June 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Fun, Games By Sadie Stein Unknown painter, Melancholia (detail), 1528. It’ll be just lovely for you to play—it’ll be so hard. And there’s so much more fun when it is hard! ―Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna As regular readers of this space know, I try to see the silver linings in things. The other day, I was Pollyanna-ing around, trying to Glad Game a fit of depression, as is my wont. What’s good about this experience? I thought. And on the face of it, that’s a tricky one: it’s hard to find much to love about those days when you wake up filled with a vague, enervating dread and simultaneously want not to exist and to wonder how anyone, anywhere, has ever had the energy to go on a self-destructive tear. When you are overcome with guilt and shame. When you know that the next days will be given over to wrestling your brain into some semblance of normalcy, and that the effort will take everything you have. And that there’s no bravery or triumph in overcoming it, because to do so is only to regain normalcy—and if you’ve done your job right, no one will know there was ever anything wrong. Read More
June 2, 2015 Correspondence The Spit of Recollection By Dan Piepenbring Philip Larkin. A letter from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym, July 18, 1971. The pair enjoyed a long, warm correspondence beginning in 1961; they met, at last, in 1975, at the Randolph in Oxford. “I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape if colder,” Pym wrote in advance. “I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect.” In 1977, Larkin helped Pym find a wider audience by choosing her as the most underrated writer of the century. Duke’s Head Hotel, King’s Lynn,Norfolk Dear Barbara, I have a theory that “holidays” evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kin of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life. You’re about to point out the essential fallacy in this, viz., that we aren’t h. & c. in our daily lives, but it’s too late now, the evolution has taken place, and we do the world’s will, not our own, as Jack Tanner says in Man & Superman. Anyway, every year I take my mother away for a week, & this is it. God knows why I chose this place—well, there are certain basic requirements—must be fairly near where she lives, must have single rooms with private bathrooms & lift, must for preference be near the sea … even so, one can make grave errors, & I rather think this is one of them. One forgets that nobody stays in hotels these days except businessmen & American tourists: the food is geared to the business lunch or the steak-platter trade: portion-control is rampant, and the materials cheap anyway (or so I guess: three lamb chops I had were three uncuttable unchewable unanswerable arguments for entry into EEC if—as I suspect—they had made the frozen journey from New Zealand). The presence of the hotel in the Good Food Guide is nothing short of farce. Of course it’s a Trust House, which guarantees a kind of depersonalized dullness. Never stay at a Trust House. Read More
June 2, 2015 On Film Seeing Red By Willie Osterweil Anticommunism at the movies. You’re trying awful hard with all this patriotic eyewash.—Skip McCoy, Pickup on South Street If you’re feeling polemical, you might argue that all Hollywood cinema is anticommunist: as the central commodity of the culture industry, big studio movies are designed for nothing so much as circulating and producing capital. But if we want to talk Communist with a capital C—you know, where the C stands for USSR—then Hollywood’s anticommunist films are a special and specific genre of flops and farces, a cinematic tradition featuring such classics as I Married a Communist, The Red Menace, Assignment: Paris, and My Son John. (Spoiler: John’s a goddamned Bolshie!) The fifties saw the heyday of anticommie popcorn flicks. True, the silent era had its Bolshevism on Trial and Red Russia Revealed, and the eighties met with Soviet invasion in Red Dawn and some serious anti-Vietcong violence in the later Rambo movies. But when you wanna see a square-jawed U.S. American call a sweaty creep a commie and slug him in the mouth, it’s the postwar period you turn to. Though most of the era’s anticommunist films were too vulgar and outlandish to survive as anything other than hilarious artifacts—or as evidence of the ever-imperialist, state-serving agenda of the Hollywood apparatus, depending on which side of the bed you woke up on—a few, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street among them, are truly great works of cinema. (Granted, 1982’s Rambo: First Blood—if you excise the last four minutes, when Sly gives a speech crying about how hippies, those “maggots at the airport,” spit on him—is also pretty great.) Both are tense, pulpy noirs, both center around the sale of nuclear secrets, and both take anticommunism more as a genre then a narrative drive. But only one, Pickup on South Street (1953), is being revived this week at Film Forum, in New York. Read More
