May 16, 2016 On the Shelf More Novels Starring Coins, Please, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Only this watermarked stock photo of a walking one-euro coin truly captures the thrill of novels with currency at their centers. I find novels starring people—or any animate creatures, really—to be unthinkably dull. For this reason I do most of my reading in the mid to late eighteenth century, when novels with inanimate objects at their centers enjoyed a brief but memorable time in the literary limelight. The most famous one was told from the perspective of a coin: “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea thrilled contemporary readers with ‘Views of several striking Scenes,’ an insider’s account of the scandalous doings of the ‘most Noted Persons in every Rank of Life,’ and tales from the gold mines of Peru, the streets of London, the canals of Amsterdam, the ports of the Caribbean, and the front lines of the Great War … It was a tipping point for what are frequently referred to as ‘it-narratives.’ It-narratives, also called ‘novels of circulation’ or ‘object narratives,’ are novels or stories that take an inanimate object or an animal as its narrator … With a market proven, writers for hire began churning them out with variable quality. By 1781, a bored reviewer in The Critical Review complained, ‘This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or—any thing else, is grown so fashionable now, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection.’ ” In which Nabokov, talking to us from 1926, attempts to make sense of his exile: “There is a very seductive and very dangerous demon: the demon of generalities. He captivates man’s thought by marking every phenomenon with a little label, and punctiliously placing it together with another, similarly carefully wrapped and numbered phenomenon. Through him a field of human knowledge as changeable as history is turned into a neat little office, where this many wars and that many revolutions sleep in folders—and where we can pore over bygone ages in complete comfort. This demon is fond of words such as idea, tendency, influence, period, and era. In the historian’s study this demon reductively combines in hindsight the phenomena, influences, and tendencies of past ages. With this demon comes appalling tedium—the knowledge (utterly mistaken, by the way) that, however humanity plays its hand or fights back, it follows an implacable course. This demon should be feared. He is a fraud. He is a salesman of centuries, pushing his historical price list.” Today in dramatic acts of digital preservation: if ever the Daily shuts down, we hope to survive in a kind of bardic oral tradition, having former readers pass down our stories one at a time through the generations, at great length and with little regard for accuracy. The website hi.co, which I’d never heard of before about ten minutes ago, is taking fewer chances. Instead of vanishing into the mists of time, they’re keeping their users’ contributions “in a nickel-plate ‘book’ designed to be readable for the next 10,000 years … Everything on the site—roughly two million words and fourteen thousand photos—will be etched in microscopic size onto a series of nickel plates. Everything will be readable with an optical microscope.” (One of the site’s founders notes that the plates are “fire resistant” and “deal well with saltwater.”) Some drink to remember, some drink to forget. Pour yourself a glass of marc and you can do both: “With marc, my favorite digestif, both the mortality and the miracle are there in the glass: sip it and you taste the pulverized remains (stems, grape skins, pips) of the wine refined to make it, as well as experiencing resurrection through distillation, in those unpromising oenological afterthoughts given new life. A marc is like a vanitas, the skull that artists once included in paintings to deliver a warning that no pleasure, however great, can last. Behind the smooth sophistication of strong, well-made alcohol, there is the musty hint of old grape skins—a pungent reminder that even the magic of alcohol cannot make a grape, or a drinker, eternal.” Philosophy departments are among the most Eurocentric in all of academe—which is fine, as long as they practice truth in advertising. Write to your congressman: “Any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself ‘Department of European and American Philosophy’ … We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the Bhagavad Gita as they do the Republic, that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980–1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Kwasi Wiredu (1931– ), Lame Deer (1903–1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.”
May 13, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Songs We’re Stuck With By Sadie Stein Real McCoy. At a coffee shop, standing on line (because I’m a New Yorker, and for some reason that’s where we stand with lines—on them, never in them), I began to cry. This in itself was not so extraordinary—the mascara has not yet been invented that’s proof against my tears—but this jag happened to be music related. The José Gonzalez cover of “Heartbeats” had come on the sound system, and the time-machine jolt to 2006 was so sudden that my body didn’t know how to respond except with tears, although it wasn’t grief I felt. Read More
May 13, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Fear, Fumes, That Fucking Cardinal By The Paris Review From the cover of Esopus 23. Photo © Estate of David Gahr Horacio Castellanos Moya published Revulsion in 1997, less than a decade after the official end of the Salvadoran civil war. The book—the first English edition of which is forthcoming from New Directions this July—began as an exercise in style, an attempt to ape the unrelenting antagonism of Thomas Bernhard. The result was a slender, scalding diatribe that brought Moya death threats and infamy. With no plot, no real action, and only the slightest sketch of two characters, Revulsion is barely a novel, and nowhere near its author’s best. (For that, try Senselessness or The She-Devil in the Mirror.) But its sprays of vituperation are often funny, and even nineteen years on, the book’s atmosphere of exasperated rage feels itchy, jagged, and real. —Robert P. Baird You don’t have to be a Stones fan to fall in love with Rich Cohen’s The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones. Part rock history, part memoir, it’s so charming, so candid, such a mixture of sweetness and disillusionment and deep fanboy research, that I found myself reading the first four chapters out loud to Sadie—then staying up late, racing to finish, so she could take my copy. —Lorin Stein Read More
