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
December 6, 2016 Our Correspondents Long Live Paul By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. Design by Kristen Radtke. Your tentacles are magical They pick the winning team! … You pick the winner When you eat your dinner! Paul the Octopus, we love you! —From “Paul the Octopus” by Parry Gripp Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection. –Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “It’s only an octopus.” —Carlos Marchena, central defender for Spain Read More
December 6, 2016 Arts & Culture From Writings By Donald Judd Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street, second floor. Judd Foundation, New York, 1985. Photograph by Doris Lehni Quarella © Antonio Monaci. Reproduced from Donald Judd: Writings. Donald Judd Writings, a new collection of Donald Judd’s essays, criticism, and ephemera, was published last month by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. Spanning 1958 to 1993, the book includes expansive, previously unpublished excerpts from Judd’s notes, integral to his creative process—they find him wrestling with the role of art and criticism in the culture. “Don’s writings were a parallel activity to his art, architecture, and design,” Flavin Judd, Donald’s son and the book’s coeditor, writes in an introduction. “The goal should be to find something within the writings that is useful, something that can be a tool for future use. We hope that Don’s thoughts, ideas, and complaints can be used by others to create.” Below, Flavin has selected some of his favorite excerpts from his father’s work. Read More
December 6, 2016 On the Shelf Kafka Feared the Clap, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just an average Kafka. There’s nothing wrong with Kafka. You don’t have to look at him like that. He’s just an average Joe, our Kafka, dreaming of erotic love but reacting with complete terror when presented with the act itself. For decades, Kafka scholars have struggled to explain his aversion to sex, especially in light of his evident fondness for women—was he gay? Did he have some kind of body issue? No, his biographer Reiner Stach says: he was just petrified of venereal disease, as were many men in his era. “I read a lot of books on sexuality published in the 1900s, books usually intended for young girls and men. They are just focused on risks, never about sexuality as a source of happiness. It is not about morality or religion—just medical risks … But look at the historical and psychological context—men and women were really separated at the time … They were educated in completely different ways. So when they met for the first time, often in their early twenties, this was often very embarrassing and very frightening … [Kafka was] unable to integrate his own sexuality into his self-image because he regarded it as something both physically and ethically impure, and therefore incapable of developing human intimacy with women who actively drew him into this filth—this anti-sensual and misogynist syndrome was shared by millions of middle-class men, whose upbringing simply did not allow for erotic happiness.” For Edmund Wilson and Nabokov, on the other hand, sex was the rare topic they could agree on—so much so that you wonder why they didn’t just get it over with and sleep together. Their famous feuds, as Alex Beam writes, could be broken only by a little X-rated titillation: “Sex was a subject the two men could talk and joke about. Wilson wrote a clever little limerick about Vladimir ‘stroking a butterfly’s femur,’ and he often brought Nabokov erotic books as house presents. In 1957, for instance, he took the French novel, Histoire d’O along on a visit to the Nabokovs in Ithaca, New York, where the novelist was teaching at Cornell. ‘[Nabokov] agreed with me,’ Wilson recorded in his journal, ‘that, trashy though it is, it exercises a certain hypnotic effect.’ Vera Nabokova frowned on the two men’s tittering enjoyment of nyeprilichnaya literatura (indecent literature) and made sure that Wilson took the book with him when he left: ‘She does not like my bringing him pornographic books,’ Wilson remembered. ‘She said with disgust that we had been giggling like schoolboys.’ ” Read More