October 10, 2016 Look In the Pines By Dan Piepenbring “In the Pines,” an exhibition of paintings, ceramics, and works on paper by Rebecca Morgan, is at Asya Geisberg Gallery through October 29. Morgan grew up in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania; her work plays with stereotypes and caricatures of hillbillies and country people. The woods suggest a coarse and hedonistic culture: it is the scene of bonfires, hunting, sex, drunken revelry, camaraderie, fights, and perversion. Morgan said in an interview with TOH Magazine. “I navigate my reverence and aversion to the place that has rejected yet charmed me. I operate in modes of frustration, cynicism, and reclamation.” Rebecca Morgan, Family Reunion, 2016, oil and graphite on panel, 24″ x 30″. Read More
October 10, 2016 First Person The Book of Life By Shelley Salamensky Aunt Rose, right, et al., 1942. In her book Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood recounts how she faked her own death, staging a car crash in the Philippines. My great-aunt Rose did something of that nature—if, admittedly, in the less dramatic mode of an aged Jewish lady with used tissues tucked into her sleeve and sagging, off-color support hose. Rose’s ride to a wedding in Newark from Paterson showed up as planned, and as confirmed by her the week before. Somebody’s nephew. Rang, rang the bell. —No answer. —Upturned an ashcan in the alley, climbed and, clutching at the window ledge, peered in. Aunt Rose was gone. Read More
October 10, 2016 Books Being a Bumpkin By Oliver Lee Bateman Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity. From the cover of Hillbilly Elegy. Scan the headlines and you’ll find that everyone’s talking about how the white trash have made their presence felt. The white trash support Trump; the white trash are losing ground; the white trash should be honored by the government for their hard work and sacrifices; the white trash are continuing to redirect their aggression at other racial minorities instead of the robber barons who exploit them. But who exactly are these people, these trashy whites who have found themselves, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, “without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power?” Read More
October 10, 2016 On the Shelf Someone’s Sending Feces to Philosophers, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Full of shit. There are plenty of people in this world who deserve to find an envelope full of human feces in the mail. Philosophers, in my experience, are not among these people; the life of the mind does not often cry out for comeuppance. But someone thinks otherwise. Sally Haslanger, a professor at MIT, was among four philosophers to receive shit in the mail last summer: “Haslanger wasn’t as confounded as one might expect a well-respected philosopher to be when faced with a mysterious package of poop. That’s because three other philosophers also received shit in the mail last summer … All four philosophy professors were embroiled in a 2014 academic brawl over what they perceived as an abuse of power within their field. Now they say someone is sending them shit in an attempt to shut them up. The question is, who? And why now?” Let’s take a trip to the annals of ghostwriting, where new research suggests that Hitler actually wrote Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, a 1923 book previously believed to be the work of Baron Adolf Victor von Koerber. “I’m convinced from the presented sources that Hitler himself wrote this short text or gave at least the basic information to an editor,” a German newspaper editor said. “This is important because it shows that Hitler thought about himself as the ‘German savior’ as early as 1923. So I think this is a small but important advance in researching Hitler’s biography.” Read More
October 7, 2016 From the Archive LBJ Ranch Barbecue By Catherine Bowman Catherine Bowman’s poem “LBJ Ranch Barbecue” appeared in our Fall 1990 issue. Read More
October 7, 2016 Brushes with Greatness The Ballad of Justin Bobby By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Recently, an article I had read in an Israeli women’s magazine when I was maybe eleven popped into my mind. The piece was about fans: people who spent a lot of their time following their celebrity idols around, splitting the difference between adoration and what would now be probably called stalking. I recalled a detail about two sisters who were obsessed with, if memory serves, Kris Kristofferson. Somehow, they had ended up at one of his houses, where a housekeeper let them in and was kind—or unprofessional—enough to give them some mementos of their idol’s: a pair of old cutoff shorts he wore out of the shower and some cigarette butts that he’d smoked. Cigarette butts that he’d smoked! This struck me both then and now as kind of extreme. Imagine being so earnestly fixated on a stranger that touching something that carried only the faintest imprint of his or her body—even something fairly gross like an old cigarette—would be a thing you’d seek out! Decades have passed, and today very few celebrities still inspire that kind of all-out adulation, engendered by real distance between the famous and nonfamous. The kind of stars I’m thinking about—Beyoncé, maybe Rihanna—have a spectacular untouchability that gives rise to the traditional model of fandom: the type that wants to touch, that desires the laying on of the hands, or at the very least a whiff of the raiment. (Think, for instance, of Drake—a big star in his own right but also, too, a known superfan of Rihanna’s—who, in a song originally meant for her to sing, wrote the lines, “Let my perfume soak into your sweater.”) Read More