October 10, 2017 Arts & Culture The Philosophy of Fly-Fishing By John Knight When I was seventeen, I drove to Missoula, Montana, to learn how to fly-fish. The town is one of the best places to fish in the country. Rivers with names like the Bitterroot and Blackfoot crisscross the valley harboring trout the size of walruses. I spent that summer learning to cast and looking for the eddies and pools where fish might be lurking. I tried a thousand different flies and a hundred different rivers, and though I tensed my entire body to be ready for a strike, though I was living with a friend who made his living as a fishing guide, in three months I didn’t catch a single fish. Not one. Published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler might best be described as a curiosity cabinet of a pious Renaissance naturalist. Framed as a dialogue between a veteran angler, Pescator, and his eager student, Venator, the book came recommended by practiced anglers and seemed to promise some bit of knowledge I was lacking. Next to descriptions of fish like pike (“a solitary, melancholy, and a bold Fish”), and bream (“scales set in excellent order”), were poems by George Herbert. Alongside a cheery round of fishing songs, I found instructions for making fishing line from horse hair (“take care that your hair be round and clear, and free from galls or scabs or frets”). I discovered that it was better to be “a civil, well govern’d well grounded, temperate, poor Angler, than a drunken Lord,” and that the clever angler would keep about two thousand black beetles alive through the winter in a firkin. Wasps are good bait if you dip their heads in blood, and if you wish to fish with maggots (and you are likely to wish it), find a “fly-blown” dead cat and you will soon be well prepared. Also “the crumbs of white bread and honey made into paste is good bait for a Carp.” My curiosity was pricked, but I doubted I was becoming a better fisherman. Modern fly-fishing is so different from what Walton practiced in the seventeenth century that the similarities perhaps begin and end with the fish. Whereas we have a cornucopia of expertly tied artificial flies, floating nylon line, and evolved casting techniques, Walton didn’t even have a reel—he just used a stick with hair tied to the end. To entice the trout, he might employ a fragrant oil; to seduce perch, he would select a minnow, a feather, or a cork, though he would not dare to try his luck before the mulberry trees were in bud. It seemed more like witchcraft than fishing. Read More
October 10, 2017 Comics War and Peace Clickbait By Tom Gauld From Baking with Kafka, by Tom Gauld. Printed with the permission of Drawn & Quarterly.
October 6, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Caterpillars, Cells, and Charlottesville By The Paris Review From Fabiola Ferrero’s photo-essay on Venezuela, linked in Todd Pruzan’s Tinyletter. All week, Sadie looks forward to the stern diktats and severe pronunciamentos in Sam Sifton’s cooking newsletter (“I loathe accounts of slaves peeling shrimp”). Me, I like to take it a little easier with Todd Pruzan’s Superb + Solid, a TinyLetter devoted to Pruzan’s long-held interests in graphic design, politics, music, and whatever catches his eye and ear. In the current issue, Pruzan reprints a photo-essay on Venezuela; he also reprints a psyops flyer dropped over Europe during World War II; and he reviews the score of an ambient iPhone game. I don’t even know what that is, but I have been following Pruzan’s interests since he helped start McSweeney’s, and even before that, and they are contagious. —Lorin Stein The first deception in Henry Green’s Concluding is the simplicity of the cover. There is nothing so minimal to be found within the novel, which is lush enough to get lost in. Green’s novel, written in 1948 and republished by New Directions this month, has tempting fairy-tale elements. The fog lifts on a glorious summer day on an estate in rural England. The “Great Place” has been converted to a girls institute for “Service” (Green’s use of capitalization creates an ever-rising totem of bureaucratic satire). The institute is run by two power-hungry matrons whose sworn enemy is an old, retired scientist, Rock, who is a parishioner on the school’s grounds. The novel takes place over one long day, the day of the annual dance. In the summer haze, there is plenty of shadow and light. At the start of the novel, two girls are missing from the school and, though this is sinister, their fate fades in and out of focus in a way that makes the reader fill complicit. There are plenty of distractions. Rock has three white animals: a goose named Ted, a cat named Alice, and a pig named Daisy. All the girls at the institute seem to have names beginning with the letter m, and there are approximately three hundred of them. Whether you will find this all fun will depend upon how much you like a high-hedged English maze and whether you can wink back at Green’s descriptions of scores of young girls slipping into sexuality. Green is pretty straight-faced: who the true innocents are is a matter of perspective. The book is at its best when it’s ambiguous: “Life and pursuit was fierce, as these girls came back to consciousness from the truce of a summer after luncheon before the business of the dance. For already the shadows were on the creep toward the mansion.” —Julia Berick Read More
