February 23, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Thirty Word Puzzles: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Bernhard Sprute, Painting Bienenbild, 2010. Ed. note: Last week, we featured Dylan’s latest puzzle: thirty punning, word-bending, assonant, homophonic, homonymic riddles. The contest has ended—thanks to all who entered! Turns out no one was able to get all thirty answers, so we’ve chosen one winner: Cindy Dapogny, who had the most correct responses. Congratulations to Cindy! Read More
February 23, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent “Me Wants Me Bhaer,” Part 2 By Sadie Stein Who could say no to that face? Read Part 1 here. As often as I’ve read Little Women, I found that I didn’t have very distinct memories of Bhaer—not the way I did of Jo or Amy or Laurie. Despite his recurrence in the later books, he’d faded into a somewhat two-dimensional character for me. When I first encountered the book, I was probably nine or ten—too young to appreciate a character like Bhaer, and more receptive to Laurie’s obvious charms. Bhaer had seemed pedantic and unromantic, and I’d retained that notion. As a grown-up, would I feel differently? By this time, having known loneliness and love, and indeed having married someone a few years my senior, would I have more sympathy for this more mature relationship? “You’re my professor Bhaer,” I said experimentally to my husband. He paled. “That’s the most horrible thing you’ve ever said to me,” he replied. Read More
February 23, 2016 On History Writ in Water By Michelle Stacey The enduring mystery of Keats’s last words. Photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment For skies Italian … —John Keats, “Happy is England! I Could Be Content,” 1817 Among the dozens of fountains in Rome, the Trevi may be the most famous, but the Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna arguably has a lock on the most poignant. Commissioned in 1629, it sits at the foot of the Scalinata, or Spanish Steps, swarmed by hordes of tourists in high season. Boat shaped to commemorate the spot where, in the historic flood of 1598, the Tiber River reached its highest level and improbably deposited a river barque in the square, the Barcaccia now seems a light-hearted way station, an oasis on a hot Latin day. But nearly two centuries ago, the fountain played a far different role for one particular admirer, a transplant from England who roomed in an apartment above the steps and listened incessantly to the murmurings of its waters. To this visitor, the Barcaccia was a temporary lifeline during a few dark winter months at the turn of 1821, as he coughed and spluttered his way to a tragically early death. That doomed young man, as devotees of English Romantic poetry know, was John Keats, and the apartment where the poet, barely twenty-five, breathed his last from tuberculosis, on February 23, 1821, is now the Keats-Shelley House, a meticulously kept museum and scholarly library founded in 1909. It’s there, in the room where Keats died, that you will find the key to a misapprehension—one could almost say a lie—about his life and death that has been promulgated, literally written in stone, since 1823. Read More
February 23, 2016 On the Shelf Come for the Secrets, Stay for the Art, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Artist unknown, Independent Order of Odd Fellows banner (detail), c. 1900–20), paint on canvas with wood and metal, 88.5″ x 71″. Photo: José Andrés Ramírez. Courtesy of American Folk Art Museum). Photo via Hyperallergic A decade before Virginia Woolf and her calls for a room of one’s own, there was Lola Ridge, a poet whose 1919 presentation “Women and Creative Will” was a watershed moment for feminism: “ ‘They say there never has been, there is not, and there never will be a really great woman artist,’ Ridge begins her speech, fifty-two years before Linda Nochlin asked, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ … She sees that ‘the [male] artist is naturally predatory. His soul sits like a patient spider, throwing out infinite antennae, clutching and drawing within,’ and writes that he allows women in the salons solely for his own stimulation.” I like to keep all my rare books in my car, for ease of access and transport. I see the error of my ways now. Lawrence Van De Carr, a rare books dealer, had his van stolen with some $350,000 in merchandise in it. “One suspect has been arrested, he said, but his van filled with novels penned by Faulkner, Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, among other famous authors, has not been found … Joshua Anderson, thirty, went to Moe’s Books in Berkeley shortly after the bookseller association sent out an alert. He and an alleged accomplice had four books, valued around $14,000, that they