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
October 28, 2016 Arts & Culture Something in the Blood, Part 2 By David J. Skal To celebrate the spookiest of holidays, we’re publishing a selection of excerpts from David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood, a biography of Bram Stoker, published this month by Liveright. Today: a love triangle between Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Florence Balcombe. Florence Balcombe, around the time she met Oscar Wilde. On one of his visits or summer vacations in Ireland, Oscar Wilde made an acquaintance of an “exquisitely pretty girl” of seventeen, he wrote to a classmate. Though unnamed in the letter, she has generally been identified as Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe. Wilde described her as having “the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.” He escorted her to an afternoon service, presumably at the ancient Christ Church Cathedral in central Dublin, which had only very recently been restored to a fashionable semblance of its medieval glory. It may have been there that he made her a Christmas gift of a small gold cross engraved with his name. At five foot eight, the willowy Florence was a good match for the six foot two Oscar, at least for the purpose of Sunday promenades, and Merrion Square was a favorite outdoor location for regular romantic parading. The gated gardens, then accessible by key only to the adjacent residences, was a haven from the unpleasant sights and persons of Dublin’s city core. Read More
October 28, 2016 Our Correspondents Breast-feeding Noir By Amy Gentry Welcome our newest correspondent, Amy Gentry. This is the first in her series about domestic thrillers. “In the midst of our current post–Gone Girl renaissance in domestic suspense,” she writes, “these films look more prescient than ever.” A still from Cradle. When the director and screenwriter Curtis Hanson passed away last month, at the age of seventy-one, obituary writers agreed he’d be remembered longest for his 1997 James Ellroy adaptation, L.A. Confidential. It’s easy to see why L.A. Confidential gets all the love, with its balletic rhythms, its crafted-yet-earnest performances from Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, and the beatific fatalism of its third-act plot twist reflected in the eyes of a dying Kevin Spacey. But my favorite Curtis Hanson moment comes from a film he made five years earlier, barely mentioned in his obits: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. In it, a stay-at-home mom played by Annabella Sciorra barges into the nursery of a house for sale and gasps in horrified recognition at something she sees on the shelf. “That’s a strange-looking toy,” says the male real-estate agent showing her the house. It’s not a toy at all, of course. It’s a breast pump—the perfect third-act reveal for what is perhaps Hollywood’s only entry in the subgenre of breast-feeding noir. Read More
October 28, 2016 On the Shelf Bury Me at the Bottom of the Ocean, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring This could be you. (Not the scuba diver.) Last week, Bob Dylan’s silence on the Nobel felt like a roguish prank; this week, it’s a matter of existential import. As Adam Kirsch writes, Dylan has effectively out-Sartred Sartre, who outright refused the prize more than fifty years ago. By ignoring it, Dylan punctures the thin membrane of authenticity that gives the Swedish Academy its cachet: “The Nobel Prize is in fact the ultimate example of bad faith: A small group of Swedish critics pretend to be the voice of God, and the public pretends that the Nobel winner is Literature incarnate. All this pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer. Mr. Dylan may yet accept the prize, but so far, his refusal to accept the authority of the Swedish Academy has been a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like.” Meanwhile, Dylan’s primary audience, baby boomers, have invented a fancy new eco-friendly way to face death: in a concrete casket at the bottom of the ocean. Ask your mortician today about “reef balls,” which are like a mafioso’s cement boots except, you know, consensual: “The idea is part of a niche movement of eco-burials intended to support artificial reefs, which proponents say could help restore sea life and coral … George Frankel, sixty-six, a founder of Eternal Reefs, said the concrete reefs attract fish and other sea life and remain stationary through hurricane-force weather … Turning a human into a reef ball is a process that often stretches over several days, he said. First, what Mr. Frankel’s company calls a ‘pearl’ is cast out of concrete and the cremated remains of the deceased. That pearl is attached to a larger prefabricated reef ball. Family members can add handprints, personal messages and even a memorial plaque on top of the reef ball when a fresh layer of concrete is added. Once those personal touches are embedded into the dried concrete, the ball is lowered into the ocean, with the family watching from a separate vessel nearby.” Read More
October 27, 2016 Arts & Culture Something in the Blood, Part 1 By David J. Skal To celebrate the spookiest of holidays, we’re publishing a selection of excerpts from David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood, a biography of Bram Stoker, published this month by Liveright. First up: the origins of Dracula. Christopher Lee as Dracula, 1958. There are many stories about how Bram Stoker came to write Dracula, but only some of them are true. According to his son, Stoker always claimed the inspiration for the book came from a nightmare induced by “a too-generous helping of dressed crab at supper”—a dab of blarney the writer enjoyed dishing out when asked, but no one took seriously (it may sound too much like Ebenezer Scrooge, famously dismissing Marley’s ghost as “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese”). But that hasn’t stopped the midnight snack of dressed crab from being served up as a matter of fact by countless people on countless occasions. While the nightmare aspect may well have some validity—Stoker’s notes at least suggest that the story might have had its genesis in a disturbing vision or reverie—it exemplifies the way truth, falsehood, and speculation have always conspired to distort Dracula scholarship. An unusually evocative piece of storytelling, Dracula has always excited more storytelling—both in endlessly embellished dramatizations and in the similarly ornamented accounts of its own birth process. Read More
October 27, 2016 From the Archive The Dreams By Karen Fish Henri-Edmond Cross, Landscape with Stars, ca. 1905–1908, watercolor over graphite on white wove paper, 9 5/8″ x 12 5/8″. Karen Fish’s poem “The Dreams” appeared in our Winter 1989 issue. Read More