September 7, 2016 Our Correspondents Summer Hours, Part 4 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of Vanessa Davis’s column. Read More
September 7, 2016 On the Shelf Step Into My Office, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Except I’m actually in my bedroom. The secret’s out: I’m writing this in my underwear, from my bedroom. I reveal this hideous truth to make a point about the nature of the workplace today—that it is everywhere, and that today’s “knowledge worker” can perform his functions from anyplace in the world, as long as there are pour overs available and chic quasi-industrial design aesthetics around. As Miya Tokumitsu and Joeri Merijn Mol argue, “It is always anytime. And anytime is check-in time … Wherever you are, you respond to the most urgent requests and make sure to nowhere yourself by deleting your ‘sent from my iPhone’ signature. You could be at your desk already, right? No one needs to know that you are two blocks away. You don’t want to convey that you are on the run and not giving them your full attention. So with some digital camouflaging you say: I am in a place where I can give you due consideration. At no point are we on the train, in a café, in bed, in the restroom … Airspace is essentially diffused workspace because the office has become a mobile home. We take it with us everywhere we go.” Hey, you wouldn’t, by some chance, have happened to see a bunch of letters between Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Morley Callaghan about a 1929 boxing match in which Callaghan kicked Hemingway’s ass, would you? If you have seen those letters, can you get in touch with David Mason? He’s been looking for them since 1993: “After receiving the books and letters, I locked them in a store safe. When I opened my shop the next day, I was shocked to discover the safe had been cracked. Except for the letters, very little else of value was taken; it seems clear the thieves were after those artifacts specifically. The case grew stranger when a street criminal was arrested with one of the stolen postcards from the lot in his possession. Soon after confessing that he was part of the crew who robbed the store, he was found dead in his cell—a puzzling suicide. Upon his death, the case went cold.” Read More
September 6, 2016 Our Correspondents Socially Displaced By Matthew St. Ville Hunte Photo: Gene93k. I had been out of college for a couple years when a friend got me a gig studying the “socially displaced.” This wasn’t as lofty as it sounds; what I really did was spend a couple months going around asking bums about their problems. The arrangement was fairly straightforward: they’d give me their stories and I’d give them a dollar. So I spent a few days roaming Castries—the capital of Saint Lucia—with a cheap recorder and a heavy bag of coins, tracking the street people and hoping a few would talk to me. I’ve never been great at interviews, mainly because I don’t like bothering people, including vagrants. I felt like I was invading their private space, which I sort of was. But surprisingly some of them were willing to tell me their life stories even without the promise of money. They had nothing better to do—and clearly neither did I. Read More
September 6, 2016 Books The Trouser Cords of Armenia (Et Cetera) By Shihab Al-Din Al-Nuwayri Image: Gianni Dagli Orti. This week, we’re publishing four short excerpts from The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, a fourteenth-century encyclopedia of … well, everything, or everything known to Arab civilization circa 1314. Compiled with dogged dedication by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī, the book runs to more than nine thousand pages; an abridged version is now available for the first time in English. Ultimate Ambition lives up to its bold title—its eclectic, protean entries cover lunar cults, the sugary drinks in the sultan’s buttery, and how to attract your dream woman by burying a crow’s head. Its translator, Elias Muhanna, believes the compendium affords “a view into the kaleidoscopic and multifarious intellectual tradition of the classical Islamic world”; the New York Review of Books calls it “a bizarre, fascinating book that illustrate[s] the sprawlingly heterodox reality of the early centuries of Islam.” Today’s extract: On Qualities of Places with Respect to Different Things such as Knowledge, Work, Gems, Clothes, Furs, Carpets, Steeds, Poisonous Animals, Sweets, Fruits, Aromatics, Physical Features and Manners, Diseases, and Meteorological Phenomena As for intellectual and professional qualities, one talks about the sages of Greece, the doctors of Jundaysābūr, the jewelers of Harrān, the weavers of Yemen, and the scribes of al-Sawād (in Iraq). With jewels, one talks of the turquoise of Nishapur, the rubies of Sarandīb (Sri Lanka), the pearls of Oman, the emeralds of Egypt, the carnelian of Yemen, the onyx of Zafār, the garnets of Balkh, and the coral of Ifrīqiya. Read More
September 6, 2016 Bulletin Escape the Election with Our New Fall Issue By Dan Piepenbring Have you heard about this election? It feels fun now, but give it time. There will come a moment when you long to escape the never-ending concussion that is electoral politics, and our new Fall issue is here for you. It’s full of the best new fiction, poetry, interviews, and art—and it contains precisely zero instances of the word election. That’s our guarantee. In the Art of Poetry No. 100, Ishmael Reed discusses growing up in Buffalo, the search for “new mythologies” that led him to write Mumbo Jumbo, and his concerns for young writers of color: Read More
September 6, 2016 On the Shelf Never Forget Houellebecq’s Corgi, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A photo of Clément from Houellebecq’s show at Palais de Tokyo. If you’re in Paris, you have only a few more days to catch Michel Houellebecq’s exhibition at Palais de Tokyo. Hot insider tip: bring a pack of cigarettes—you can smoke them on the premises. True, much of his art is devoted to his beloved pet corgi, Clément, who is no longer with us. (Miss you always, Clem!) But there’s also, as Chinnie Ding writes, plenty of art that wouldn’t feel out of place in the pages of The Map and the Territory: “Vaguely oceanic sounds and slowly throbbing lighting carry us through some corridors where Houellebecq’s photographs of anonymous terrain glow and dim to the steady soporific rhythm of a fogged-out distress signal or a drowsy peep show. An all-female island-themed soft-core short, La rivière (The River), 2001, directed by the author, plays in a carpeted baisodrome In the next room, eyes adjust to blindingly glossy souvenir place mats advertising scenic French regions, such as Guadeloupe and Bretagne, which tile the floor and rebrand the nation as one turquoise-skied terroir. [Robert] Combas has contributed several glinting, convulsive paintings that look like religious icons becoming unhinged. All this nervous enjoyment, culminating in a functioning smoking room, seems convinced of an unusable past and a fait accompli.” Tired of novels? I don’t blame you. Read one, you’ve read them all. It may be wise to get your fiction as you get everything else—from corporations. John Lanchester makes a good case for the literary appeal of correspondence between CEOs and shareholders: “From the literary-critical point of view, there is always going to be a difficulty with the genre of the investor’s letter. What we’re dealing with here, in essence, is rich people wanting more money. That creates issues of tone. The attempted solutions to the problem change over time, just as financial fashions change … These letters are performances, attempts at persuasion: they are trying to get someone to do something. The desire to make money is always sincere, but not everything else is.” Read More