November 7, 2016 Arts & Culture Have You Read Schlump Yet? By Volker Weidermann Fritz Fuhrken, Granate trifft englischen Panzer, Somme Schlacht, 1918. In 1928, Hans Herbert Grimm published his first and only novel, Schlump. It is the latest offering from the NYRB Classics Book Club. Schlump describes the violence, chaos, and absurdity of World War I, experienced firsthand by its author. The book was critical of the German government and military and presents graphic depictions of the high cost of human sacrifice in war; Grimm published it anonymously. The novel’s witness is Emil Schultz, nicknamed Schlump, a wandering tailor who, despite experiencing the horrors of battle up close, remains an optimist, eager to get back to the job of living: “he was determined to make something of his life, because surely there would be peace again now, soon, peace! Peace and decency—how lovely life would be! What a golden era was beginning now!” Schlump’s hopefulness would have been short-lived: Five years after the book’s publication, the Nazi party came to power in Germany. A decade after its publication, Germany was again at war, and Grimm was sent to the Western Front. A pale wall in the living room of a gray house with a pointed roof in the thousand-year-old Thuringian town of Altenburg. The sun is shining through the large windows. Against one wall is a blue sofa, at the other end of the room a grand piano, while a colourful Bauhaus carpet adorns the floor. Cups and small porcelain plates sit on a round coffee table. A closer look at the pale wall reveals a fine crack in the plaster. Here, on this wall, in this house, a strange German fairy tale began. Or is this where it ended? The house, with its large fir trees in the garden and white bench beside the front door, was built at the beginning of the 1930s by doctor of philosophy and schoolmaster Hans Herbert Grimm. Some of the money to finance the house came from a book he’d written, although nobody here in Altenburg nor anyone anywhere else was to know he was its author. Schlump—Tales and adventures from the life of the anonymous soldier Emil Schulz, known as ‘Schlump’. Narrated by himself: the book of his life. Grimm was worried that he wouldn’t be able to go on living normally if it became known that he’d written the novel. It would spell the end of his career as a teacher, and of his peaceful existence in his beloved Altenburg, if word got out that he was the author of a book that described the German soldiers of the Great War as less than heroic, German military strategy as misguided, senseless and foolish, the Kaiser as a coward, and the entire war as a cruel, bad joke. Read More
November 7, 2016 On Film How to Swim By Adam Shatz The Birth of a Nation, Moonlight, and the black protest tradition. A still from Moonlight Last week, I took a train to Harlem to see The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s retelling of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Released in October, the film had already disappeared from most theatres, including my local cinema in Brooklyn. At the matinee at the Magic Johnson 9 cinema on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, there were a total of three people, and I was there with a friend. The Birth of a Nation was supposed to be the film of the year. Fox Searchlight acquired the world rights for the film for $17.5 million dollars, a record-breaking deal for the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January. Nate Parker, who produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film, instantly became a media darling, and the Academy nomination for best picture seemed all but assured. After the #OscarsSoWhite boycott of the Academy Awards, here was a FilmSoBlack, made by a black director, in which heroic slave rebels slaughter their white masters. The film seemed to speak to the insurrectionary spirit of contemporary black America while also offering a belated corrective to D. W. Griffith’s eponymous ode to the Confederacy, released almost exactly a century earlier. Read More
November 7, 2016 On the Shelf When Bulletin Boards Were Cool, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A golden-age BBS. Instagrammers: think before you geotag. Are you really just “announcing your location” to your “e-pals” for “fun”? No. You’re bragging. Worse, you’re setting into motion a creaky, elaborate machine that despoils everything in its path, loosing hordes of tourists into the wild. It’s probably, if we’re being honest, just another form of colonialism. Molly McHugh writes, “Social media and Instagram did not invent discovery of beautiful outdoor spaces — but they have become a curator-friendly guide to collecting them … Manifest Destiny is defined by the nation’s westward territorial expansion, but it’s also a philosophy about the need to conquer, to discover. What happens when social media increases the rate of outdoor discovery? How long until every corner of the planet has been Instagrammed and geotagged?” Time was, you could stay home and explore the world from your living room—no geotagging required. Before the Internet came around and made modems boring, there were Bulletin Board Systems, an early form of PC-to-PC communication with all the thrill and adventure of ham radio. Benj Edwards writes, “BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ’90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code … To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. BBS hosts had converted a PC—often their only PC—into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement.” Read More
