February 24, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gunpowder, Gay Saints, Game Wardens By The Paris Review From Escaped Alone. In the February issue of Harper’s, the gospel historian Anthony Heilbut writes about gays in the black church, past and present: “Even when they haven’t been the preachers—and they sometimes are—they have constituted the pastors’ inner circle and praetorian guard. Music dominates the traditional black church; the minister is as much cantor as village explainer. In particular, a good ‘Mississippi whoop,’ or melodic growl, has been the making of many a preacher. And when the minister growled, the gay organist would accent his every moan, while the gay choir members made their joyous noise, and the gay saints (i.e., members of the flock) jumped to their feet, clapping and dancing in the spirit. The whole experience was orchestrated and annotated by gays and lesbians. This is one reason why many straight men have shunned the church—why, for example, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was ashamed to tell his mother that he had joined a choir.” —Lorin Stein Caryl Churchill’s new play Escaped Alone is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for one more weekend. Go see it—it’s not even an hour long. Four British women, getting on in years, sit in the backyard and wonder where the time goes. They bicker, they ruminate, they joke about Tesco; in a manic outburst of nostalgia, they break into a skillful rendition of “Da Doo Ron Ron.” But there’s a nameless unease in the air—it might just be the apocalypse! Occasionally the stage goes dark and one of the women steps into a frame of terrifying red LED lights, where she recounts what I can only describe as fun facts about the end of the world. (“Smartphones were distributed by charities when rice ran out, so the dying could watch cooking.”) If Pinter had lived to see—and sniff at—Black Mirror, he might’ve fused it to Kitchen Sink Drama like this, but it would’ve wanted for Churchill’s warmth. Not to say she’s a softy: the tension, in the play’s best moments, breaks its neighborliness, and a dark, Beckettian ooze seeps out. One of its many fine monologues goes like this: “Terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage, terrible rage.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
February 24, 2017 Books Lamplight and Shadow By Alice Kaplan Patrick Modiano’s novels gaze through “the glass wall of our consciousness of history.” Patrick Modiano In a French TV show from 1990, the forty-five-year-old Patrick Modiano wanders around a supermarket on the rue de Sèvres in Paris. He speaks to himself and to the cameraman as he moves through the aisles of food, then pauses in front of a dairy case. He’s looking for traces of the Pax movie theater that once stood in the same spot, trying to recall where the screen was. But nothing he remembers is quite right, and his sentences break up in midcourse, leaving only verbal gestures at a past no longer visible. His attempt to locate the screen amounts to a fool’s errand. Like the writer in this video, the characters in Modiano’s fiction fail in their search for a lost past. His heroes are elusive, disappearing into the crowd, more comfortable listening than speaking their mind, and always aware of the futility of the hunt: their prey is forever receding. In The Black Notebook, translated with perfect pitch by Mark Polizzotti, a writer named Jean tries to fathom the life of a former girlfriend, Dannie, a woman with multiple pseudonyms and a mysterious bond with gangsters who lived in the Unic Hôtel, in the shadows of the Montparnasse train station. During their affair, the police question him about the criminal activities of the group, but he has no information to give them. In a quintessential scene, Jean stands on the sidewalk of his imagination and stares at the men through the glass window of their hotel lobby. He gazes into an impenetrable story, not for its decor or its nostalgic atmosphere, but for the pull history exerts on the present: “Perhaps the glass was opaque from inside, like a one-way mirror. Or else, very simply, dozens and dozens of years stood between us; they remained frozen in the past, in the middle of that hotel lobby, and we no longer lived, they and I, in the same space and time.” Modiano’s books are full of moments like this; they transmit something deep and essential we’re forced to reckon with, the glass wall of our consciousness of history. Read More
February 24, 2017 On the Shelf Readability, Schmeadability, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring James Aumonier, Where the Water Lilies Grow, 1870. I’m a man of simple tastes: I take my food edible, my water potable, my words legible. But people can be awfully choosy. Ben Roth has inveighed against the rise of “readable” books—“readability” being an increasingly prevalent form of critical shorthand, a way of telling us which novels go down easy. Roth is advancing the latest variant on an ancient argument about whether lit’rit’cher should be fun, or work, or work that tricks you into thinking it’s fun: He writes, “Readable books are full of familiar characters, familiar plots, and most especially familiar sentences. They are built up out of constituent commonplaces and clichés that one only has to skim in order to process. Nothing slows you down, gives you pause, forces you to think or savor. Not too much description, or abstraction, or style. A little bit literary, perhaps, but not too. To praise a book as readable is really just to say that you won’t have to add it to your shelf with the bookmark having migrated only halfway through its leaves … To praise readability is to embrace the vicious feedback loop that our culture now finds itself in. Short on concentration, we give ourselves over to streams of content that further atrophy our reserves of attention.” But Sarah Perry is having none of it. In Roth’s “entertaining little polemic,” she sees aimless fulminating, and she stands up for readability, because someone had to. (Stay tuned for my think piece, “In Praise [But Gentle, Delicate Praise] of Books That Are Just Readable Enough [While Also Providing