November 1, 2016 On the Shelf It’s Never Too Late to Mock Nixon, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. “I do nothing professionally, I do everything for fun,” Prince’s character Christopher Tracy says in the serially overlooked Under the Cherry Moon. It’s a line that seems to unlock some of his mystique—his spontaneity, or, as Zadie Smith writes, the constant sense of mirage surrounding him onstage: “Prince’s moves, no matter how many times you may have observed them, have no firm inscription in memory; they never seem quite fixed or preserved. If someone asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the splits, if you’re able. But there won’t appear to be anything especially Prince-like about that. It’s mysterious. How can you dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like a secret only I know? (And isn’t it the case that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?) … His shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest thing you ever saw and yet its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.” When I’m feeling down, really down, about my potential as a shaggy creative type, I find it helps to make fun of Richard Nixon. It’s helped countless writers and artists, among them the Philips Guston and Roth, who met in Woodstock in the summer of ’71 and discovered a mutual muse in our esteemed thirty-seventh president. Charles McGrath writes, “The two men shared a love of books and of what Guston called ‘crapola’—billboards, diners, junk shops, burger joints—and Richard M. Nixon was soon added to the list … Mr. Roth began working on what became Our Gang, his book-length satire, which begins with the president, Trick E. Dixon, hoping to give the vote to the unborn and ends with him in hell, after being assassinated in a hospital where he had gone to have his sweat glands removed … Mr. Roth showed some early chapters to Guston, who in a mood of shared Nixon-loathing exuberance, responded with a flood of satirical drawings. In a couple of them Guston’s Nixon is a hooded Klansman conspiring with his cronies Spiro T. Agnew and John Mitchell, but in most he is a kind of walking gonad, his nose a penis that grows longer with every lie he tells.” Read More
October 31, 2016 Look Light and Dark By Dan Piepenbring Marcos Bontempo’s exhibition “Light and Dark” is at Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York through November 26. Bontempo lives and works in Andalusia; he paints on the floor using ink and salt on paper, which he prefers to canvas. “The shapes express the poor reality, the mutilation of an ill body that does not want to be forgotten by God,” he’s said of his abstracted human forms, often depicted in extremis. “I do not let them alone in their ordeal … I think I am a schizophrenic.” Marcos Bontempo, Untitled, 2016, ink and salt on paper, 25.5″ x 19.5″. Read More
October 31, 2016 Correspondence Something in the Blood, Part 3 By Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman To celebrate Halloween, we’re publishing a selection of excerpts from David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood, a biography of Bram Stoker, out this month with Liveright. Today: letters between Stoker and Walt Whitman, published in full for the first time in Something in the Blood. Stoker, moved by Leaves of Grass, was an ardent fan of Whitman—he and his Trinity College peers called themselves “Walt Whitmanites.” He kept his first letter to the poet, a meandering and adoring document, in his desk for four years before gathering the courage to send it. Bram Stoker at age twenty-five. DUBLIN, IRELAND, FEB 18, 1872 If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it. I don’t think there is a man living, even you who are above the prejudices of the class of small-minded men, who wouldn’t like to get a letter from a younger man, a stranger, across the world—a man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing and your manner of singing them. The idea that arises in my mind is whether there is a man living who would have the pluck to burn a letter in which he felt the smallest atom of interest without reading it. Read More
October 31, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Forty “Autumnal” Hink Pinks By Dylan Hicks Every month, the Daily features a puzzle by Dylan Hicks. The first list of correct answers wins a year’s subscription to The Paris Review. (In the event that no one can get every answer, the list with the most correct responses will win.) Send an e-mail with your answers to [email protected]. The deadline is Friday, November 4, when we’ll post the answers. Good luck! This month, the puzzle makes one of its intermittent returns to the semipopular rhyming game hink pink. As was previously explained in nearly identical language, hink pink is a word game in which synonyms, circumlocution, and micronarratives provide clues for rhyming phrases. In the standard explanatory example, an “overweight feline” is a “fat cat.” Hink Pinks on that babyish level aspire to lend vocabulary building an air of fun, but more sophisticated puzzles are sometimes mulled over on road trips, in trenches, and in other settings where boredom and tension might be mellowed, to paraphrase Dryden, by the dull sweets of rhyme. Read More
October 31, 2016 On the Shelf These Are the Reasons You’ve Failed, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring So sorry, writer! Image via Open Culture/Slate; full list available via link below. If you opened a bookstore with a section devoted to climate-change fiction, you’d have a pretty shitty shelf on your hands. (You’d also run the risk of attracting those who believe that climate change itself is the ultimate fiction.) Amitav Ghosh wonders why so many “serious” novelists consider the subject beyond their grasp: “Fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel … This discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction … The calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, If this were in a novel, no one would believe it.” A good form rejection letter should be like a good execution: swift, efficient, and demonstrating the kind of brutal indifference that marks true authority. Essanay Studios, a Chicago film company from the silent era, had it down to a science. They would mail prospective screenwriters a stock list of seventeen reasons their screenplays sucked, with a check mark next to the relevant one. E.g.: IDEA HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE, NOT INTERESTING, NOT HUMOROUS, and that old classic, ROBBERY, KIDNAPPING, MURDER, SUICIDE, HARROWING DEATH-BED AND ALL SCENES OF AN UNPLEASANT NATURE SHOULD BE ELIMINATED. Read More
October 28, 2016 This Week’s Reading Spooky Staff Picks: Smelly Ghosts and Sex-crazed Catholics By The Paris Review From the cover of The Crown Derby Plate. Almost a year ago, old friends gave me a big fat Portugese novel I’d never heard of, which promptly burrowed its way under a stack of old New Yorkers and stayed hidden until a month ago. It was a buried treasure. To get an idea of The Crime of Father Amaro, by Eça de Queirós, imagine a Trollope novel—early 1870s, cathedral town, church politics, Tories v. Whigs—except that everyone’s super Catholic, and sex crazed, and with the added difference that the author can’t ever quite decide whether he’s writing a bawdy comedy or a satirical tragedy, and so ends up writing both. This wavering tone must have been hard to translate, but Margaret Jull Costa’s 2002 translation makes it look easy. The Crime of Father Amaro is the best novel I’ve read this year. —Lorin Stein Biblioasis is reviving an apparent tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmastime through a quintet of booklet-size publications, each containing a spooky story and designed and illustrated by the cartoonist Seth. It’s a lovely little set, with tales by Dickens, Wharton, A. M. Burrage, Marjorie Bowen, and M. R. James, but I haven’t saved them for Christmas (no one tells me what to do). I’ve already torn through the Burrage and Bowen, and while they aren’t bloodcurdling, they’re lots of fun. Burrage’s One Who Saw relates the tale of a man lured by the specter of a desolate woman in an ominous hotel garden. He describes his irresistible attraction to her as being akin to “starting on a voyage, feeling no motion from the ship, and then being suddenly aware of a spreading space of water between the vessel and the quay.” Bowen’s tale, The Crown Derby Plate, involves a dumpy, smelly spirit who won’t relinquish his beloved china collection. It’s not exactly a nail-biter, but Bowen manages an eerie description of wasted wintry marshes—“olive-brown broken reeds were harsh as scars on saffron-tinted bogs”—that bears the uncanniness of a Charles Burchfield landscape. —Nicole Rudick Read More