August 4, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent No Name Is Safe By Sadie Stein Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. It has been a bad summer for the iconic characters of Southern literature. A couple of weeks ago, a New Hampshire man named Huckleberry Finn was accused of rape. This was surely not what his parents had in mind when they named him. When the world learned that Atticus Finch had aged into a crotchety reactionary with KKK sympathies, we thought of the children. Not just those thousands schlepping their mauve trade summer-reading paperbacks all over the country. But those named after what we believed was literature’s best dad; Atticus was the #1 boy’s baby name in 2015. As one baby-name Web site puts it, “Atticus, with its trendy Roman feel combined with the upstanding, noble image of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, is a real winner.” As the New York Times put it, “Fans of Mockingbird have been crestfallen and disbelieving that their hero could be so changed, but perhaps no group more so than those who chose that name for their children.” Read More
August 4, 2015 On the Shelf Without Need of Makeup, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An 1889 poster for Sissieretta Jones, who sang opera but gave recitals, because she was never hired by opera houses. Some writers take years to finish their novels. These people are fools: writing a novel takes only seventy-five minutes, if you crowdsource it effectively. This Saturday, the sci-fi author Chris Farnell will prove it at a “Geekfest” panel in Heathrow: “the fifty or so attendees of the panel will spend about forty-five minutes collaboratively hammering out a plot, characters and structure. Then, for the next half an hour, each of them will be given one chapter to write, and the results will be collected together, lightly edited, and published as a free ebook.” The book stands little chance of being good—but the same could be said of those that take years to limp their ways to the finish line. Opera has a long and vexed tradition of blackface—and the Met, this season, has finally put an end to their use of “dark makeup,” prompting a reconsideration of the role of African Americans in the opera. “Too many Black artists have devoted their lives to opera, working inside and outside the establishment, sharing their insights, pleasure, and critiques, to allow their art to be sidestepped in this way. Besides more opportunities for Black singers on stage, says Dr. Gregory Hopkins, artistic director of Harlem Opera Theater, there needs to be recognition of works in which Black artists can ‘tell our own stories, without need of makeup, where we’re not being dressed up to look like someone else.’ ” Why is everyone still obsessed with the Bloomsbury Group, a century later? Because it was elitist: “Paradoxically, the idea of the Bloomsbury Group as socially, intellectually and artistically exclusive is bound up with its wider appeal. Close the door and people come knocking … Establishing an explicitly exclusive and anti-populist club is, of course, a long-established route to long-term popularity.” Charles Simic interviews his brother about New York’s jazz scene in the sixties: “[Jackie McLean] told me about his first time playing at Birdland. It was 1952 or something, with Miles Davis. The very first solo he took that night, he was so nervous he stopped, turned around and went back through the curtain at the back of the stage and into the dressing room behind it and threw up. Oscar Goodstein, the Birdland manager, ran in and yelled at him, ‘Get back on stage!’ Jackie goes back out, finishes his solo and gets a big round of applause from the audience. Miles turns to him and says, ‘Man, I’ve never seen that one before!’ ” Today in walking metaphors: hitchBOT, a Canadian robot attempting to hitchhike to San Francisco, was found brutally dismembered in Philadelphia. “We know that many of hitchBOT’s fans will be disappointed, but we want them to be assured that this great experiment is not over,” its creators said in a statement. “For now, we will focus on the question: ‘What can be learned from this?’ and explore future adventures for robots and humans.”
