November 10, 2015 On the Shelf Kiss the Leaves, Don’t Be Naughty, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the (fairly creepy) Brazilian cover of My Sweet Orange Tree. Everyone loves a good international children’s-lit imbroglio, all the more so when K-pop stars enter the fray. Please note, then, that Korean pop legend IU stands accused of sexualizing the story of My Sweet Orange Tree, a Brazilian novel more than forty years old, which she recently adapted for her song “Zeze.” The book concerns a kid—yes, it’s Zeze—who gets into a lot of innocent trouble and faces corporal punishment as a consequence. But IU’s lyrics tell a different tale: “Zeze, come on up the tree quick and kiss the leaves, don’t be naughty and don’t hurt the tree, come up the tree and get the youngest leaf … you are innocent but shrewd, transparent but dirty and there is no way of knowing what’s living inside.” Christopher Logue was a fine poet, but I’ll always wonder what might’ve been if he’d stayed the course as an actor: “His considerable work in theatre and film as actor, playwright and screenwriter nourished the poetry, much of which was dramatic in nature … Rather pleased with his performance as Cardinal Richelieu in Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, Logue boasted to the director Lindsay Anderson that he had a future as ‘the only English poet / film star.’ To which Anderson responded, sighing: ‘You will never be a star. You might become a featured player specializing in intellectual villains, artistic misfits, et cetera.’ ” (He did, it must be said, score the role of “Spaghetti-eating fanatic” in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky, from 1977.) The great irony of psychoanalysts is that many of them, despite the depth of their insights into filial relations, were shitty parents. Reading their family memoirs is an illuminating experience, especially in the case of Franz Alexander, whose granddaughter Illonka has written a book about him: “Her grandfather declined to house her, as if, she said, he was punishing her for her mother’s choices. She wound up in a Catholic residence for girls in downtown Los Angeles. She didn’t know that she had family in San Diego, Cleveland, New York, Chicago, Madison, and Dallas. No one told her. When Franz Alexander died, in 1964, two years later, Ilonka was adrift. Although she had two half-sisters, she thought of herself as an only child … The biggest lie: Franz told everyone that he didn’t know where Ilonka’s mother’s was. He was embarrassed, Ilonka said, analyzing him.” Today in publishing-industry nostalgia: Remember when magazines were rolling in the dough, and when their words-to-pictures ratio was nearly one-to-one? I don’t, either. But Robert Hughes does—he was Time’s art critic for thirty-one years, and it was, he says, good: “Being the art critic of Time in the seventies was like enjoying a perpetual research grant from the most benign of foundations. I could go more or less anywhere I wanted, look at anything I wished to, and be paid generously for doing it … If there was a show in Rome or Florence, Paris or Brussels, Berlin or London, or indeed practically anywhere in Europe, a show that could be argued to hold some interest for an intelligent reader and from which two, four, or six pages of splashy color could be extracted, off I would go … When I heard some power hog from the movie industry bombing on about the truffes sous la cendre he had recently demolished at Le Park 45 during the Cannes Film Festival, I would not need to wonder what they tasted like.” And today in nostalgia, full stop: Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill is twenty years old, and she’s here to remind you: “I remember telling them, ‘Well, if you wanted a record that sounded like Dan Steely, then maybe you should have signed someone in their thirties, rather than me, a nineteen-year-old.’ This was met with silence, in typical form. My friend quickly leaned over and said, ‘It’s “Steely Dan,” Alanis.’ Oh, jeez. I said, ‘Well, regardless, this record represents me, and anything other than this is not a record I am interested in being a part of.’”
November 9, 2015 Events Tuesday: Ben Lerner and Thomas Demand at MoMA Store By Dan Piepenbring Our Spring issue featured “Sample Trees,” a portfolio by Thomas Demand and Ben Lerner. Demand constructed and photographed paper flowers based on a detail from a news photo of Katherine Russell, the widow of the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev; Lerner wrote a series of poems to accompany the photos. “Sample Trees” is part of a larger cycle, Blossom, available now from Mack Books in a lavish Japanese-bound hardcover. Tomorrow, November 10, the pair will be at the MoMA Design and Book Store (11 West Fifty-third Street) to celebrate and sign copies of the book. The signing begins at seven P.M. We hope to see you there.
