August 25, 2016 On the Shelf Five Hours of Happy Hour, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from Happy Hour. Early in the fourteenth century, an Egyptian bureaucrat embarked on the kind of project that many of us attempt on nights off: an enormous encyclopedia designed to contain all knowledge in the Muslim world. The book, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, ran to nine thousand pages, and a part of it will see English translation, after so many centuries, this fall. It illustrates “the sprawlingly heterodox reality of the early centuries of Islam, so different from the crude puritanical myths purveyed by modern-day jihadis,” Robert F. Worth writes. “Reading it is like stumbling into a cavernous attic full of unimaginably strange artifacts, some of them unforgettable, some merely dross. From the alleged self-fellation of monkeys to the many lovely Bedouin words for the night sky (‘the Encrusted, because of its abundance of stars, and the Forehead, because of its smoothness’) to the court rituals of Egypt’s then-overlords, the Mamluks, nothing seems to escape Nuwayri’s taxonomic ambitions.” (We’ll have excerpts on the Daily after Labor Day.) Read More
August 24, 2016 Listen Jean Rhys Speaks By Dan Piepenbring Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, an island among the British West Indies. Though she spent most of her life in England, her time in the Caribbean left her with a distinctive, lilting accent. It sounds beautiful to me, but in 1909 it got her kicked out of the Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she was supposedly “slow to improve” it. In this minute-long clip, she dispenses some dour wisdom about writing and happiness. (The rumors are true: they’re inversely related.) If you don’t have a pair of headphones handy—or if you’re just paralyzed with fear at the thought of hearing a deceased person’s voice—here’s a rough transcript: Read More
August 24, 2016 Our Correspondents Summer Hours, Part 3 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 of Vanessa Davis’s column. Read More
August 24, 2016 Revisited Alan Watts, This Is It By Clay Byars Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Alan Watts. In my high school creative-writing class, one day a week was set aside for reading, our choice of material. The hippieish teacher guided those choices, but almost anything worked. It was here, because of her, that I first encountered Alan Watts, specifically his essay collection This Is It. All I remember about the book itself is my teacher dreamily commenting on the title. I picked up a copy because it was short, and because the subtitle—and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience—spoke to me. The idea seemed “cool”—Watts was a forerunner of the counterculture movement—but I must have been too busy with the eternity of high school to focus my attention. I was in college when I was in a car accident that tore a nerve in my shoulder. A botched surgery to repair it severed an artery and released a blood clot that, a week later, caused a massive stroke that left me locked inside my body. I couldn’t move or speak, and the doctors said I would be paralyzed from the eyes down for the rest of my life. Read More
August 24, 2016 On the Shelf It’s Time to Don Your Salt Gown, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sigalit Landau’s salt gown emerging from the Dead Sea. Photo: Matanya Tausig. Today in occasions for self-satisfaction: a new study suggests that readers of literary fiction have an improved understanding of other people’s emotions, which doesn’t explain why that guy reading Shalimar the Clown on the train was such a jerk to me. “Academics David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, from the New School for Social Research in New York, put more than 1,000 participants through the ‘author recognition test,’ which measured exposure to fiction by asking respondents to identify writers they recognized from a list … Those who had recognized more literary fiction authors in the list were better at inferring others’ feelings, a faculty known as theory of mind.” (People have gotten very excited about this on Twitter, but no one seems to have reached the article’s devastating conclusion: “ ‘It doesn’t mean you can give Don DeLillo to an autistic child and they’ll be fine.’ ”) Read More
August 23, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery The French Fries Had a Plan By Dan Piepenbring Is Kanye’s McDonald’s poem a parable of class struggle? Avoid temptation. When I wrote in May about the seriocomic implications of a Burger King Spa opening in Helsinki, I thought I’d pegged the most extraordinary fast-food story of the year. Reader, I blew it. In the past month alone, McDonald’s has opened a “McDonald’s of the Future” in Saint Joseph, Missouri, luring customers to their purportedly healthier, Chipotlified restaurant by promising all-you-can-eat fries; BK has debuted the “Whopperito,” a burger-burrito hybrid that fits in your cup holder; and KFC has sold two thousand bottles of fried-chicken-scented SPF 30 sunscreen. For any writer hoping to capture the texture of our greasy-fingered moment, the ineffable Sturm und Drang of life in a world where Denny’s believes the ideal male body is a stack of flapjacks, the outlook is grim. As Philip Roth wrote, American reality “stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.” And he said that before Chicken Fries were a thing. But Philip Roth is no Kanye West, and Kanye West won’t just sit there while actuality outdoes his talents—heaven forfend. Instead, Kanye West has published a poem about Mickey D’s in Boys Don’t Cry, a one-off zine from Frank Ocean. It goes like this: Read More