October 22, 2015 On the Shelf Thoreau? Kids Love the Guy! And Other News By Dan Piepenbring Lanjee Chee’s Thoreau stamp, designed ca. 1967. Kathryn Schulz’s Thoreau-bashing New Yorker piece last week was only the latest in a long tradition of broadsides against Walden—people love to hate Thoreau. James Russell Lowell, Garrison Keillor, Jill Lepore, and Bill Bryson have all taken swipes at him in print. But all of them, and especially Schulz, are dearly misreading him, especially when they accuse him of misanthropy: “He was active in circulating petitions for neighbors in need. He was attentive to what was going on in the community. He was involved in the Underground Railroad. He quit his first teaching job, in protest, because he was expected to administer corporal punishment, and struggled to find a new one. He loved watermelons, and threw an annual watermelon party for his friends, of whom he had plenty. Children were especially fond of him … He was very handy. He could dance, and play music. He wrote lovingly about his father, mother, and siblings in his journals, and they wrote lovingly about him, and he was so devastated by his brother’s death that he developed symptoms of tetanus in sympathy.” Notes from the annals of traffic planning: one of the greatest innovations in Frederick Law Olmsted’s designs for Central Park was his way of guiding people and horses—and, later, cars—gently away from one another: “In 1900 there were some two hundred horse-related deaths in New York City. Thus Olmsted and Vaux’s strict division of circulation in the park acknowledged the ever-present danger of such accidents by consigning heavy east–west vehicular traffic to crosstown transverses sunk well below surface level, while above-grade pedestrian footpaths dipped beneath north–south roadways through small bridges and short tunnels … This concept of dual circulation soon became an article of faith among progressive planners in the United States and Europe. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright’s much-praised 1929 design for Radburn, New Jersey—touted as the ‘New Town for the Motor Age’—so effectively segregates cars and people that children can walk to local schools and playgrounds without crossing a street. Stein, whose Central Park West apartment overlooked the 65th Street Transverse, said that he discovered what became known as ‘the Radburn idea’ simply by peering out his front window.” The Polish writer Agnieszka Taborska is gazing seaward, as writers are wont to do. In the ocean she’s found a suitable home for surrealism: “The sea calms and alarms. Its swoosh is compared to a hundred sounds at once and yet there’s no way to convey the whole complexity. Screams, wails, thunderclaps, whistles, moans, rumbles, shrieks of exhortation, the boom of waves breaking on rocks, seagulls’ cries, sirens’ chants, the weeping of sailors tickled to death, half-audible words coming from no one knows where, transfused with their own echo. Ghost ships on the horizon, spirits of castaways floating on waves nearer the shore, shadowed by the amused look of a mermaid combing her wet locks for eternity … And then there are the beaches! Dunes torn asunder by secret life.” “Do you remember Novokuznetskaya Station? … My mother threw up at each of the throne-like benches and felt sick at the sight of the lamps that look like a dentist’s spittoons…” Each chapter of Hamid Ismailov’s newly translated The Underground is named after a Moscow metro station, which is fun and all, but how is a bewildered, provincial American reader to make heads or tails of these places? You can use Google, for starters—it brings those sick-making spittoon-lamps right to life. Isn’t it high time that we give Ursula K. Le Guin the anarchist cred she deserves? “Le Guin has received her due as a master crafter, as the lyrical chronicler of worlds of the imagination, spaces apart from the world, where children and lingering adults can find an oasis. But the political implications of her anarchist aesthetics go much further than that … Stalin said that the poet should be the engineer of human souls. Le Guin is the anti-engineer.”
