July 11, 2016 On the Shelf Bloodthirsty Billboards, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring As integral to the landscape as the horizon is. On February 3, 1974, Philip K. Dick was minding his own business—just recovering from dental surgery as you or I might, maybe with a pint of rum raisin Häagen-Dazs and some trashy daytime television—when a divine spirit had the nerve to interrupt his solitude, altering his life forever: “The doorbell rang, and when Dick opened the door he was stunned to see what he described as a ‘girl with black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense’ wearing a gold necklace with a Christian fish symbol. She was there to deliver a new batch of medications from the pharmacy. After the door shut, Dick was blinded by a flash of pink light and a series of visions ensued. First came images of abstract paintings, followed by philosophical ideas and then, sophisticated engineering blueprints. Dick believed the pink light was a spiritual force which had unlocked his consciousness, granting him access to esoteric knowledge.” Imagine a world without billboards. I can’t do it, either. But an earlier generation, their synapses blessedly unfried by constant advertising, had the creative wherewithal to mount an assault on the whole industry. Erica Berry writes, “Billboards are democratic invitations, tickets to Dionysian adventure and Hedonistic romps … Taking a cue from the English Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, American anti-billboard reformers quickly organized against this assault, with the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., helming early efforts. The signs concealed piles of litter, blocked sunlight, distracted from the scenery, and ‘obtrude[d] all sorts of sordid ideas upon the mind,’ Olmsted wrote in 1900. Beyond moral objections, anti-billboard activists seized on the practical effrontery of the signs, as when wooden boards atop San Francisco’s buildings helped conduct the city’s disastrous 1906 fire, or when a ‘bloodthirsty billboard’ tipped and injured pedestrians in Kansas City in 1905, as reported by the Kansas City Journal.” Come to Catullus for the hunger and heartache, stay for the dick jokes: “The verses Catullus addressed to male rivals, or to friends who he felt had let him down, often pullulate with rage and obscenity. Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabois his gloriously defiant reply to two companions, Furius and Aurelius, who had criticized the indecency of his writings: ‘I shall fuck you in the ass and I shall fuck you in the mouth.’ His fearless attacks on his enemies, even revered public figures, teem with anuses, penises, stinking armpits—one man, a certain Rufus, is said to have a wild goat living beneath his—and graphic sex acts either given or received. The saltiness of these poems has thrilled many a beginning Latin class, but their power extends beyond mere shock value. With his freewheeling aggression, his willingness to let fly at the slightest provocation, Catullus evokes the modern Beat poets; the ‘neoteric’ school to which he belonged was just as daring as theirs in breaking with literary tradition.” Our poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, reviews Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, which finds Matar returning to Libya for the first time in thirty-three years, after Qaddafi’s fall: “His memoir is set in this honeymoon of the revolution, the brief window between the dictatorship and the current civil war. ‘Anything seemed possible,’ Matar writes of this hopeful interim, ‘and nearly every individual I met spoke of his optimism and foreboding in the same breath.’ In the memoir’s most rapturous passages, which recall Albert Camus’s essays on his Algerian childhood, Matar evokes his rediscovery of the Libyan landscape, the luminous Mediterranean coast and the austerity of the interior, where the earth ‘stood as all the unpeopled landscapes of Libya stand, clean and witnessing.’ ” In which James Wolcott sits down with a group of memoirs looking back at the golden age of magazines, including Terry McDonell’s The Accidental Life: “The twilight melancholy that creeps through the book is due not only to the ghosts of those now gone … but also to the waning of an entire way of life, the shrinking power, prestige, glamour, and advertising clout of glossy print in the Digital Age beneath the Death Star of Silicon Valley hegemony and the loss of journalistic comradeship. Everything McDonell writes rings sad and true, but the marvel is (as I’m sure he’d agree) that so much superb, adventurous work is still being done in magazines in the encroaching void of such adversity. If you’re going to go down with the ship, might as well go down swinging.”
