January 8, 2016 Books The Countries We Think We See By Tara Isabella Burton For Lesley Blanch, travel writing offered a chance to explore her preconceptions about a place as much as the place itself. Every travel writer is a character in her own narrative, no less a part of the story than the “foreigners” that story depicts. In my own travels, I’ve found that women in countries that discourage mixed-gender interactions often speak to me more openly about culturally illuminating subjects—sex, love, motherhood—than they might to a male writer. My femaleness, it seemed, wasn’t simply a question of perspective; it was a question of action. When I raised this subject in a lecture last year, someone in the audience broke in with a question. Why did I feel the need to “insert” myself into my narratives at all? She brought up the travel writer Colin Thubron, whom she cited as the paradigmatic example of the quiet, objective observer. “He doesn’t insert himself into his writing at all!” she exclaimed. Read More
January 8, 2016 On the Shelf A Fun Time at the Frost Fair, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Mehetabel Lovell, a 1740 frost-fair souvenir. Image via Slate Over the course of the “Little Ice Age” that befell Europe some centuries back, the River Thames froze twenty-three times—such an unlikely occurrence that people had no choice but to party on the ice. These “frost fairs” often lasted for days; people set up tents and printers commemorated the occasion by selling letterpressed sheets of souvenir paper. “The men who dragged their presses onto the ice and produced these keepsakes were a competitive lot, each trying to offer the most enticing product … Promiscuity and sexual license were constitutive elements of the frost fair … Some of the tents set up on the ice were brothels.” Five booksellers and publishers have gone missing in Hong Kong, and their disappearance may be linked to a contentious manuscript about China’s president. “The book’s title was being debated by the publisher before the abductions … The two choices were: The Lovers of Xi Jinping or Xi Jinping and His Six Women … It is unclear whether the book alleges Xi had an extramarital affair. As part of his crackdown on corruption since he took office in 2012, Xi has led an anti-corruption campaign that made adultery grounds for banishment from the Communist Party.” Cognitive behavioral therapy long ago overtook psychoanalysis as the dominant form of therapy—and it had results to back up this dominance. In more recent studies, though, the talking cure has proven increasingly effective. Is it time to bring Freud back into the fold? “In contrast to the meandering conversations of psychoanalysis, a typical CBT exercise might involve filling out a flowchart to identify the self-critical ‘automatic thoughts’ that occur whenever you face a setback … Yet rumblings of dissent from the vanquished psychoanalytic old guard have never quite gone away. At their core is a fundamental disagreement about human nature—about why we suffer, and how, if ever, we can hope to find peace of mind … CBT doesn’t exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs, and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change them. Psychoanalysts contend that things are much more complicated. For one thing, psychological pain needs first not to be eliminated, but understood. From this perspective, depression is less like a tumor and more like a stabbing pain in your abdomen: it’s telling you something, and you need to find out what.” Many of us enjoy a good walk. I myself embarked on a walk this very morning, and plan to walk more throughout the day. But I’ll probably never walk as much, or as far, as Werner Herzog, whose book Of Walking in Ice tells of his journey on foot from Munich to Paris in 1974. “‘Walking on foot brings you down to the very stark, naked core of existence,’ Herzog told a Film Comment interviewer in 1979, a year after Of Walking in Ice was first published in Germany. ‘We travel too much in airplanes and cars. It’s an existential quality that we are losing. It’s almost like a credo of religion that we should walk.’ Over the course of many years, and in countless different interviews, Herzog has spoken of his filmmaking—and of walking—in vaguely spiritual, even divine terms (‘It’s like a grace, like a gift of God that has fallen into my lap’).” In which Ben Lerner pays a visit to the new Whitney’s conservation department: “For many modern and contemporary artists, ephemerality is part of the point. Dieter Roth, to take just one example, didn’t cover his canvases with yogurt for the sake of durability; they were built to biodegrade. Picasso and Braque told friends that they would rather let their canvases deteriorate than have them varnished … In the absence of explicit and complete instructions—that is, most of the time—conservation is fundamentally an interpretive act … The work of a conservator can re-sacralize the original art object … Conservation can help produce—not just protect—the aura of the original.”
