August 12, 2015 On the Shelf As American as April in Arizona, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Nabokov in 1969. Photo: Giuseppe Pino For three years, Barton Swaim worked as a speechwriter for Mark Sanford, the maligned former governor of South Carolina. His book, The Speechwriter, suggests that Sanford’s grammar was as wanting as his ethics: “Nearly every page of this book is wet with the tears of a pedant. At their first meeting, Sanford interrupts Swaim to ask whether it is appropriate to begin a sentence with a preposition. Swaim suggests that he must mean a conjunction, in which case it is a silly non-rule that no good writer has ever observed. Sanford is unconvinced: ‘There’s a rule against beginning a sentence with a prepositions [sic]—conjunctions, whatever—and you can’t break rules.’ Determined to keep the boss happy, Swaim dutifully tries to remove ‘yet’ from a speech a few weeks later, only to be rebuffed by a colleague who assures him that Sanford ‘doesn’t know “yet” is a conjunction’.” When Nabokov came to America, his whole style underwent a transformation, and he took pains to emphasize his Americanness; he said once that he was “as American as April in Arizona.” “Nabokov turned himself into a more purely American writer than many others have so far acknowledged … But the questions remain. Where did Nabokov really develop what Kingsley Amis, in a brilliant review of Lolita in The Spectator, called his ‘Charles Atlas muscle-man’ style of writing? Was it in St Petersburg or on an American campus? On the family estate back home in Russia or in the lonely motel rooms he and Véra liked to stay in on their long summer tours of the Rockies and the Southern states? Are literary audacity and effrontery really echt American or are they the products of aristocratic disdain?” Somewhere deep in the annals of facial-hair scholarship you’ll find T. S. Gowing’s The Philosophy of Beards, a treatise from 1875 or thereabouts that makes a series of dubious aesthetic and functional arguments for bearding: “‘The beards of foreign smiths and masons,’ he remarks, ‘filter plaster dust and metal from the air, protecting the lungs.’ Bearded soldiers, he claims, are less likely to catch colds; and the ability of a moustache to warm the air is invaluable ‘in a consumption-breeding climate like ours.’” He also suggests that a shaved man resembles a monkey—contradicting more recent research that suggests that men grow beards expressly to indulge “simian displays of size and aggression.” Today in holography: Alkiviades David, a forty-seven-year-old billionaire and hologram impresario, thinks that “the hologram business is bigger than porn. It’s going to be as big as the movie market.” He imagines hologram performances so sophisticated that it would be possible to bring back Amy Winehouse. Or the Beatles. Or Jesus. But he seems to miss the fact that people have a limited appetite for novelties and imitations: “Ultimately, what is a hologram good for? … It’s entirely possible, even probable, that, at some point, David’s technology will be fully able to create and project a celebrity digital likeness that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, one that moves fluidly and organically and delivers unerringly consistent performances. But no matter how lifelike, a hologram still favors the second half of that adjective more than the first.” The French artist Bernar Venet has written conceptual poetry since 1967, when the phrase conceptual poetry inspired many fewer grunts of disdain than it does now. His focus is on “the rudimentary syntax of the list,” and his “list poems” comprise everything from “synonyms to acronyms to currency exchange rates to the most frequented tourist destinations in France.” His poem “Monostique” is literally a math problem. “Following French semiologist Jacques Bertin, he associates figurative representation with polysemy (which is open to multiple meanings) and abstraction with pansemy (which is open to any meaning). Mathematical symbols, on the other hand, convey only a single, fixed meaning, and for Venet, such unambiguity has not yet been explored in the history of art.”
