October 20, 2015 On the Shelf Marcel’s Spurious Sponge Cake, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Marcel Proust, date unknown. Proust’s madeleine is one of modernism’s essential images—a cookie whose unique taste, whose absolute singularity, could conjure for the author a whole lost world. So it’s downright disturbing, then, to learn that the cookie was damn near something else: “A first draft of Proust’s monumental novel dating from 1907 had the author reminiscing not about madeleines as the sensory trigger for a childhood memory about his aunt, but instead about toasted bread mixed with honey … A second draft, the manuscripts showed, had the evocative mouthful as a biscotto, a hard biscuit.” Nostalgia is hereby ruined for everyone. Condolences. Rivka Galchen has been spending a lot of time singing lullabies, which has given her ample room to consider their origins, their mysteries, and the plangent sadness they sound: “What, really, is a lullaby? We can define it functionally—a song used to lull a child to sleep … Another function is to let the singer speak. Maybe this is one reason the lyrics of lullabies are often so unsettled and dark. One way a mother might bond with a newborn is by sharing her joy; another way is by sharing her grief or frustration … When even relatively happy, well-supported people become the primary caretaker of a very small person, they tend to find themselves eddied out from the world of adults. They are never alone—there is always that tiny person—and yet they are often lonely. Old songs let us feel the fellowship of these other people, across space and time, also holding babies in dark rooms.” Looking for a way forward, young writer? Embrace Ottessa Moshfegh’s scatological philosophy, and find truth in the ouroboros of your gastrointestinal tract: “My aim was to shit out new shit. And so in writing, I think a lot about how to shit. What kind of stink do I want to make in the world? My new shit becomes the shit I eat. I learn by digesting my own delusions. It’s often very disgusting. The process requires as much self-awareness and honesty as I’m capable of having. It requires the courage to be hostile and contradictory. My creativity seems to gain traction out of this relationship with reality: I hate you, I hate myself, I love myself, you love me, I love you, I hate you, ad infinitum. I am interested in my own hypocrisy. It provides the turbulence for me to change.” John Clare, cast off in the nineteenth century as a minor poet, is today one of our most essential, especially in his treatment of nature: “He saw tragic ironies all over the place, but he never sought verbal ironies himself: he is about as sincere (if not naive) as poets get. Clare seems to have benefited from few of the changes wreaked on the planet since the invention of the steam engine and cannot be blamed for whatever brought them about: he may be the last significant white Anglophone poet for whom that was true.” Accordingly, poets like Lisa Fishman, Matthew Dickman, David Morley, David Baker, and Donald Revell have opened up a kind of dialogue with him in work that directly addresses his own: “Clare’s apparently unorganized—but minutely observed—poetry looks like a model for poets who want to stay true to a material world while rejecting the hypotactic, well-made structures that earlier generations preferred.” You’ve probably spent hours in your toolshed puzzling over the etymology of monkey wrench—who hasn’t? Relief is at hand: you may now learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about the history and origin of monkey wrenches, and their mystery runs deep. Charles Moncky, the alleged inventor of said wrench, is often believed to have inspired its name, but “he would have been only twelve years old in 1840 when the earliest known accounts of monkey wrenches appeared in print.” The answer may lie in a popular toy, the monkey stick—you decide.
