February 29, 2016 On the Shelf The Year in Odd Book Titles, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Another year, another volume of My Struggle, another news cycle rich in Knausgaard. Here he reflects on the shame of writing about himself: “Building a fiction room requires either great strength or great ignorance … To me all writing is blind and intuitive, either it works or it doesn’t, and the explanation as to how a novel turns out the way it does is always a rationalization after the event. What works always wins over in the end, seemingly of its own accord. So when, after ten years of trying, I sat down one day and wrote a few pages about something that happened to me, something I felt so ashamed about I had never mentioned it to a living soul, and did so using my own name, I had no idea why I went there, nor did I to begin with connect it in any way to the novel I wanted to write, it was just something I did.” Voting is open for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. This is direct democracy in action, people. Will it be Reading from Behind: A Cultural History of the Anus? Or perhaps Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed Birdwatchers? Or the dark horse, Paper Folding with Children? Get out there to the polls and make a difference. Today in role models: Remember when Mark Zuckerberg started his “book club” and it seemed as if the very act of reading was doomed to serve as part of the Silicon Valley lifestyle-guru agenda? Well. It was. And it gets even worse, Matt Haber reports: “Mr. Zuckerberg’s efforts have made him the object of fascination and emulation among a subset of millennials in and around the tech industry … ‘I run three experiments each year inspired by Zuckerberg,’ said Dave Fontenot, 22, a San Francisco resident who used to be an agent for engineers, but who said he is currently ‘focusing on myself.’ This year, Mr. Fontenot aims to improve his posture, meditate and spend more time alone. He also trained himself to send thank-you notes, either handwritten or as voice recordings via text, inspired by Mr. Zuckerberg. ‘For a period of time, I wasn’t thanking people at all, but then, for one of the most powerful person in the world to do it, I was like, Wow,’ Mr. Fontenot said.” Today in Pearl Jam: Eddie Vedder’s unlikeliest contribution to the culture has been an enduring image of the archetypal school shooter: Remember the music video for “Jeremy,” in which a teenager raises a gun at the front of a classroom? The song was about teen suicide, but because MTV censored the original video, it’s become part of “the cultural script of school shooters.” Daniel Wenger writes: “I asked the director, Mark Pellington, who went on to direct many other videos and films, about this misreading of his work. He said that people were responding to a ‘Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox,’ as the story was translated from life to song to screen … Eddie Vedder identified ‘Jeremy’ as part of a lineage of ‘teenage death songs.’ The music biographer Graeme Thomson has written that the genre marks ‘the first time in modern musical culture youth equates with introspection and unhappiness.’ One of the early anthems was ‘Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots,’ recorded by the Cheers, in 1955.” And today in reminders that George Plimpton was a helluva guy—“George Plimpton—he didn’t disappoint me, aye? I was really taken by him, Timmy. He was sort of an exaggeration of himself. With his big hair, his suit, his accent. But what I will remember about this day is that he was so kindly. And he loved you. He stopped doing what he was doing to pay homage and respect to you and I liked that because I love you, too. Me, I would always pay homage and respect to you. But who am I? I’m just Sunny. The fact that he did it—this is George Plimpton. I know he’s not better than I, not worse than I, but he wasn’t full of himself, aye?”
February 26, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: China, Children, Church By The Paris Review Gary Panter. Printed Matter, one of the best art bookstores on earth, recently moved into spacious new digs, which means their legion of artists’ books, posters, zines, and whatnot has room to breathe. So, too, do their exhibitions—great news for the current show, “The Rozz Tox Effect,” an astonishing survey of publications produced by Gary Panter over the past forty-four years. On view (and for sale) are issues of Slash and Raw and Wet, copies of Jimbo books, Pee-Dog zines, a Screamers print, the stunning comic Alamo Courts from 1977, and much more. What makes this exhibition deeply weird is the ridiculous amount of Pee-Wee Herman ephemera Panter has culled from his own collection: lunch boxes, children’s clothes, coloring books, Colorforms, suspenders, dolls, and placemats—all manner of commercial objects he helped create as an extension of his role as set designer for the show. Panter’s output is voluminous and kaleidoscopic, and yet I’m constantly reminded how it’s all of a piece, sprung from the mind of one man. —Nicole Rudick Read More
February 26, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Bhaer in Film, Part 5 By Sadie Stein This week, Sadie is taking an in-depth look at Professor Bhaer, the most divisive character in Little Women. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Today: Professor Bhaer in film and TV adaptations of Little Women. 1933: There aren’t many Bhaer-centric clips available online for this Katharine Hepburn version; its fans are clearly and firmly in the #TeamLaurie camp. At the two-minute mark in the trailer, though, you can see the professor in action. And what action it is! Bhaer, “blundering in,” is played in this version by the Hungarian actor Paul Lucas. He is kind of sleazy and unctuous and dandified in a way that makes any Bhaer partisan—or indeed, any lover of fairness—tremble with indignation. Even so, he gets points for using actual dialogue from the book, and whoever casted him should be lauded for drawing, kind of, from Bhaer’s actual region of the world. Rating: 🐻 One Bhaer Read More
