December 22, 2016 On the Shelf Champagne Is for Chumps, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “It looks like sparkling urine, but I promise it tastes good.” Champagne has become so synonymous with luxury that you’d think it was produced in an elaborate, secret ritual involving bolts of crushed velvet and diamond-tipped drill bits and the blood of rosy-cheeked virgins from spa towns in the Swiss Alps. But it’s just wine, Tim Crane reminds us: “It is worth reflecting on how extraordinary the champagne phenomenon is. The winemakers and merchants of Champagne—the Champenois—have somehow managed to persuade people who would not dream of spending £15 on a bottle of wine to spend more than twice that for champagne—especially at Christmas, weddings and other celebrations … More depressing than supermarket champagne (for the oenophiles, at least) is the champagne houses’ attempt to secure more luxury status for their cuvées, greedily hiking up the price of an already expensive product, when it is not obvious that the quality justifies it. This is one way in which the champagne business balances precariously between courting the vulgarity of the super-rich, and desiring to make genuinely exquisite, age-worthy wines of the standard of those made a few miles away in Burgundy.” Fiona Pitt-Kethley had a booming career in the eighties, writing travel books and the especially successful Literary Companion to Sex. Now she struggles to get agents to return her calls. Her story of the publishing industry should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who thinks the business is essentially fair-minded: “I started to apply for an agent and after being turned down by several did the cheeky thing of advertising for one. Giles Gordon of Sheil Land was amused enough to take me on. Under his wing my income improved greatly … A few years later, Giles decided to move to Edinburgh … For a while I was with his assistant, Robert Kirby, who was pleasant enough but never had the same kind of enthusiasm for my work. When I made a minor criticism of his inability to sell my project on the red light districts of the world he showed a desire to shed me and we went our separate ways. At this stage I was still relatively well-known and I assumed I would be able to acquire another agent. I still bumped into Giles occasionally at literary parties but he said he thought I would be better with a London-based agent. Soon after this, he died in an accident falling downstairs. This is why I sometimes sum the whole story up as ‘I had an agent but he died.’ ” Read More
December 21, 2016 Best of 2016 Our Contributors Pick Their Favorite Books of the Year By The Paris Review From Society of the Spectacle. This was a year of path-breaking books of poems—the taut intensity of Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons, the striking diction and bitter tenderness of Monica Youn’s Blackacre. It was also a year of culminating ones—John Koethe’s wise, prescient The Swimmer and John Kinsella’s Drowning in Wheat, which gathers thirty years of his work. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees jolted my sense of the forest and the trees—and parts and wholes everywhere. Finally, Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm, a meditation on species plenitude and extinction, sent me back to Audubon on passenger pigeons, “obscuring the light of noon as by an eclipse.” Chased by a single hawk, “they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.” —Susan Stewart (“Channel”) Some stories are simply imagined. Others are birthed. Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Another Brooklyn has been birthed from fragments of memory of what it feels like to grow up “Girl,” not just in Brooklyn, not just in brown skin, but in bodies that betray us and make us vulnerable, even as we are young and magical, powerful and fierce. Set against a backdrop of loss, death, war, and the constant threat of physical violence—for these things will always be the background music to becoming a woman—this book is both heartbreaking and beautiful, and it is especially meaningful and necessary in today’s current climate. I wish every woman would read this book: the young women who have just embarked upon their pilgrimage of becoming unapologetically themselves, and the older women who may have forgotten they were ever searching. —Christine Lincoln (“What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story”) Read More
December 21, 2016 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 3: Utopia By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. Biosphere 2. One morning, in early 2011, my friend Ray took a few friends and me up to a place about an hour north of Tucson called Biosphere 2. Ray was working or volunteering there in some capacity and suggested that we follow him around. We drove up Oracle Road, which turns into Route 77, which I mention because you know that when a road turns into a route that you are leaving something. Strip malls and sprawl thinned out into empty desert. We made a few turns and rumbled over some cattle guards and that’s when I saw it, like a young boy’s crayon drawing of a space station rising majestically out of the dust. “We’re here,” Ray said, as though that wasn’t already clear. At the time, all I understood about Biosphere 2 was that it was a scientific research facility filled with re-creations of real-world environments: jungle, desert, ocean, et cetera. That, and that a group of scientists voluntarily locked themselves in there for two years during the early 1990s, where they strived, studied, bickered, lost a lot of weight, and eventually became the butt of a cultural joke. I admired them already. Read More
December 21, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Laura Park The latest entry in the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novel The Return of Münchausen, translated into English for the first time by Joanne Turnbull. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime (he died in 1950). “A fantastical plot is my method,” Krzhizhanovsky once wrote. “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.” In Münchausen, he borrows from the life—both real and legendary—of Baron Münchausen to spin his own absurd tale involving the baron’s post–World War I perambulations in Berlin, London, and Moscow on a diplomatic mission. Bizarre and fantastic, Münchausen (or is it Krzhizhanovky?) defends imagination above all else. The Daily is featuring a trio of adaptations of short excerpts from the novel. In our last installment, Laura Park finds the baron recalling a strange encounter in “the Land of the Soviets.” Read More
December 21, 2016 On the Shelf How to Build Your Evil Headquarters, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The Pyramids, in Indianapolis. Photo: jikatu Science fiction’s evil megacorporations all seem to hire the same architect—it’s as if they’re so focused on turning the world into a bleak, ashen dystopia that they don’t even have the time to design a truly unique headquarters. Or maybe they just know what they like. Kate Wagner looks at a few examples: “What’s fascinating about the evil megacorporation is that its architectural aesthetic has remained virtually unchanged throughout its history: brooding Late Modernist (AKA High-tech or Structural Expressionist) buildings have become a well-worn trope, reaching a peak during the sci-fi smorgasbord of the eighties … Modern architecture from its inception has always been associated with the coming of the machine. The movement’s founders in Europe believed that the architecture of the time laid in the hands of industry—factories, concrete silos, and other functional, rational buildings. New technology like steel and reinforced concrete enabled architects to come up with dramatic and powerful forms.” Thinking of how best to fight Trumpism, Jedediah Purdy takes some cues from Thoreau, of all people: “Thoreau took solitude as well as social life with utter seriousness because he believed both were at once necessary and impossible. Alone, you were in the company of received ideas, condescending self-judgment, anxiety that you were not doing your part; in company, you were alone in your strange mind—and everyone’s mind is strange—throwing words like stones into the pools of other people’s minds, disturbing their smooth surfaces … Thoreau’s responses to nature are not naïve, but they do not reject what is alive and instructive in the naïve response. We might find, in the next four years, that we need to recapture the living kernel in those ideas that seem to be clichéd husks. In my world of academic lawyers, only schemers even pretend to believe that the Constitution simply means what it says, or that we could stand to live by it if it did. But it will soon be time to defend constitutional limits on the President’s power, or limits on the power of the police, as if they were divine commandments (as if there were divine commandments).” Read More
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