August 14, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent We Are All Sensitive People By Sadie Stein From the cover of Let’s Get It On. On an uptown local train during the height of an August rush hour, an old man fell asleep in his seat. It should be said that the man in question probably believed his music was contained; he was wearing earbuds. But either he’d neglected to properly plug the headphones into the outlet or the mechanism was somewhat faulty. Because for whatever reason, “Let’s Get It On” started blasting loudly in the otherwise quiet car. The average urbanite sees a few things in a lifetime of public transit. Kids fighting. Women screaming. Perverts perving. Madmen ranting violently. And the occasional eel, escaped from a shopping bag, writhing wildly down the length of a J-train car. On one occasion, a seven-foot schizophrenic caked in filth spent the better part of an uptown express trip berating a woman whom he claimed had grabbed his ass, threatening to turn her into the transit cops for sexual harassment. And yet, I have never seen a trainful of passengers more uncomfortable than in the moment when the first four insinuating notes started to play, and Marvin Gaye’s sensuous, passion-roughened voice filled the car. Read More
August 14, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cavewomen, Contentlessness, Crawfish Étouffée By The Paris Review From the cover of Scattered at Sea. This week, in anticipation of sending files to our printer, I’ve mostly been reading the work that will make up our Fall issue. But I’ve snuck moments to read from Amy Gerstler’s new collection, Scattered at Sea. Gerstler’s poems are witty and direct, informal but also decisive. She seems to be thinking about things that other people aren’t thinking about—or they are thinking about them but don’t take notice of the fact. So we have “On Wanting to Be Male,” in which she “Lusted after their sprint speed, briefcases, Tahitian aftershave, crew cuts, blue nuts, thrusty cutlasses” instead of the “undulating, oft-colonized potential baby cave” of the “female model.” Elsewhere, she imagines herself as a cavewoman who “Can’t keep cave clean” and has “Tender feeling for baby mammoth as we eat him.” There are moments of sublimity, too, as when she describes a sunset as “a cocktail of too many boozes / she’d like to switch off / via remote control / but there’s no antidote / for celestial events.” And when she says of the early Greek philosophers, “getting a lot of the science right / While still pawing through entrails to divine the future,” I feel the distance between then and now shrink to almost nothing. —Nicole Rudick Barton Swaim’s memoir The Speechwriter is about his time working for Mark Sanford, the disgraced former governor of South Carolina—but Sanford’s name never appears in print, which helps the book to shrug off the lurid connotations of political tell-alls. There’s actually nothing scandalous in The Speechwriter: it’s a sober, lucid, funny story about language and its fraught relation to statesmanship. Early on, Swaim learns that what the governor wants from him isn’t well-honed rhetoric—it’s logorrhea, a torrent of verbiage designed to conceal the total absence of content at the heart of the gubernatorial body. “Sometimes,” he writes, “I felt no more attachment to the words I was writing than a dog has to its vomit.” In the extent of its dysfunction, Sanford’s office seems like something out of an Armando Iannucci show, and Swaim allows himself to feel cynical about it, but never inhumane or Orwellian. In fact, unlike nearly every book of its kind, The Speechwriter at its core is sensitive and apolitical: Swain just wants to understand why we so often insist on mangling the language. —Dan Piepenbring Read More
August 14, 2015 On the Shelf It’s Not a Bean, It’s an Oil Bubble, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Karmay’s suspiciously Kapoor-ish new sculpture. Plenty of adjectives are fit for Norman Mailer—insecure, misogynistic, overrated—but the one people seem to settle on, as a kind of euphemism, is pugnacious. Yes, here was a man whose ears always pricked up for the call of combat, a man who’d ask you to put your dukes up even when no one was watching: “Imagine it: Mailer is living in small-town Connecticut. He takes his dogs out after midnight to relieve themselves. He chances to stroll past a few young men sitting on a porch, one of whom points out the obvious: Mailer’s well-groomed poodles were probably queer. Mailer must have seen the implication: Who would own homosexual dogs, if not a homosexual man? In the middle of the night, with no one there to impress, one of the world’s most famous authors demanded satisfaction … Fearing for his life and bleeding from both eyes, Mailer surrendered and dragged himself home. Laid up in a dark room for days afterwards, he didn’t feel too badly about himself: there was only dishonor in flinching from a fight, not in losing decently.” Joan Didion, meanwhile, has been held up as the embodiment of feminine cool, even with her wincingly elitist, antifeminist politics: “It’s interesting to think about how Didion would have fared had she come to New York in 2015 rather than 1955. She is, after all, a writer for whom feelings (especially her own) are inherently unreliable sources. She assailed feminism’s ‘invention of women as a “class” ’ and wrote dismissively of the oppressed ‘Everywoman’ who ‘needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date … and raped finally on the abortionist’s table.’ She never got involved in the women’s movement, because, according to a friend, ‘she was beyond that.’ Didion is, for all her sensitivity and curiosity, more than a little bit of a class snob.” “The Contemporary Novel,” an 1927 essay by T. S. Eliot, is finally seeing publication in English, nearly ninety years later. Of novelists like Woolf, Lawrence, and Huxley, he writes, “I can find unity—or rather, unanimity—only in the fact that they all lack what [Henry] James seems to me so preeminently to possess: the ‘moral preoccupation.’ And as I believe that this ‘moral preoccupation’ is more and more asserting itself in the minds of those who think and feel, I am forced to the somewhat extreme conclusion that the contemporary English novel is behind the times.” Some twenty-five hundred words of a lost F. Scott Fitzgerald novel have been found languishing in a box in the Princeton library. They’re from an unfinished work called Ballet School—Chicago, which is about, sure enough, “a ballerina trying to make her way in Chicago. She has an attraction to a wealthy neighbor because he can get her out of this tough existence … and she can have a happy life with him. The story goes into the very hard training for ballet dancers. But then something quirky and unsuspected happens that changes her impression of him.” Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, otherwise known as “the Bean,” has been a major attraction in Chicago since 2006, which is maybe why in China, the city of Karamay, Xinjiang, has just ripped it off with a new, shiny, surprisingly Bean-like sculpture of their own. “A spokesperson from the Karamay tourism bureau went on the record to defend the sculpture, telling the Wall Street Journal that while Kapoor’s sculpture was ‘a bean shape,’ the sculpture in Karamay ‘looks like an oil bubble.’ ”
August 13, 2015 Arts & Culture Design a Cover for the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest By Dan Piepenbring There are two routes to literary immortality: Slave for years—if not decades—over a work of fiction so searingly sui generis, so well and truly fused with an authentic zeitgeist, so deeply attuned to life’s vicissitudes and the mysteries of the soul, that establishment and nonestablishment figures alike have no choice but to revere you and send you soaring toward the firmament, never to be forgotten. Hitch your wagon to David Foster Wallace’s star. For the less ambitious among us, option number two has never been more desirable. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Infinite Jest, Little, Brown is hosting a contest: you can design the cover for the new edition, thus earning one thousand dollars and suturing your memory to Wallace’s own. Read More
August 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Letters of Note By Sadie Stein Thomas Rowlandson, A Book Auction, 1810-15. In his late twenties, my father was a habitué of the Charles Hamilton Autograph Auctions at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, where he would snap up anything that went unsold at the end of the day; in this way he earned the nickname The Vulture. Charles Hamilton himself was a noted signatures expert who had given testimony in a number of prominent forgery cases. His auctions were known for their quality and their miscellany, and for the personality of their proprietor. ‘‘Unless you have a soul made of solid lead,’’ he purportedly said, ‘‘your pulse quickens and your eyes brighten when you look upon something that a great man actually held and into which he put his personal thoughts.’’ My father, due to his own somewhat indiscriminate buying practices, ended up with a somewhat unfocused collection of bargains. He had some good pieces of ephemera—two tickets to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, a dinner invitation from Thomas Jefferson—but he also had a single strand of John Keats’s hair. And then there were the ones that got away. There was that time Hamilton auctioned off Harry Truman’s World War I diaries, and the asking price was a bit high, and no one was allowed to inspect them before bidding, “and they might have been incredibly boring,” but still … Read More
August 13, 2015 On Translation Burgers and Copters, Shelves and Pants By Damion Searls How rebracketing gives us new words. From Find the Differences, a series of paintings by Peter Klashorst. How is a helipad like a cheeseburger? It’s all about arms being legs, and having an ear. There are words that sound right in a language and words that sound wrong, and the latter often, as the gangsters say, go on a little trip. A sound or two will be dropped like a stool pigeon with cement shoes (from the front, apheresis: [k]nife; from the back, apocope: memo[randum]), or added or modified, and the word will be domesticated. What’s easier or lazier than changing anything is to leave it as is and see it differently: a process known in life as getting a new perspective or reframing, and in linguistics as rebracketing. Unusually for such technicalia, rebracketing is a good, solid English word, not Latin or Greek. Other terms for the same thing, false splitting or juncture loss, are also easy to grasp, and in fact each more poignant than the last. False splitting, juncture loss—they sound so lovelorn. It hurts to see things that go together come apart. Read More