December 19, 2016 On the Shelf An Historic Minivan, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring May we remember it always. In an age of rising income inequality, there’s no real justification for coziness. To sit fireside in a pair of Smartwool socks is to reek of privilege—not even the most exquisite cup of hot cocoa can cover the smell. But fear not: this is why we have the Danes. Their culture comes with a word, hygge, whose venerable, old-world connotations of comfortable conviviality were just waiting to be bankrupted by American consumer culture. It’s okay to relax if the Scandinavians are doing it! As Anna Altman explains, “At least six books about hygge were published in the United States this year, with more to come in 2017 … Helen Russell, a British journalist who wrote The Year of Living Danishly, defines the term as ‘taking pleasure in the presence of gentle, soothing things,’ like a freshly brewed cup of coffee and cashmere socks … The most striking thing about hygge, though, might be how its proponents tend to take prosperity for granted. All the encouragements toward superior handicrafts and Scandinavian design, the accounts of daily fireside gatherings and freshly baked pastries assume a certain level of material wealth and an abundance of leisure time. As a life philosophy, hygge is unabashedly bourgeois … When transferred to the United States, the kind of understated luxury that Danes consider a shared national trait starts to seem like little more than a symbol of economic status—the very thing that Scandinavian countries have sought to jettison.” When it debuted in 1983, Chrysler’s minivan was so cutting edge that the New York Times insisted on dropping a hyphen between mini and van. (Nothing dampens the spirit of neologism quite like a copy department.) Back then, the original minivan—the urtext for the Dodge Caravan and a crucial component in the founding myth of soccer moms—was heralded as “one of the hot cars coming out of Detroit.” Today, it’s on the National Historic Vehicle Register. Nick Kurczewski writes, “Brandt Rosenbusch, an archives manager for more than 300 historic vehicles owned by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, is not shy about extolling the first minivan’s significance: ‘It did change everything. There was nothing like this when it came out in 1983. It was radical for its time, really … It’s a really popular vehicle,’ he said. ‘Whenever we take a minivan to a show, it’s just amazing the amount of stories there are. Everybody remembers their family had one. Everybody relates to the minivan.’ ” Read More
December 16, 2016 Look Mythologies By Dan Piepenbring “Mythologies,” an exhibition of work by the French painter Hervé Heuzé, is on display at Galerie Richard in New York through January 28, 2017. Hervé Heuzé, Natacha, 2013, oil on canvas, 28 3/4″ x 36 1/4″. Read More
December 16, 2016 Literary Architecture Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary By Matteo Pericoli Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as architectural projects. In this series, he shares some of his designs and what they reveal about the stories they’re modeled on. “My problem is … finding my proper place with respect to your story. … I thought I could … remain objective. But objectivity, in such an undertaking, is a delusion.” In The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère tells us the unbelievable yet true story of Jean-Claude Romand, a man who, in 1993, tried to commit suicide after brutally killing his wife, his two children, and his parents. The investigation reveals that Romand, an impeccable family man with a degree in medicine and a researcher at the World Health Organization, well-off and well-liked by everyone, in reality was an impostor. Every aspect of his life is a lie—a giant and unsustainable scaffolding created to support his fabrication. Read More
December 16, 2016 Our Correspondents The Long and Pretty Good-bye By Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew Bergman’s column is about naturalism. This week, she discusses the role of modern elegiac writing in an era of extinction. Michelle Blade, Entrance, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 60″ x 46″. It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth, to no longer practice customs barely acquired, not to give a meaning of human futurity to roses, and other expressly promising things —Rilke, “The First Elegy” Last week, my daughters and I were talking about the extinction of the northern white rhino, looking at a photograph I took last November through a fence at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. “He’s the last of his kind,” I said, pointing to the hulking animal in sagging, dusty-white skin. “And one day soon, no northern white rhinos will exist.” “Why?” they wanted to know. Detailing the horrors of poaching and civil war in the Congo and Sudan seems harsh, and I’m still learning how to talk to my girls about the human hand in death and change. When a neighbor died, the answer was still safely that “death is the natural course of things,” but the answers become more complex when we talk about war, extinction, or place. How do we acknowledge human complicity, the way resource consumption impacts the habitat and survival of other species? Read More
December 16, 2016 On the Shelf Show Me the Money (Over and Over), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s Jerry Maguire Man! It’s Friday! Let’s watch a movie. How about Jerry Maguire? I love Jerry Maguire. I could watch it every day for the rest of my life and I’d be happy as a clam. Oh please can we please watch Jerry Maguire? I have the videocassette. I have dozens, hundreds of copies of the videocassette. Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, a modern classic, please can we please … my walls are lined with copies of the videocassette. And now: “A Los Angeles art gallery will play host early next year to an exhibit in the form of a videotape rental store with nothing but thousands of VHS copies of the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire. ‘Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste and existence as a whole,’ the collective said in a statement. ‘The Jerrys are a beautiful thing’ … The event is merely a precursor to a planned Jerry Maguire pyramid that the collective hopes to build ‘in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.’ ” Reading Samuel Beckett’s last letters, Robert Fay is heartened by the vision of him as a doddering old man, his health failing but his spirit strong: “‘Might have damaged myself beyond repair last night in the bathroom,’ Beckett writes at the age of sixty-nine to his life-long mistress Barbara Bray in 1975. ‘Had got out of the bath & was drying myself with my back to it when my feet slipped & I fell in backward.’ Two years later he writes, ‘I slipped & fell in the street yesterday, but could pick myself up & go on cursing God & man’ … In 1988 Beckett’s life took its most severe turn when he entered a nursing home in Paris. He understood this was his final home. He writes, ‘Still here with the old crocks [Beckett’s slang for old people], it sometimes feels for keeps.’ A year later, during his final year, his letters become shorter, terser, more like e-mails than epistles. In one of the more touching lines, he ends a letter to his friend Rick Cluchey by writing: ‘Silence is my cloister.’ ” Read More
December 15, 2016 Sleep Aid The Art of Bread Making By Dan Piepenbring 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 The Bread and Biscuit Baker’s and Sugar-Boiler’s Assistant, an 1890 book by Robert Wells. When we reflect upon the present conditions under which the bread-making industry is carried on in most of the large cities and towns of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and remember the importance of that industry to mankind, we cannot but be impressed by the little progress that has been made in the art of bread-making. Whilst other industries have been marked by important improvements, we find bread being made in much the same manner as it was five hundred years ago. The mystery is how—by accident, it would seem—we get such well-made bread as we do. There are very few even now who have the slightest conception of what yeast really is, and fewer still who know how or why it makes bread light. But it will surprise me if the trade does not undergo, in the course of the next ten years, a complete and beneficial change. Read More