April 13, 2016 On the Shelf Zines, Zines, Zines, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Dear Motorist, one of the zines newly acquired by the University of Kansas. Every April for years, intrepid editors have searched in vain for a way to fuse National Poetry Month to Mathematics Awareness Month, killing two birds with one stone. It turns out a pair of Italian mathematicians solved the problem centuries ago: “Niccolò Tartaglia (ca. 1500–1557) had discovered a way to solve certain kinds of cubic equations. Another mathematician, Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), wanted to learn the formula and promised not to publish it. Tartaglia shared the formula with Cardano as a poem, and Cardano ended up publishing it.” Even with its terza-rima rhyme scheme, though, the poem is pretty bad, I’m sorry to report. It begins: “When the cube with the cose beside it / Equates itself to some other whole number, / Find two others, of which it is the difference. // Hereafter you will consider this customarily / That their product always will be equal / To the third of the cube of the cose net.” Legend tells of a radical library in Lawrence, Kansas—a library teeming with zines, a countercultural cornucopia, its shelves overflowing with DIY ephemera. And this library … is totally out of business. But the University of Kansas has acquired its holdings and plans to digitize all of them. “You can already explore over 830 digitized examples from the Solidarity archives in the Internet Archive … There are hand-illustrated guides to fertility awareness, freedom for Palestine publications, essays against prisons, Firefly fanzines, and more curious titles like ‘Don’t Leave Me: How to Make Better Coffee at Home and Spend More Time With Your Cat(s).’ ” Today in butterfly genitalia and literary luminaries: a new book examines Nabokov’s work as a lepidopterist, especially his “intensely magnified” drawings of butterflies’ reproductive organs. The book argues that Nabokov’s drawings provide a new lens through which to view his fiction—but maybe they’re just butterfly drawings. Laura Marsh writes, “The more we find out about Nabokov’s work as a lepidopterist, the more difficult it is to grasp what he saw in butterflies, and how much his study really found its way into the worlds of his books … As a lepidopterist, he was interested in stories that spanned vast, geological time periods, informed by fine-grained empirical observations. But in his novels and stories, butterflies flit in and out of the narrative, either to adorn a moment of impossible desire or as flickering omens of doom—as in the case of the red admiral that lands on John Shade’s arm before he is assassinated in Pale Fire. They are creatures of the ever-disappearing present, hardly existing for any concrete purpose at all; their wings bear the heavy load of subjectivity.” Writers, screenwriters, narrative artists of all stripes: if you’re still laying the foundation for your next project, I suggest throwing a kidnapping into the mix. People love kidnappings, especially when they involve young women. Add a seamy, irrepressibly erotic abduction to your plot and success will be yours for the taking. As Anna Leszkiewicz notes, “British and American pop culture has been gripped by the kidnap narrative. Young women stare desperately out of skylights or at heavy metal doors, before wrenching themselves through. Their kidnapper has methodically planned their captivity for years, making escape particularly difficult. They often exploit the mental weaknesses in their abusers in order to do so. They struggle to find a psychological liberty that matches their newfound physical freedom, and to detach themselves from the events of their captivity … The victim is always a young woman, usually adolescent either at the time of her capture, or during her captivity. She looks a specific way, too: a pretty brunette with big, round eyes; skinny when first captured, gaunt as her captivity develops; and despite the huge number of missing black girls and women, she’s white. She has all the physical attributes Hollywood and our wider society problematically conflate with innocence, purity and victimhood—and enthusiastically sexualize.” Jonathan Shaw owns the largest collection of vintage tattoo flashes in the world. Lucky for us, he’s put them in a book called, yes, Vintage Tattoo Flash. Behold the mess of cowboys, sailors, smoking skulls, neon dice, good-luck charms, babes, and babies that have made their way onto American bodies from Long Beach to the Bowery.
