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
October 27, 2016 First Person Infiltrating Wrigley By John Paul Rollert Wrigley Field is a little over a mile north of where I live, close enough that on summer nights when the “Friendly Confines” hosts a concert (August saw both Billy Joel and Pearl Jam), familiar ballads fill the courtyard of my prewar walk-up, prompting tenants to abruptly open, or close, their windows. Technically I don’t live in the same neighborhood as the Cubs—that would be Wrigleyville, the residential enclave surrounding the 102-year-old park—but for more years than most Chicagoans care to think, a steadfast devotion to the team has had a way of uniting the various neighborhoods on the North Side in a shared community of suffering. In the seventies, when the team consistently flirted with the worst record in baseball, the Cubs earned the nickname the “Loveable Losers.” The qualifier is a tribute to the loyalty of the fans, but it hardly redeems the category. Say what you will about history, tradition, and heroic team players—and the Cubs have all three in abundance—this is still sports, and sports is about winning. The Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908. They have not even gone to the World Series since 1945. When Saturday night began, these records remained, though it looked as if, at long last, at least one of them might finally be broken. Read More
October 27, 2016 On the Shelf Roth’s Reading Room, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A postcard of the Newark Public Library. Today in hometown heroism: Philip Roth, having recovered from yet another year without a Nobel, is donating his book collection to the Newark Public Library. Young readers will be able to flip through them and look for the dirty bits—just as he once did—for generations to come. (The library will likely see an uptick in visitors, as well. T-shirt idea: I VISITED THE NEWARK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEFORE PHILIP ROTH’S BOOKS WERE THERE.) “Roth’s library, some 4,000 volumes, is now stored mostly at his house in northwest Connecticut, where it has more or less taken over the premises … The books will be shelved in Newark exactly as they are in Connecticut—not a window into Mr. Roth’s mind exactly, but physical evidence of the eclectic writers who helped shape it … He chose Newark, he added, because like a lot of people of his generation, especially those who had attended Weequahic High School, he retained a singular attachment to his old hometown. ‘It may also be true of people who grew up in Cleveland or Detroit,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I do know that kids who graduated between when Weequahic opened in the ’30s and the great population shift that occurred in the 1960s remain very devoted to their memories and to the school.’ ” Claire Jarvis on reading Sarah Waters—whose latest novel, The Paying Guests, has a graphic abortion scene—while pregnant: “For the past two decades, Sarah Waters has been the best-known contemporary novelist of women’s sexual history. Her novels all develop, in some way, from her earlier work as a researcher focused primarily on lesbian and gay historical fiction. Her first, Tipping the Velvet, which Waters conceived of while writing her Ph.D. thesis, details the hidden-in-plain-sight world of what we would now call queer life in Victorian London. An unexpected success when it was published in 1998, it was followed by two more Victorian pastiches, Affinity and Fingersmith, both bodice-ripping lesbian reworkings of nineteenth-century sensation novels. Waters’s three most recent books, which have been set in the twentieth century, are moodier, and more self-consciously literary, combining the suspense plotting of her earlier work with domestic fiction’s absorption in the details of everyday life. To these genre pastiches, Waters adds graphic descriptions of the bodily experiences of people—particularly women—in the past, making the blood, dirt, and pleasure of those lives as explicit as possible.” Read More
October 26, 2016 Events This Thursday: Yasmine El Rashidi and Robyn Creswell By The Paris Review Photo: Brigitte Lacomb Join us this Thursday, October 27, at the New York Public Library for a conversation between our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, and the Egyptian writer Yasmine El Rashidi, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and an editor of the Middle East arts-and-culture quarterly Bidoun. They’ll discuss her debut novel, Chronicle of a Last Summer, which is narrated by a girl growing up in Cairo over three tumultuous summers from 1984 to 2014. Claire Messud calls it “rich in its quiet implications … An entire nuanced world emanates from these apparently offhand recollections.” The event begins at seven P.M. It’s free, but we recommend reserving seats in advance through the NYPL’s website. See you there!