August 11, 2015 On the Shelf The Bard Blazed, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Our greatest dramatist, debilitated by the effects of cannabis at some kind of “reefer party.” Shakespeare scholars are reeling from a discovery so major, so irrefutably epochal, that it sets the entire field on its head: four clay pipes found in his Stratford-upon-Avon garden contain cannabis residue. Historians may never know for certain if Shakespeare composed his masterworks among purple plumes of the dankest kush, but for the sake of sensationalism, we of the media have no choice but to assume he did. T-shirts featuring the Bard ripping tubes, smoking bowls, and otherwise enjoying a good old-fashioned toke will be available in novelty shops near you by C.O.B. today. I had nothing to do with them. A 1991 letter from Elena Ferrante to her Italian publisher, Sandra Ozzola, lays out her approach to promotion with the utmost candor: “I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it. If the book is worth anything, that should be sufficient. I won’t participate in discussions and conferences, if I’m invited. I won’t go and accept prizes, if any are awarded to me. I will never promote the book, especially on television, not in Italy or, as the case may be, abroad … I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” In which Avies Platt, “an art mistress at Wellingborough County High School for Girls in Northamptonshire,” has a stirring encounter with an aging W. B. Yeats: “she met the seventy-two-year-old Yeats at an open meeting of the Sex Education Society, a group headed by controversial sexologist Norman Haire … As the evening progressed it became obvious that the elderly poet’s interest in Platt went further than conversation—she mentions him sitting outside the Athenaeum club in Pall Mall and expressing his regrets at ‘the stupid rule that we may not take ladies in after midnight.’ ” Let’s talk about trolling, and while we’re at it, let’s throw some existentialism in there, too: “If the Internet was predicated on everyone co-existing on a level playing field, able to distribute and share knowledge without the previous gatekeepers of status or affiliation to slow things down (perhaps one of the main benefits of having user names rather than real names), trolling takes that utopian possibility and throws it by the wayside … trolling is a destructive way of addressing the ambivalent state of being that is life online, that is, being connected to millions and even billions of people simultaneously, but being incredibly isolated, separated from the nuance of subtle body language, body odor, touch, taste, et cetera.” Today in new applications for 3-D printing: haute couture. At Paris Fashion Week, Chanel presented a version of its classic two-piece suit: “Using selective laser sintering—a high powered laser fusing together tiny particles—much of the suit vest was sculpted, appearing boxlike, with no sewing necessary … With endless possibilities in shape, texture and transparency, the experimentation of 3-D printing techniques and materials has a worthy place on the cutting edge of couture. But fashion designers must learn how to generate computer files and complex computer-aided drafting techniques for the printing process to work.”
August 10, 2015 On Film The Battle of the Butt By Dan Piepenbring From the theatrical release poster for Cold Turkey. Before he found success with All in the Family and its spin-offs, Norman Lear wrote and directed Cold Turkey, a cynical 1971 antismoking comedy that is, to date, his only credit as a film director. It’s showing August 13, 15, and 17 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives as part of their One-Film Wonders series, a collection of cinematic one-offs and also-rans. Cold Turkey has the kind of stupefyingly ridiculous premise we need to see more often in our movies: in a bid for good PR, a big tobacco company promises twenty-five million dollars, tax free, to any town whose residents can stop smoking for a full month. (Their magnanimity earns them comparisons to the Nobel Peace Prize.) The 4,006 residents of Eagle Rock, Iowa, are up to the challenge, at least once their minister—played by Dick van Dyke, typically affable and guileless—goads them into action. Read More
August 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Fruit-Basket Routine By Sadie Stein The first-class lounge on a seventies-era American Airlines 747 Luxury Liner. The veneer of civility is always thin on a red-eye. But somehow, at the airport, it seemed that the news playing on the screen overhead—the shootings, the civil unrest, the human tragedy—had forced some perspective on this particular group. Or so I was thinking as we waited to board, stoic, carrying pillows and eyeshades and cranky children. And then a guy sidled up to the kiosk. “I see there’s one first-class seat left,” he said in an undertone to the agent. “Can I go ahead and grab that?” “There’s a waiting list for that seat, sir,” the agent, a man in his fifties, said. “Is there … really?” the passenger said, raising an insinuating eyebrow. Read More
