November 23, 2016 From the Archive At a Motel Near O’Hare Airport By Jane Kenyon Photo: NARA, 1973 Jane Kenyon’s poem “At a Motel Near O’Hare Airport” appeared in our Winter 1975 issue. Read More
November 23, 2016 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 1: Flora By Mike Powell Mike Powell is the Daily’s newest correspondent. His column is about living in Arizona. Ryan Schneider, It’s All Around You (detail), 2016, oil on canvas, 24″ x 20″. Courtesy the artist and Taymour Grahne Gallery. Shortly after my wife and I bought our house in Tucson, I noticed a strange growth on a paddle cactus in the yard. It was puffy and white and looked a little like wet mold. “A fungus,” one landscaper told me, adding that it would be expensive to get rid of. Something about the generic phrase “a fungus” gave me pause. A man paid to understand plants should know more proper nouns. One man’s fungus turns out to be another man’s cocoon for a small parasite called the cochineal, which burrows into cactus pads and, in great numbers and slow speeds, kills them. To the naked eye, male cochineal look like tiny ants, while females, which hang sessile in their cocoons, look like fat gray worms about half the length of my pinky nail. Read More
November 23, 2016 On the Shelf Literature Is Money, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Secondhand Time. There’s a great Tom Waits song called “What’s He Building in There?” that I’ve thought about a lot as we ponder the Trump transition: “He’s hiding from us,” Waits growls. “I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children.” The architecture critic Martin Filler is asking the same question about Trump, looking back at a career of eyesores and evils: “Grotesque though the rise of Donald Trump has seemed to many, his political ascendance has struck those of us who love architecture as a particularly personal affront, given our familiarity with his forty-year record as the foremost architectural schlockmeister and urban design vulgarian of his generation … One of course cannot help but wonder what Trump will impose architecturally on our national landscape, especially since he has promised to create vast infrastructure projects, most notoriously his “big, beautiful, powerful wall” along the 1,989-mile expanse of our border with Mexico … Despite uncertainties about exactly what travails the Trump presidency will bring us, I am convinced that the architectural imprint he has already imposed—extrapolated to a national scale—tells us all we need to know.” There’s no good reason not to fear the alt-right and their white-nationalist fantasies—but Jacob Bacharach, a gay, Jewish novelist, spent his high school years immured in what he calls “teenage Nazi” culture, and his message is comforting: these dudes are a bunch of insecure mouth-breathing losers who couldn’t revolutionize their way out of a paper bag. Bacharach recalls a DIY film project he and his friends undertook in 1999, his senior year: “The movie inevitably made its way to our principal. There were plenty of bits to get a decent and unimaginative man riled up—rituals cribbed from Anton LeVay, drug use both simulated and actual, violence, and plenty of fake blood. But I have to believe that the worst moment for that poor administrator and for our poor parents was when they watched another friend of ours, a nice girl from a devoutly Christian family—Lord knows how we cajoled her into participating—crawl between my legs to perform simulated fellatio on a TV remote control. I suspect we meant all this as some kind of commentary on the media. The camera panned up to my contorted face. ‘Oh yeah, baby,’ I growled, ‘Suck it. Heil Hitler, my dick is your Fuhrer.’ ” Read More
November 22, 2016 First Person His Frown By Adam Valen Levinson The Yale Institute of Charts. The other day, an Uber driver asked me to come join his church. I told him I was relatively busy being a nonpracticing Jew but that I’d think about it. He said, You don’t need to do anything. You just need faith. And my first thought was, Well, that sounds pretty swell. And then I thought, Hold on, WTF? Read More
November 22, 2016 Books Mariette in Ecstasy By Nick Ripatrazone Revisiting Ron Hansen’s outré, erotic Catholic novel, twenty-five years later. From the cover of Mariette in Ecstasy. In 1906, Mariette Baptiste, a seventeen-year-old postulant, is the talk of the Sisters of the Crucifixion convent. Although their days are scheduled down to the minute—silence, recitation, meditation, prayer, work, meals—the sisters can’t help but talk about the new, rich teenager in their midst. Why did she join them? What’s her secret? Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen’s prose-poetic novel, was published twenty-five years ago, and its strangeness hasn’t withered. The rare book lauded by both The Village Voice and diocesan newspapers, Hansen’s novel is written in gorgeous sentences that combine meticulous material specificity with ambiguous emotion. (Mariette’s room in the convent is described as a “cell” where a “holy water stoup is next to the doorjamb, and just a few feet above Mariette’s pillow is a hideous Spanish cross and a painted Christ that is all red meat and agony.”) A quarter-century after its publication, no other novel has quite captured its marriage of the sacred and the sexual, the pious and the secular. Read More
November 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Oh! You Tony By Elena Passarello The Daily’s newest correspondent is Elena Passarello, who will be writing about famous animals from history. This week’s beast is the silent-film star Tony the Wonder Horse. Design by Kristen Radtke. Tom Mix and Tony at their best! Rip snortin’ action!—break neck horsemanship! A thrill for everybody! —Destry Rides Again promo poster, 1932. When they were about to do a difficult scene, Tom would pat Tony on his nose and say, “Now, look, Tony, here’s the way we’re going to do this.” And then that was the way they did it. —Olive Mix, 1957. Tom once told a newspaperman that I liked to show off. Well, I’ll tell you something. He likes to show off too. Do you think he would do all those difficult and dangerous tricks if he thought nobody would see them? —“Tony’s Story Told By Tony Himself,” 1923. Read More