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
January 10, 2017 Our Correspondents Saint of Saints By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Barry the Saint Bernard. Design by Kristen Radtke. From the day he was born, before he was given his name or opened his eyes, even as a tiny puppy, Barry heard the alarm. —Barry of the Great Saint Bernard, 1977 Just where it drifts, a dog howls loud and long, And now, as guided by a voice from Heaven, Digs with its feet. —Samuel Rogers, “Barry,” 1850 After his death, which was but recent, his body was carefully buried, and his skin stuffed to imitate nature, and with an action resembling life, stands in this state, decorated, with his collar, in the Museum of Bern. —Ladies’ Literary Cabinet, 1820 Name: Barry Species: Canis familiaris Years Active: 1800–1812 Habitat: A snowy cloister eight thousand feet above sea level Skills: Surefootedness, loyalty, the ability to smell humans buried deep in snow Distinguishing Features: Up for debate Additional Notes: Read More
January 10, 2017 On the Shelf Delivering Packages to the Afterworld, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jizo statues at Zōjō-ji Temple in Tokyo. Photo: Jakub Hałun Mainly writers are paid for cleaning your gutters, vacuuming under the seats in your car, and standing in line for you at the DMV. But sometimes, for reasons that few understand and even fewer are willing to discuss on the record, writers are paid to write. A new book, Scratch, collects essays about this legendary experience. Laura Miller thinks it’s in more urgent need of demystification than anything else in the profession: “Few connections are more mysterious than the one between writing books and making money … For authors, money, however obscurely, is always entangled with legitimacy because writers have for centuries equated publication with professional and artistic anointment. Anyone can call themselves ‘a writer,’ but to be published (by somebody other than yourself) is to be a real writer. It’s indeed a significant testimonial when someone else wants to invest their own money in a writer’s work, so it’s easy to forget that a publisher is actually the writer’s business partner, not a conferrer of literary worth … Publishing isn’t literature: Literature is literature. Publishing is a separate, if related enterprise.” Mark Greif aspires to join the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau—examining the reasons behind our self-presentation and directing readers toward a moral good. Jon Baskin writes of the “new unfreedom” that Greif beliefs has captured us: “In the more privileged parts of the developed West, we have largely emancipated ourselves from biological necessities (hunger, disease) and even from moral ones (God, the old taboos), but, perplexed by our unprecedented liberty, we have fabricated a new set of necessities to take their place. We no longer suffer from food scarcity, so we devise a baroque maze of taboos regarding what we can consume. We no longer prohibit any one form of sex, and yet, in making sex an all-important component of our self-esteem, we bow down to a new set of norms (namely, that we should always want sex, and with different partners) nearly as coercive as the old. We squander our ‘free time,’ a relatively recent gift of history, at the gym, in ridiculous outfits, on primitive machines, in order that we may have a little more free time to spend in a future that perpetually recedes.” Read More