October 6, 2017 On Music What Once Was Lost: Unfinding and Refinding Music History By Bradford Morrow Félix Vallotton, Lady at the Piano, 1904. Courtesy the Hermitage Museum. Most of us have, at one time or another, put something valuable in a supposedly safe place and then forgotten where we left it. Car keys, wallets, eyeglasses, cell phones—whether through distraction or neglect or diabolical misfortune, things disappear. And it’s not just household items. Over the centuries, more than a few of our most precious cultural artifacts have been lost in similar ways. This includes historically significant music manuscripts, a spate of which have turned up in recent years, to the delight of musicologists and listeners alike. Which is to say that sometimes, through an unpredictable combination of knowledge, awareness, sleuthing, and occasional pure luck, lost treasures are, like paradise, regained. Not long ago, when George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, was rummaging in a piano bench in Friar Park, the couple’s expansive and whimsical Gothic estate in Oxfordshire, she found a long-forgotten folder the late Beatle had left there. In it were twenty years of original documents, including the lyrics of a previously unknown song from the early seventies, “Hey Ringo.” Written as an imaginary dialogue between himself and Ringo, it is something of a lament about the Beatles’ breakup. Although George was as ready to move on as the others, this song sheds light on the close musical relationship between two of the most influential players in rock history. Read More
October 6, 2017 The Lives of Others The Short, Daring Life of Lilya Litvyak By Edward White Lilya Litvyak. On June 22, 1941, the Third Reich launched its ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was pestilential in scale; more than three million Axis soldiers swarmed Russia’s borders in a matter of hours, overwhelming Soviet defenses. Hitler regarded the peoples of the Soviet Union to be a subhuman rabble against whom victory was inevitable. But the supposed Untermensch turned out to be ferocious opponents, hardened by decades of deprivation and fueled by an unbending love of country. Among those supercharged patriots were eight hundred thousand women who volunteered for frontline action, in roles such as snipers, machine gunners, and tank drivers. Nearly two hundred thousand women served in air defense, including those who flew bombers and fighter planes in Air Group 122, at the time the world’s only all-female air-combat unit. It was established in the fall of 1941 by the twenty-nine-year-old navigator Marina Raskova. Thanks to a series of daring long-distance flights undertaken in the late 1930s, she was one of the most famous people in the Soviet Union, and a role model to millions of young women. Yet, Raskova’s reputation was to be surpassed by one of her students: the petite, baby-faced Lilya Litvyak, who became the world’s first female fighter ace, and is better known as the White Rose of Stalingrad. Read More
October 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Documenta’s False Optimism By Sarah Cowan The Google results for “he made the trains run on time” were loading slowly on my phone because the Wi-Fi wasn’t really working at the Frankfurt train station. I could glean from the summary text of the first results that the saying is a verified myth; it turns out there are no benefits to fascism. Information about my delayed train was echoing incoherently from the platform loudspeaker. I hadn’t slept since I woke up in New York twenty-four hours earlier and knew I would have to stay awake for another full day once I got to Kassel for Documenta 14. Documenta itself started as a postmortem on fascism, particularly the Nazi’s erasure of art history in service of a narrative considered more desirable. On my first afternoon there, a tour guide told me that the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode, wanted to “use art as a tool to restore the feelings and minds of the people.” He may have wanted to restore more than that, because in 1955, when he inaugurated the exhibition in his hometown of Kassel, the city was still being rebuilt. Kassel had been the site of a Nazi tank plant, and the city and its inhabitants were all but completely eviscerated by strategic Allied bombs between 1942 and 1945. Today, the city center is so bland that the most noticeable features are a Pizza Hut and a TJ Maxx. It doesn’t strike one immediately, nor after three days, as a site for global art-world tourism, but restoration can be another mode of erasure, and the entire event preserves a kind of normalcy through understatedness, with artwork quietly installed in storefronts and local businesses, hidden in public parks, former train stations, and municipal buildings, and snuck into the galleries of local museum collections, all with casual paper labels. The show is mounted every five years under the direction of a single curator. This year, the Polish curator Adam Szymczyk chose to speak to this decade’s political crisis by having the exhibition straddle Europe, with one foot in Kassel, the other in Athens. The show was joined under the title “Learning from Athens,” though I only had time to spend a weekend at the Kassel half. Read More