September 30, 2016 On the Shelf Live Your Best Pod Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: scarletgreen Today in extravagant acts of self-protection: Julian Barnes wasn’t a fan of his first novel, 1980’s Metroland. So he wasn’t surprised when it got a savage notice in an organ called The Daily Sniveler by one “Mack the Knife”—a nom de guerre for Barnes himself. Yes, Barnes trashed his own novel, just so he could be sure he got there first. “In the old days,” he wrote, “the Sensitive Young Man, after producing his novel, would slide back into the obscurity of book-reviewing and hock-and-seltzer; he would in middle age be much taken with writing letters to the newspapers; and in old age, chairbound in his club, he would reveal himself to be the unremitting philistine which his earlier manifestation had sought to conceal. We must wish Mr Barnes well as he sets off on this inevitable journey.” Hi, here are some metaphors: Translation is a handshake. Translation is mimicry. Translation is a chess match. Translation is reproductive printmaking. Translation is a groom kissing a bride through her veil. Translation is an imaginary map. Translation is a hall of mirrors. Translators are horticulturists. Translators are conductors of an orchestra of words. Translators are ghosts. Translators are ninjas. Translators are… Read More
September 29, 2016 Books Snorri the Seal By Dan Piepenbring What a vain little seal! It’s Banned Books Week, and everyone is rallying around the classics: your Gatsbys, your Catcher in the Ryes, your Mockingbirds and Lady Chatterleys. No one is giving any love to Snorri the Seal—to my eye one of the handsomest books ever to face censorship. Snorri is a Norwegian children’s book written and illustrated by Frithjof Sælen. Published in 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Norway, it tells the story of “the vainest little seal in the Arctic Ocean”—that’s our Snorri!—who whiles away his seal-days delighting in his own good looks. And who wouldn’t, with a luxurious coat like his? He’s so self-absorbed that he fails to see trouble on the horizon in the form of Brummelab, a distinctly Soviet polar bear. Read More
September 29, 2016 From the Archive On Seeing an Ex-Husband on the Cheese Line of the Gourmet Grocery Store By Meredith Trede Meredith Trede’s poem “On Seeing an Ex-Husband on the Cheese Line of the Gourmet Grocery Store” appeared in our Fall 1994 issue. Her latest collection is Tenement Threnody. Read More
September 29, 2016 On Film Where Nothing Can Go Wrong By James Hughes We’re not spying, but it feels like we are. Each moment is tracked on surveillance monitors, recorded, studied. On one screen, a man, dressed moments ago in cowboy gear, is now postcoital with a robot prostitute. She soon makes herself scarce, heading back to recharge her circuits in the break room. The cowboy stares up at the ceiling, his six-shooter cooling in a holster draped over a chair. He’s luxuriating inside a simulacrum of an 1880s Western whorehouse, one situated within a network of amusement parks in an unnamed desert expanse. It’s the end of the first act of the 1973 film Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton, a master of the techno-thriller novel whose occasional forays into filmmaking—he directed a half dozen features over two decades—yielded more modest, earthbound results than the fantastical predictions he packed into his paperbacks. But Westworld, his feature debut, continues to haunt. Its vision of a pleasure dome with exploited, humanlike robots as moving targets has been reprogrammed into a highly anticipated HBO series, premiering Sunday. Read More
September 29, 2016 On the Shelf The Seedy Splendors of the Love Motel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Capri, from Jur Oster and Vera van de Sandt’s Love Land Stop Time. Image via Hyperallergic. Herman Melville ended his life as a failure, with no inkling of the posthumous glories to come. It sounds so miserable when you put it that way, doesn’t it? And in many ways it was. But his final years had small pleasures of their own. Mark Beauregard writes, “Having failed commercially as a novelist, he had spent the last twenty-five years of his life out of the public eye, and he had written poetry nearly every day. Mostly, his verse was tortured and cramped, and he often drew his themes from unlikely sources: ancient Greece and Rome, the Holy Land, myths, gods, and temple architecture … Six days a week, he walked west from his apartment at 104 East Twenty-Sixth Street, across lower Manhattan, to the docks along the North River (as the Hudson was then known). His job was to check ships’ cargoes against their bills of lading and write reports, for which he earned four dollars a day (a salary that never changed). He walked back home in the evening, an unwavering routine. After dinner, he wrote poems late into the night.” Time was, comic books were seedy, pulpy diversions designed to educate the curious youth about the nightlife and detective folkways and various intricate sorts of lingerie. Now that they’re a dignified art form, Titan Comics is hoping to bring them back to the gutter, launching several sordid new series. Among them is Peepland: “Written by crime authors Gary Phillips and Christa Faust—herself a former peep show employee—with art from rising star Andrea Camerini, the comic lifts the lid on the seedy goings-on at 1980s Times Square peep-show booths … It almost feels as though we’re entering into a fresh golden age of comics doing the job they were intended to—corrupting the innocent minds of young people.” Read More
September 28, 2016 On Film The Scary Peeper By Dan Piepenbring Nothing so appalling … In Canada today, Home Depot announced that it was pulling a Halloween decoration called “Scary Peeper Creeper” from its shelves. Shoppers were deeply perturbed by the Peeper’s pockmarked, rubbery visage, and for good reason—he’s designed to scare the living shit out of people. “Realistic face looks just like a real man is peering through the window at you,” boasted the description on Home Depot’s website; all that’s missing is the labored mouth-breathing. The manufacturer advises sticking him “on the passenger side of a car window, in a bedroom window, basement window, kitchen window, bathroom window, or garage window … We’d love to hear where you’ve gotten good results with your Scary Peeper!” The debacle brought to mind Herschell Gordon Lewis, cinema’s very own Scary Peeper, who got very good results with his pictures. He died yesterday at ninety. (It’s been a bad week for voyeurs.) In his forty-one turns as a director, he did more to popularize gore, splatter, and willful puerility than a Peeper in every window could do. His films range from the out-and-out depraved (Blood Feast, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In) to the merely lascivious (Boin-n-g!, Living Venus, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre), but—per the Peeper Code of Conduct—they were always, always in poor taste. Read More