June 2, 2015 On the Shelf Urgent Questions for Librarians, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A question to an NYPL librarian from October 1976. Photo: NYPL, via the Guardian “My idea of hell on earth,” Philip Larkin wrote once, “is a literary party.” He had in mind the Oxford parties of his era, which, much like the Oxford parties of this era, comprised “a lot of sherry drill with important people.” But what if those parties were in fact really entertaining, as at least one guest avows they were? “God, they were fun. Ever since Mrs. Dylan Thomas, at a literary party, stuck her elbow into the bowl of ice cream that T. S. Eliot was eating from, before presenting it to the great poet with the instruction to ‘Lick it off,’ these things have been democratic, argumentative and often memorable.” “Please give me the name of a book that dramatizes bedbugs?” “What is the significance of the hip movement in the Hawaiian dance?” “Is it good poetry where every other line rhymes, instead of having each line rhyme with the one before it?” Questions for librarians at the New York Public Library before there was the Internet. Saul Bellow’s portraitist remembers their encounter: “Bellow talked all the while, about life in New York when he was younger, his cohorts and various writers. What a duplistic moment for me: I had to ask him to be quiet so I could take some close-ups. He was fidgety even while cooperating. He picked up a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets and began reading, first quietly, and then aloud. I listened for a few minutes, and cringing apologetically, shushed him again.” If Louise Erdrich could go back in time, she’d go to prison, as long as the company was good: “I am stranded for a few days in a comfortable jail cell with Walt Whitman and Henry James. I take one side of the room, share a bunk with Emily Dickinson. We listen in on their awkward conversations, exchange sharp glances of amusement.” Max Mathews, who died in April, wasn’t the first person to make sounds with a computer—but his experiments with an IBM 704 mainframe in 1957 were the first to use “a replicable combination of hardware and software that allowed the user to specify what tones he wanted to hear.” He was the first computer musician: “He provided the initial research for virtually every aspect of computer music, from his early work with programming languages for synthesis and composition … to foundational research in real-time performance … Max also helped start the conversation about how humans were meant to interact with computers by developing everything from modified violins to idiosyncratic control systems such as the Radio Baton.”
June 1, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A Surly Clang By Sadie Stein Laurits Andersen Ring, In the Month of June, 1899. And what is so rare as a day in June?Then, if ever, come perfect days;Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,And over it softly her warm ear lays;Whether we look, or whether we listen,We hear life murmur, or see it glisten …―James Russell Lowell Even people who don’t know poetry—and who certainly don’t know much about James Russell Lowell—have often heard the June line from “The Vision of Sir Launfal.” This is probably a bit of oral tradition at work; pick up any school primer from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and you’re likely to find an excerpt from the poem. Generations of American schoolkids probably recited it and, in the way of recitations, remembered it instead of much more important things all their lives. (“What is so rare as a day in June,” my grandfather would sometimes say, in June. That was all he remembered—that and “hie me away to a woodland scene,” which I’ve never managed to place. But in those moments, it was 1920s Arkansas.) Lowell—Boston Brahmin, poet, satirist, Atlantic editor, abolitionist, and diplomat—was a major cultural figure in intellectual circles of his day. And a popular writer, too. Like the other Fireside Poets (Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, and Holmes) his themes were frequently romantic or heroic, and “The Vision of Sir Launfal” is both. Here’s how Lowell describes it in the poem’s 1848 preface: Read More
June 1, 2015 Arts & Culture I Was Dreambox By Leah Ollman Wearing a sandwich board for Richard Kraft’s “100 Walkers.” Photo: Helen Kim On a warm, Saturday afternoon in mid-April, I stood among ninety-nine others in grid formation in a West Hollywood parking lot, beneath a radiant red-and-gold Shepard Fairey mural. We wore all black—pants, blazers, and bowler hats. Each of us also bore a sandwich board with an image or phrase on the front and a different one on the back: a photograph of the ocean or the stars; a detail from an illustrated children’s book; a picture of a fiery, comet-tailed rocket; a portrait of a dissident, activist, or athlete; a close-up of a single human eye or a snarling dog; a snippet of a Dutch floral still life; a rendering of hands clasped in prayer or holding a lit match. The texts, in slender caps against vibrant emerald, violet, tangerine, or magenta, issued hopeful declarations (THE FUTURE IS FEMALE) and unfortunate truths (THE PEOPLE ADORE AUTHORITY!), cartoonish sound effects (EEEEEEK), commands (ABANDON SHIP!), questions (AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?), warnings (BEWARE OF THE RABBLE), and urgent, private reminders (I MUST TELL THE FLOWERS I MUST TELL THE TREES). We stood in position for several minutes, a curious and dazzling assembly, a tenuous poem, a solemn, slyly subversive army. Then, one by one, we were dismissed according to our designated start phrases—body parts in Cockney slang. From head to toe, the corps dispersed. I answered to Dreambox and left through the lot’s south gate. My five-mile route took me along the glare of Sunset Boulevard and down jacaranda-shaded, bougainvilla-draped residential streets. As directed by the orchestrator of “100 Walkers,” Richard Kraft, I faced forward, kept a steady pace and neutral expression, and stayed silent. Read More