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The Daily

April 21, 2016
From the Archive

Morning Street

By Carlos Drummond de Andrade

William Edouard Scott, Rainy Night at Etaples, 1912

Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem “Morning Street” appeared in our Fall 1986 issue. He is considered by some to be the greatest Portuguese-language poet of all time.

The splashing rain
unearthed my father.
I never imagined
him buried thus,
to the din of trolleys
on an asphalt street
giant palm trees slanting on the beach
(and a voice from sleep
to stroke my hair),
as melodies wash up
with lost money
discarded confessions
old papers, glasses, pearls.

To see him exposed
to the damp, acrid air,
that drifts in with the tide
and cuts your breath,
to wish to love him
without deceit
to cover him with kisses, with flowers, with swallows,
to alter time
to offer the warm
of a quiet embrace
from this elderly recluse,
discarded confessions
and a lamb-like truce.

To feel the lack
of inborn strengths
to want to carry him
to the older sofa
of a bygone ranch,
but splashes of rain
but sheets of mud beneath reddish street lamps
but all that exists
of morning and wind
between one nature and another
yawning sheds by the docks
discarded confessions
ingratitude.
What should a man do
at dawn
(a taste of defeat
in his mouth, in the air)
in whatever place?
Everything spoken, drunk, or even pretended
and the rest still buried
in the folds of sleep,
cigarette stubs
the wet glare of streets
discarded confessions
morning defeat.

Vague mountains
greening waves
newspapers already white,
hesitant melody
trying to spawn
conditions for hope
on this gray day, of a broken lament.
Nothing left to remind me
of the seamless asphalt.
Abandoned cellars
my body shivers
discarded confessions:
abruptly, the walk home.

—Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie
April 21, 2016
Our Daily Correspondent

Lousie

By Sadie Stein

Detail showing delousing from Jan Siberechts’s painting Cour de ferme, 1662.

PEDICULARE, the lousie disease, that is when the bodie is pestred and full of lice and nits.
—Iohn Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English

Think of the above as an indirect nod to Shakespeare’s birthday: living as he did in a particularly pestilential period of London’s history, the bard had reason to reference “the lousie disease” with some regularity. The plague of 1593 famously shuttered all of London’s theaters; ten thousand people died in this outbreak alone. Even in nonplague years, typhus was a major killer. And at the best of times, lice were a quotidian nuisance and a marker of hygiene.

Indeed, lice of various kinds come up in Titus Andronicus and King Lear, and that’s just for starters. The reason I am not quoting them is because most of these references are very lascivious and vile indeed. The only context in which Shakespeare uses lice is as an insult: always insulting someone’s cleanliness to sexual hygiene. (Which seems harsh in a time when vermin of all kinds must have been fairly rampant.) Surely not only slatterns and villains were prone to the pestilence! What about Thomas of Beckett, with his hair shirt running with lice? Shakespeare was most definitely a part of the problem.

And the shame and stigma in the modern classroom are alive and well, even in places well-fortified with antibiotics and running water. To wit: On a downtown subway platform, I heard one little girl in a Catholic school uniform—maybe six—turn to her friend and say, “Pinkie swear you’ve never had lice. Pinkie swear.” Duly sworn in, the two then walked down the platform and approached a third little girl, standing alone.

“Have you ever had lice?” they demanded sternly. The loner looked around in a panicked sort of way. “N-no… ” she said uncertainly.

“Will you pinkie swear?” demanded the ringleader.

I have! I wanted to tell her. It doesn’t make you dirty or weird, even if you happen to be sort of weird and lonely! And maybe dirty! Anyone can get it! And those nit combs and that horribly painful shampoo are punishment enough! And then one day you’ll just be a grown-up on the platform and no one will even check if you wash your hair! It will be okay!

And blessedly, then the train pulled in.

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.
April 21, 2016
Arts & Culture

Kill Thurber

By Matthew Thurber

Matthew Thurber is an artist living in Brooklyn. He is the author of the graphic novels 1-800-MICE, INFOMANIACS, and Art Comic, which is forthcoming next year. “Kill Thurber” appears in Kramers Ergot 9.
April 21, 2016
On the Shelf

