged every possible variable into the equations at hand and wrote anthems that were reverse engineered to appeal to rock and roll’s core constituency of disaffected teenagers. The songs were ‘intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few’, Berry said. But the lyrics were fine-grained and cinematic … Berry is celebrated for his neologisms: ‘botherations’ and ‘coolerators’ (in ‘Memphis, Tennessee,’ tears are ‘hurry home drops’). But his images and similes are just as impressive, and his sense of control is startling: when Berry shouts to the city bus driver—‘Hey conductor, you must … slow down!’—the song slows with him.” Read More
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