July 8, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Gold Teeth, Hawk Noses, Flying Cars By The Paris Review Andy Thomas’s animation of bird sounds. In 1924, Samuel Beckett, eighteen, lurked at a Sunday salon in Dublin, standing obtuse and silent against the wall, his head down as conversation breathed around him. Five years later, in 1929, in Paris, he sat silently on the edge of a circle of James Joyce’s acolytes, while “Shem” (Beckett’s affectionate sobriquet for Dublin’s literary master) held court. On a balmy afternoon, in 1932, he slouched into a corner during tea at Walter Lowenfels’s (a cheerful American—and failed publisher—in Paris’s literary society), where he sat “tall, thin, looking like a forest ranger in a Western.” Beckett’s dark form—I imagine him in the shadows of these parties, hunched, hawk-nose angled down, and blue eyes focused on a point—is a recurring image in the early chapters of Samuel Beckett, the 1978 biography by Deirdre Bair that I started reading this weekend. But these aren’t my only impressions of him. Bair was given unprecedented access to Beckett: the book was written while he was still alive, and though he didn’t give her any interviews, he allowed Bair to write to his friends and family, informing them that they should give her whatever they like. And so Beckett emerges—layered, brilliant, brooding, genius. —Caitlin Love From the first page of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel Zama—in which the eponymous hero spies a monkey’s floating corpse “caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf … ready to go and not going”—a humid nimbus cloud of despair settles over the story, never to dissolve. Set in the Paraguay of the late eighteenth century, Zama follows a bureaucrat in his tortured efforts to secure a better position in far-off Buenos Aires, where he hopes to settle with his even-farther-off wife and children. Listless, phlegmatic, and increasingly horny, Zama wanders the lush country doing something close to nothing, watching almost distantly as he loses his moral compass. As a study in exile, paranoia, and the lonely tedium of quashed ambitions, this is great shit. But read it above all for the triumph of its style: Zama holds forth in deep, stewing paragraphs as pompous as they are incisive. It’s Sartre by way of J. Peterman, and in Esther Allen’s translation it still feels unique and alive. —Dan Piepenbring Read More
July 8, 2016 First Person Mr. Brooks By Drew Bratcher From the cover of In Pieces. I saw Garth—that’s what we called him, just Garth—with three friends when we were in the fourth grade, maybe fifth. He was touring in support of 1993’s In Pieces album. A Nashville native, I had been listening to country music for as long as I could listen, but Garth was the artist that had turned me from a passive listener into an enthusiast. My grandfather had had Johnny Cash, my parents Alabama. But Garth, Garth was mine. As far as they were concerned, I could have him. When the guitar arpeggio at the start of “Friends in Low Places,” his first hit, came over the radio, my parents would switch the dial from 97.9, which played Top 40 country, to 95.5, which played the classic stuff. “Blame it all on my roots / I showed up in boots,” Garth sang, in a lyric that seemed to announce a changing of the guard, “and ruined your black tie affair.” Read More
July 8, 2016 Our Correspondents In Praise of Minor Literature By Matthew St. Ville Hunte Houseboats by the Thames. Some of the writers and books I hold in the highest esteem were discovered en passant: buried in the archives of a little-read blog; mentioned in a thirty-year-old essay devoted to more prominent writers; planted near the end of a long list on Wikipedia. (Idleness and obsession are the impetus for most of my discoveries.) Most of these books are rare tastes, not even well known for not being well known. They are not likely to come up at dinner parties, and they are not part of any canon or curriculum. I don’t get any credit for having read them. They are what some people call minor. What does it mean to be minor? It’s not the same thing as being obscure. Leon Forrest’s oeuvre is a megalith, but there seem to be about six of us who have read him. Nor is a minor writer a bad writer. Guy Davenport proposed that Thomas Love Peacock, Colette, Simenon, and Michael Gilbert were all “impeccable stylists” but also, next to Tolstoy, Cervantes, Balzac, and Proust, incontrovertibly minor. Davenport, a self-described minor prose stylist who was great enough to be genuinely self-effacing, said that “the theme of a major work must be universal and time-defying.” When judged by this standard, he suggested, even Borges and Poe were minor, since “a Martian could not learn about human nature from either of them.” Read More
