October 1, 2015 Books The Nonessential: On Marianne Fritz By Adrian Nathan West Marianne Fritz’s apartment in Vienna. Image from Marianne Fritz Archiv Wien. Eine Dokumentation, edited by Klaus Kastberger and Helmut Neundlinger. In an interview published three months before his death, W. G. Sebald referred to his aversion to the systematic and to his faith in the haphazard: “If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this.” Though my own aversion to structure is less an outgrowth of any faith in serendipity than a temperament both indolent and indecisive, rooting around has at times for me, too, yielded benefits that a single-minded approach to literature wouldn’t have afforded. And it is particularly fitting, in light of the quotation above, that I should have hit upon Marianne Fritz—whose novel The Weight of Things I have just translated—by following up on a footnote from Sebald’s posthumously published Across the Land and the Water, a selection of poems translated by Iain Galbraith. In the late poem “In Alfermée,” named for a Swiss commune where Sebald twice visited the scholar Heinz Schafroth and where the ashes of the poet Günter Eich are scattered, the following two stanzas appear: Threading sleep letter by letter comes a language you do not understand The exhausted eyes of the writer the fingers of one hand on the keys of her machine Read More
October 1, 2015 On the Shelf Obnoxious Effluvia at Every Turn, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “A London Fog” (detail), 1802, colored aquatint. “I love the nuance and depth of feeling in the poems of T. S. Eliot,” you’ve probably said to yourself, sighing: “If only the man had written more erotica!” Reader, he did, and soon it will be yours to behold. A new edition of Eliot’s poems will feature several previously unpublished efforts dedicated to his second wife, Valerie, and found in notebooks. Steel yourself for such succulent similes as “Her breasts are like ripe pears that dangle / Above my mouth / Which reaches up to take them.” And while the Eliot fire sale is in progress, you might as well get your hands on his formerly unpublished volume of several works by Alfred North Whitehead. It contains the words “Foxy Grandpa.” The contemporary fascination with castrati has two sources. First, we’ve never heard their music, and unheard music haunts us; second, they were people with no testicles, and we are, as a people, obsessed with testicles and wonder how they got along without them, what they did in bed, et cetera. “The very in-betweenness of castrati, their being neither women nor complete men, neither peasants nor aristocrats, having access to kings’ ears and girls’ bedrooms, allowed them to move into positions of easy privilege and influence … From this middle ground he could have a great deal of fun and wield a good deal of influence. It is also important to remember, in this context, that same-sex relations did not have the same meaning as they would later come to have.” The debate surrounding appropriation has reached a fever pitch: “Questions about the right to your creation and labor, the right to your identity, emerge out of old wounds in America, and they provoke familiar battle stances … Can some kinds of appropriation shatter stereotypes? This has been literature’s implicit promise: that entering into another’s consciousness enlarges our own … What conversations about appropriation make clear is that our imaginations are unruly kingdoms governed by fears and fantasies. They are never neutral.” In William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella, The Doom of the Great City, Londoners are “choked to death under a soot-filled fog”—an unsettlingly prescient conceit, from our vantage point. Or is it just kooky propaganda for the miasmatists, who believed that bad smells meant bad air? “At their best, the miasmatists practiced social medicine that included a focus on diet, education, and forms of social uplift. At their worst, they were racist and classist bureaucrats. But whatever their scientific and ideological deficiencies, miasmatists were amazingly successful at marshaling the resources and political will (often with the important tool of disgust at their disposal) to create a compelling vision of the sanitary city.” The inimitable Peggy Guggenheim came into her second inheritance in 1937 and decided to open her first gallery in London. “‘I am in Paris working hard for my gallery and fucking,’ she wrote to her friend Emily Coleman the following January; and when Coleman remonstrated, Peggy wrote back to reassure her: ‘My fucking is only a sideshow. My work comes first every time.’ ”
September 30, 2015 From the Archive Aunt Alma By Dan Piepenbring Judith Mason, Self Portrait Age Ninety (detail), 1985. “Aunt Alma,” a poem by W. S. Merwin from our Spring 1958 issue. Merwin is eighty-eight today. Read More
September 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent And So Say All of Us By Sadie Stein A birthday from Mr. Belvedere, one of TV’s many disquieting alternate universes. Television Land (not to be confused with the ever-sadder TV Land) is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The residents get very excited about fast food. Dads are childish buffoons and moms are smug scolds. All kids are bratty smart alecks. Police witnesses are strangely insolent and really busy. And everyone who uses online dating services is beautiful, chic, and well adjusted. But perhaps the strangest thing about this parallel universe is that in lieu of “Happy Birthday,” they sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Read More
September 30, 2015 On Translation That Old Goat! By Damion Searls Robert Walser’s scrupulous art of translation. Robert Walser Today is International Translation Day, an occasion of particular piety among the few who observe it. Translation, that glorious service to culture and human understanding! There are failures, too, though. Some are of the sort that plague most any endeavor in this vale of tears: inadequacy, incompetence, ineptitude. A New Yorker cartoon, beloved in translator circles, shows someone approaching a horror-stricken writer and saying, “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the book of you?” Read More
September 30, 2015 On the Shelf Mourning the Striped Pig, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Time was you could find this fella on newsstands, getting sloshed. Fact: the American newspapers and gazettes of the nineteenth century had names that absolutely trounced their present-day counterparts where liveliness and creativity are concerned (with the exception of the Modesto Bee, which remains a truly great paper title). In simpler times, you could spend your mornings over the Horseneck Truth Teller and Gossip Journal, Estabrook’s Great Public Chowder, Steven H. Branch’s Alligator, and the Striped Pig, among others. For a different kind of nostalgia, contemplate MacGyver, which hit the airwaves thirty years ago and has left in its wake a mess of nerdy white-male heroics and misplaced, quasi-racist adventure: “MacGyver embraces its own insistent loneliness to an absurd degree. And that, in turn, makes the whole show feel distinctly retrograde … MacGyver sags under the weight of its old-school definition of heroism. It glorifies the single man—the single mullet—while treating other people as victims and saps.” Not dissimilarly: in a new book, Lions in the Balance, Craig Packer attempts to careen between the MacGyver-esque machismo of those who hunt lions in the Serengheti and the “communal emotionalism” that so often animates conservation movements. “It is his position, as the story begins, that the lions of the Serengeti need sport hunters to survive; that Cecils must die if prides are to endure … In his quest to restructure incentives, in his willingness to take the long view, in his commitment to numbers over narrative, Packer deems himself ‘ultimately alone.’ ” Trying to build a brand of one? Of course you are! This is the age of the brandividual. Let me tell you a few things you already knew, though: it’s a futile project, authenticity is a myth, and branding strategists are working to make our society a waking nightmare of empty professionalism. “I don’t think it’s possible to appeal to everyone and still be authentic, let alone unique. When [my branding strategist] declared my web-site font ‘almost hippie-dippy,’ I couldn’t help but get a bit defensive. So what if it is? My truest self does not use ‘impact as a verb.’ My truest self likes to be catty about former employers that have done me wrong, not write pleasant summaries of what I was able to achieve while working there. My truest self is sending GIFs to my friends, not cheerfully influencing strangers’ thoughts.” Today in new and novel uses for the black crayon: Richard Serra’s strangely affecting “Ramble Drawings” are seventy-four works on paper, all “variations on Malevich’s square, stretched out and pressed with black lithographic crayons to achieve different textures: oily, streaky, pocked, solid. The pictures, stacked like rows of large, incongruous industrial cement bricks across the gallery walls, are anything but monotonous, however. Black never looked so colorful.”