April 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fifteen By Sadie Stein From the cover of a seventies edition of Fifteen. Beverly Cleary has turned one hundred. And while there’s no shortage of well-deserved and lovely tributes out there, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite of her books: Fifteen, a YA novel published in 1956. Like all of Cleary’s work, it combines gentle observational humor with a genuine understanding of young people. And like the rest of her oeuvre, it holds up, even decades down the line. Read More
April 12, 2016 Books Bodies Moving Through Space By Edward Gauvin How Blutch’s graphic novel Peplum shatters the Satyricon. In an interview after Peplum’s first publication in book form, Blutch tells of a reader who asked him why he was such a difficult author. “But I don’t feel like I’m difficult at all!” he exclaimed. “I don’t understand why I get asked that. What I do is fairly simple, and not at all intellectual. In my stories, I try to favor action.” And in action, Blutch’s book abounds: stabbing, stoning, amputation, eye-gouging, sex, seafaring, Attic dance, pirate attacks. Yet these sequences are as artificial as they are visceral, feral, and formal at once. Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic—one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty. Read More
April 12, 2016 Look From Peplum By Blutch Blutch’s Peplum, a graphic novel, is out this month from New York Review Comics. A phantasmagoric take on the Satyricon, it was originally serialized in the French magazine À suivre in 1996; this is its first appearance in English. In his new introduction, Blutch’s translator, Edward Gauvin, writes, “Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic—one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty.” Read More
April 12, 2016 On the Shelf Lego Karl Ove, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via Instagram (@legokarlove). Today in things you didn’t know you wanted: scenes from Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, reconstructed with Legos. Throw in some gravlax on an IKEA plate and you’d have a veritable orgy of Scandinavian exports. Ever wondered what a corporate bookstore in the UK looks like? Well, friend, you needn’t book a flight to London just to check out a Waterstones. Alice Spawls went to one recently, and it wasn’t pretty: “Gifts now seem to take up as much space as books, at least on the tables, where the prettiest paperbacks are distributed among Orla Kiely pots and enamel cups … Something is working, because digital sales are down and those of paper and glue books are up, but the ephemera isn’t only disguising the books, it’s disguising the rise of the non-book book … Books can function as gift objects, lifestyle signifiers, thematic attributes; they can be non-book products too, word-based diversions, color-me distractions, bucket lists, how-tos, extensions of celebrity brands. Putting something between two covers doesn’t make it a book, and putting them on shelves doesn’t make a bookshop.” Poor Kafka. Even beer, which many German men have turned to in times of need, proved fraught for him: “His most joyous—and meaningful—memories of beer were of the drinking sessions he shared with his father. But these memories were also inextricably allied with the twin sites of his childhood humiliation … [His father] Hermann was a blustering bully. But the deeper problem was that father and son had such different personalities, they were like slapstick antagonists. Hermann the confident and coarse shopkeeper vs. the timid Franz, who worked in insurance (Hermann derided it as a Brotberuf, or ‘bread job’), wrote weird stories in his room, became a vegetarian, and showed no interest whatsoever in the family dry-goods store … The only time his father had a word of praise for him, wrote Kafka, was when ‘I was able to eat heartily or even drink beer with my meals’ … Beer made everything better.” Christina Crosby, a professor at Wesleyan, suffered a devastating bike accident that left her paralyzed. Her memoir A Body, Undone eschews the clichés of disability narratives; instead, as Michael Weinstein writes, Crosby lavishes “brutal detail on the pain of her post-accident body—of finding her sphere of movement and sensation contracted down to almost nothing—and on the slow, excruciating process of navigating her quadriplegic body’s new limits. She describes waking to find her frame cobbled together and held in place by a man-made exoskeleton: ‘My mouth was full of metal, arch bars that ran from side to side to keep the roof of my mouth from caving in—somehow the bits of bone that had been my chin were pinned together, as were other bones in my face—and I wore a very high, tight, and rigid cervical collar around my neck. I could not turn my body or sit up. I could not move my legs or feet. I could not lift my arms or use my hands, which were uselessly curled up into loose fists by atrophying muscles and tightening ligaments.’ An entire chapter is devoted to describing Crosby’s bowel program, while half of another chapter discusses her intestinal gas.” Jennifer Moxley on poetry, prizes, and poverty: “The poet needs money to live, but the poem needs only a reader. Which is more difficult to secure? In the history of the West, in some perverse way, a poet’s integrity has long been bound up with periodic privation, in love, in luck, in money. Publicare, the Latin root of the English ‘to publish,’ means also ‘to prostitute,’ to make public and ask money for what should remain private, whether your thoughts or your body. Perhaps the whiff of shame in making money from poetry comes from this etymological association, and drives poets to claim penury as their excuse.”
April 11, 2016 Arts & Culture The Rest Is Silence By Henry Giardina Chaplin’s trip abroad. From the cover of My Trip Abroad. In the fall of 1921, journalists were clamoring to know if Charlie Chaplin intended to play Hamlet. They asked him in Chicago at the Blackstone Hotel. They cornered him at the Ritz. His response each time was coy and evasive: “Why, I don’t know.” Of all the unlikely questions they tended to ask him at this point in his career—“Are you a Bolshevik?” “What do you do with your old mustaches?”—the Hamlet question seems most out of place. Why would an actor known for his comedy and silence take on a famously verbose and tragic role? Hamlet, with his hemming and hawing, didn’t seem a natural fit for an actor in Chaplin’s position. But then, no actor had ever been in Chaplin’s position before. Read More