August 3, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Husbands and Wives By Sadie Stein One soon learns the point of a modern honeymoon. In this day and age, when most couples don’t need the time to become acquainted, it can seem like pure indulgence: a well-earned rest after the interpersonal stresses of wedding planning, and the rare chance to see each other without the intrusion of family and social demands. All very wholesome, I’m sure—but not lasting. Long after you’re home and your muscles have reclenched with tension and those lotus-eating vacation days feel like a hazy memory, you will carry with you the honeymoon’s true legacy. (I don’t mean a baby, by the way—though that, too, I guess, is a legacy for some.) Because by the end of your honeymoon, be it a week or a month or a day, whether you’re in the tropics or Niagara Falls or a nearby motel, you will have a husband. Or a wife. Read More
August 3, 2015 On Design The Font of Poetry, the Poetry of Font By Adrienne Raphel Adventures in typography. Photo: Willi Heidelbach I was a teenage font addict. On Microsoft Word I’d lovingly scroll through the drop-down font menu: Avenir Book, Baskerville, Goudy, Goudy Old Style. For every story or poem I started to write, I first spent hours choosing the font. The dystopian soap opera could only be in Geneva; surrealist time travel, Book Antiqua. In college, my writing was corralled into twelve-point Times New Roman, regardless of how beautiful it might have been in Hoefler Text. I chafed at this restriction, but a true typographical enthusiast finds ways to express her creativity. Font manipulation became a tool to avoid real editing. To make a paper longer, change the spaces to size fourteen; make the punctuation thinner to squeeze more into the page. Read More
August 3, 2015 Correspondence Chillin’ at the Holiday Inn By Dan Piepenbring Hayden Carruth in the forties. A letter from Hayden Carruth to Jane Kenyon, dated April 29, 1994. When Kenyon was dying of leukemia, Carruth wrote her almost daily, though he knew she was unable to respond. His correspondence is collected in Letters to Jane. Carruth, born on August 3, 1921, published poems in three issues of The Paris Review; he died in 2008. Dear Jane, I’m in the waiting area at the Washington National Airport with another hour before boarding for my flight to Syracuse. I hate this place, I hate it. Hatred has not been a prominent factor in my life, but in this particular place at this particular time it is. The weather here is INTOLERABLE, hot, hot, hot, and coming from Upstate New York I’m not dressed for it, wearing my faithful tweed jacket that I customarily use for readings. And I’ve had three glasses of house chardonnay in one of those little cubicles off the waiting area, the only place where one is permitted to smoke … Well, I’ll insert a “poem” I wrote while I was having my coffee and so-called croissant: Read More
August 3, 2015 On the Shelf Crunching Christie, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The poster for Murder Most Foul. Data analysts have descended on the corpus of Agatha Christie—to celebrate the 125th anniversary of her birth, they’ve crunched some numbers and honed a formula “that they claim will enable the reader to identify the killer before the likes of Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple have managed the feat,” thus taking the fun out of what had been formerly known as “reading.” The formula examines factors like setting, gender of culprit, number of culprit mentions per chapter, and sentiment of culprit mentions; in some cases its findings are surprising. “They found that if the victim was strangled, the killer was more likely to be male … if the setting was a country house—not uncommon for a Christie novel—there was a 75% chance the killer would be female. Female culprits were usually discovered thanks to a domestic item, while males were normally found out through information or logic.” At Stanford, meanwhile, new software called ePADD will change the way researchers process e-mail collections. Archivists who’d been “grappling with more than 150,000 e-mails in the archive of poet and author Robert Creeley” used ePADD to separate the wheat from the chaff: e-mails “accumulate like dust … A mountain of ‘See you at eight o’clock.’ Every now and then, there must be significant ones but the sheer volume is very great.” An old lecture by Shirley Jackson looks at two of a writer’s most necessary tools—memory and delusion: “The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing.” This is your periodic reminder that it’s okay, or even laudable, to pursue “difficult” fiction: “Think back on our country’s rich literary traditions in fiction: from Hawthorne to Melville, through Poe to James, Stein, Ellison, and Faulkner, just to cite a few. Their books make use of circularity, fragmentation, and elision, and at their most extreme reject coherence in an effort to produce new meaning. Their wildness has played an important defining role in our culture’s literary identity … If we want to make sure this important tradition continues, we have to sustain the curiosity to care about work that, at first glance, might seem difficult … Let’s not give up on the intricacies of ambitious fiction. Let’s not stop reading the kind of books that keep teaching us to read.” Marie Darrieussecq’s first book, Pig Tales, published in 1996, is “narrated by an unnamed young white woman who aspires to a higher class, but in turn, is becoming a pig. As her body undergoes this great metamorphosis, she attracts increasing acts of sexual violence … The narrator, who works at Perfumes Plus as a perfume seller and prostitute, doesn’t seem to know that she is abused, let alone deceived about her pay.” But in all its grotesquerie, the book’s formalism offers an effective way of depicting violence against women: “Darrieussecq, in Pig Tales, rigorously insists on visibility—form is light. Her formal rigor, her careful and caring arrangement, her tactic, bares her comment. I want all writers, if they want to take the female body out of their tool kit, and hurt it, to work hard. Mostly, so hard they don’t bother.”