It’s Time to Stop Bothering with Underwear, and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring
A pair of silk-chiffon knickers from the 1930s, on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
- Today is Charlotte Brontë’s two-hundredth birthday, and no two-hundredth birthday is complete without a new biography. Claire Harman has furnished one for the occasion, the first new biography in twenty years: Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart. “The main thrust of Harman’s biography,” writes Daphne Merkin, “endeavors to show how this most self-doubting yet obdurate of young women turned her emotional vulnerability and anxieties about her place in society as a fiercely passionate but plain Jane into a new kind of literature, one that forged a candid and poignant female voice of unaccountable power, telling of childhood loneliness and adult longing … There is a wonderfully poignant scene in London when the appearance-conscious Charlotte goes to a fashionable painter for the first of a series of sittings to have her portrait done and is asked to remove ‘a wad of brown merino wool that had stayed on top of her head when she took her bonnet off’—which proves to be a hairpiece. The experience leaves her ‘mortified (to the point of tears).’ ”
- I wear underwear all the time, mainly because my peer group frowns upon diapers. But there are other, deeper reasons, and it’s these that Tom Rachman explores in a trip to a new London exhibition, “Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear”: “The motives for covering up, it turns out, include avoiding chafing, keeping outerwear unsoiled (vital in the days when a person’s outfits were handmade and few), restricting the jiggles of less well-moored body parts, and advertising the sexual organs to better advantage … Women’s wear constitutes the bulk of the exhibition, probably because male undergarments have tended to be staid and uniform, concerned primarily with comfort, in sharp contrast to the female garments concocted to suppress or accentuate the body … The hypocrisy of sexual repression is blatant in historic underwear, which at once prudishly hid the female body while exaggerating its sexual traits: breasts hiked up, hips widened, butt enlarged. A few underwear fads have diminished the sex traits, notably the androgynous looks of the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-seventies; intriguingly, both were times of comparative sexual liberation.”
- Meanwhile, a traveling show called Famous Deaths lets you experience, in rich multisensory detail, the last four minutes of a famous person’s life. Simply slide on in to a metal mortuary drawer and you, too, can know the smells and sounds of JFK at Dealey Plaza, Whitney Houston in that Beverly Hills tub, Princess Diana in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Allison Meier chose the JFK option: “The intense smell of grass and the sound of an approaching crowd filled the small space … I’ve seen the footage, even visited the grassy knoll in Dallas, and some mixture of the saturated 1960s video and the Texas streets merged in my mind with the scents and sounds. I picked out the strong smell of coffee, which [cocreator Marcel] van Brakel later explained was from the crowd, and something leathery that suggested a car interior … When the bullet came, it wasn’t the blaring noise I’d feared, but a whistling shot followed by a flowery fragrance.” (That’s Jackie’s perfume.)
- Emmanuel Carrère reports from Calais, where the Jungle, the largest shantytown in Europe, has attracted a wealth of journalists and documentarians, all eager “to bear witness to the migrants’ misfortune.” But what about the rest of the town? Carrère receives an anonymous eight-page letter: “We’re fed up with the glitterati—pardon the term—coming to feed off Calais’ misfortunes and treating the people stuck within its walls like lab rats … I wonder: which traps will you fall into? What story are you looking for? One thing I know for sure: your venture will be a failure.” So he looks, literally, in other direction, talking not to the migrants but to the locals. “I met people, lots of people, not just the bourgeois in their bubble, as you put it—even if I found it reassuring that they still exist in Calais … ”
- Did you know? Queen Elizabeth II is ninety. It’s a terrifying time to be in Britain. “As with Diana’s death, and the traipsing pageant of sprogs, weddings, and jubilees, the birthday’s another of those moments when the country morphs into a twee version of North Korea. The Beeb goes into auto-drool; ITV is even worse. Mugshots of the supreme leader stare glassily out as bands blare and brass hats prink. She’s taking on the holographic aura of her mother, whose last decades plied the pale between chiffon and outright inexistence. One of the better portraits of the queen, Chris Levine’s Equanimity, actually is a hologram … The queen adheres to the throne as stubbornly as a seagull-splat baked to a sunshine roof. Commentators trot out the palace line that she sticks at it from a pitiless sense of duty. But everyone knows she knows that every extra day her reign grinds on is one less for that of Charles III. No one, maybe not even the dauphin himself, is clamoring to see the crown teeter atop those jug ears. Perhaps a corgi could be made regent till death or dementia claims him.”
April 20, 2016
Arts & Culture

Barney’s Wall

By Dan Piepenbring

From the trailer for Barney’s Wall.

Longtime readers of the Review will recall our 1997 interview with Barney Rosset, the irrepressible publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. In the fifties and sixties, Rosset brought scores of ostensibly obscene books to the U.S., often to the gross offense of the era’s leading fuddy-duddies. The unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover? A Grove title. Tropic of Cancer—also Grove. American editions of Waiting for Godot, Our Lady of the Flowers, Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn—all Rosset’s doing. Even I Am Curious (Yellow), everyone’s favorite X-rated Swedish art-house flick, was a Rosset import. As he says in his Art of Publishing interview, all this illicit material came with its share of trouble—some of which he sought out willingly. When he published Chatterley, for example, Rosset was so eager to strike a blow against censorship that he used the book as bait, getting himself hauled into court: Read More
April 20, 2016
Our Daily Correspondent

The Wrong Scent

By Sadie Stein

From a vintage Bienaimé advertisement.

When I rejoined my husband, the first thing he said was, “I love that perfume!”

“That’s just as well,” I said shortly.

Here’s what had happened: I’d taken refuge from the weather in a shop. Guiltily aware that I wouldn’t be buying anything, I sniffed at a series of perfume stoppers. Some customer in a fishing hat, a pair of white socks with sandals, and a bag with a picture of Liza Minnelli on it was chattering with the saleswoman about the exorbitant price of neighborhood tea and his depression. “Maybe some cologne will help your day,” said the saleswoman. Read More