January 7, 2016 On Games Ready Player None By Michael Thomsen Talking to Jonathan Blow about his new game, The Witness. From The Witness. “Don’t print this,” Jonathan Blow tells me. I’ve just asked him how his game The Witness is going to end, having spent an hour playing it alone at the Bryant Park Hotel—in a suite I’d discovered was actually Blow’s personal room when I got a glass of water. He’d gone to the lobby so I wouldn’t feel like I was being watched as I played. I felt immediately conscious of being in someone else’s space as I stepped through the bedroom to reach the bathroom sink. The bed was still unmade; a small bag sat agape on a chair beside a pile of clothes in the corner. Blow’s games excel at making one conscious of these things: of being in someone else’s territory, at once intimate and opaque. Like unknowingly stepping into someone’s bedroom, it’s natural, when you play his games, to want to make sure you can find your way back out again, even as you think about going further in. Blow is the designer of two commercial games—2008’s Braid and now The Witness, due out later this month—and he’s as much a point of fascination as his creations. A 2012 profile in The Atlantic by Taylor Clark called him “the most dangerous gamer.” Though Braid added, by his own admission, “a lot of zeroes” to his bank account, he lives in a largely unfurnished apartment in Oakland, displaying what Clark described as “a total indifference toward the material fruits of wealth.” His longtime friend and programmer, Chris Hecker, told Clark, “You have to approach Jon on Jon’s terms. It’s not ‘Let’s go out and have fun.’ It’s more like ‘Let’s discuss this topic,’ or ‘Let’s work on our games.’ You don’t ask Jon to hang out, because he’ll just say ‘Why?’ ” Read More
January 7, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Existence Precedes Essence By Sadie Stein Uh … I lost an idea last night. It was late, and I was tired, and I had some kind of insight that seemed interesting—but, with hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy, I told myself I’d remember in the morning. Of course, I didn’t. All I remembered was the lightbulb moment, which, with each passing hour, became more dazzling, more revelatory, more important in my memory. Within a few hours of my forgetting it, this had become the best idea I’d ever had. Read More
January 7, 2016 Look Russian Book Jackets from the 1930s By Dan Piepenbring E. Kuznetsov, Circus, 1931. These Russian book jackets from the thirties are among the many riches on offer in the New York Public Library’s newly enhanced digital collections. Below are some favorites; you can see the whole collection here. Read More
January 7, 2016 On the Shelf Empty Your Own Chamber Pot, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Tolstoy’s family circle at Yasnaya Polyana, ca. 1905. The Swedish Academy keeps its lists of potential Nobel winners confidential for fifty years—meaning that, at last, we can see who coulda been a contender for the 1965 prize in literature. That year it went to the Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov, of And Quiet Flows the Don. Among the writers in contention, though, were Nabokov and Borges, neither of whom would ever make the cut. According to his maid, Borges was “tortured” by the annual spectacle surrounding the prize: “On the day of the announcement journalists would queue outside his door. This would happen year after year. The news each time that he had not won would make him very sad.” In 1894, communes dedicated to the teachings of Tolstoy began to spring up in England; two of them still exist today, vowing to keep the flames of pacifism, anarchism, and clean Christian living. Kelsey Osgood paid one a visit: “Another community resident, Jo, wearing knee-high Wellingtons and a flashlight on her head, showed me the outhouses and taught me how to sprinkle wood shavings into the bucket to compost the bodily waste. (The shavings were from pine trees that they grow on their land and sell at Christmas.) I thought of how Tolstoy asked a young Desmond MacCarthy, the Eton and Cambridge-educated literary critic and journalist, to empty his own chamber pot while visiting Tolstoy’s grand house at Yasnaya Polyana, because the Count thought it degrading to ask the servants to do it. A friendly reminder: mice are people, too, often somewhat literally. Maud Newton has humanized mice on the mind: “According to New Scientist, the researchers put human brain cells into mice by injecting ‘immature glial cells’ from human fetuses into baby mice, where they ‘developed into astrocytes, a star-shaped type of glial cell,’ and became invasive … It’s impossible to know how many kinds of humanized rodents exist, in part because, if you’re a researcher, you can have the mice tailor-humanized just for you. One company claims to provide at least seventy-five hundred strains … So far, whatever discussion exists in the scientific community about how humanized mice themselves might be affected by, for example, having human brain cells, seems to focus on the ways we’ve succeeded in making the mice more like us.” The New York Public Library’s special collections department has released some 180,000 images into the public domain. You want postcards? They got postcards. You want maps? They got maps. You want rare images of “Town Ball” and “Old Cat,” two stick-and-ball games that were precursors to baseball? You got rare images of “Town Ball” and “Old Cat,” two stick-and-ball games that were precursors to baseball. “It’s not just a data dump,” said Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America. “It’s a next step that I would like to see more institutions take.” If you’ve ever arrived in New York through the Lincoln Tunnel, you’ve probably espied the big red sign for the New Yorker, a hotel whose iconic name has nothing to do with the magazine. This was “the hotel of the traveling salesmen, pilots and aircrew on short layovers, tourists and GIs being shipped to the European Front … If the Waldorf-Astoria were a well-dressed woman in an elegantly feathered hat, the New Yorker would be a salesman in a crumpled suit, drinking a whiskey and soda.” But what goes on there? What went on there? Early photos tell of a glut of Art Deco glamour—and a secret tunnel leading to Penn Station.