May 13, 2016 On Music You Think You’re Special By Dave Tompkins Prince Pizza Aktion restaurant, Innsbruck, 2013. Photograph by author. I have 294 records of showers of living things … there’s no accounting for the freaks of industry. —Charles Fort, Book of the Damned While My Guitar Gently Gets Bent at Pizza Hut The florist sat drunk in the corner booth of a Pizza Hut in Myrtle Beach. “Erotic City” quietly grinded away on a jukebox over near the bathrooms. For the past three hours, I’d been feeding the florist cans of Coors Light while he drove his son and me across South Carolina. Purple Rain played the entire route. “Let’s Go Crazy” in Pageland, “The Beautiful Ones” in Ruby, “Computer Blues” through Cheraw, “Take Me with U” to Aynor. That October of 1984, my friend’s listening habits skewed toward Pyromania. Mine: keytars, eyeliner dudes, and black radio—whatever Les Norman, “The Night-Time Master Blaster,” happened to be playing on WPEG. I remembered Leppard for their one-armed drummer arrested for spousal abuse. Meanwhile Prince played, like, twenty different instruments while having sex in the backseat of taxicabs, ducking the Antichrist, and shouting for gun control. Also: girlfriend on drums. What’s fair is fair. Read More
May 13, 2016 On the Shelf Elaborate Networks of Siphons, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from an illustration in an 1851 English edition of Hero’s Pneumatica. The forecast is calling for more rain this weekend. Why not stay in and curl up with a cup of organic fair-trade tea and a nice, laminated U.S. Geological Survey topographical map? Tom Vanderbilt does it from time to time: “For the past number of years, I have been collecting the U.S.G.S.’s maps, treating them as eminently affordable pieces of American art. A favorite is the 1977 map of Eureka, Calif., which contrasts, in stunning dualism, the rugged bathymetry of the Pacific Ocean against the rolling hills of Humboldt County’s redwood forests … On some gray afternoons, sequestered in my Brooklyn apartment, I will pull out, say, a map of Arches National Park, spread it over my kitchen table and trace imaginary pathways across airbrushed depictions of reddish sandstone with my finger … The beauty intrinsic to these maps is the byproduct of an entirely different mode of production, the last gasp of an antiquated way of representing the world.” While we’re on government-generated weekend-reading material: if you’re feeling morbid, you could try, instead, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s catalog of the ways people have died on the job. Something about its bland, administrative style makes it a chillingly effective memento mori: “Worker was crushed when tractor he was driving, pulling a bin dumper full of pomegranates, fell onto its side. Worker was possibly trying to make a U-turn while going too fast … Worker was engulfed after standing on a pile of beans at a bean plant … Worker was crushed by a rack of baked goods … Worker was eating lunch and swallowed a bee … ” Well before the likes of Alan Turing, the notion of artificial intelligence came alive in automata, i.e., self-moving machines. The first robots were, in a sense, waterworks. Jessica Riskin writes: “Many involved elaborate networks of siphons that activated various actions as the water passed through them, especially figures of birds drinking, fluttering, and chirping … Waterworks, including but not limited to ones using siphons, were probably the most important category of automata in antiquity and the middle ages. Flowing water conveyed motion to a figure or set of figures by means of levers or pulleys or tripping mechanisms of various sorts. A late twelfth-century example by an Arabic automaton-maker named Al-Jazari is a peacock fountain for handwashing, in which flowing water triggers little figures to offer the washer first a dish of perfumed soap powder, then a hand towel.” Claudia Rankine remembers facing young adulthood with Adrienne Rich as a lodestar: “As a nineteen-year-old, I read in Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months … By my late twenties, in the early nineteen-nineties, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published An Atlas of the Difficult World. I approached the volume thinking I knew what it would hold, but found myself transported by Rich’s profound exploration of ethical loneliness. Rich called forward voices created in a precarious world. And though the term ‘ethical loneliness’ would come to me years later, from the work of the critic Jill Stauffer, I understood Rich to be drawing into her stanzas the voices of those who have been, in the words of Stauffer, ‘abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.’” It’s one thing to translate a dead author, who can no longer quibble with your decisions—but a living author is another matter entirely. “The few living authors I’ve translated,” Lydia Davis says in a new interview with Liesl Schillinger, “tend to be very modest and self-effacing, like Snijders and Blanchot, so they’ll say, Whatever you think is best, this is really your work, that sort of thing. I have had friends who have had very different experiences with authors, who say, No, that’s not it at all, and virtually force them to write in a way that they’re not happy writing. I’ve had times when I wished an author were still alive, especially in the case of Michel Leiris, so I could ask, What exactly did you mean? Actually, Leiris sent me a couple of postcards that I framed. His handwriting is great, black spidery old man’s handwriting. As I remember, he said something like, I’m here to help in any way I can. I don’t think I took advantage of his offer, which is something I really regret, now.”
May 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Greenwich Village, 1971 By Sadie Stein Djuna Barnes. Although she died in 1982, at the age of ninety, Djuna Barnes seems to have recorded her voice on only a few occasions. The tape below was made in her Patchin Place home in 1971. Barnes is best known for Nightwood, her modernist classic, but she had a long and thriving career as a journalist and in the avant-garde literary scene. Her body of work, including The Book of Repulsive Women, Ryder, and The Ladies Almanack, spans aestheticism, Dada, and high modernism. Her books are deep, often challenging, and crucial. Read More