November 9, 2015 From the Archive The Dog Wants His Dinner By James Schuyler From the first-edition jacket of The Crystal Lithium. “The Dog Wants His Dinner,” a poem by James Schuyler, first appeared in our Winter 1972 issue; it’s part of his collection The Crystal Lithium. Schuyler was born on this day in 1923. He died in 1991. Read More
November 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Between Books By Sadie Stein William Strang, Münchhausen entdeckt die Bibliothek von Alexandria, 1895. I am between books. It’s a very uncomfortable place to be. On the one hand, after finishing something good and thought provoking, you don’t necessarily want to move on too quickly—you want to digest and mourn the loss and crave the comfort of its world. You miss the characters. It would feel jarring to just open another novel and invest your mind and heart fully once again. On the other hand, after enough time, you become restive and begin to yearn for the escape, the absorption and stimulation that only a good book can bring—and you begin to wonder if you can ever feel again the pleasure and compulsion you knew only days ago. Maybe, at last, you’ve read every good book in the world. Read More
November 9, 2015 Books The Truth Keeps You Young By Lena Dunham Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club turns twenty. Mary Karr. Photo © Deborah Feingold The first time I met Mary Karr I was, quite frankly, stunned. She was not what I had expected, not that I knew what to expect. I had read all her books, was familiar with the basics of her biography—including any gossip I could find, which is scant in the literary world, even when it comes to best-selling and notoriously dynamic authors—and had even seen her author photo, so I am not sure what came as such a shock to me except for something I might nebulously refer to as her “essence.” I was standing in the middle of a party, lost, anxious, and sweaty in a slew of people who would all qualify as name-drops among certain bookish weirdos, when I received a firm tap on the shoulder. I spun around to find a petite brunette smiling about six inches too close to my face, if you’re following traditional social protocols. “I’m Mary Karr and I love you, honey.” Read More
November 9, 2015 On the Shelf Bring on the Dedicated Smell Words, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Paul Thévenaz, Untitled (Nude smelling flowers), 1922. Today in language and sensory perception: the verdict is in and English is a laughably inadequate language when it comes to describing scents. We must close the smell deficit, giving the olfactory its due in a mad rush of neologism. “In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are more about the smeller’s subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself … the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between twelve and fifteen dedicated smell words … ltpit describes the smell of a binturong or bear cat—a two-meter-long animal that looks like a shaggy, black-furred otter, and that famously smells of popcorn … Another word is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings, some species of millipede, the root of wild ginger, the wood of wild mango, and more. One seems specific to roasted foods. And one refers to things like squirrel blood, rodents, crushed head lice, and other ‘bloody smells that attract tigers.’ ” In her quest to compile a kind of contemporary ars moriendi, Robyn K. Coggins has taken an exhaustive survey of how people would like to die: “Sometimes I think getting sniped while walking down the street is the best way to go. Short, sweet, surprising; no worries, no time for pain. Sure, it’d be traumatic as hell for the people nearby, but who knows—your death might spark a social movement, a yearlong news story that launches media, legal, and criminal justice careers. What a death!” I can think of where not to die: in Gore Vidal’s pool, which has apparently fallen into disuse. “The pool was … filled with dead fish with bruised purple backs hovering beneath the dark green surface. Abandoned sun chairs lay by the side.” You can change all that, though. Vidal’s 10,500-square-foot property on the Amalfi coast, La Rondinaia, is for sale for a cool $21.1 million. Invite me over once you’ve fixed the place up. Don’t let me die in the pool. Far beyond the walls of the academy, poets like Tyler Knott Gregson are pouring their hearts out online, putting forth page after page of unvarnished verse. They’ve found that most coveted thing: a wide readership. Gregson’s new book of haiku has a first printing of a hundred thousand copies; he “belongs to a new generation of young, digitally astute poets whose loyal online followings have helped catapult them onto the best-seller lists, where poetry books are scarce. These amateur poets are not winning literary awards, and most have never been in a graduate writing workshop … Their appeal lies in the unpolished flavor of their verses, which often read as if they were ripped from the pages of a diary … The rapid rise of Instapoets probably will not shake up the literary establishment, and their writing is unlikely to impress literary critics or purists who might sneer at conflating clicks with artistic quality. But they could reshape the lingering perception of poetry as a creative medium in decline.” In the late eighties, the artist Kembra Pfahler decided to sneak subversive commentary into the most accessible vehicle around: a rock band. “The first performance I ever did … was when I came home and looked around and there was nothing in the house except an egg. There wasn’t anything to use, I didn’t have a guitar, I had an egg. So I stood on my head and cracked an egg over it … I decided in 1989 to start a classic rock band … so I could slide the imagery into the consciousness of the viewer a little easier. This was The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black … The band allowed me to squeeze in all the strange images I’d been working on for all these years, what I now call my ‘manual of action,’ my own vocabulary of images: the sewn vagina; the egg piece; all of the costumes, like Abra Kedavour; the flowing anal bead shirt; the shark piece; the upside down Crucifix piece, where I hang upside down on the cross; the wall of vagina; the bowling ball piece. For the most part, the performances happened during the guitar solo, and were over before you knew what happened.”