January 13, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Salukis, Sincerity, Slithering By The Paris Review An illustration from Vice’s Fiction issue, which featured an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s Transit—see what we did there? The 2016 Vice Fiction issue is the best literary magazine I’ve seen this year. Maybe I’m biased. It includes new (and very good) work from a bunch of Paris Review writers, namely Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Tim Parks, Christine Smallwood, Deb Olin Unferth, and Benjamin Nugent—plus our former web editor Thessaly La Force. Oh, and the whole issue is edited by Plimpton Prize winner Amie Barrodale. But it’s not just the stories themselves. I also love the interior art direction—with literal photo illustrations of each story, all in what you might call the Vice house style. It screams sincerity, and it pays respect. —Lorin Stein Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit, which we excerpted last summer, is out next week. Like its predecessor, Outline, it comprises several long, fluid, exactingly rendered conversations. Saying more feels like window dressing, and I worry I’m making it sound like My Dinner with Andre, but here goes. Recently divorced, the narrator’s upheaval has led her to a state of social alertness (not to say vulnerability) that makes others eager to confide in her, to try out hidden versions of themselves. The feeling is of swimming, with blissful immersion, through hours of watery talk. It’s hard to describe a novel like this without making them sound “quiet” or “slight,” but Transit is neither—people speak and people listen, and it is good. In one of the many passages I earmarked, a man explains the elaborate, concerted hunting process of “a shoal of Salukis” as they track birds of prey: “It suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves.” You could think of Transit as the pursuit of that shared state. In its fidelity to the long talk—to the sense of permeation that comes with a lively exchange—it argues that conversation is the ideal vehicle for the sublime. —Dan Piepenbring Read More
January 13, 2017 Our Correspondents A Meeting of the Fern Society By Wei Tchou After failing to save my dying fern, I decided to look for help among experts. Fern specimens. Last winter, I had a moment of crisis after failing to keep my Green Clubfoot fern alive, despite establishing a complicated routine for my increasingly ailing plant: I set my fern’s pot on river rocks within a tray of warm water, for humidity; I alternated its position according to the sun, and misted its fronds twice a day. But no matter how damp I made the air or how much I considered its position to my radiator, by February it had shriveled in on itself, its tendrils drying to paper. I spent the next spring and summer attempting to read my way into expertise, but every field guide or plant study seemed to unfurl more disparate curiosities. Did you know, for example, that ferns reproduce with spores, rather than with seeds? Since spores are invisible to the naked eye, eighteenth-century naturalists believed the seeds of ferns to be invisible—some even thought you could harness the power of invisibility if you managed to collect fern seeds and stuff them into a pocket. In Fern Fever, Sarah Whittingham describes a method by which these enthusiasts devised to gather the mysterious seeds from bracken: In some places it was said that brake produced a small blue flowers once a year on 23 June, the night before the Feast Day of St John the Baptist, or Midsummer’s Day. The flower’s seed could be collected by stacking twelve pewter plates beneath a frond at midnight. It would fall through the first eleven plates and accumulate on the last one. However, fairies were also meant to be particularly active on Midsummer’s Eve, and if you were not careful, they would seize the spores as they fell and steal away with them. Read More
January 13, 2017 On the Shelf Every Day Is Friday the Thirteenth, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the theatrical release poster of Friday the 13th. Today is Friday the thirteenth—but then, hasn’t every day been, since November 9? New horrors greet us each morning and tuck us in each night. Rebecca Solnit runs a long, thorough postmortem on the election that got us here, imploring us to remember the sexism that coursed through it from start to finish: “In the spring, Trump retweeted a supporter who asked: ‘If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?’ Perhaps the president is married to the nation in some mystical way; if so America is about to become a battered woman, badgered, lied to, threatened, gaslighted, betrayed and robbed by a grifter with attention-deficit disorder … Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours, and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld from her because she did not deserve it or did not attract them. They did not blame themselves or the electorate or the system for failing to stop Trump.” While we’re pressing our noses to the cold, clear glass of reality, we might as well ask—just to be prepared—how our society could practice cannibalism without hating ourselves for it. It just seems like it might be a valuable skill in the not-too-distant future, I don’t know. Bill Schutt’s new book Cannibalism offers some guidance. Libby Copeland writes in her review: “What does cannibalism look like in a culture that doesn’t attach as much stigma to it? Like many other peoples, the Chinese practiced survival cannibalism during wars and famines; an imperial edict in 205 B.C. even made it permissible for ‘starving Chinese’ to exchange ‘one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives.’ But, according to historical sources cited by Schutt, the Chinese also practiced ‘learned cannibalism.’ In Chinese books written during Europe’s Middle Ages, human flesh was occasionally cited as an exotic delicacy. In times of great hunger or when a relative was sick, children would sometimes cut off their flesh and prepare it in a soup for their elders. One researcher found ‘766 documented cases of filial piety’ spanning more than 2,000 years. ‘The most commonly consumed body part was the thigh, followed by the upper arm;’ the eyeball was banned by edict in 1261.” Read More
January 12, 2017 Sleep Aid An Ideal Kitchen By Dan Piepenbring Vermeer, A Maid Asleep 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 An Ideal Kitchen, an 1887 book by Maria Parloa. Read More
January 12, 2017 Look The Dynamics of the City By Dan Piepenbring An exhibition of photographs by Sy Kattelson opens tonight at Howard Greenberg Gallery, where it’s on display through February 11. Featuring work from the forties through the nineties, the show marks the breadth and depth of Kattelson’s contributions to street photography. “I try to be as unobtrusive as possible, looking for those moments when people are focused in on themselves,” Kattelson, now ninety-three, told the gallery. “And I try to find settings where this inwardness is contrasted by the dynamics of the city, by taxi cabs rushing past, by advertisements, the perspective of the street, and by the other people in the same space, everyone in their own thoughts.” Sy Kattelson, Woman Crossing Street, c. 1954, gelatin silver print, 8 1/2″ x 13 1/8″. Read More
January 12, 2017 Department of Tomfoolery Kafka’s Budget Guide to Florence By Robert Cohen József Rippl-Rónai, Houses in Florence by the River Arno (Woman Leaning on Her Elbow), 1904. During a trip that they took together in August and September of 1911, Kafka and Max Brod hit on the idea of creating a new type of travel guide. “It would be called ‘Billig’ (‘On the Cheap’),” Brod remembered. “Franz was tireless and got a childlike pleasure out of elaborating all the principles down to the finest detail for this new type of guide, which was supposed to make us millionaires, and above all wrest us away from our awful office work.” —Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? Exploring Florence Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wishes to attach himself somewhere, anywhere—to be drawn at last, that is to say, into human relation, human harmony—might do well to come to Florence in the shoulder season, when the prices are lower and the narrow, crowded streets, with laborious effort and the proper shoes, can still be managed. There is so much to see. One chases after the city, stumbling and frantic, like a beginner learning to skate. And yet how can one be glad about the world unless one occasionally takes refuge in it? There is no having, only a state of being that craves suffocation. Read More