August 15, 2016 On the Shelf Hemingway’s Antlers Returned, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A photo posted by aspentimes (@aspentimes) on Aug 10, 2016 at 11:51am PDT Try to stay calm, everyone, but I have some very exciting news: it’s about Hemingway’s antlers. Back in 1964, Hunter S. Thompson stole a set of elk antlers right off the guy’s wall, only three years after he’d shot himself … Thompson felt bad about it and meant to return the antlers promptly, but you know how it is, the decades go by, stuff piles up in your garage, and you just sort of forget that you have these priceless antlers sitting around, and then it’s 2005 and you’re dead, too. So it fell to Thompson’s widow, Anita, to return the property to the Hemingways last week: “They were warm and kind of tickled … They were so open and grateful, there was no weirdness … Still, it’s something that was stolen from the home. They were grateful to have them back. They had heard rumors. Sean Hemingway, the grandson, was the first family member that I’d heard from. He spoke with other Hemingway family members and he said that everyone agreed that he should have them. He lives in New York, where he curates a museum. So now that I’m back from Ketchum we’re actually shipping them to Sean.” Finally, New York’s newspaper of record has taken it upon itself that humblest of tasks: defining punk. Since 1976, the punk-rock spirit has been noxious, amorphous, and utterly unreconstructed. That was okay, but isn’t it better to have the Gray Lady trotting out a bunch of musician types to tell you what it’s really all about? One twenty-five-year-old says that punk as “like a massive piece of denim, and with that denim you can make something really cool. You can make a jacket, you can make some cool jeans, or you can make a cushion or a cover. There’s nothing that’s wrong or right about it, it’s just a thing that gives anything you want to do some backing.” Walter Benjamin wrote of the age of the mechanical reproduction—how quaint! In 2016, a good 3-D scanner-printer combo can do what mere mechanics never could; we have arrived, as Noah Charney writes, in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction. “When we speak of scanned and printed works of art, copies made by computers and a fabrication mechanism rather than a human hand, it is a different story altogether. It might look good, but what about Benjamin’s ‘aura’? … A danger arises when amateurs and bogus experts aren’t able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s reproduced. Worse, they might see the digital copy and decide that it is not worth the effort to see the original. They might not think that the work is better, but it is unarguably more convenient to access.” Two new books, American Girls and Girls and Sex, see a kind of crisis in young women today, and of course social media is to blame—these girls’ parents didn’t grow up with Instagram, so Instagram can only be the enemy. Zoe Heller raises an eyebrow: “To be sure, certain kinds of sexism have been amplified—or perhaps transmitted more efficiently—in the Internet era, and girls are now under pressure to present themselves as pliable sexual creatures at a much earlier age than they have been in the past. But even in the far-off 1970s and 1980s, young women experienced their share of exploitation, abuse, and unsatisfactory sex … If the good old days were never as good as both writers are wont to imply, the dark days of our present era are not quite as unremittingly desperate either.” Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book of atypically intimate interviews between the two filmmakers, turns fifty this year, and it’s still “one of the sharpest, most enthralling studies of creative thought” in print, Nathan Heller says: “As Truffaut presses Hitchcock on decision after decision, in film after film, an elaborate, reasoned logic rises to the fore—a point that both directors, similarly inclined toward meticulous visual formalism, were keen to drive home. Hitchcock is occasionally self-dismissive in a way that seems self-blind. My first destination, on paging through, was the discussion of Rear Window, from 1954, which to me seems Hitchcock’s greatest … Yet the director’s account extends from indifference to dissatisfaction. He dismisses the Franz Waxman score—whose weaving through a wash of overlapping urban sounds is striking even today—as disappointing. Not even the most deterministic director in the movies, it would seem, could see a clear path to his full achievement.”
