April 20, 2016 Arts & Culture The H. L. Mencken Show By Carson Vaughan A brush with the Sage of Baltimore. H. L. Mencken at the Baltimore Sun. For better or worse, I am a child of the Plains, and so my first experience with H. L. Mencken was less an introduction than a confrontation. I first learned of the Sage of Baltimore during his cameo appearance in a Great Plains history course, at the University of Nebraska. Henry Mencken considered us part of a large and ever-growing species he called homo boobiens, my professor explained. Wedged between the Omaha race riots and the Agricultural Marketing Act of ’29, Mencken showed up during the Scopes Monkey Trial to wield his pen against William Jennings Bryan, whom he described as “one of the most tragic asses in American history.” What a dick, I thought. I liked him immediately. I liked him so much that I bought The American Language, the pillar of his bibliography, and never touched it again. Unaware of my purchase, my girlfriend gave me a copy of the same book as a gift, but not before gluing the pages together and carving out the middle to camouflage my secrets. Later I purchased a used copy of The New Mencken Letters and schlepped that 635-page tome around wherever I went, reading a letter or two here and there, recklessly quoting from it in term papers. From the letters, I became smitten with Mencken’s verbal gymnastics, his apparent refusal to say something plain when it could be said with the cocksure verbosity of a Southern lawyer. Perhaps, too, I was charmed by that most convenient of facts: he was dead. Had Mencken still been alive, I have no doubt I’d have raised my guard, but that is the gift of hindsight. Instead I accepted him the way he accepted himself, disregarding the imperfections—of which, I would later find out, there were many. Read More
April 20, 2016 On the Shelf Take the Throne, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Maurizio Cattelan’s mock-up of his solid-gold toilet, debuting in a bathroom at the Guggenheim this May. For years, I’ve implored the management here at the Review to install a gold toilet—it would raise morale and the magazine’s profile. I’m sad to report that the Guggenheim has beaten us to the flush. And their gold john is designed by Maurizio Cattelan, no less, who came out of retirement to make it: “You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr. Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call … Guggenheim officials said that they anticipated lines for the Cattelan bathroom and added that a guard or attendant might be placed near the door to ensure orderly waiting—and also to make certain that no one tries to abscond with a piece of the toilet. They added that eighteen-karat gold was chosen for its solidity, though they acknowledged the possibility that the sculpture still could be scratched or damaged.” Shakespeare teaches many things to many people. He taught me, for instance, how to kill kings by pouring poison in their ears. But he taught Jillian Keenan something even better: the joys of spanking. She writes of a pivotal moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I could find a huge spectrum of sexualities reflected in its characters. I saw passionate monogamy in Hermia and Lysander, confident polyamory in Oberon and Titania, playful anthropomorphism in Titania and Bottom, and loving bisexuality or homosexuality in Oberon and Puck. But in Helena and Demetrius, I just saw assholes. The problem was that damn scene … My Helena is kinky. In Midsummer, she chooses the love she wants. It doesn’t matter what we think of Demetrius or whether we approve of their dynamic. Helena loves him unflinchingly, and for that she deserves our respect. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about consent, and its message is clear: not only can we consent to sex, we can consent to love. It only demands our honesty.” Last year, we featured “Big, Bent Ears,” a documentary from the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Alex Ross attended this year’s festival—which “might be,” he writes, “the most open-minded music gathering in the country … At Big Ears, the sounds are the stars, free of the tyranny of categories … At Big Ears, composers serve as a center of gravity, a point of reference. Riley, Reich, and Glass have visited in past years, as have Pauline Oliveros and members of Bang on a Can. This year, the composer-in-residence was John Luther Adams; the Knoxville Symphony, under the direction of Steven Schick, kicked off the festival with the ominous surge of Adams’s ‘Become Ocean.’ Such pop-classical agglomerations have happened before, not least in late sixties and seventies New York, when everything merged in a haze of droning tones. But the total map of music has seldom been unrolled on the scale that Big Ears has achieved.” Satanists have long been regarded as creepy occultists—but really they’re just a voting bloc. The Satanic Temple, a religion-ish thing that doubles as a political movement–ish thing, has taken the national stage: “TST chapters across the country have launched campaigns demanding the same religious rights and privileges afforded to Christianity. These have included the creation of satanic coloring books for distribution in schools in Florida and Colorado; bids to erect satanic ‘nativity scenes’ on government property in Florida, Michigan, and Indiana; offering prayers to Satan at a high school football game in Seattle; and demanding that a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol be accompanied by a monument to Baphomet (a goat-headed idol associated with witches’ sabbaths).” David Szalay, who won our Plimpton Prize this year, has a new novel out, All That Man Is—excerpted in the Review. Jude Cook sees in Szalay a new approach to masculinity: “Insufficiency is a favorite David Szalay word. The narrator of his previous novel, Spring, suffered from ‘insufficiency of feeling’; in this new collection of carefully juxtaposed tales, a Scottish ne’er-do-well adrift in Croatia decides his smile is ‘insufficient.’ Szalay’s dissections of masculinity can produce wonders from such banal anxieties. Over 400 pages, he goes to town on nine specimens of the male gender, only surfacing to spit out the bones … Nobody captures the super-sadness of modern Europe as well as Szalay. The atmosphere is stained yellow with a Mittel-European ennui.”
