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
November 22, 2016 On the Shelf We Don’t Really Know Anything About Anything, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Girl with a Book, ca. 1875. William Trevor, an Irish writer who saw the short-story form as a chance to perfect “the art of the glimpse,” has died at eighty-eight. “His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate. In ‘The Ballroom of Romance,’ one of his most famous stories, a young woman caring for her crippled father looks for love in a dance hall but settles, week after week, for a few drunken kisses from a local bachelor. The hero of ‘The Day We Got Drunk on Cake’ repeatedly phones a young woman he admires in between drinking sessions at a series of pubs. The relationship deepens and, during a final call in the wee hours, takes a sudden, unexpected turn.” Let’s put some things in perspective about human knowledge. Sure, there are plenty of things we know as facts (New York thin crust is superior to Chicago deep dish) and others we can be basically sure of (Donald Trump prowls the outer boroughs at night in a latex superhero costume, torturing stray cats and hyperventilating into a paper bag), but many even more basic matters remain mysterious to us. Consciousness, for instance. We don’t know shit about consciousness. In a new series, Tim Parks asks the philosopher Riccardo Manzotti to take him into the riddle: “Why doesn’t our behavior simply happen, taking its course the way the planets follow their orbits? We don’t know. Just as cosmologists don’t know what dark matter is. All we know is that there is something that doesn’t add up and very likely points to some profound error in our assumptions about reality … The truth is that we just don’t know a priori the nature of physical reality. This is a point Bertrand Russell made very strongly back in the 1920s. The more we investigate the physical, the more varied and complex it appears.” Read More
November 21, 2016 Contests Win Free Tickets to 92Y’s Celebration of Albert Murray By The Paris Review On Monday, November 28, 92Y will host Renata Adler, Paul Devlin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Wynton Marsalis, and Ayana Mathis for a celebration of Albert Murray, the critic, novelist, essayist, and biographer, who died in 2013. The Library of America has just published Murray’s Collected Essays and Memoirs. “His writing about racism can prickle your skin,” Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times. “To paraphrase Murray’s praise of Ellison’s Invisible Man, reading this book is like watching someone take a twelve-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra.” You can enter here to win two free tickets to Monday’s event from The Paris Review and 92Y. We’ll notify the winners this Friday, November 25. Thanks and good luck!