February 26, 2016 Arts & Culture The Native Henry James By Philip Horne February 28 marks the hundredth anniversary of James’s death. Photo: Alice Boughton, 1916. Henry James died in London, at the age of seventy-two, on February 28, 1916, in the midst of World War I. His funeral was held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3, with a mostly British congregation of mourners—though his sister-in-law Alice, widow of his brother, the philosopher William, was in attendance, having crossed the war-torn ocean when she heard of his illness. The U.S. had not yet entered the war—the issue was controversial, and indeed, James and his old antagonist Theodore Roosevelt, who had long denounced him as un-American, had found common cause in their indignation at their country’s prolonged neutrality. This caused particular tension on James’s death, because the novelist had taken British nationality in July 1915, an implicit protest against America’s refusal to join the conflict. As he had written to his fellow American-in-London John Singer Sargent just after the event, “It would really have been so easy for the U. S. to have ‘kept’ (if they had cared to!) yours all faithfully, Henry James.” He had finally grown tired of waiting for America to end its neutrality, and felt he needed, by this gesture, to end his own detachment from the conflict. The memorial in Chelsea Old Church tactfully describes him as “a resident of this parish who renounced a cherished citizenship to give his allegiance to England in the first year of the Great War”—the “cherished” insisting from the grave that James had been a good American. Read More
February 26, 2016 On the Shelf NPR Mug Optional, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Lit mag to the stars. That image above comes from the trailer for Maggie’s Plan, which features Ethan Hawke reading our Winter 2014 issue (if I had to guess, he’s somewhere deep in the Michael Haneke interview) as Greta Gerwig looks on with envy. Is the rest of the film this scintillating? One can only hope. Since it closed in 1957, Black Mountain College has achieved a level of renown verging on mythic—it’s now the subject of an exhibition in Boston, the fourth show devoted to it in recent years. Barry Schwabsky asks: “Why the recurring preoccupation with a short-lived, unaccredited school at the back of beyond, which never had enough students to pay its way? It could be the school’s believe-it-or-not story and how, the more you learn about it, the more unlikely it seems … The idealism, the creative élan, the infectious sense of possibility that the exhibitions highlight—these were all part of Black Mountain, and the school’s implicit promise was fulfilled surprisingly often. But there were illusions, too … the community’s internal politics turned out to be nearly impossible to negotiate with grace. An educational philosophy based on ‘the whole person’ gave no indication of how to square the conflicting goals of community and individuality.” In 1960, James Baldwin gave a speech called “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel.” “I want to follow a group of lives,” he said, “almost from the time they open their eyes on the world until some point of resolution, say, marriage, or childbirth, or death.” Edwidge Danticat unpacks those remarks: “In other talks and essays, he laid out some ideas about what made an unsuccessful novel, citing problems like too neat a frame, sentimentality, and facile lessons and solutions. The novel he was referring to in the speech, though, he claimed, was both ‘unwritten and probably unwritable.’ Neither was it meant to be a ‘long, warm, toasty’ novel. ‘This hypothetical book is aiming at something more implacable than that … The social realities with which these people, the people I remember, whether they knew it or not, were really contending can’t be left out of the novel without falsifying their experience.’ ” Before the black-and-white photograph came to prominence, there was the lowly cyanotype, a photographic process known for its blue tint and its speedy, easy production. A new exhibition gives the form its due, as the curator Nancy Burns says: “The fact that they were blue was also just too weird for people—that the idea of what a photograph was supposed to look like was black and white … but blue was just too bizarre … Last but not least, is that they were used for making blueprints—that you could make cyanotypes as not just a photograph, but you can use it to transfer a drawing or text. And because it has an association with something so pedestrian and being used as a photocopier, it didn’t quite make it into the earliest histories of photography because people weren’t entirely convinced that they were photographs.” Creative people like to say they hate small talk, with its eye-rolling tendencies toward banality and formality. But no matter what Heidegger and other opponents of “idle talk” suggest, their hatred for it is probably to blame on the fact that they’re bad at it: “We are living in a low moment for the art of minimal social interactions … Small talk has always been a tool to avoid the minefield of unintended boorishness … Even those who found small talk uninspiring once recognized its utility, like the British statesman Lord Chesterfield, who’s responsible for the first-known use of the phrase … It requires playing within the lines. Using sports, weather, family, and other unremarkable raw material, the skilled conversationalist spins it into gold—or at least cotton candy.”
February 25, 2016 Bulletin Now Online: Our Interviews with Eileen Myles and Jane Smiley By Dan Piepenbring In the halcyon days of September 2015, when the weather was mild and Trump’s candidacy was moderately less terrifying, we published interviews with Eileen Myles and Jane Smiley. Our print subscribers have long since read, digested, and discussed them, and would no doubt greet any mention of them with “That is so two quarters ago”—but now, five long months later, the interviews are freely available to everyone. Read More