April 19, 2016 Poetry Two Poems By Nathaniel Mackey To celebrate our event tomorrow with Nathaniel Mackey at 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, we’re publishing two poems from his latest collection, Blue Fasa. Read More
April 19, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent We Guarantee It By Sadie Stein From a vintage Sealy mattress ad. “Oh my God,” I said, turning to my husband with tears in my eyes. “What is it?” he asked, understandably alarmed. The train had stopped at a Connecticut station—Rowayton, maybe—and it smelled like sun-warmed Naugahyde and Metro-North and commuter. “What is it?” Blinded by tears—and the fact that I’d removed my glasses to dash them away—I pointed to an advertisement on the platform. Read More
April 19, 2016 Arts & Culture Who Wrote Lolita First? An Interview with Michael Maar By Daniel Kehlmann Nabokov in 1969. Photo: Giuseppe Pino In this conversation—first published last month in the German magazine Cicero—Daniel Kehlmann and the Nabokov scholar Michael Maar discuss one of Maar’s most unlikely discoveries about Lolita. In your book The Two Lolitas, you made an intriguing discovery—it started to obsess me a bit. What’s equally interesting, and kind of outrageous, is that most Nabokov scholars ignored your finding. Maybe they felt they ought to shield Nabokov from charges of plagiarism. So let’s get this out of the way first—is this about plagiarism? Of course not. The word came up in the press when I published my first article about the discovery, but that’s not what this is about at all. Read More
April 19, 2016 On the Shelf Ping-Pong: The Game of Medieval Discovery, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Two female war workers play ping-pong at the YWCA war workers’ club in Yeovil, Somerset, England, 1944. I speak only English, so I write in English, too. And though for years this seemed to me the natural state of affairs, it might just be that I’m economically and politically undiscerning. As Tim Parks writes, “Ever since Jhumpa Lahiri published In Other Words, her small memoir in Italian, people have been asking me, Why don’t you write in Italian, Tim? You’ve been in the country thirty-five years, after all. What keeps you tied to English? Is it just a question of economic convenience? … But beyond any understandable opportunism, there is often a genuine idealism and internationalism in the decision to change language. If you have ‘a message’ and if English is the language that offers maximum diffusion, then it would seem appropriate to use it. In the 1950s, the rebellious and free-spirited Dutch novelist Gerard van de Reve felt that the Dutch language and culture was simply not open enough and not big enough for an artist with important things to say. Van de Reve moved to England in 1953, dropped the exotic ‘van de’ from his surname, and set about writing in his adopted language … Writing in another language is successful when there is a genuine, long-term need to switch languages (often accompanied by serious trauma), and when the new linguistic and social context the author is moving in meshes positively with his or her ambitions and talents.” Sup, speed reader? You think you’re so cool, with your fast retinas and your fancy apps. I think you’re a fraud. And the Gray Lady has my back: “In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people ‘speed read,’ they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over. A deeper problem, however—and the one that also threatens the new speed-reading apps is that the big bottleneck in reading isn’t perception (seeing the words) but language processing (assembling strings of words into meanings). Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable—but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning. The same phenomenon occurs with written text.” Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe wrote, respectively, the first book in English by a woman and the first autobiography in English by a woman. Their manuscripts are being shown together at the Wellcome Center, but only one of them has a discovery story involving Ping-Pong. “Only one known manuscript exists of Margery Kempe’s story: its whereabouts were unknown from around 1520 until the 1930s, when it was discovered in the cupboard of a country house during a game of Ping-Pong. One of the players stepped on the ball and while searching for another, the Book of Margery Kempe manuscript fell out of a cupboard.” Meanwhile, in Culver City: a pair of sisters have opened the first-ever “exclusively romance brick-and-mortar bookstore.” “The Ripped Bodice is a clean, well-lit place, devoted to the many subgenres of romance, such as cowboys, aliens, Vikings, biker dudes, and the paranormal. There’s also a large erotic section, a Spanish-language area, and plenty for young adults, as well as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer communities. In the historical section, books include Jane Austen spin-offs and romantic tales among tartan-clad Scottish highlanders. ‘Love can come in many forms,’ says Bea, twenty-six, with a smile.” In which Emma Cline offers a tour of her writing room, an old garden shed in Brooklyn one block from the Gowanus Canal: “It reminds me of the cruddy little outbuildings I saw a lot of growing up in Northern California—the sloping floor, the amateur carpentry. We still haven’t finished the ceiling and it’s been three years … The best thing about working in such a small room, especially one without Internet access, is the sense of compression, a winnowing down to the essential things. Even one other person makes the space feel crowded. There’s really not very much to do in here but write, or nap on the air mattress in the loft.”