were trying to sell, said John Wong, manager at the store … The men said they got the valuable volumes from a deceased uncle, but Anthony, one of Wong’s employees, wasn’t buying it … When officers arrived, one of the men escaped through a back door, but Anderson ran out through the front, where he was caught and arrested, Wong said.” America’s secret societies have been occultist, dubiously charitable, and occasionally outright supremacist—but they came with some truly bizarre art, as demonstrated in the new book As Above, So Below: Art of the American Fraternal Society, 1850–1930: “As fraternal associations grew in the U.S. in the late 1800s, they looked to Etruscan, ancient Greek and Egyptian, Gothic, Moorish and so-called Oriental sources for themes and influences (echoing that era’s popular fascination with the ‘exotic’), which were reflected in their rituals, costumes and objects, and even in the fantasy architecture of some of their assembly halls.” Tough guys are changing, and Deadpool, for all its schlocky vulgarity, is proof: unlike the taciturn screen idols of yore, its hero is free to run his mouth. “The contours of Deadpool’s drama—maturing in love while maturing in allegiance—nudge against those of the classic Hollywood wartime loners exemplified by Bogart … Reynolds is no Bogart (who is?), but, in any case, the very nature of flamboyant sarcasm has changed—and, at least in one way, for the better. In Bogart’s time, the tough guy was epigrammatic, speaking in terse and tight-lipped aphorisms, leaving florid verbosity to the (usually affected, often European) villains. One great thing that hip-hop has done, over the past thirty or thirty-five years, is to create a bridge between intricate verbal intelligence and masculine strength, or, to put it differently, to make poetry streetwise and unleash it from its old-fashioned stereotype as feminine or effete. Pop-culture tough guys can be fast talkers now.” Today in subversive skeleton keys: The artist Jordan Seiler makes chunky metal rods that you can use to access the advertisements hidden behind Plexiglas all over the city. His Public Ad Campaign urges people to find and replace every ad they come across—a kind of perfect counter effort against those who seek to plaster every public surface labeled POST NO BILLS with as many handbills as possible. “Seiler’s work seeks to remind you that if you live in a major city, your eyes are currency. Agencies are constantly coming up with new ways to turn public spaces into ads. This is what the Public Ad Campaign hopes to fight. Seiler wants to distribute his keys as widely as possible to everyday people so they can help quiet the unavoidable ads into a dull roar.”
February 22, 2016 Arts & Culture My Harper Lee SparkNotes By Adrienne Raphel Writing the SparkNotes for Go Set a Watchman. From the cover of Go Set a Watchman. Context The summer when I was eight, I read two books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird. My copy of Mockingbird was a cheap lilac paperback. Its cover featured the knot of a tree with a pocket watch and a ball of yarn inside, a mockingbird stamped in silhouette. In the corner, a crescent moon as thin as a tea-stain rose above a clot of green trees. I lived inside that book. I read it, reread it, and reread it again, sitting in an attic bedroom of my grandparents’ house, hunched on the green shag carpet. I remember the book in discrete images: Dill’s duckweed-like tufts of hair. Slimy Mr. Ewell leering at his daughter. Miss Maudie’s house going up in flames, like a pumpkin, and her prized azaleas frozen and charred in the aftermath. Crotchety, liver-spotted Mrs. Dubose with her perfect camellias, ivory and globular against the glossy leaves. The day when Jem, in a sudden rampage, snatches Scout’s baton and shears off all the buds and flowers on the camellia bushes. And then, when Mrs. Dubose dies, the white box that her servant gives to Jem with one pristine, waxy camellia resting inside. To Kill a Mockingbird showed me how to create a fully realized, sensory world. Read More
February 22, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Getting to Know Professor Bhaer, Part 1 By Sadie Stein He isn’t old, nor anything bad, but good and kind, and the best friend I’ve got next to you. Pray don’t fly into a passion; I want to be kind, but I know I shall get angry if you abuse my Professor. I haven’t the least idea of loving him, or anybody else. —Little Women Literature has known many divisive characters. The dubious morality of Humbert Humbert, the disreputable spikiness of Holden Caulfield, the judgment and snobbery of Emma Bovary—all have pitted readers against one another since time immemorial. That said, there’s one character more controversial than all of these put together: Friedrich Bhaer. Read More