September 22, 2016 On History Rare Beasts, Birds, and the Calaboose By Laura Bannister A brief history of London’s Tower Menagerie. Royal Menagerie, 1812. It was New Year’s Eve 1764, and John Wesley—founding father of Methodism, horseback proselytizer, teetotaler—stood before the structure now known as the Tower of London, accompanied by a flautist, who was, in turn, accompanied by his flute. Wesley had traveled to this sprawling complex in the hope of testing a hypothesis. Could music soothe the most savage of beasts? If it did, Wesley might clear up a burning theological ambiguity—the question of whether nonhuman animals had souls. With his contracted companion in tow, he marched through the tower, determined to find some big cats and to smother them with song. Zoos, as we know them today, did not exist in Wesley’s lifetime—the zoological garden is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Even the London Zoo, one of the oldest “scientific” outdoor sites for animal rehoming, opened six decades after his tower trip. If Wesley wished to glean the spirituality of lions firsthand, the infamous citadel, all arched cages and grilles, was his best bet in England. (Spoiler: the reaction to a live flute performance was mostly lukewarm—only one out of five lions stirred and stood up on all fours—not quite what our preacher had been hankering for.) For those unfamiliar with the capricious usage history of the Tower of London, it might be hard to imagine parts of the site used as a full-blown menagerie—one that lasted about six hundred years. But through its almost thousand-year history, the place has morphed like a sort of Room of Requirement, having served variously as a palace, a public-record office, an armory, a torture chamber, a private ground for beheadings, and the Royal Mint. Its most recent incarnation is as a magnet for jewel-ogling, cash-happy tourists. Today the tower’s official website reflects this diversity—it includes a Peasants’ Revolt Quiz (“Are you revolting?”), details on venue hire for weddings, and an e-shop peddling miniature armor and replica Lionheart shields. Read More
September 22, 2016 Our Correspondents Black Pearls Before Swine By Alison Kinney Florence Foster Jenkins is remembered as a failed opera singer. What can we learn by listening to her today? Florence Foster Jenkins. When Florence Foster Jenkins made her self-financed public debut as a singer—in October 1944, when she was seventy-six—she sang “Clavelitos,” crying “Olé!” and flinging carnations at the audience in Carnegie Hall. For her encore, she had the carnations collected—and then pelted the crowd again. “Olé!” they roared back. Her friends cheered, hoping to drown out the screams of hilarity and derision. Born in 1868 to a wealthy family in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Jenkins had been a talented child pianist. She eloped with, then separated from, a man from whom she contracted syphilis, transforming herself into a working woman who supported herself with piano lessons; an heiress; and a socialite, arts patron, and founder of the musical Verdi Club. By 1944, she may or may not have known that her invitation-only recitals and vanity recordings of operatic arias had attracted a cult following. “People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing,” Jenkins famously (maybe apocryphally) said. But soon after reading the New York Post’s damning assessment of her Carnegie Hall debut (“she can sing anything but notes”), Jenkins suffered a heart attack and, within weeks, died. Today, her notoriety endures in five plays and three films, including a new Meryl Streep movie, and in a tradition of private entertainments reminiscent of Jenkins’s own soirees: at midcentury critic and photographer Carl van Vechten’s parties, “Often the evenings were spent innocently, writhing on the floor in laughter at Florence Foster Jenkins.” Streep first heard her at a theater students’ gathering. Even I heard first Jenkins’s “Queen of the Night” over digestifs at a New York dinner party. Read More