October 21, 2015 Department of Tomfoolery Floating Capital By Dan Piepenbring Fear him. The eeriest and most gravid of today’s new emoji is this guy: the so-called Man in Business Suit Levitating. In Apple’s rendition, he cuts an imposing figure, like a rich kid who’s just aced his LSATs—a simpering, dubiously pompadoured fella in polarized glasses and a natty suit. His tapered silhouette hangs above a blip of a shadow. He’s a superhuman exclamation point. He’s the floating face of capitalism. And if literature has taught us anything, it’s that he brings nothing but bad news wherever he roams. I’m prepared to advance an entirely unfounded argument based on an hour of Googling: that this levitating businessman is the latest, most accessible form of a character who has haunted literature for more than a century. Sometimes wily, sometimes unscrupulous, and sometimes merely misguided, he’s held aloft by Adam Smith’s invisible hand only to be flung earthward again. Join me, won’t you, on an impromptu whistle-stop tour of THE LEVITATING BUSINESSMAN IN LITERATURE. Read More
October 21, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Dressed for Success By Sadie Stein Barbara Pym. Mayotte Magnus © The Barbara Pym Society Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress and shoe designer, has named a shoe after Donna Tartt, the writer. The Tartt is a glittery Mary Jane with a chunky low heel. The color is called Scintillate. It retails for $385 and sold out within hours on NeimanMarcus.com. Here’s how Neiman Marcus describes Parker’s shoe line: She became a fashion icon starring as the quintessential shoe-obsessed New Yorker. Now Sarah Jessica Parker is taking the next natural step: designing her shoe collection. The SJP Collection is her own expression of style with personal touches woven throughout. Take for instance, the grosgrain ribbon details. Adorning every shoe, they’re a nod to the ribbons Parker wore in her hair as a young girl. Some design elements borrow from the legendary wardrobe she wore as Carrie in the show Sex in the City. Even the names of each shoe, such as “Sophia” and “Raquel,” reference her favorite fashion influencers. To create the collection, Parker turned to a familiar name in the industry. George Malkemus (the shoe-guru himself) teamed up to share his thirty years of design expertise. The results? Classic styles that feel as current now as they will in seasons to come. And to ensure they’ll last, every pair has been crafted by artisans in Italy. But with all respect to Parker and “the Tartt,” when I think of literary fashion influencers, I think of Barbara Pym. Read More
October 21, 2015 Arts & Culture Moebius and the Key of Dreams By Robert Pranzatelli Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, at the exhibition “Moebius-Transe-Forme,” in 2001. Courtesy Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. “Even when you reach a certain level of success,” Jean Giraud once said, “there’s still this desire to break the established rules and be a bit of a delinquent.” The cheerfully libertine Frenchman spoke those words in his early seventies, just two years before his death in 2012, but he had voiced similar sentiments throughout most of his adult life. He was already established as an extraordinarily gifted comic-strip artist in his twenties, having created, with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, the immensely popular Western series Blueberry, which he signed as “Gir”; he nonetheless found himself intermittently beset by that restless desire to be “a bit of a delinquent.” A decade later, partly inspired by his infatuation with American underground comics and their countercultural freedom, that restlessness produced a creative eruption, a second artistic identity, and a second pseudonym: Moebius. Blueberry remained Giraud’s most bankable project in Europe, but from the seventies onward he used its success to underwrite his more outré impulses as solo auteur Moebius. With virtuoso line work, relentless experimentation, and radical shifts of style, his fantastical works proffered a bouquet that could include the dark, the erotic, the whimsical, the intellectual, the bawdy, the scathing, the humorous, and the philosophical in countless, often chance, combinations. Characteristically, he did not leave a neatly ordered oeuvre; instead of a manicured garden of civilized delights, we find a multiverse of astonishing impulses. Read More
October 21, 2015 On the Shelf A Corporation for Every Artist, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Andy Warhol, lenticular prints designed for Rain Machine (Los Angeles version), 1971. Image via Hyperallergic Fact: there are men still walking the earth who have shared a meal at Denny’s with Orson Welles. “One day in 1974, Orson Welles, John Huston, and the comedian Rich Little were sitting in a Denny’s near Carefree, Arizona, about to order a meal … A waitress approached the table where the three men sat. She recognized Little right away. After bantering with the impressionist for a bit, she nodded toward Welles and asked Little, ‘Who’s your fat friend?’ Huston, saving the day, answered for Little with a straight face. ‘You know, we don’t actually know this man,’ he said, indicating Welles. ‘We picked him up on the highway and he seemed undernourished. We’re going to feed him and then send him on his way.’” Today in the sex lives of whalers: few things speak to the hardships of a whaler’s life than dildos, which were ubiquitous (or, okay, maybe just not uncommon) in the New England homes such men abandoned for the seas. At least one such dildo survives to this day, all plaster and memories. “By 1830, the average length of a whaling voyage was thirty months, but they were often longer—Nantucket wives were dubbed ‘Cape Horn widows,’ because their husbands might be gone for eight years. In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab tells his first mate, Starbuck, that of the past forty years of ‘making war on the horrors of the deep’ he’d only been ashore three, leaving only ‘one dent in [his] marriage pillow.’ ‘[W]ife?’ Ahab rages, ‘wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!’ The dildos, called ‘he’s-at-homes’ in some books on the history of the Yankee whale fishery, were meant to be some insurance of fidelity for a husband who was rarely present.” Halloween is coming, which means it’s time to practice an age-old ritual: reading online essays about books bound in human skin. Bonus points if you go on to give them to trick-or-treaters. “The earliest examples of books bound in human skin date from the seventeenth century and were produced in Europe and the United States … Many of the earliest examples relate to punishment. England’s Murder Act of 1751 stipulated that those convicted of murder would not only be executed but, as an additional deterrent, could not be buried … making items out of criminals’ skins provided yet another way to ensure the body stayed aboveground. A famous example of such punishment was the body of William Burke, who, with his accomplice William Hare, killed sixteen people in a ten-month period in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and then sold the bodies to medical schools. After being caught, executed, and dissected, some of Burke’s skin was used to make a pocketbook as a final—and lasting—humiliation.” Back in the sixties, Kaiser Steel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, RAND, and Lockheed Aircraft started a program to match artists with corporations—a kind of late-model patronage system. “Some of the collaborations resulted in successful projects. Working with the magazine publisher Cowles Communication Inc., Andy Warhol created holographic photographs of daisies … Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Ice Bag (1969) was produced in collaboration with WED Enterprises, the design and development branch of Disney. The pink sculpture was designed to undulate and twist as it deflated and inflated, in accordance with Oldenburg’s interest in objects that broke and then reconstituted themselves … Richard Serra, who was matched with the Kaiser Steel Corporation, created stacked sculptures that did not differ radically from his usual output. In contrast, Robert Rauschenberg, who collaborated with the industrial company Teledyne, created an installation that split from his best-known assemblage work but was consistent with his later interest in viewer-activated spaces.” Andrew DeGraff’s Plotted: A Literary Atlas makes maps from great literature, allowing you at last to visualize, say, every nook and cranny of the bleak terrain in Waiting for Godot. Hours of fun await. “DeGraff’s book … raises the question of the way we tenuously hold fictional universes in our minds. Absent anything concretely visual to latch onto, we create messy, complex maps to maintain a grip on the disorienting profusion of information coming at us. If we could transcribe these mental representations, they would probably look less like DeGraff’s thorough, well-executed images and more like those medieval maps, with small pockets of knowledge surrounded by huge swaths of emptiness. In literature, as in life, we can’t see everything. We can’t keep track of all the details, nor can we truly envision specific geographies, even ones we’ve visited before.”
October 20, 2015 Correspondence Rimbaud Ascends the Alps By Dan Piepenbring Over the Gotthard, an engraving by Wilhelm Rothe after a drawing by Johann Gottfried Jentzsch, 1790. From a letter by Arthur Rimbaud to his family, dated November 17, 1878, and sent from Gênes. After a disastrous affair with Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854, left France to travel the world, eventually setting up shop in Ethiopia, where he sold coffee and arms before falling gravely ill. This note chronicles his harrowing journey through the Gotthard Pass, in the Swiss Alps. It’s translated from the French by Wyatt Mason, from I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud. As for how I got here, it was full of wrong turns and sporadic seasonal surprises … for after a certain point no carriage could get through with an average of fifty centimeters of snow and a storm brewing. The Gothard crossing was supposed to be the route; you can’t get through by carriage in this season, and so I couldn’t get through either. At Altdorf, on the south side of lake Quatre-Canton along the border of which we strolled through steam, the Gothard road begins. At Amsteg, fifteen kilometers from Altdorf, the road begins to climb and follow the contours of the Alps … At Göschenen, a village that has become a market town because of the affluence of its workers, you see the opening of the famous tunnel at the back of the gorge, the studios and canteens of businesses. Moreover, this seemingly rough-hewn countryside is hardworking and industrious. Even if you can’t see the threshers going in the valley, you can hear the scythes and mattocks against the invisible heights. It goes without saying that most of the local industry manifests in wood. There are many mining operations. Innkeepers show you mineral samples of every variety, which Satan, they say, buys on the cheap and resells in the city. Read More