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
January 11, 2017 Our Correspondents My Pillow: The Movie By Jane Stern Mike Lindell with My Pillow. Camera scans the rubble of a gray, dystopian landscape. Nothing is left, fallen buildings smolder; wrecked cars and gutted bodies of the dead lay discarded on the street. Camera pans to small object on the horizon. Slow zoom to pristine white rectangle. It is the sole survivor of the apocalypse. It is all that is left of civilization. It is My Pillow. Read More
January 11, 2017 On the Shelf Bad Man Forward Bad Man Pull Up, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Serious Things A Go Happen, a book of Jamaican dancehall flyers. Image via The New Yorker A standardized test creates its own ineluctable logic. The test is the ultimate authority—the test has all the answers—that’s why it’s the test, and you’re merely the test taker. But there are limits to these strong-arm tactics. Asking multiple-choice questions about poetry, for instance, can be like trying to wash your car with a power sander. The poet Sara Holbrook has learned that a standardized test in Texas is asking seventh and eighth graders questions about her work that not even she knew the answers to. Ian Birnbaum writes, “Holbrook started paying attention after a Texas teacher e-mailed her looking for guidance on why she had inserted a line break in one of her poems. The questions asked about the writer’s motivations, but no test writer had ever asked Holbrook why she made her choices. ‘I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there,’ she wrote in a Huffington Post editorial. ‘Note: That is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it … Any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich.’ ” Everyone remembers Casanova as the ultimate hustler—the historical record indicates he once charmed the pants off the pope, or, you know … something like that … but a new biography tells of a time when the hunter became the hunted: “In 1763, Casanova was himself fleeced in a convoluted scam by a young French-Swiss courtesan, Marie Ann Charpillon, and her mother, in London’s Soho. He was deeply shaken by the episode, and apparently on the verge of drowning himself in the Thames, when he bumped into a playboy friend, Sir Wellbore Agar, who lured him away with the promise of drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding. For revenge, Casanova had to satisfy himself with the modest prank of training a parrot to repeat, in French, ‘Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother.’ ” Read More
January 10, 2017 Look Trestlework By Dan Piepenbring An exhibition of Randy Dudley’s photo-realist drawings of Chicago and Brooklyn is on display at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through February. Randy Dudley, CTA Redline on the North Side, 2016, pencil on bristol board, 15″ x 20″. Read More
January 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Chasing the (Literal) Dragon By Oliver Lee Bateman Once I became a historian, I began to regret my teenage obsession with fantasy novels. When the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore and the avuncular “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, I didn’t bat an eyelash. Bush and Gore were, I thought, small potatoes, and I, at age seventeen, was preoccupied with Winter’s Heart, the ninth book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series, in which an ever-growing roster of oddly-named characters sought to unite a fractious, war-torn world against the machinations of the “Dark One” and a bunch of other, self-interested factions. I’d read the first book, The Eye of the World, a few months earlier, then charged through the rest. Real life, which for me was mostly dreadful, held scant appeal. I needed an alternative universe comprising details, trivia, minutiae—and Jordan obliged. Sixteen years later, I had thousands of pewter fantasy figurines, hundreds of dog-eared fantasy novels and, perhaps not coincidentally, a Ph.D. in history. Most of the fantasy I liked was pure genre schlock, R. A. Salvatore and Margaret Weis titles heaped one atop the other; others, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth titles, boasted a certain literary cachet, but I’d never cared about that. Whether it was a companion to J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts tales or those cocktail-napkin notes Chris Tolkien compiled and passed off as “Histories,” what mattered to me most was that they were chock-full of facts that I could memorize. I took creative-writing courses in high school and college, whiling away the hours as I filled notebook after notebook with imaginary family trees and historical sketches about a dysfunctional family of half ogres who were tasked with securing a remote outpost of some collapsing empire. Only years later did I realize that these efforts, sophomoric and clichéd though they might have been, represented an attempt to explore the toxic father-son dynamic that had defined my childhood. Read More