September 30, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Menace, Music, Melrose Place By The Paris Review What’s Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy doing in an episode of Melrose Place? You can thank the GALA Committee for that… I know Patrick Hoffman as a real-life detective. So when I picked up his novel Every Man a Menace, I expected to find a bunch of believable lowlifes killing each other, believably, over a large shipment of drugs. I was not expecting—wasn’t demanding—subtle characterization, tricky narrative switchbacks, or vivid, moody prose. I also wasn’t expecting the action to begin with a long acid trip. “In his mind’s eye, Raymond saw emeralds cut into shapes that couldn’t be described in human language … He saw the insides of stars like rooms in a house.” When Hoffman takes off his detecting hat, he’s closer to Denis Johnson than to Elmore Leonard. —Lorin Stein I’ve never watched much Melrose Place, but I’m always looking for reasons to start. I found the best one at Red Bull Studios, where Mel Chin and his team of artists, the GALA Committee, are displaying all the art they designed for the show. In an inspired marriage of fine art and pop culture, GALA convinced Aaron Spelling to let them pepper his sets with sly, subliminal artworks that most viewers never even noticed. (And how could they, with such melodrama unfolding around them?) A box of Chinese takeout with ideograms for “Human Rights” made a cameo in a post-Tiananmen Square episode; a dartboard with a silhouette of a woman who represents the show’s “target demographic” hung in the bar; and a blanket embroidered with the chemical structure of the morning-after pill found its way to one character’s bed just as she learned she was pregnant. The irony—such pointed social commentary in such hidden art—never got old; I wandered the premises long after most had left. It helped that a number of Melrose Place’s sets have been lovingly resurrected onsite. Yes, the pool is there. —Dan Piepenbring Read More
September 30, 2016 Literary Architecture Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Judge and His Hangman By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s mystery novel The Judge and His Hangman revolves around a sudden nighttime encounter between chief detective Bärlach, an inspector with the Bern police, and his eternal rival, Gastmann. Read More
September 30, 2016 On the Shelf Live Your Best Pod Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: scarletgreen Today in extravagant acts of self-protection: Julian Barnes wasn’t a fan of his first novel, 1980’s Metroland. So he wasn’t surprised when it got a savage notice in an organ called The Daily Sniveler by one “Mack the Knife”—a nom de guerre for Barnes himself. Yes, Barnes trashed his own novel, just so he could be sure he got there first. “In the old days,” he wrote, “the Sensitive Young Man, after producing his novel, would slide back into the obscurity of book-reviewing and hock-and-seltzer; he would in middle age be much taken with writing letters to the newspapers; and in old age, chairbound in his club, he would reveal himself to be the unremitting philistine which his earlier manifestation had sought to conceal. We must wish Mr Barnes well as he sets off on this inevitable journey.” Hi, here are some metaphors: Translation is a handshake. Translation is mimicry. Translation is a chess match. Translation is reproductive printmaking. Translation is a groom kissing a bride through her veil. Translation is an imaginary map. Translation is a hall of mirrors. Translators are horticulturists. Translators are conductors of an orchestra of words. Translators are ghosts. Translators are ninjas. Translators are… Read More
September 29, 2016 Books Snorri the Seal By Dan Piepenbring What a vain little seal! It’s Banned Books Week, and everyone is rallying around the classics: your Gatsbys, your Catcher in the Ryes, your Mockingbirds and Lady Chatterleys. No one is giving any love to Snorri the Seal—to my eye one of the handsomest books ever to face censorship. Snorri is a Norwegian children’s book written and illustrated by Frithjof Sælen. Published in 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Norway, it tells the story of “the vainest little seal in the Arctic Ocean”—that’s our Snorri!—who whiles away his seal-days delighting in his own good looks. And who wouldn’t, with a luxurious coat like his? He’s so self-absorbed that he fails to see trouble on the horizon in the form of Brummelab, a distinctly Soviet polar bear. Read More
September 29, 2016 From the Archive On Seeing an Ex-Husband on the Cheese Line of the Gourmet Grocery Store By Meredith Trede Meredith Trede’s poem “On Seeing an Ex-Husband on the Cheese Line of the Gourmet Grocery Store” appeared in our Fall 1994 issue. Her latest collection is Tenement Threnody. Read More
September 29, 2016 On Film Where Nothing Can Go Wrong By James Hughes We’re not spying, but it feels like we are. Each moment is tracked on surveillance monitors, recorded, studied. On one screen, a man, dressed moments ago in cowboy gear, is now postcoital with a robot prostitute. She soon makes herself scarce, heading back to recharge her circuits in the break room. The cowboy stares up at the ceiling, his six-shooter cooling in a holster draped over a chair. He’s luxuriating inside a simulacrum of an 1880s Western whorehouse, one situated within a network of amusement parks in an unnamed desert expanse. It’s the end of the first act of the 1973 film Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, a master of the techno-thriller novel whose occasional forays into filmmaking—he directed a half dozen features over two decades—yielded more modest, earthbound results than the fantastical predictions he packed into his paperbacks. But Westworld, his feature debut, continues to haunt. Its vision of a pleasure dome with exploited, humanlike robots as moving targets has been reprogrammed into a highly anticipated HBO series, premiering Sunday. Read More