June 16, 2015 Correspondence Down Where the Asparagus Grows By Dan Piepenbring “The Little Review: A Magazine of the Arts―Making No Compromise with the Public Taste,” Vol. 4, No. 11, March 1918. A letter from Ezra Pound to James Joyce, March 1918. Pound, then an editor for the New York magazine The Little Review, had arranged to serialize Joyce’s Ulysses; he feared its more scatological parts would result in confiscation from the government. The Egoist, a British magazine also running the novel in installments, had failed to find a printer willing to accept it. The Little Review had already been suppressed once, in November 1917, for a piece by Wyndham Lewis; Judge Augustus Hand had banned it, citing a subsection of the U. S. Penal Code that likened prurient literature to information about contraceptives. “I confess to having been a bad citizen,” Pound had rebutted in print, “to just the extent of having been ignorant that at any moment my works might be classed in the law’s eye with the inventions of the late Dr. Condom.” Read More
June 16, 2015 On the Shelf All the Fun of Poetry Without All Those Poems, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kenyon Cox, An Eclogue, 1889. Ben Lerner stares into the mire of futility and falsehood that is poetry: “What if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are—every single one of them—failures? … The fatal problem with poetry: poems. This helps explain why poets themselves celebrate poets who renounce writing.” While we’re on poets and failure—in the midthirties, W. H. Auden entered into an auspicious if unlikely collaboration with Benjamin Britten. Here’s how that went: “Britten wrote his first opera, and I my first libretto, on the subject of an American folk hero, Paul Bunyan. The result, I’m sorry to say, was a failure, for which I was entirely to blame, since, at the time, I knew nothing whatever about opera or what is required of a librettist. In consequence some very lovely music of Britten’s went down the drain, and I must now belatedly make my apologies to my old friend while wishing him a very happy birthday.” Sixty years on, J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man “remains a hilarious and upsetting portrait of postwar Ireland and the American GIs who showed up there, with the prerogative and the wherewithal to carouse and copulate on a level that the locals did not appreciate.” And what of its author? He remains … obstreperous, a new interview suggests. “When I return to the kitchen, I see that Donleavy has put on a funny pink bucket hat. He tells me he never allowed any changes to his manuscripts, nor is he particularly inviting of second readers or the like.” What’s your very favorite thing? If you answered “art fairs,” congratulations—you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. (Also, you are probably very wealthy.) You could be at an art fair right now, in fact, in beautiful Switzerland, instead of reading this. Art Basel “is one of at least 180 international art fairs held each year, up from only fifty-five in 2000 … The art calendar is so packed with them that there is increasing talk of ‘fair fatigue’—visitor and exhibitor saturation.” Airports are such liminal spaces—and are so widely loathed—that we risk losing them to history. Who is documenting the airports? Who will remember them? Andrea Bruce is one of twenty photographers who took pictures of the airports she passed through in April. “Each time she let security scan her ISO 400 film with x-rays. Though the TSA claims that airport x-rays do not affect film of that speed in the United States, the repeated exposures to radiation left some of Bruce’s photographs with what she describes as ‘a faint, ghostly wave.’ ”
June 16, 2015 Sleep Aid Things to Know About Trademarks By Dan Piepenbring Ferdinand Max Bredt, Couch with Sleeping Lady, date unknown. It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “Infringement,” the fourth chapter of Things to Know About Trade-marks: A Manual of Trade-mark Information, a 1911 book by J. Walter Thompson Company. There is no intrinsic value in a trade-mark. Its worth in dollars is a creation, and it depends upon the successful sale, or popularity, of the commodity to which the trade-mark is applied, the distribution of this commodity, the extent to which it has been advertised, and the profit that there is in it. Some widely-known trade-marks are worth millions of dollars, and many are valued at a hundred thousand dollars or more. The ownership of an advertised and favorably known trade-mark is, therefore, a valuable property right. In estimating the assets of a business, its trade-mark is included under the head of Good-Will, and Good-Will is Reputation. The value of a trade-mark is the value of the reputation of the goods it represents and identifies. Read More
June 15, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Back to Chicago By Sadie Stein From a travel-poster advertising Chicago ca. 1910. Last night, I discovered a portal to another time and place—specifically, Hyde Park, Chicago, in June 2000. I hadn’t meant to, but when I opened a new tube of peppermint foot cream, there I was. The smell had transported me. Like all sense memory, smell is evocative for many people—for some of us more so than music or even taste. The Stanislavski method often involves conjuring smell to infect the audience with theater’s noble ecstasy. But until last night, I had not known its true power. Read More
June 15, 2015 On Music Two Remembrances of Ornette Coleman By Brian Cullman & Rafi Zabor Coleman died last week at eighty-five. Coleman in 1971. Photo: JPRoche For nearly fifty years, Ornette Coleman was the philosopher king, the trickster, the barbarian at the gate, the prodigal son. Despite advancing years, his ideas remained so young and so wild that they were always carded at the door. A powerful, emotional, seemingly tireless sax player, he took inordinate pleasure in performing and recording on violin, an instrument he played with the cheerful exuberance of a cocker spaniel. Like most philosophers, Coleman was more interested in questions than in answers, and his gnomic sayings and musings are almost better known than his music, which could be impenetrable unless you gave in and let it wash over you with its pure mineral sound, allowing it to take you where it wanted to go—which was often not a destination but a way of getting there. It sounds like a melody, but it’s not a melody, he said. Read More
June 15, 2015 Bulletin Say Hello to Our Next Writer-in-Residence By Dan Piepenbring We’re delighted to announce that Thomas David will be our third Writer-in-Residence—and our first biographer—at the Standard, East Village, in downtown Manhattan. He will be in residence for three weeks this July. We wish him a happy and productive stay. Read More