October 19, 2015 Look No Gate, No Lock, No Bolt By Dan Piepenbring These images are from the Dobkin Family Collection of Feminist History’s exhibition, on display through Saturday, October 24, at Glenn Horowitz Booksellers’ Rare Gallery, in New York. The show takes its title from a powerful passage in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own about the female novelists of the nineteenth century: What genius, what integrity it must have required … in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë … They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too-conscientious governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Brydges, to be refined; dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex; admonishing them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which the gentleman in question thinks suitable … It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. The Dobkin Family Collection, amassed over twenty-five years by the philanthropist Barbara Dobkin, spans five hundred years and comprises thousands of letters, papers, posters, and ephemera pertaining to women’s advancements in all walks of life. It’s intended to help research and writing on the history of feminism. Among the items on display at “No Gate” are Simone de Beauvoir’s working manuscript for The Second Sex; a lighthouse logbook signed by a young Virginia Woolf, who was apparently later moved to write To the Lighthouse by her experience there; Margaret Sanger’s manuscript notebook for Family Limitation; and a letter from Amelia Earhart on Cosmopolitan letterhead naming her as their aviation editor. Read More
October 19, 2015 At Work Women in Crime: An Interview with Sarah Weinman By Cullen Gallagher From the first-edition cover of Mischief. Sarah Weinman’s two-volume Women Crime Writers challenges and redefines our notions of American crime fiction. Broken into two decades, the 1940s and the 1950s, her collection comprises eight novels—with Vera Caspary’s Laura, Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall in the first volume, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Blunderer, Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, and Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold in the second. Together, these books reveal an unjustly forgotten feminist tradition by writers who were, in their day, respected as the best in their field. Diverging from the pulp action tradition embodied by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—and from the cozier school of British whodunits by Agatha Christie—these authors pioneered a new trend in mystery fiction: psychological suspense. The stereotypical mysteries of the day featured hard-boiled masculine heroes battling femme fatales. These works, by contrast, presented a variety of innovative plots and perceptive commentary on the gender and class issues of their time. The women in these novels—the titular, savvy careerist in Laura; the psychotic babysitter in Mischief; the struggling mother who covers up the murder of a blackmailer in The Blank Wall—consistently defy what were then conventional notions of womanhood. As the mother in The Blank Wall acknowledges, “[Her husband and children] would give her love, protection, even a sort of homage, but in return for that she must be what they wanted and needed her to be”; ultimately, hers is a quest not only to protect the family name but also to exercise personal agency. Sometimes the hero (In a Lonely Place), the villain (The Blunderer and Beast in View), or a more ambiguous but still integral role (The Horizontal Man and Fools’ Gold), they’re all refreshingly realistic, relatable, and archetype-breaking female characters. Read More
October 19, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Premonitions By Sadie Stein Yeah, real spooky, Austin. I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:To you they have show’d some truth. —Macbeth In the Austin airport, there is an ad for a major national bank. “You keep it weird,” it says. “We’ll keep your rates low.” (Okay, so I’m paraphrasing that second part—I stopped paying attention.) It refers, of course, to the famous Keep Austin Weird campaign launched in the early aughts by the Austin Independent Business Alliance. The movement was designed to promote small businesses and maintain the place’s idiosyncratic character, and was later adopted by cities around the country in the face of corporate encroachment. You see Keep Austin Weird merch everywhere in the city, on mugs and tees and coffee carriers, all of it looking as un-weird as possible. But this bank ad was next-level. It was, as magazine people might say, almost too on-the-nose. Read More
