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
June 9, 2015 On the Shelf Man Versus Machine, Part 1,000,000,001, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring In 1959, the Mark 1 Translating Device produced its first automated Russian-to-English translation. The Mark 1 was demonstrated for the public at the IBM Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. With machine translation growing ever more sophisticated, we may as well revive the old is-translation-an-art-or-a-science question—and ask if machine translation imperils human translation. “What mostly annoys human translators isn’t the arrogance of machines but their appropriation of the work of forgotten or anonymous humans. Machine translation necessarily supervenes on previous human effort; otherwise there wouldn’t be the parallel corpora that the machines need to do their work … In a sense, [Google’s] machines aren’t actually translating; they’re just speeding along tracks set down by others. This is the original sin of machine translation: the field would be nowhere without the human translators they seek, however modestly, to supersede.” When we read, we often recognize—The Death of the Author be damned—a personality behind the page, even when we don’t want to; our opinion of this shadowy presence is compartmentalized from the rest of the reading experience. “Even when I know nothing about a novelist’s life I find, on reading his or her book, that I am developing an awareness of the writer that is quite distinct from my response to the work … I might be attracted to both work and author, but in different ways … Literary genius is the ability to draw readers into one’s own world of feeling, with all its nuance and complexity, and to force them to position themselves in relation to you.” In 1910, Apsley Cherry-Garrard accompanied Robert Falcon Scott on his doomed Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica. The latter froze to death; the former returned and did what every survivor must: he wrote a book about the experience, The Worst Journey in the World. Now Jason Novak, who has drawings in our new Summer issue, has made some illustrations to accompany one of the book’s bleaker passages. “If the worst, or best, happens, and death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than as a gruesome foe.” Today in privilege: a young, straight, white, male poet bemoans his status as a young, straight, white, male, and another young, straight, white, male says, Hey, man, it’s okay to write as a young, straight, white male, because, like, “Every human has a unique perspective.” John Aubrey and John Soane: two men, two singular approaches to paper. “After his death in 1837, Soane’s elaborate will instructed his executors and trustees to open a series of containers revealing the family secrets at preordained intervals. The last of them, his bathtub, was opened in 1896: the contents included papers which revealed further grim episodes in Soane’s family battles and a set of false teeth.”
June 8, 2015 Arts & Culture True Blue By Ravi Mangla A brief history of ultramarine. Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665. Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine. His painting The Entombment, the story goes, was left unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. Rafael reserved ultramarine for his final coat, preferring for his base layers a common azurite; Vermeer was less parsimonious in his application and proceeded to mire his family in debt. Ultramarine: the quality of the shade is embodied in its name. This is the superlative blue, the end-all blue, the blue to which all other hues quietly aspire. The name means “beyond the sea”—a dreamy ode to its distant origins, as romantic as it is imprecise. Derived from the lapis lazuli stone, the pigment was considered more precious than gold. For centuries, the lone source of ultramarine was an arid strip of mountains in northern Afghanistan. The process of extraction involved grinding the stone into a fine powder, infusing the deposits with melted wax, oils, and pine resin, and then kneading the product in a dilute lye solution. Because of its prohibitive costs, the color was traditionally restricted to the raiment of Christ or the Virgin Mary. European painters depended on wealthy patrons to underwrite their purchase. Less scrupulous craftsmen were known to swap ultramarine for smalt or indigo and pocket the difference; if they were caught, the swindle left their reputation in ruin. Read More