December 8, 2016 On the Shelf This Guy Needs a Lot of Surgery, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A textbook Medieval Wound Man. Image: Wellcome Library, via Public Domain Review. Imagine being a successful writer. Like, one who actually makes enough money to have a large disposable income; one who has so many passionate readers that one’s personal life comes under scrutiny. It’s hard to picture it, isn’t it? If it actually happened to you, would you even know how to spend the money? Or would you do what Sara Gruen, the author of Water for Elephants, did, and buy a bunch of Hatchimals on eBay? Michael Schaub writes, “The writer purchased 156 of the in-demand toys at an average price of $151—spending more than $23,000—with the goal of reselling them at a further marked-up price. She intends to use the proceeds to help fund the defense of a man she says is serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Her plan backfired, though, when eBay wouldn’t let her resell the toys, she wrote in a Facebook post that drew some harsh criticism from readers. One called her move ‘Christmas greed,’ while another wrote, ‘Exploiting families whose children want these toys for Christmas is awful.’ She did have supporters, however, such as the woman who wrote, “Don’t let the haters stop you from doing what you believe is right! (((HUGS)))” Tony Tulathimutte has had it up to here with this whole notion of the “voice of a generation” novel—so don’t ask him if he’s at work on one: “The idea of a one-size-fits-all masterpiece runs squarely against the novel form. Novels can certainly cover plenty of ground, containing hundreds of characters in diverse settings, but they’re still all about specificity. To a novelist, the lowest common denominator of affectations, fashions and consumption patterns evoked by the generational tag are seldom any character’s most interesting qualities, except in novels that are about superficiality itself, like American Psycho. The generational novel, like the Great American Novel, is a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality.” Read More
December 7, 2016 Look Wave Phenomena By Dan Piepenbring A recent group of Ara Peterson’s interlaced relief paintings are on display at Derek Eller Gallery through December 23. The paintings, according to the gallery, evoke “the elegance of New England transcendentalism, the overwhelming geographies of H. P. Lovecraft, the crisp sonic landscapes of Steely Dan, and the vertiginous feeling of swimming out to sea … Peterson begins his process with a lengthy period of development rooted in the visualization of wave phenomena. For each work, he plots the relationships between color, mood, scale, weight, surface tension, and directional flow.” Ara Peterson, Untitled, 2015, acrylic on wood, 18.5″ x 45″ x 2″. Read More
December 7, 2016 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 2: Raul By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. The wall along the Arizona-Mexico border. Photo: Cecilia Balli/PRI. My friend Raul is thirty-six and until recently played in a band called the Electric Blankets. Raul works at a bar that I drink at all the time. I generally don’t talk to bartenders because I don’t want to get in their way, a trait I’ve always considered to be European but have been informed is just unfriendly. One night, Raul saw me at a party and he patted me on the back and that was that. Raul lives here in Tucson on an expired green card. He was born in Tijuana and moved to Southern California when he was eleven. His family started a Mexican restaurant outside San Diego; it turned into two. As a teenager, Raul started going up to Los Angeles with a crew of kids to dance to hard house, a genre of music I was unfamiliar with until Raul told me about it. “DJ Irene,” he says. “DJ Trajic.” I listened to them later. It sounds like a pinball machine crossed with construction noise. Raul married a friend when he was twenty-three and moved to Tucson shortly thereafter. The plan was to stay for eight months; that was eleven years ago. Raul watched the 2016 presidential election at his bar in a state of mounting anxiety. Tucson is a blue pocket in a mostly red state. The plan was to celebrate. “We had TVs, we had bands, we had guest speakers,” he says. By the end of the night, he was crying on his barstool, “not out of sadness or anger, but out of fear. It felt like the fucking twilight zone.” Read More
December 7, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Kevin Huizenga 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,” he 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, Krzhizhanovsky 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. Here, Kevin Huizenga finds the baron composing aphorisms at a house known as Mad Bean Cottage. Read More
December 7, 2016 On the Shelf Castro the Copy Editor, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Pausing to make a correction in a manuscript, no doubt. When he wasn’t oppressing people, standing up to U.S. hegemony, or shopping for new fatigues, Fidel Castro was apparently copyediting—and quite handily, at that. A new report claims that Gabriel García Márquez used to send Castro all his manuscripts, taking advantage of the dictator’s keen attention to detail: “After reading his book The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Fidel had told Gabo there was a mistake in the calculation of the speed of the boat. This led Gabo to ask him to read his manuscripts … Another example of a correction he made later on was in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, where Fidel pointed out an error in the specifications of a hunting rifle.” Attention British people and/or Anglophiles with large quantities of British currency: look at your five-pound notes. A micro-engraver has etched teeny-tiny portraits of Jane Austen onto four of these bills, which substantially increases their value: if you have one, it’s probably worth something on the order of twenty thousand quid. You’ll need a microscope to be sure you have one of the special notes. So go out and buy a microscope already—you keep putting it off, putting it off, all these years you’ve said to yourself, Self, it’s high time you bought that microscope you’re always going on about … Read More
December 6, 2016 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Dag Solstad, Jay McInerney By The Paris Review The interviews from our Summer issue are now online in their entirety, freely available for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Fiction No. 231, Jay McInerney discusses the circumstances that led to his first published short story—which appeared in The Paris Review: Read More