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
January 12, 2017 On the Shelf How to Be Authentic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. With Obama’s last presidential speech behind him—and with churlish inarticulacy personified prepared to take his place—Christian Lorentzen wonders how the literature of the past eight years will be remembered: “What will we mean when someday we refer to Obama Lit? I think we’ll be discussing novels about authenticity, or about ‘problems of authenticity.’ What does that mean? After the Bush years, sheer knowingness and artifice that called attention to itself had come to seem flimsy foundations for the novel. Authenticity succeeded storytelling abundance as the prime value of fiction, which meant that artifice now required plausible deniability. The new problems for the novelist became, therefore, how to be authentic (or how to create an authentic character) and how to achieve ‘authenticity effects’ (or how to make artifice seem as true or truer than the real).” And looking forward, Alexandra Alter asks what the Trump era portends for conservative book imprints, those most maligned redheaded stepchildren of the publishing industry: “Without conservatives filling the role as the voice of opposition, the urgency and potency of right-wing books will almost certainly be diminished. And with the political principles that conservative writers have advocated—the repeal of Obamacare, a crackdown on immigration and the dismantling of environmental regulations—set to become the policy goals of a Republican-led government, the commercial future of conservative publishing looks far more unsettled … Will books that hold Mr. Trump accountable to his campaign pledges alienate his supporters, and will mainstream Republican politicians and pundits appeal to or repel his base? Will voices from more extreme wings of the Republican Party find a bigger foothold in publishing, further cementing their place in mainstream political discourse?” Read More
January 11, 2017 On Music This Is Ourselves By Dave Tompkins Photo: Dave Tompkins The Trump sign stood offscreen in the scrub, appointed to an unfinished home on Tingler Avenue in Marathon, Florida. No roof, just scudding clouds framed by crossbeams. It was as if the stake had been pounded into the lot before the slab had even been poured. First things first: get it on cheap paperboard. On the beach nearby, four men talked over one another about the electability of real estate. They’re deep in their tans and cups, buzzing about their candidate’s ground game. It was only February but the heat pressed for summer. Down by the water, the landscape itself screamed: faces in the oolitic rock that had been there all along, terrified by history. You didn’t have to look too hard—see one and the others join its hysteria. Their features are produced by erosion and rock-boring sponges, “solution holes” that form eyes and mouths. Inside the mouths, armored chitons read the sky with eyes of stone, their shells composed of hundreds of crystalline aragonite lenses, hundreds of views, each perspective also eroding. In the beach chairs, the conversation grew more animated, accumulating property. The water gurgled. Bubbles popped. You hear what you want to hear, or you try to drown it out with something else. Two days and several worlds later, I’m in Miami, home of the empty home of Steve Bannon, where he was illegally registered to vote for his future employer. Also home to 2016’s best film Moonlight, which stands for what Trump’s chief counselor wishes to silence. As Samuel R. Delany once wrote, “There are times when all the yellin’ and the hellin’ can’t fill the lack.” The scream is digitally transferable, from master tapes to a computer in a small studio owned by Andrew “Le Spam” Yeomanson. Recorded in 1993, by Palm Beach County’s Splack Pack, the scream is a stem, a part of a song disbanded into its constituents. Alone, it’s merely trying to tear the room in half. Or maybe it’s just trying to holler at Ozzy (circa “Crazy Train”) and a man from Broward County identified as Sir Knight Slime Nasty. Using indoor voices, this could be a simple “hi.” Then it sits on a thumbtack. Throw in some congas getting their hide tanned and a massive pressure wave of tropically warm feelings. It sounds so good that you almost forget what you’re not hearing: the other stems that made “Scrub Da Ground” a hit in the clubs, where women could reclaim themselves from the title’s kitchen-floor grind, owning dance floor and the song. Recalled one YouTube viewer, “I remember letting it be known this WAS my song. And refused to dance with anyone because I needed this one ALONE.” Read More