July 13, 2015 On the Shelf Hunky, Virile Consumers, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a thirties-era Esquire spread. In postwar America, magazines like Esquire and Playboy helped to shape our concept of the bachelor: an unfettered man, a man in complete control of his life, a man who helped to preserve conventional masculinity even as he fretted over his appearance and his home decor. Bachelorhood became the paragon of manly existence—even though most of Esquire’s readers were married. “Because Esquire relied on corporate advertising to continue existing, overthrowing corporate hierarchy and stratification didn’t factor into their discussions of masculine rejuvenation … women were presented as an obstacle to men’s success at entertaining, which reinforced the theory that women were ultimately responsible for men’s inability to control their lives.” People love to hate the Middle Ages—such benighted centuries, those were, full of blood and swine and religious drudgery! Well, people are fools: the medieval era was every bit as culturally rich as any other. They gave us “castles, cathedrals, Italian and Flemish and Byzantine art, printing, plainsong, and parliaments, not to mention universities. Yet the black propaganda of Voltaire, Hume, Kant, and Mark Twain remains suspended in the air like soot in the old factory towns, while intellectuals crow over the birth of ‘modernity’ like fancied fighting cocks.” James Salter had been corresponding with Sally Gall for more than a year, working toward an extended interview—the final edits were en route to him when he died a few weeks ago, and now the transcript has a new resonance. “Style is really more than a particular voice or way of writing,” Salter says. “It presents an entire subjectivity. In a sense, it determines what can be written … Style is the writer.” One of America’s earliest literary hits was Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s 1840 chronicle of his transformative stint as a sailor onboard the Pilgrim. The memoir left a deep mark on Melville, who called it “unmatchable”; today it’s remembered as “a model of reportage, rife with the nautical jargon of a specialist and an anthropologist’s descriptive mastery of life aboard ship and in the Pilgrim’s then-exotic ports of call.” What’s the role of handwriting in the age of the touch screen? “Handwriting is profoundly bodily. Like an exaggerated, intensified version of the sweeps and swipes we use on a tablet, writing by pen can make muscles ache. Write while crying and one’s hand becomes shaky, write with excitement and watch the swirls and loops of one’s arcs become wild—an inky neurochemical expression that type just can’t replicate or capture.”
July 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Tender Trap By Sadie Stein From the cover of Das doppelte Lottchen, by Erich Kästner, illustrated by Walter Trier. In The Parent Trap—and the German book, Das doppelte Lottchen, on which it’s based—two strangers arrive at a girls’ summer camp only to discover they are identical. “The nerve of her! Coming here with your face!” exclaims one roommate in the 1961 film. Of course, in The Parent Trap, they’re actually twin sisters. But as anyone who’s been compared to someone else knows, just the accident of resemblance is enough to cause an instinctive enmity. I used to work at a store where this one customer would always remark on how much I looked like some friend of hers. She talked about it every time she came in. The friend was named Jen something. She was a potter. She lived in the Hudson Valley. The customer even brought in another woman to attest to this miraculous phenomenon. “You may think you’re a unique person walking around in the world,” said the customer one day. (I guess I had thought that.) “But you’re not—you’re a copy of Jen.” Obviously I had no alternative but to hate this Jen person. I imagine she felt the same way. Read More
July 10, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Moaning, Sobbing, Trolling By The Paris Review Oksana Baiul, after her Olympic gold medal–winning performance in 1994. Just yesterday, I snuck an advance-reader’s copy of Lorenzo Chiera’s Shards: Fragments of Verses, translated from the Italian by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, off a colleague’s bookshelf and devoured it on my subway ride home. The pocket-size book comprises delicious morsels of twelfth-century verse by an otherwise unknown fellow from Testaccio. Though the fragments—plucked from scratches on parchment paper or fiber sacks—are no more than a few lines each, they brim with raunch and grime and love. Chiera breathes sex into most verses, which are bound to make one blush with either delight or despair. Some read as playful winks, others as moans, and still others as desperate, carnal prayers. “Hearing Chiera for the first time,” Ferlinghetti writes in his introduction, “we soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years … He’s vulgar. He’s mad. He’s uncouth. Yet he is innocent.” Here’s a little taste of Chiera himself: “Sexy Nonny / in her silk nun’s habit / behind the arras / of the