June 10, 2015 From the Archive Defenestration of Prague By Dan Piepenbring Susan Howe at a lecture in 2011. An excerpt from Susan Howe’s “Defenestration of Prague,” originally published in our Winter 1982 issue. Howe, who was born in Boston, is eighty-eight today. “People often tell me my work is ‘difficult,’” she told the Review in 2012. “I have the sinking feeling they mean ‘difficult’ as in ‘hopeless.’ ” Skeletal kin tiltitalic lunacy long illness of little difference Read More
June 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Playmobil Fun Club By Sadie Stein Photo: Merete Sanderhoff, from Vermeer and Dürer Raise a tiny plastic goblet, please, to Playmobil’s founder Horst Brandstaetter, who has died at eighty-one. Brandstaetter, who was apparently known as “Herr Playmobil,” joined the family company in 1952, but it wasn’t until the seventies—and the oil crisis—that he was moved to come up with the cost-effective and efficient three-inch plastic figurines we know today. The first three—a knight, a construction worker, and a Native American—made their appearance in 1974, and the rest is toy history. Read More
June 10, 2015 On the Shelf Opium for the Masses, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine. Vincent Musetto, a New York Post editor who wrote “the most anatomically evocative headline in the history of American journalism”—HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR—has died at seventy-four. “But however lauded it became, it was not Mr. Musetto’s favorite among the many headlines he wrote for the paper. That honor, he often said, went to one composed the next year: GRANNY EXECUTED IN HER PINK PAJAMAS.” Let’s pause to remember the golden era of American pharmaceuticals—the turn of the twentieth century, when patent medicine was ubiquitous and any old ailment could help you score some heroin. “If it doesn’t actually cure your cold, the high dose of cocaine might trick you into thinking otherwise.” Yesterday marked the 350th anniversary of the Great Plague of London, which claimed some seventy thousand lives. The diary of Samuel Pepys provides a rich account of the events: “From the moment he saw the red crosses on that boiling June day, through September when the death rate peaked at 7,000 a week, and until January 1666 when it began to wane, Pepys chronicled the plague’s progress through narrow alleys and grand mansions. He tells of the pest-houses and pest-coaches, and how the Lord Mayor forbade citizens from going out after dark so that the sick could ‘go abroad for ayre’ and funeral corteges pass through without infecting the healthy.” In happier anniversaries: Clueless, everyone’s favorite “adaptation” of Emma, turns twenty this summer; a new oral history tells us how “as if!” and “way harsh” entered the lexicon. Who doesn’t love a good pair of sparring meteorologists? In the nineteenth century, one William Redfield had developed a momentous theory of whirling winds, and he was the toast of weathermen everywhere until some hotshot named James Espy tried to derail him. “Not only was Espy’s prose bold, it also had a pompous edge. Academic discourse was governed by the same strict code of gentlemanly civility that dominated intellectual society, from politics to religion. At times Espy seemed waspish and condescending.”
June 9, 2015 Look Charlie, Charlie, Are You There? By Dan Piepenbring The Prince of Darkness, Dagol, devouring human limbs. I like to root for the underdog, so I’m always comforted to find Satanism in the news. There are, after all, some two billion Christians in the world, and only about a hundred thousand Satanists; if the eternal war between good and evil is a numbers game, then it would seem the good guys have this one in the bag. And yet Satanism persists—pure evil’s got moxie. The latest coup from the dark arts is Charlie Charlie Challenge, a Ouija Board-ish pursuit in which players—who tend to be, let’s face it, kids and teens—cross two pencils over a piece of paper and attempt to summon a Mexican demon. According to no less reliable a source than the Daily Mail, four Colombian high school students were hospitalized for “hysteria” after playing the game, which set off an international pandemic of DIY voodoo: Read More
June 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Copious Free Time By Sadie Stein A postcard, ca. 1910. “Why are narcissists always talking about how busy they are?” my friend wondered as we left the party. At this party, a certain narcissist had been droning on about how much she had to do; how she really shouldn’t be there; that she would be leaving any moment. The implication had been, I suppose, that she was far busier than anyone else—or at least that her docket of tasks was more important. Or that she was more conscientious, maybe. I’m not sure. But it did seem to signify a failure to live in the moment, as it were. This is a type most of us have encountered at one point or another. Two stand out in my mind—a college professor and the manager of a restaurant where I worked one summer. Both liked to talk, constantly, about how frantically busy they were. But more than this, both of these people were fond of a certain phrase: in my copious free time. As in, “Yes, yet another thing for me to do in my copious free time,” or, “Thanks, Bob! We all know how much I need to fill my copious free time!” or, “I think we all know who’s going to end up doing that—with all my copious free time.” Read More
June 9, 2015 On Translation Pure Prose By Damion Searls Translating Jon Fosse from Norwegian. From the cover of Aliss at the Fire. Norwegian is a language that English-language writers and translators seem willing to pick up: James Joyce learned it to read Ibsen; Lydia Davis is learning it to read, and solely by reading, Dag Solstad; and I learned it to read Jon Fosse. It helps that grammar is simple, with few tenses and word endings; the vocabulary is small; the language is one of the deep cores of English, so reading it feels eerily familiar, like a song you half know. After being asked to read Fosse’s novel Melancholy in German, I decided to cotranslate it with a native Norwegian-speaker friend, and I have since translated, on my own, two more of Fosse’s novels—Aliss at the Fire and Morning and Evening—two stories, and a libretto. Jon Fosse is less well-known in America than some other Norwegian novelists, but revered in Norway—winner of every prize, a leading Nobel contender. I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all. Harrison’s titles—Something (aka Something in the Way She Moves), Here Comes the Sun, While My Guitar Gently Weeps—could even be Fosse’s: Someone Is Going To Come, Closed Guitar, The Name, Night Sings Its Songs, Angel with Tears in Its Eyes. But it’s harder to show what makes his music work. Prose doesn’t have hooks, and Fosse’s incantations are as unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Béla Tarr tracking shots. Here is an opening, a fraction of the first sentence of Aliss at the Fire: Read More