November 13, 2015 On the Shelf Dying in a National Park Is Very Unpleasant, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A postcard made between 1930 and 1945. Flogging! Embezzling! The public humiliation of a churchman named John Winterbottom! These and more await you in an unpublished story by Charlotte Brontë, discovered in the “much-treasured” pages of the family copy of Robert Southey’s The Remains of Henry Kirke White. There’s a new poem, too: “The pieces have been dated to 1833, when Charlotte would have been around seventeen … Historian Juliet Barker, author of the biography The Brontës, said that ‘the book alone is a valuable acquisition because of its rare associations with Mrs Brontë ’ … According to the Brontë Society, the Southey title is one of Maria’s ‘rare surviving possessions,’ after a box containing all her property was shipwrecked off the Devon coast shortly before she married Patrick Brontë in 1812. It also features Patrick’s Latin inscription, reading that it was ‘the book of my dearest wife and it was saved from the waves. So then it will always be preserved.’ ” Today in national parks and the macabre: “For years, I’ve been an avid reader of what I call the Death in … books. It’s not quite an actual series—there are four so far, from three different publishers—but the Death in … books all do the same thing: They chronicle accidents, murders and mishaps in several of America’s most treasured national parks, giving us Death in Yellowstone, Death in Yosemite, Death in the Grand Canyon, and Death in Big Bend. The Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Canyon books purport to chronicle every single death (excluding illness and car accidents) from the mid-nineteenth century onward, sorted into chapters by type: flash floods, bear maulings, murder, falls, poison gas and so on … The Death in … books are morbid documents, and their authors’ defensiveness about that only proves the point. But what’s so wrong with being morbid?” “One thinks, usually, of drizzle being the opposite of thick, and of being lazy and gentle rather than sudden and sweeping. Still, an admirable deployment of the gerund.” That’s Christian Lorentzen, dismantling one of seventeen opening lines from new books. (In this case, the line is from Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies: “A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping.”) Look away, children. Sixty-five years after its publication, the childbirth scene from Barbara Comyns’s Our Spoons Came from Woolworths still has everyone talking—and it resonates with contemporary literature: “Winding up in a public hospital, Sophia [Spoons’s heroine] is prodded, rebuked, and shamed for her body’s involuntary actions. It’s a setting in which women giving birth are seen either as docilely on track, or deviant … [This] brings to mind Maggie Nelson’s query in … The Argonauts, about the process of childbirth: ‘How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?’ … Ferrante, for one, has said that her heroines don’t suffer so much as struggle. Comyns enacts the opposite: arguably, her characters suffer. Sophia exits each chapter of her life and enters a new one clearly exhausted, clearly in pain, and yet we don’t see her thrashing much. Her narration is triumphant proof that she has made it through, but the way out is seeded with resignation.” A note to the bagpipers: listen, let’s not beat around the bush. There are times when ordinary, run-of-the-mill bagpiping will suffice, and there are times when life calls for extreme bagpiping. Those are the times I want to hear about. I’m talking about bagpiping on the beaches of Normandy during D-Day. I’m talking about bagpiping in Antarctica with a penguin beside you. I’m talking about bagpiping on the International fucking Space Station.
November 12, 2015 Events Tonight: Rowan Ricardo Phillips at McNally Jackson By Dan Piepenbring Rowan Ricardo Phillips, award-winnig poet and basketball columnist. New York: tonight at McNally Jackson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips will read his latest basketball column—so new, in fact, that I haven’t even seen it yet. (If you haven’t heard, Rowan is our new, and also first-ever, basketball columnist.) He appears tonight as part of the bookstore’s weekly variety show, with Michael Cunningham, Billy Hough, Alex Mar, Adam Sternbergh, and Michael Robbins there to cover any and all non-basketball-related portions of the evening. The event begins at seven tonight. If you’re not in New York, you can livestream it from McNally Jackson’s Web site.
