January 3, 2017 On the Shelf Lethem’s Puking Cats, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Jonathan Lethem’s vomiting-cat collection. Photo: David Brandon Geeting for the New York Times John Berger, whose keen, generous writing changed the way we look at and talk about art, has died at ninety. As the Guardian’s obit puts it, “Art and the wider world seemed to make more sense after watching Berger on the BBC, with his piercing blue eyes, steady delivery and groovy seventies shirt, eloquently explain perspective or the idealization of the nude. Susan Sontag once described Berger as peerless in his ability to make ‘attentiveness to the sensual world’ meet ‘imperatives of conscience.’ ” Berger told Geoff Dyer in 1984, “storytellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people … At any one moment it is difficult to see what the job your life is because you are so aware of what you lending yourself to. This is perhaps why I use the term ‘being a witness.’ One is a witness of others but not of oneself.” We all dream of hitting the big time—and when you’re a writer, there’s probably no “big time” bigger than selling your papers to a library. (You have to take your pleasures where you can get them.) Jonathan Lethem has just sold his papers to Yale, meaning they’ve laid claim to his ephemera, his diaries, the very essence of his writerly being … including his rich stock of drawings of vomiting cats: “For about fifteen years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about two a.m., I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat … I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers.” Read More
January 2, 2017 Best of 2016 O Death By Lucy Sante We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Judging by its austere style, this picture might have been taken by a member of the Crewe Circle, a group of British spirit photographers active in the early twentieth century. It could possibly be the work of Ada Emma Deane (1864–1957), who was in her late fifties when she first started taking photographs that included the faces of the dead. Her career was tumultuous and brief. Although she apparently managed some two thousand sessions, fame and consequent downfall came to her in 1922, when she photographed the annual Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London. The resulting picture shows the scene blanketed by a sea of faces, purportedly those of the war dead, hovering in vapor. The Daily Sketch, however, matched many of the faces with those of living athletes, including some as famous as the Senegal-born boxing champion Battling Siki. Despite her insistences and the support of the consistently credulous Arthur Conan Doyle, she became an object of public ridicule and retreated to her suburban faithful, whom she photographed with their “extras” for a few more years before fading into complete obscurity. Read More >>
January 2, 2017 Best of 2016 Dostoyevsky’s Empathy By Laurie Sheck We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! A woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg for The Idiot, ca. 1940s. I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press. For the seven months following his arrest, he’d been kept in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva, his cell window smeared with an oily paste to prevent any daylight from seeping through. Read More >>
January 2, 2017 Best of 2016 On Transcribing the Lyrics to Pop Songs By Anthony Madrid We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Still from Adriano Celentano’s music video for “Prisencolinensinainciusol.” You really can’t tell what a song is going to look like until you type it, and that fact itself is interesting to me. When you listen to a song, for instance, you don’t know whether its “stanzas” are in quatrains or tercets or what. The stanzas and line breaks you install when you type the lyrics simply were not there before you typed them. They were not in your head, and they were not really in the song either. You discover all kinds of things. For example, I recently typed up the words to Cream’s “White Room” (1968). Before doing that, I didn’t know that the song does not rhyme. If someone had asked me if it rhymed, I would’ve had to sing it to find out. It somehow seems like it rhymes? But how is that possible. I go around telling people that 99 percent of songs rhyme. Is that true? It might not be. Maybe songs all seem like they rhyme, but when you actually check … ? Read More >>
January 2, 2017 Best of 2016 Breast-feeding Noir By Amy Gentry We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Still from Cradle. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle looks more prescient than ever. When the director and screenwriter Curtis Hanson passed away last month, at the age of seventy-one, obituary writers agreed he’d be remembered longest for his 1997 James Ellroy adaptation, L.A. Confidential. It’s easy to see why L.A. Confidential gets all the love, with its balletic rhythms, its crafted-yet-earnest performances from Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, and the beatific fatalism of its third-act plot twist reflected in the eyes of a dying Kevin Spacey. But my favorite Curtis Hanson moment comes from a film he made five years earlier, barely mentioned in his obits: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. In it, a stay-at-home mom played by Annabella Sciorra barges into the nursery of a house for sale and gasps in horrified recognition at something she sees on the shelf. “That’s a strange-looking toy,” says the male real-estate agent showing her the house. It’s not a toy at all, of course. It’s a breast pump—the perfect third-act reveal for what is perhaps Hollywood’s only entry in the subgenre of breast-feeding noir. Read More >>
January 2, 2017 Best of 2016 Conservatism with Knobs On By Edward White We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Rotha Lintorn-Orman. How Rotha Lintorn-Orman became the unlikely founder of the British Fascisti. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. When Britain had its brush with fascism in the 1930s, it came not in the form of some ugly, uncouth gate-crasher, as has been the case in many Western nations, but a suave establishment tyro: Sir Oswald Mosley, once a Labour MP tipped for Number 10 Downing Street before becoming the leader of the British Union of Fascists—colloquially known as the Blackshirts—in 1932. When the Blackshirts suddenly, and thankfully briefly, emerged as a political force, it was widely accepted that Mosley’s good looks and sexual charisma was at least partially responsible. “He has what is known as ‘magnetism’ … sex-appeal of a sort,” wrote Lionel Birch in his 1936 study Why They Join the Fascists. “For some people, his appearance resembles that of a traditional cavalry officer, for others that of a traditional gigolo.” Mosley’s contemporary, the former Labour cabinet minister Ellen Wilkinson, thought of him as one of the cads played by Rudolph Valentino, not “the nice kind of hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture, but the one who hisses, ‘At last … we meet.’ ” As the historian Robert Skidelsky explains, Mosley deliberately cultivated a public image of a “dark, passionate, Byronic gentleman-villain of the melodrama,” twirling his waxed mustache as he vanquished his enemies and ravished their daughters. Mosley considered his womanizing one of his great strengths, and in private took the business of treating women like dirt extremely seriously; he repeatedly cheated on his first wife, including with her sister and, so he once claimed, her stepmother. Publicly, he was “pledged to complete sex equality.” He maintained that nobody had more respect for women than he did, and that “my movement has been largely built by women.” The notion that the Blackshirts were seriously committed to furthering the collective and individual rights of women is as spurious and dishonest as most of what came out of Mosley’s mouth. Like his hero Mussolini, he considered fascism a bulwark of masculinity against women’s suffrage, consumerism, mass media, and the other emasculating assaults of the modern age. Yet, he was right that women played a more prominent role in building fascism in Britain than had been the case on mainland Europe. In fact, the first Briton to lead an avowedly fascist organization was a woman named Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the founder of the British Fascisti. Read More >>