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
February 23, 2017 On the Shelf I’m a Macaroni Man, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Richard Cosway, who went by the “Macaroni Painter” or “Billy Dimple”, poses for a portrait. Image via the Public Domain Review. I’ll just come out and say it: I enjoy macaroni. Always have, always will. And I’m fortunate to live in a time when a man can eat his noodles with no fear of reprisal from the squares and fuddy-duddies of the anti-macaroni establishment. It was not always so. As Dominic Janes writes, Britain in the eighteenth century cast a cold eye on young men who dared to devour macaroni in public—they seemed, you know, funny. Soon the very word macaroni “became associated with sodomy … Horace [Walpole], who was not a married man, presented himself as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the existence of a ‘Maccaroni club’ in 1764, which consisted of ‘all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses’ … Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly acquired tastes for Italian cuisine—with a supposed penchant for macaroni pasta in particular … Permeating all these late eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels.” By the next century, not much had changed—the historian Heather Ellis argues that Sir Humphry Davy, a preeminent chemist, was the target of a smear campaign implying that he was too effeminate to be a good scientist. His takedown reinforced the sexism in the sciences that continues to this day: “Popular magazines, like the John Bull, launched vicious personal attacks on the chemist’s flamboyant dress and the charismatic delivery at lectures that had brought him a wide female following … Rivals also spread rumors of closet homosexuality, speculating on not only his dress, but also his close association with the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Coleridge, with the latter once declaring of Davy: ‘Had he not been the first chemist, he would have been the first poet of his age.’” Read More
February 22, 2017 On Film The Right to Speak By Sarah Cowan “Africa was colonized, and so is its cinema,” Sidney Sokhona wrote. His films aimed to change that. Still from Safrana. The first time we see Sidney Sokhona, the director and star of Nationalité: Immigré, he is on his knees. Two French bureaucrats sit behind a desk, not bothering to look at him as they conduct their interrogation, mechanically writing down his details and finally handing him a piece of paper, which he takes in his mouth before crawling away on all fours. The paper bears the name of his public-housing assignment. His submission symbolizes the inhumane treatment he’ll face in his new home, and the politeness with which he will be expected to endure it. Hybridizing documentary and fiction, Nationalité: Immigré reaches occasionally into the surreal, as in this first scene. The film was shot between 1972 and 1975. With no money to pay another actor, Sokhona, a Mauritanian immigrant in his early twenties, was forced to play the lead role himself. As the story begins, Sokhona arrives in Paris, having traveled in the trunk of a car. His fantasy of city life, as thin as it is—“Finally, I will see with my own eyes the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, which I have seen so many times at free movie screenings organized by the French embassies in Dakar and Nouakchott”—never materializes, and neither do job opportunities, despite the prayers and lotto tickets to which he pins hope. Sokhona centers the film on the real-life rent strike undertaken by the rue Riquet shelter tenants in those years, in opposition to abusive and dangerous housing conditions. Voice-over explains: “Immigrant workers were already living and working in the most inhumane conditions. But then five people died in Aubervilliers, victims of the owners of this slum. One week after this atrocity, two black Africans were pulled from the Ourcq Canal with fractured skulls.” Over an image of two bodies under a sheet, the voice insists, “So for us immigrants, the situation presented itself like this: we had to organize ourselves to struggle or we would all perish.” Read More