August 11, 2015 Look The Joys of Polychrome Xylography By Dan Piepenbring All images via Cambridge University Library Among the selections recently added to Cambridge’s Digital Library is Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu, or Manual of Calligraphy and Painting, a seventeenth-century Chinese book by the Ten Bamboo Studio, based in Nanjing. First published in 1633, it’s believed to be the earliest surviving example of multicolor printing—specifically, of a woodcut technique known as douban in which inks of varying colors are applied in succession, giving the finished print the look of a hand-painted watercolor. The book’s butterfly binding—an early Chinese process in which the pages are printed on only one side, and then pasted together and folded—made it so fragile that the university forbade anyone to open it until it had been digitized. It comprises eight sections: birds, plums, orchids, bamboos, fruit, stones, ink drawings, and (that perennial favorite) miscellany. You can see some of the woodcuts below, and read more about the book at Hyperallergic. Read More
August 11, 2015 Books The Phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement By Ryan Ruby In an unremarkable section of Paris, Roger Caillois saw hiding places for “floating beings.” Caillois ca. 1975. Photo: R. Minnaert Pity the Fifteenth! Paris’s most populous arrondissement is also one of its least celebrated. Stretching from the Front de Seine high-rises in the northwest to the Tour de Montparnasse in the southeast, the Fifteenth is sleepy, residential, and architecturally undistinguished. Home to minor government agencies and the headquarters of various corporations, its streets and thoroughfares are named for military officers, former colonial possessions, inventors, and Émile Zola, France’s dullest great novelist. Rue des Entrepreneurs intersects Rue de Commerce, where it branches off into Rue de l’Église and Rue Mademoiselle, which gives a good indication of what was on the minds of the men who incorporated the small suburban villages of Grenelle, Javel, and Vaugirard into the metropolis in the early years of the Second Empire. To make matters worse, the Fifteenth is tantalizingly adjacent to some of Paris’s genuine landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, located just across the Avenue de Suffren in the Seventh, the Cimetière Montparnasse, on the other side of the neighborhood’s eponymous and much-reviled skyscraper, or the tony apartment buildings on right bank of the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Yet this is Paris, and even the most unremarkable stretches of Zone 1 have their devoted mythographers. Born in 1913 in Reims, the jack-of-all-genres Roger Caillois knew something about being fame-adjacent. If you were to look at the faded group photographs of some of the most important avant-garde literary movements of the twentieth century, you would see him, in the background, with his thick eyebrows and chubby cheeks, manuscript in hand, ready to launch into a lecture about his latest intellectual obsession: mimicry, ludology, the sacred, gemstones, secret societies, science fiction, the City of Light. As a student at the prestigious École pratique des hautes études, Caillois became acquainted with the works of pioneering philosophers and anthropologists like Alexandre Kojève and Marcel Mauss. He was a member of the surrealists until a disagreement with André Breton over the nature of a Mexican jumping bean got him kicked out of the movement. He went on to found a discussion group, the Collège de Sociologie, with fellow excommunicant George Bataille, contributing articles to Bataille’s journal Acéphale while skipping the meetings of his secret society, one of which notoriously involved a serious discussion about a ritual sacrifice of one of the members. Walter Benjamin loathed him, but nevertheless included several citations from his writings on Paris in The Arcades Project. In Buenos Aires, where Caillois, a militant antifascist, spent the war years, he met Victoria Ocampo, the editor of the journal Sur. Ocampo was responsible for publishing some of the leading lights of what would become known as the Latin American Boom. Upon his return to France, Caillois took up a position at UNESCO, using his influence there to introduce the French reading public to his new friends Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Silvina Ocampo. Read More
August 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Clutter By Sadie Stein Image: 10ch/Flickr Somewhere in the world, there must be people who actually take a moment to unsubscribe from all those e-mails—newsletters and sale alerts and publicity blasts—that clutter their inboxes. Rather, I mean, than simply deleting them every single day. One doesn’t like to calculate the time costs of these things; it’s too depressing. It’s best to avoid the implications. There are the discount offers, of course. Don’t we all get those? Dirt-cheap massages! Flash sales! Exorbitant shoes made merely overpriced! And wait—the sale has been extended! Here’s the Project Runway contestant you started following nine years ago because you were so moved by his tears when he was told to pack his things. And the headache-prevention newsletter you never seem to get around to reading; wouldn’t it hurt that aging hippie’s feelings if you unsubscribed? Surely she’d notice. Remember the one time you attended an adult Christian-education class at that Episcopal Church? They do. You think of the unhappy example of the Yiddish class you dropped out of in 2004. You were on that guy’s mailing list until he died last year. Read More
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