December 20, 2016 Our Correspondents Beautiful Animal of the King By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. This week: Zarafa. Design by Kristen Radtke. All these observations bring to mind the possibility of bringing her to Paris by small daily journeys. No other manner of transport seems preferable to me. —Count Villeneuve-Bargemon At each arrival in populous towns … I had to fight the crowds who rushed tumultuously at the animal. —Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire The giraffe occupies all the public’s attention; one talks of nothing else in the circles of the capital. —La pandore Name: Zarafa Species: Giraffa camelopardalis camelopardalis Years Active: 1825–1845 Distinguishing Features: Sixteen-inch prehensile tongue, tufted ossicones, bedroom eyes Skills: Long walks, befriending dignitaries Habitat: A parquet-floored wing of the Jardin des Plantes rotunda: “truly the boudoir of a little lady” Additional Notes: When Zarafa arrived at the port of Marseilles in the autumn of 1826, she did so unnamed. Though she was occasionally called “the child of Egypt,” “Dame Girafe,” or “the Beautiful Animal of the King” by dignitaries, newspapers, and her thousands-strong French fan club, Zarafa lived her eighteen years never officially known as anything but la girafe. There were no other beasts of her kind, you see, with which to confuse her. Read More
December 20, 2016 Arts & Culture The Captured Santa By Dan Piepenbring Why pop culture fixates on the incarcerated Claus. From Get Santa, 2014. Let me tell you something you already know: our culture longs to incapacitate Santa. At Christmastime, as the tired “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” apparatus lurches to serve up the same perverse images of twinkling, Old World pageantry, we dream of the captured Santa, the deposed king, thwarted by his own bumbling jollity into reckoning with his parochialism. Santa represents a tradition at its breaking point. He’s the relic of a broken Eurocentric past, held over by the glad-handing rearguard in smoky backroom deals. Everywhere you look, you marvel at how brittle his grip is on power. You can feel it in the decorations, the imperious gimlet-eyed nutcrackers and gaudy wreaths, the prickly holly bushes with their poisonous berries, the wantonly felled firs, the long wasteful chains of eco-unfriendly incandescent lights. You can smell it on nog-breathed mall Santas, their faces glistening with sweat, their hours punishingly long, the ink still wet on their International University of Santa Claus diplomas. Santa is ripe for abduction—Santa wants to be abducted. This is why pop culture is teeming with images in which he’s out of commission. Read More
December 20, 2016 On the Shelf I Got You This Dead Bird, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Americans just hate it when you sleep on the job. I learned this the hard way when I installed a Murphy bed in my last office. Boy, was the management steamed! I thought their issue was that I was spending too much time alone—not being a team player and such—so I invited my colleagues to watch me sleep, or even to join me in the Murphy bed if they were so inclined. (It was a queen.) But that only made them fire me! Imagine the joy, then, with which I greeted Bryant Rousseau’s reporting from Japan, where napping in public is not just allowed, but celebrated: “The word for it is inemuri. It is often translated as ‘sleeping on duty,’ but Dr. Brigitte Steger, a senior lecturer in Japanese studies at Downing College, Cambridge, who has written a book on the topic, says it would be more accurate to render it as ‘sleeping while present’ … Sleeping in social situations can even enhance your reputation. Dr. Steger recalled a group dinner at a restaurant where the male guest of a female colleague fell asleep at the table. The other guests complimented his ‘gentlemanly behavior’—that he chose to stay present and sleep, rather than excuse himself.” Not dissimilarly, I went through a phrase where the only Christmas gifts I could think to give were dead birds. Not birds of prey or anything gauche like that—just cute, deceased little songbirds, sometimes on dry ice, wrapped in little parcels of tissue and tied with twine. Well, people weren’t having it. My best friend spit in my face. Even my mom asked if I kept the receipt. I was born in the wrong time, I guess, because in Victorian England, people just loved dead birds for the holidays. Allison Meier writes, “The image of a dead bird in the snow is similar to the popular ‘Babe in the Woods’ motif of children who are in their mortal sleep in the forest, and may have likewise been a call to empathy for the less fortunate. John Grossman, author of Christmas Curiosities, told Tea Tree Library that the cards were ‘bound to elicit Victorian sympathy and may reference common stories of poor children freezing to death at Christmas’ … Hunter Oatman-Stanford at Collectors Weekly noted that the birds are often robins and wrens, and that ‘killing a wren or robin was once a good-luck ritual performed in late December.’” Read More
December 19, 2016 In Memoriam Shirley Hazzard, 1931–2016 By Matthew Specktor Photo: New York Society Library The call came at eleven at night. I was breathless, having raced inside to pick up. I’d been on my way out to dinner, and only a shot of curiosity at who might have been calling at such an hour, on a Friday, had urged me to run back and catch it. “Is this Matthew Specktor?” The voice on the other end was remote. It sounded, for a moment, as if she might have been calling from somewhere far away—an analog, transatlantic connection—but that wasn’t it. The accent wasn’t American, wasn’t Australian, wasn’t English, certainly, although it muddled a few of these things. “This is Shirley Hazzard …” Once I got to know her—it would take a few years—I’d understand that this “remoteness” was not geographical but temporal. Everything that seemed to constitute Shirley, everything that mattered, was also a piece of the historical past. But just then what I felt was surprise—something akin to what an astronomer might’ve experienced (to borrow a figure from one of her own books) upon receiving a signal from another star. Proof of life. Read More
December 19, 2016 Inside the Issue The Moviegoer: An Interview with Fanny Howe By William Corbett Fanny Howe. Photo: Cybele Knowles. Our Winter issue features a poem by Fanny Howe, whose latest book, The Needle’s Eye, came out in October. At seventy-six, Howe has published sixteen books of poetry, fourteen works of fiction, and three collections of essays. On top of that, she’s a filmmaker—earlier this year, she debuted two new short films at a lecture called Acts of Mercy at the CUNY Graduate Center. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an apartment she’s dubbed “the brick womb.” Her longtime friend William Corbett went to Boston to interview her about her life and work; an excerpt of this interview appears below. —The Editors INTERVIEWER Samuel Beckett was your mother’s childhood friend. What were your encounters with him like? HOWE My senior year in high school, my father sent me to France, my great dream. I was signed up for a French-immersion course just outside of Paris in Sèvres. I felt trapped and so, on the second night, I went out with my bag and the gardener helped me climb over the wall. I got to the train station and in to Paris. I had one name, Mr. Beckett and a phone number. I called him and he came right away and helped me find a cheap hotel. He looked after me and walked me around the city until a friend arrived, as planned, from America. Read More
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