August 10, 2015 Arts & Culture I Think I Would Rather Be a Painter By Robert Anthony Siegel At the Guggenheim, writers and artists cross-pollinate. Carol Bove, Vague Pure Affection, 2012, wood and steel shelves, paper, brass, concrete, and acrylic, 85″ x 35 1/2″ x 16″. © Carol Bove, photo courtesy Maccarone Inc., New York Writers have always been in love with the visual arts. Just think of Frank O’Hara’s sly poem “Why I Am Not a Painter,” which is actually all about the creative entanglement of the two forms—tinged with yearning and a wry bit of envy: I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, And it isn’t just poets. Hemingway, that great champion of muscular prose, credited Cézanne as one of his masters—a guy who painted pictures of rooftops. More recently, Don DeLillo has haunted the outer edges of the art world in novels such as The Body Artist, Falling Man, and 2010’s Point Omega, which begins and ends with a description of Douglas Gordon’s video installation 24 Hour Psycho. Read More
August 10, 2015 On the Shelf Kafka on the Shore Stage, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Kafka on the Shore. Photo: Takahiro Watanabe “It wasn’t easy to interest glossy magazines in poverty in the 1980s and 90s,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes: “I once spent two hours over an expensive lunch—paid for, of course, by a major publication—trying to pitch to a clearly indifferent editor who finally conceded, over decaf espresso and crème brulee, ‘OK, do your thing on poverty. But can you make it upscale?’ ” That was then. Today, things are even worse: “Now there are fewer journalists on hand at major publications to arouse the conscience of editors and other gatekeepers. Coverage of poverty accounts for less than 1% of American news.” How New York Review Books is perfecting the art of the reissue: “It was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue … We set out to do the whole mix of things that a curious person might be interested in, which would take you back and forth from fiction to certain kinds of history … We were picking low-hanging fruit, only no one knew the fruit was out there, hanging from the branches.” In 2003, the Russian writer Kirill Medvedev lifted the copyright from his publications, putting them all into the public domain worldwide. Twelve years later, he defends his choice: “Do you, as a poet or writer or musician, really want to go the way of prohibitions, fences, barbed wire and guard towers to defend texts and music the way some would defend private cottages, private forests, private fields and private earth?” Nearly a century after it was composed, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains the quintessential adolescent poem: “Eliot himself was barely out of his teens when he wrote it, uncannily in touch with the exquisite torments of hypersensitive youth, and with the peculiar burden of seeing through everything without having experienced much of anything. This was a different species of verse. It exuded cinematic urgency rather than exam-ready ‘messages’ and ‘themes.’ It was full of sudden rhythmic jolts and colliding tones, and could make emotional pirouettes on a vowel. Unapologetic, brash, discontinuous, ‘Prufrock’ taught me the thrill of disorientation in language. No matter how often I returned, it was never tamped down by classroom-style explanations. It grew. It seemed to understand me more than I understood it.” Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore has been adapted for the stage at Lincoln Center by Yukio Ninagawa: the production is “a collage of modern, neon-lit, commercialized, glitzy Japan, haunted by dark, mostly unspoken memories of World War II, including the atom bomb, shown in what looks like a stylized advertising logo … [it’s] still unmistakably Japanese: stylized, poetic, comical, violent, full of spectacular effects, and often exquisitely beautiful to look at.”
August 7, 2015 From the Archive Pet Brick By Dan Piepenbring “Ethics,” a prose poem by Adam LeFevre from our Winter 1975 issue. LeFevre, now sixty-four, is also a playwright and an established character actor. Where I went to college in the purple valley of northwest Massachusetts, there was a fellow in my class who used to drag a brick around by a string. He called it his “pet brick.” Every night he would drag his brick into the campus snack bar when the snack bar was most crowded, and order two vanilla milkshakes—one for himself, one for his brick. The first time I saw him I laughed at the absurdity of the proposition. A pet brick! A brick drinking a milkshake! The subsequent occasions of my seeing his fellow and his brick made me respond differently. Often I was angry, thinking he dragged the brick for just the clamor that will always attend the outrageous. Sometimes, when I could convince myself that he and his brick were actually a charade protesting technology gone wild or man’s inhumanity to man, I could feel the pleasant twinge of belonging to a fraternity of hoodwinkers. But when I saw him in the early morning, dragging his brick through the empty quads, my heart would fill with the silent despair that rose from the strange interplay between them. Just as it was impossible to know exactly how he felt about the brick, in those days I never knew how I should feel about anything. Only one thing was clear. He did not love the brick. Nor did the brick love him. This fact became my reference point in all matters of faith.