a Neat, Salubrious Challenge]).” As Perry notes, very Britishly, “Prose which is ‘readable’ is prose which is skilled. It is quite useless to argue that there is no objective standard for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ where writing is concerned; one need read hardly more than a dozen books before discovering that a bar is set. Readable prose is, generally speaking, diligent in its sentence construction, erring from received rules of grammar only deliberately and to a clear effect. Its figurative language functions so that the reader is not left puzzling over a metaphor which creaks like a well-oiled door (you see, I hope, what I did there); its characterization bears some resemblance to people as you and I know them; it is what one might call ‘ontologically sound,’ creating a world entire from which it does not willfully depart. Yet all these principles the skillful, ‘readable’ book may wickedly flout, and still remain skillful and ‘readable.’ ” Read More
February 23, 2017 Sleep Aid The Decline and Fall of Whist By Dan Piepenbring It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from The Decline and Fall of Whist, an 1884 book by John Petch Hewby. Though Mathews (circa A.D. 1800) in two short sentences laid down the true and only principle of discarding: “If weak in trumps, keep guard on your adversaries’ suits; if strong, throw away from them,” fifty years afterwards it was discovered by the “little school” that “the old system of discarding was just this—when not able to follow suit, let your first discard be from your weakest suit.” Rough on poor Mathews! but the absent are always wrong. However, by a process of evolution, to the first step of which no exception can be taken, we are next told—(a) “When you see from the fall of the cards that there is no probability of bringing in your own or your partner’s long suit discard originally from your best protected suit.” “You must play a defensive game.”—Cavendish. Read More
February 23, 2017 On Film Herr Fassbinder’s Trip to Heaven By Charlie Fox The prolific, careening career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. FAUST: Joy is not the issue, I give myself to frenzy, to pleasure that hurts most. —Goethe Death stands there with its thing sticking out. —Frederick Seidel “Ah,” said the policeman studying the corpse on that summer morning in 1982, “even Fassbinder is mortal.” The German filmmaker lay on his bed in a swank benefactor’s penthouse, flesh cold, blood snaking from one nostril and the script for a new project—a spaced-out biopic of the communist heroine Rosa Luxemburg—lying next to his body. The postmortem would later reveal that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, aged thirty-seven, had died around four A.M. on June 10, his heart stopped by the fatal interaction between a mixture of cocaine and sleeping pills. Even if this scene related in Robert Katz’s scurrilous biography Love Is Colder Than Death (1987) is cultish apocrypha, there is something in its freeze-framed combination of unbelievable fact, mythic allure and disclosure of a desolate fall that serves to encapsulate Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life. Dionysiac excess was the norm: he drank all day, snorted snowdrifts of coke like a vacuum and gorged on barbiturates by the bagful but work was all that mattered. He spent the next day behind the camera shooting his new project, editing its predecessor at night, and writing whatever was next until dawn. “I really have a drive that’s hard to explain,” he said, “I’m actually only happy when I’m doing things and that’s my drug, if you will.” Adopt his thinking and the merits of coupling sleeping pills with cocaine are obvious: achieve white-hot exhilaration with coke but smooth that comedown into a sweet dream with a rainbow combination of knockout tranquilizers. If that wasn’t a fast enough route to oblivion, he wasn’t scared to darken the mixture with a little heroin and promptly vanish down a black hole for the next few hours. The drugs would be syncopated with whiskey sloshed into a pint glass to keep his thinking limber and remove any residual jitters from the cocaine. For any observer, the whole desperate party must have looked like a suicide accomplished in slow motion. Fassbinder had kept up this rhythm for years; his films, too, were about fatal interactions, encounters between the kind-hearted and wicked that frequently end with the innocent’s demise. The policeman was right: he didn’t seem to have the same needs or limits as other men—he was, to quote the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s fond description of his friend, “an unruly beast.” Read More
February 23, 2017 Revisited Language Games By Caite Dolan-Leach Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Caite Dolan-Leach remembers her first encounters with Oulipo. Meeting of Oulipo in Boulogne. © Archives Pontigny-Cerisy By my last year of high school, French was the only class I bothered to attend with any diligence. I was too busy organizing my escape to far-flung climes; a foreign language was the most likely thing to help me secure this imagined, overseas future. I would skip PE to memorize verb conjugations, sitting in the high school’s abandoned auditorium, mumbling to myself in the dark. I think the janitor who occasionally walked in on these foreign monologues was a little frightened of me. I stumbled across Queneau’s Exercises in Style while browsing the chipped and nibbled pages of the French section at a local used book sale. I was thrilled by the book’s concept, but quickly bored with its execution. Written by one of the founding members of Oulipo, a group that uses constraints of language to spur on creativity, Exercises in Style is a single story told ninety-nine times, each time in a different style. Other members’ works include books composed using mathematical problems derived from chess games, dismembered sonnets, and lipograms. At the time, I liked sprawling, character-driven novels, and this book was stripped of character and even plot. I bought the book—it cost just fifty cents and appealed to my literary vanity—but I’ve still never finished it. Read More