August 12, 2016 Correspondence All the Misfits of This World Are Lonely By Radclyffe Hall Radclyffe Hall, right, with her lover, Una Troubridge, 1927. The below comes from a love letter dated October 24, 1934, sent by the English writer Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline, a Russian émigré. Hall, best known for her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, wrote with unprecedented openness about her lesbian identity; she often went by the name John. Though she lived with Una Troubridge, pictured above, she carried on a long love affair with Souline. Her letters to Souline are collected in Your John: The Love Letters of Radclyffe Hall, edited by Joanne Glasgow. Why is it that the people I write of are so very often lonely people? Are they? I think that perhaps you may be right. I greatly feel the loneliness of the soul—nearly every soul is more or less lonely. Then again: I have been called the writer of “misfits.” And it may be that being myself a “misfit,” for as you know, beloved, I am a born invert, it may be that I am a writer of “misfits” in one form or another—I think I understand them—their joys & their sorrows, indeed I know I do, and all the misfits of this world are lonely, being conscious that they differ from the rank and file. When we meet you & I will talk of my work and you shall be my critic, my darling. If you wish to you shall be very rude—but I do hope you like your John’s work just a little. I want you to like my work, Soulina. Read More
August 12, 2016 Look Doing Hard Time By Caitlin Youngquist Tom of Finland, 1984, graphite on paper. All images courtesy of Taschen. © 2016 Tom of Finland Foundation. “He only knew a drawing was good if it got him hard,” writes Dian Hanson of Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland (1920–1991). I’ve been spending my evenings drooling over “Tom’s men,” as they’ve come to be called—famously erotic, fabulously gay, and achingly virile. Tom’s is a métier that worships the male form. Sculpted, brawny bods dress up in archetypically masculine uniforms—men in uniform were a fetish of Tom’s—and frolic across the page to bone. Since the late fifties, when a (comparatively tame) drawing of his was featured on the cover of the muscle mag Physique Pictorial, Tom and his drawings have risen to an iconic status—and there’s a whole cottage industry of ToF merch, from fire blankets to anal beads, to prove it. But I, bashfully, have only just found him. I owe much of that to Taschen, who has, to mark the quarter century since the artist’s death, published a handful of books comprising much of his delicious oeuvre—a retrospective culminating in the reissue of the Holy Writ of all ToF books, Tom of Finland XXL. Among the collection is The Little Book of Tom of Finland: Cops and Robbers, one of three in the Little Book series, and my favorite of the bunch. Read More
August 12, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Surveillance, Silence, Pseudocide By The Paris Review From Will You Dance with Me? Our colleague Bobby sent me back to Edith Wharton’s novel of 1870s New York, The Age of Innocence. What struck Bobby (I’m paraphrasing) was the air of heavy surveillance: the action begins in an opera box, under the scrutiny of hundreds of eyes, and basically stays there. It feels oddly contemporary. At the same time The Age of Innocence is, very self-consciously, an historical novel. That’s what struck me: it appeared in 1920, almost fifty years after the events it describes, and belongs to that fun subgenre of novels—e.g., A Journal of the Plague Year, Middlemarch, Swann’s Way—that imagine what the grown-ups were actually up to when the author was a kid. —Lorin Stein When City Lights was preparing to publish the first edition of Julio Cortázar’s poetry in English in 1997 (it’s number fifty-three in the Pocket Poets series), Ferlinghetti wanted to produce a lean volume. In doing so, he cut the essay “For Listening Through Headphones,” which Cortázar begins by mourning the “pre-echo” on some records that mars “the brief night of the ears as they get ready for the fresh irruption of sound.” It’s funny that an essay that more than once uses the play of light and darkness to illuminate sound would be omitted from a book titled Save Twilight. But this month, City Lights is reissuing the volume, now heftier, thanks in part to the restoration of “For Listening” (and other poems that were left out from the original). In addition to being mesmerizing and utterly gorgeous (“now the needle / runs through the former silence and focuses it / in a black plush … a phosphene silence”), the essay links the experience of hearing music through headphones to poetry’s innate intimacy: “How not to think, then, that somehow poetry is a word heard through invisible headphones as soon as the poem begins to work its spell.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