November 4, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Forty “Autumnal” Hink Pinks: The Answers By Dylan Hicks This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner this time is Ryan Grabowski, who got thirty-seven out of forty hink pinks. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Ryan! Below, the solutions. (Answers in bold managed to stump everyone.) See you next month. Read More
November 4, 2016 The Lives of Others In the Joints of Their Toes By Edward White The ruse that gave rise to the spiritualist movement. The Fox Sisters. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. On July 13, 1930, Arthur Conan Doyle made an appearance at London’s Royal Albert Hall in the middle of his own memorial service, six days after his death. Nobody saw him, but the spirit medium Estelle Roberts assured those present that Doyle had kept his deathbed promise: he’d returned to deliver proof that talking to the dead really is possible. In life the creator of the arch logician Sherlock Holmes had been as suggestible as those ten thousand paying guests in South Kensington: he was the world’s best-known proponent of spiritualism—the discipline of talking to the dead—and an adherent of just about any wad of mumbo-jumbo going. Doyle believed not only in clairvoyance, but telepathy, telekinesis, and, quite literally, fairies at the bottom of the garden. Throughout the 1910s and ’20s Doyle’s books, articles, and talks on these subjects helped to furnish spiritualism with mainstream credibility. But the roots of the movement were planted decades earlier in a tiny one-bedroom cottage in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York, the family home of Margaret and John Fox and their daughters Maggie, fourteen, and Kate, eleven. Read More
November 4, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Borscht, Barns, Blazes of Greatness By The Paris Review The closest I’ve come to visiting Ukraine is binging on late-night pierogies at Veselka, where I arrived so drunk you could’ve told me I was in Kiev. I’ve had a much richer (and largely more sober) experience with Sophie Pinkham’s Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, the best travel book I’ve read this year—it’s a funny, alert, and more vital account of life there than any you’ll find in the media. Pinkham has a gift for portraiture; even the people she meets in passing feel alive on the page. In an excerpt on the n+1 site, she hikes and camps on the Crimean cape of Meganom, where naked Moldovan hippies spend the summer playing panpipes and living off the land. Pinkham tries to cross the chasm between her life and theirs: “I had never been so acutely aware of my lack of the basic skills that have allowed people to keep themselves alive for millennia,” she writes. “I met a six-year-old who could make borscht; her twelve-year-old brother could dive for mussels. Neither could read—but what good was reading when you were hungry for dinner? The children reminded me of deer, slim and agile, with caramel limbs and sun-bleached hair. They almost never cried, probably because no one would have listened.” —Dan Piepenbring “Richard Howard was once asked how he would translate the French word x—a recherché term intended to stump the Master—and responded, ‘I don’t translate words.’ On the one hand, this is clearly untrue. All translators spend a great deal of time fretting over their choice of words. On the other hand, it is exactly right.” In the current issue of Public Culture, our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, makes a case for nonliteral translation. His main exhibit: the crummy (but literal) New York Times translations of Osama bin Laden’s famous eloquence: “The effect of the Times’ translations, which toggle between barely grammatical speech and weak imitations of rhetorical commonplaces, is to confirm the idea of bin Laden, and of Arabic speakers more generally, that many Times readers already had—that of a strange and potentially deranged exotic, whose speech shows no ability to connect one thought to another. And in this way Arabic itself gets represented as an untranslatable language, which has pretty much been its historical fate in English.” —Lorin Stein Read More