September 22, 2016 On the Shelf Hy-Brasil Is Wherever You Want It to Be, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hy-Brasil in Petrus Plancius’s “Orbis Terrarum Typus de Integro Multis in Locis Emendatus,” Amsterdam, 1594. Image via Mapping Boston Foundation and Hyperallergic Today in cartographical howlers: a new exhibition in Boston, “Hy-Brasil: Mapping a Mythical Island,” chronicles the exciting centuries when no one really knew where anything was and mapmakers had carte blanche to draw whole islands anywhere they damn well pleased: “O Brazil, or Hy-Brasil as it was frequently labeled, had haunted maps since the fourteenth century, first as a mistake, then as a mythological tribute. Its size and shape often morphed, its location wandered from Ireland to North America, and its name varied, but for five centuries it endured in Western cartography … There are all sorts of legends attached to Hy-Brasil, including giant black rabbits that lived with a sorcerer, gods hidden by the mists, lost civilizations, and, more recently, UFOs. However, its greatest connection is to Irish folklore, particularly the belief in the ‘Otherworld’ and its Elysium, a ‘Land of Youth.’ When it first was illustrated on a 1325 map, Hy-Brasil was considered to only be visible once every seven years due to the heavy mists, its land housing an immortal race of people.” Planning your next family vacation? Why not force your loved ones to embark on a literary pilgrimage of Russia? You can tour the places where Dostoyevsky suffered, and where Tolstoy suffered, and then you can bicker among yourselves about which one of them suffered more productively. Jacqueline Carey did it, and she makes it sound more appealing: “We had the chance to visit the place where [The Brothers Karamazov] was written—Dostoyevsky’s last apartment, now a museum … Tea was always kept hot in the samovar, and he thought only he could make it right. When he drank tea made by his wife, he would say, ‘Oh, how wretched I am.’ He died on the couch, gazing at the Bible … In the Tolstoys’ sixteen-room winter house were many objects: books, a chess set, a piano, a tiger skin, a closet of clothes. On the landing an upright stuffed bear held a plate for visiting cards. Tolstoy was a man of obsessive enthusiasms. At the back of the house was a workroom with his cobbler tools, which he used to make shoes, including a pair for his oldest daughter Tatyana’s future husband.” Read More
September 21, 2016 Correspondence Who the Hell Is This Joyce By H. G. Wells H. G. Wells does not approve. In honor of H. G. Wells’s sesquicentennial, here’s a letter he wrote to James Joyce in November 1928, brought to light a few years ago by Letters of Note. The note finds Wells reacting, irascibly if not uncharitably, to early passages of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which had by then begun to circulate in literary magazines. Read More
September 21, 2016 Arts & Culture Flooded Penthouse By Margaux Ogden & Hunter Braithwaite The below is excerpted from Flooded Penthouse, a book by the painter Margaux Ogden and the writer Hunter Braithwaite, launched to commemorate Ogden’s new exhibition at Puerto Rico’s Embajada, a gallery in a former sex-toy shop. The show, “Nothing Had Yet Been Sacrificed,” takes its title from Luc Sante’s line about the young Bob Dylan—“Everything seemed possible then; no options had been used up and nothing had yet been sacrificed.” Much as a relationship grows from a mulch of moments, these drawings are built up on a ground of notes, numbers, lists. Small bills, pocket change. Doing so causes a slight impropriety to arise, not only because it’s so decidedly un-art (or, depending on how much Rauschenberg you looked at when you were younger, too-art) but because the pocket scraps are exhibitionist. Stored in our pants, folded tight against ourselves, they reveal how we pass our days: what we plan to buy, how much we paid for it, how we check off the world. Read More
September 21, 2016 First Person Least-Favored Animals By Rachel Mabe On confronting death, in the road and elsewhere. All photographs by Rachel Mabe. The rented farmhouse in North Carolina sat at the midpoint of a dead-end street, where the only light came from a streetlight in my neighbor’s front yard. Every night before bed, my dog, Henry (David Thoreau), and I walked down the circular drive and into the road, going as far as the light reached and back again. This provided time for the night to settle in, the stars to announce themselves, and Henry to take care of business. One autumn night, Henry found a dead frog where the light fell brightest on the pavement. I stooped to examine the creature. He lay on his back, red innards escaping from his perfectly still mouth. The following night, I searched ahead for the frog as we walked out of the dark driveway and into the light. Henry sniffed him and moved on. The frog was in the same place as the night before, only flatter. The next night he looked less like a frog. After staring at him for a while, I needed more. Read More