August 12, 2016 On the Shelf Revere the Fig, Pity the Fig Wasp, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a package of California Fig Syrup Company’s “Syrup of Figs” laxative. Friends, the great march of progress continues apace. The word bawbag—“a Scots word meaning scrotum, in Scots vernacular a term of endearment but in English could be taken as an insult”—has been added to the Macmillan Open Dictionary. Now the official record will never forget the rich, protean history of this fine word: ‘Bawbag made the headlines five years ago when hurricane force winds hit Scotland in a storm dubbed Hurricane Bawbag by Twitter users—a name which quickly went viral. It was also one of the many insults leveled at the US Republican party’s presidential candidate when he arrived in Scotland earlier this summer—the Daily Record reporting that anti-Trump protestors held up signs reading ‘Trump is a bawbag.’ The Ukip leader Nigel Farage was met with cries of ‘Nigel, you’re a bawbag, Nigel you’re a bawbag, na, na, na, hey!’ in Edinburgh three years ago.” I eat figs as I eat most things—hell-bent on my own delectation, and totally ignorant of the food’s history or provenance. Ben Crair has taught me the ancient ways of the fig, though, in all their beauty and tragedy: “Because a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination, but because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That task belongs to a minuscule insect known as the fig wasp, whose life cycle is intertwined with the fig’s. Mother wasps lay their eggs in an unripe fig. After their offspring hatch and mature, the males mate and then chew a tunnel to the surface, dying when their task is complete. The females follow and take flight, riding the winds until they smell another fig tree … When the insects discover the right specimen, they go inside and deposit the pollen from their birthplace. Then the females lay new eggs, and the cycle begins again. For the wasp mother, however, devotion to the fig plant soon turns tragic. A fig’s entranceway is booby-trapped to destroy her wings, so that she can never visit another plant. When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing fig-wasp mummies, too.” A. S. Hamrah notices a disturbing trend in new movies: British people are now cast in record numbers as Americans. “Formerly assigned parts as villainous Romans and Nazis, British actors now populate American films as the worst America has to offer, and sometimes as exemplars of the white working class. What American demons are being exorcised by this kind of casting, and what does it say about how Hollywood views the white underclass that it thinks RADA-trained actors are best at playing them? At the same time, British actors also portray our greatest heroes, from Abraham Lincoln to Superman. All these types and historical figures inhabit a Shakespearean Disneyland in which America is an idea for export, best brought to cinematic life by trained specialists in a brand of good-versus-evil drama set in fictionalized hinterlands or the glorious past.” In the media, to call a piece of writing “academic” is to condemn it in the worst terms. David Wolf and Jo Livingstone discuss the eroding reputation of professorial prose: “People talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing as if it’s obvious what they are … In a journalistic context, extremely formal and exhaustive academic writing can come across as so pretentious and ridiculous when, in fact, there’s a lovely humbleness to it. The academic is saying, ‘Look! I’ve acknowledged all these people that have thought really hard about this’ … But, I think, one way in which academics writing for journalistic audiences can go wrong is not appreciating that the world which you are writing for is completely different … It’s not the job of the readers of the Guardian, say, to read you. They’re either going to read you because they’re interested, or they think it’s really important, or they’ll do it for pleasure or entertainment, but they’re not doing it out of any sense of duty.” The National Library of France has digitized the 1588 manuscript of Montaigne’s seminal Essays. It is, yes, in French. But if you can jump over that hurdle, you’ll see that Montaigne’s handwritten annotations (allongeails) are intact here. (Previously, the manuscript lived for many centuries in a convent in Bordeaux.)
August 11, 2016 Brushes with Greatness Orlando Bloom in the Nude By Naomi Fry In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Frédéric Bazille, Fisherman with a Net, 1868. It’s a funny thing about celebrity nudity. You would think, in this day and age, that American adults are inured to the essential facts of the unclothed body, thanks not just to their own workaday experiences but to their broader sense of the world. All anyone ever talks about, after all, is how skin-centric popular culture has become—with its Victoria’s Secret campaigns, its premium-cable fuckfests, its red carpet nip slips. And so, it stands to reason, we should have only a limited interest in celebrities baring all, whether of their own initiative or not. A fascination, however, persists. And how! A big celebrity gossip story last week hinged on the public excitement generated by the actor Orlando Bloom’s uncircumcised penis, revealed in paparazzi shots taken during a Sardinian beach vacation he went on with his girlfriend, the singer Katy Perry. In one set of pictures, Bloom and Perry were seen paddleboarding, Bloom on his knees at the back of the board, fully naked save for a baseball cap and sunglasses, Perry cross-legged in a bikini and sunglasses at the front. In another set of pictures, Bloom was captured alone on dry land, still naked, still wearing only a baseball cap and sunglasses—not unlike one of those 1980s Playmates with nothing on but a man’s tie or fingerless lace gloves, drawing yet greater attention to their otherwise exposed body. Read More