July 8, 2016 On the Shelf Looks Are Not Styles, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Filters, bro. The police murders of so many black men have been caught on video, putatively for the sake of justice. But these videos perpetuate themselves with the same moral ambiguity that comes with war photography or any document of suffering. As Ezekiel Kweku writes of Alton Sterling, “I was detached enough to critique the video of his death, classify it, find myself consigning it to genre. I’ve long passed the point at which watching these videos makes me feel like a helpless bystander—I am another distance removed. At this point, I am a critic of images of men like me, dying. I’m a connoisseur … For these videos to prick the conscience, that conscience must already value the lives of those who are dying. Otherwise, the videos are simply lurid entertainment, the modern version of the postcard-size images of lynchings that were passed around during the last century.” While we’re on the power of images: Ricky D’Ambrose contrasts the “looks” of the Instagram-and-design age with legitimate style. “Style annuls the impersonal … A look—insofar as it has any resemblance to style at all—is a kind of instant style: quickly executed and dispatched, immediately understood, overcharged with incident. To say that a film, a photograph, a painting, or a room’s interior has a look is to assume a consensus about which parts of a nascent image are the most worthy of being parceled out and reproduced on a massive scale. It means making a claim about how familiar an image is, and how valuable it seems.” Americans and Canadians. What could ever unite these two disparate peoples, given their distinct views on the welfare state and their radically different approaches to bacon? I’ll tell you what: a library. Sarah Yahm reports that “for nearly 200 years Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, essentially functioned as one town. Citizens drank the same water, worked in the same tool factory, played the same sports … They also shared the same cultural center, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, an ornate Victorian edifice built deliberately on top of the international border in 1901 by the Canadian wife of a wealthy American merchant … Against all logic, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House continues to serve both Vermonters and Quebecers, and remains a transnational space that residents from both the U.S. and Canada can enter without a passport. Today, it is the only library in the world that exists and operates in two countries at once.” Emma Cline remembers discovering the perversities of Archie comics: “As we grew older, we began reading the comics with a sharper eye. Catching spelling errors, repetitive story lines. Continuity problems. The innocence started to rupture around the edges. There was only one black character in Riverdale … Or Betty and Veronica, teen-age girls drawn with pervy precision by the male cartoonists, men who traced the bodies of the girls over and over and over, who posed them like pinups, often barely clothed. Their nipples obvious through tank tops, their skirts riding up their thighs when they sprawled on their pink beds. In some panels, a segment of their white underwear could be seen. It had been there all along, underneath the adamant wholesomeness—flashes of the world the comics had been trying so hard to keep out.” And Tim Parks, reading a new biography of Dante, finds a rich irony in the poet’s present-day cultural standing: “Excluded from his home culture in his lifetime, Dante is absolutely at the center of it seven hundred years on. Pathetically wrong when he supposed that his own self-important interventions might swing the course of history, he was triumphantly right when he prophesied that the vernacular would prevail over Latin and that he would be numbered among the great poets of all time. In the early 19th century, Giacomo Leopardi would remark that the factional fragmentation of Italian society was such that no Italian past or present was ever entirely honored or dishonored ‘since there can be no honor without a shared sense of society’. Dante is the exception that proves the rule, more honored it seems to me than any other Italian in history, perhaps because his great work so completely captures and in its way celebrates the endless divisiveness that unites Italy’s present with its past.”
July 7, 2016 Arts & Culture Let Them Be Spoiled By Charles Curkin The rise of the spoiler alert. Still from the film Witness for the Prosecution, 1957. In all forms of media, the spoiler alert has barreled into common usage. It has become necessary because we’re living in an age when information is diffused at such a violent pace. With the privilege of speed comes great sensitivity. We no longer read books or watch TV shows and movies for their gestalt; art is now only as powerful as the emotions it exploits. It’s a tragic state of affairs, but it’s likely to get even worse. It’s now within reason to get litigious over spoiling. The blogger “Reality Steve” Carbone, whose website has a section dedicated to reality-show spoilers, has been sued not once but twice for ruining certain seasons of ABC’s The Bachelor and its equally insipid sister show, The Bachelorette. Read More