cult of the Virgin / stuck her tongue in my mouth / when I was fourteen / Made me cream.” —Caitlin Youngquist I’ve never read any fan fiction, and I never made it all the way through Pretty Woman, so devotees of either may take this recommendation with a grain of salt, but I loved Michael Friedman’s novel Martian Dawn, all about a couple of movie stars (viz Richard and Julia) whose off-screen romance is strained by a visit to the Red Planet. No doubt half the jokes went over my head. It didn’t matter. Friedman’s urbane silliness and élan hark back to the glittering twilight of high camp—without seeming to hark back. Hats off to Little A for reissuing Martian Dawn and Other Novels. I didn’t know anyone could still make it look so easy to have so much fun on the page. —Lorin Stein Read More
July 10, 2015 On the Shelf I Demand Satisfaction, and Other News By Jeffery Gleaves Ilya Repin, Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky’s duel, 1899. Your extensive library is all vanity: Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady warns against associating our books with status and considering them a marker of “the supposed growth of our intellect advertised in terms of shelf space.” Do you collect books, or do you actually read them? What happened to midrange film dramas? Maybe they just got better and look more like big pictures. Example: that “art film” aesthetic we like so much (hand-held camera work, low and bad lighting) is tied more to compromises made by directors with low budgets than to artistic choice, and yet these bad techniques are often misused as a markers of “artistic authenticity.” Film history has seen a number of these gambles and trade-offs, but not all have stuck: “there’s no connection between the short-term appeal of a movie and its artistic importance. Some aesthetic landmarks are profitable, some aren’t.” The comic-book publisher Drawn & Quarterly celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday this year, and everyone is excited because they’ve been doing the Lord’s work: “The D+Q backlist is rich in volumes that have been at the forefront of making comics an accepted literary and visual form—works by such prominent cartoonists as Lynda Barry, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet, Adrian Tomine, Yoshihiro Tatsumi.” Before you do your literary duty and read Go Set a Watchman, consider naming your child after your literary hero. If the trends tell us anything, we may be destined for a generation of Atticuses: “Harper, which nationwide ranked 887th for newborn girls in 2004, actually ranked 11th in 2014. Atticus rose from 937th in 2004 to rank 370th in popularity for male babies in 2014.” Touché! A specific set of literature is steeped in pistol-wielding duels. Whether it be the soufflet, the acknowledgement of the offense, the rencontre, the violent encounter, or listening to the dying opponent’s final words, John Leigh’s Touché catalogues and analyzes the duels of literary history. Through this chronicle of absurd formality, Leigh looks at everything, from “Casanova’s account of his duel with a Polish nobleman, to comic duels in Dickens and to two of Maupassant’s short stories.”
July 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent One-Man Job By Sadie Stein Clara Peeters, Still Life with Shrimp and Eggs, ca. 1635. It is nice when people offer to help and mean it. But I was sincere, too, when I said that no, I didn’t need help cooking the eggs. That it was a one-man job. It’s true, I could have told him what to do. I could have instructed him to cover the eggs with an inch of cold water, and bring it just to the boil. But I know he would have been watching the pot anxiously, proverbially, and that the exercise would produce a stress all out of proportion to the scale of the job. Where to me, turning off the heat, covering the pot, setting the alarm, and then shocking the eggs in their ice-water bath don’t interrupt other thoughts, or even tasks. Read More
July 9, 2015 In Memoriam James Tate, 1943–2015 By Jeffery Gleaves James Tate at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in 1965. Photo: Elsa Dorfman James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Tate’s poems were “always concerned to tell us that beneath the busyness and loneliness of our daily lives, there remains in us the possibility for peace, happiness and real human connection,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Times. Tate was born in Missouri but lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1971. “I’ve imagined that every character and every single event takes place in this town, Amherst,” he once confessed. But John Ashbery once opined that Tate is a “poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere.” His poetry is often described as absurdist, and indeed the speakers in his poems come across as bewildered narrators who are as inquisitive as they are clueless—which is all part of their charm. His poetry has also been described as comic, ironic, hopeful, lonely, and surreal; “I love my funny poems,” he said, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.” Read More