October 19, 2015 On the Shelf Beauty at the Cash Register, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Design for Point of Sale. Weimar Berlin is “typically presented as a nonstop freak show of grotesque transvestites and mutilated war vets, lumpen Brechtian beggars and top-hatted industrialists, Charleston-crazed floozies, effete gigolos, and brazen rent boys”: imagery at once bolstered and challenged by “Berlin Metropolis: 1918–1933,” an exhibition at Neue Galerie. “Drawing on 350 well-chosen examples displayed in six jam-packed galleries arranged by Richard Pandiscio (who also designed the handsome catalog), the survey summons up the fast-paced, jittery, but scintillating atmosphere of a wide-open world city that attracted foreign hedonists enticed by its louche nightlife.” Chris Ware’s new illustrated essay is about why he loves comics, in a very, very, very big-picture sense: he invokes neuroscience, linguistics, and cosmology. “Really, when one comes right down to it, in the end, that’s all we have. Our memories! Not to bum anyone out, though … As organisms on a planet that’s bifurcated by a daily passing dance between shadow and radiation, comics are, like, the perfect art form!” Today in midcentury design nostalgia: Ladislav Sutnar’s Design for Point of Sale, a 1952 guide inflected with the ideals of the Bauhaus, is “easily the most exquisite book about supermarket store displays ever created.” Here, at last, is your chance to master that most delicate art: retail. Sutnar—who was also the guy who told Bell Telephone to put area codes in parentheses, a major advance in telephone-number design—gives us “page after page of beautiful layouts with ample white space, as well as his architectural renderings of point-of-purchase display spaces.” While we’re stuck in the fifties, go ahead and answer these questions: In a first edition would you prefer a soiled original binding to one in morocco? What great country has never produced a great painter? Would you like to see more of our public buildings decorated by artists? What is the origin of the romantic conception of love in the Western world? Name several of the leading nineteenth-century antagonists of revealed religion. These are drawn from The Cultured Man, a 1958 book of quizzes that aimed to elevate mankind by asking him not just about facts, but about his attitudes. Its author, Ashley Montagu, believed that “a person considered ‘cultured’ would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings,” and that nothing could access these feelings quite like a good quiz. On Percival Everett, whose new collection of stories, Half an Inch of Water, extends his satirical purview: “He rarely does publicity, doesn’t write reviews, and doesn’t read reviews of his own work; he is probably not coming soon to a bookstore near you. His novels tend to be both choppy and dense, with chapters broken up into one- or two-page scenes that are riven with philosophical asides, interpolations from outside texts, wordplay, classical allusions, self-interrogations, metafictional interjections, and the occasional photograph, drawing, mathematical equation, or semiotic square … Everett’s novels suggest that the self is a patch job, a cognitive illusion. It’s no surprise, then, that the shift to the third person in his short fiction feels like a kind of liberation, a sweet relief. And if the price of that shift is a loss of intimacy or immediacy, the reward is composure and lucidity —which, it turns out, are not the same as comprehension. You can see something clearly and still not know what to make of it, or even what it is.”
October 16, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dreamers, Dealers, Kidney Donors By The Paris Review An illustration by Gustave Doré for Poe’s “The Raven.” The two things I like most about annotated classics are the annotations and the pictures—which are really the point, if you think about it: you can read the text itself in any edition. Truth be told, sometimes the annotations aren’t very interesting, but the pictures rarely disappoint. Such is the case with the new Annotated Poe from the Belknap Press. Some are illustrations that were made to accompany Poe’s works: there’s great stuff from Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Doré, such as his very cosmic (very Little Prince) depiction of a line from “The Raven”: “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” But the book also includes art that was influenced, sometimes obliquely, by Poe: a still from Batman in 1966 shows Adam West quoting a line from Poe’s poem “To One in Paradise”—a nod perhaps to the fact that Bob Kane, Batman’s creator, came up with the idea for the masked detective while visiting the Poe Cottage in Fordham, New York. And still other art in the book feels simply like a wonderful excuse to draw connections across time: a moody photographic close-up by Lisette Model of a pair of legs striding the nighttime pavement made the cut because Poe’s description of a man’s “agitated restlessness” in “The Man of the Crowd” prefigures Model’s candid street photography, which appeared a century later. —Nicole Rudick As a child, I understood the harrowing effect of my sullen and unloving behavior on my parents, yet continued to behave rottenly anyway. Ben Marcus’s story in this week’s New Yorker, “Cold Little Bird,” about a ten-year-old boy who suddenly begins to withhold affection from his parents, is a chilling evocation of the pressure-cooker tension that can arise in family life. Marcus teases striking images out of dense thickets of metaphor; here his writing is spare, the story proceeding in a series of clipped passages. He captures the subtle features of relationship maintenance; one of the best scenes involves the advance-and-retreat dynamics of tactical apologies. In its refusal to diagnose, the story offers no release valve. I persevered to the end and felt uncomfortable, then guilty, then gladdened by the knowledge that I had never been as bad as this little shit, then embarrassed by that thought, then terrified of my own (nonexistent) child; then impressed that Marcus had been able to provoke in me a parent’s anxiety I had never known existed. —Henri Lipton Read More