November 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A New Secret By Sadie Stein John Singer Sargent, The Birthday Party, 1887. “It’s weird,” my brother, Charlie, said. “Lately a lot of my friends have been talking about learning things about their parents.” “You mean, secrets?” said my mother. It was her birthday; we were having lunch. Read More
November 12, 2015 Arts & Culture Kilroy Is Still Here By Scott Beauchamp In wartime, the walls of the latrine provide a rare opportunity for self-expression. Photo: Lee Cannon “It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech,” as a patriotic poem by Charles Province has it. That presumption is a point of pride among service members, who defend civilian rights and privileges they’re often not afforded themselves. You don’t have the right to foment a strike in the military. You don’t have the right to a trial with a jury of your peers. You can’t sue the military. You don’t have the right to peacefully assemble. There is no such thing as freedom of speech. But self-expression is like hydraulics: plugging one hole only builds more pressure somewhere else. In my own experience as an infantryman in Iraq, the only place where the stress of combat found unfettered freedom of expression was on the walls of the latrine. You begin to notice it as soon as you hit the staging area in Kuwait. At places like Camp Buehring, a crossroads where battalions came and went on their way to different operating areas in Iraq, American troops are sheltered under the anonymity of massive logistical bureaucracies. A port-a-potty next to a chow hall could be used by any number of soldiers, sailors, airmen, or marines passing through. Unlike a permanent duty station, where bathrooms are assigned to specific companies and any defacement is easily traceable, there simply wasn’t any way to catch someone scrawling on the walls of a well-trafficked latrine. The situation wasn’t very different once one finally got to Iraq, where the bases were just as large and sprawling, and combat outposts were constructed in the half-destroyed hovels of what had been private residences. In the former, the anonymity was conducive to getting away with latrine graffiti; in the latter, no one cared if you wrote on some walls. Read More
November 12, 2015 On the Shelf A Brief History of Shelving, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Titles on the spines: what a concept! A shelf in the Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek. Photo: Erik Kwakkel In 1650, William Pynchon—Thomas’s earliest colonial ancestor—published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a small quarto volume about, you know, God and stuff, which caused a hell-storm of controversy in Puritan New England: “To leading officials in the government of Massachusetts Bay, however, this was an insidious text, an exercise in heresy—one the Puritan clergy believed capable of throwing their young and vulnerable colony into irreversible chaos. Pynchon, a prominent layman with a devoted constituency, was charismatic enough to inspire a movement similar to the Antinomian debacle that had nearly brought the colony to its knees in the previous decade … In addition to the burning of Pynchon’s book, the General Court also commissioned a theologian named John Norton to write an official rebuttal … The General Court accepted [Pynchon’s] contrition, though the magistrates did demand he appear before them again the following October. They set bail at £100. This time, Pynchon absconded.” Imagine what it must’ve felt like to be the scribe who invented page numbers. Or title labels. Or spine titles. A physical book is an efficient device, but to look at the history of bookbinding is to see how momentous and hard-won these modest advances were, as Erik Kwakkel writes: “The early history of displaying a book’s title and author on the outside is long and winding: first the information was found on the front or back, then on the fore-edge, and finally on the spine. This order is no coincidence, because it roughly reflects another development, namely how books were stored: first flat (Early and Central Middle Ages), then upright with the fore-edge facing the reader (Later Middle Ages), and finally with the spine facing outward (Early Modern period). Judging from surviving book bindings, the history of the dust jacket actually starts surprisingly late. After all, the earliest traceable specimens date from the fourteenth century.” Punk, which began as street fashion, has completed the final step in its transformation from ethos to consumerist movement: now it’s just street fashion again, and we’re left to wonder if there was ever really anything to it. “Forty years after Television’s legendary residency at CBGB, the world is awash in punk. In the last twenty months, former Village Voice rock critic and punk champion Robert Christgau wrote a memoir about his downtown New York youth, Kim Gordon published her memoirs, Viv Albertine published hers, Richard Hell released the paperback edition of his, Patti Smith released the follow-up to her National Book Award–winning memoir, and HarperCollins signed Lenny Kaye, Smith’s guitarist, to write a memoir of his own. Ramones fans can look forward to a forthcoming Martin Scorsese–helmed biopic and a documentary promising new footage of the seminal band, whose last founding member perished in 2014 … As punk pushes into its fourth decade, its rules, aesthetic, and parameters are still murky at best. Does punk retain any meaning at all?” On the connection between writing and running: “Writers, like runners, often like the idea of their pursuit more so than the difficult work. The appeal of a running regimen is how the miles not only condition the body, but free up a space for the creative mind … Since I’ve returned to distance running, I’ve changed the way I think about writing. Writing exists in that odd mental space between imagination and intellect, between the organic and the planned. Runners must learn to accept the same paradoxes, to realize that each individual run has its own narrative, with twists and turns and strains.” The Paris Review’s intern Joshua Maserow on J. M. Coetzee: “Coetzee doesn’t hate truth. In fact, he yearns for it (transcendental, objective truth). The truth just doesn’t seem all that comforting or that accessible. We must search for our truths but won’t find them. He wears two hats: that of the hopeful Platonist (‘our engagements are with a constantly changing interplay between shadows (fictions) and the real’) but also that of the weary pragmatist (‘the more a person has been offered sympathetic fictions of herself, the more easily she will be able to live within the fiction(s) she holds herself’).”
November 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Elle Nous Juge By Sadie Stein From Some Are More Human Than Others. Early in 2016, New Directions will publish All the Poems, the complete works of Stevie Smith. Smith’s poetry—which Diane Mehta called “playful” and “carnivalesque” even as she acknowledged the elliptical voice’s “uncertain likeability”—have a well-deserved cult following. This makes sense. Her work has a whimsical flintiness, a combination she somehow pulls off; her performances were cannily theatrical such that people still talk about them today; and her books, as physical objects, are equally intriguing. Consider the literal Novel on Yellow Paper, or the unapologetically bizarre Cats in Colour, one of the best acts of literary defiance ever written or published. Read More