September 8, 2015 On the Shelf Calvino Late to the Movies, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Italo Calvino, no doubt pondering a film to which he has arrived in a less than timely fashion. Today in strange testing procedures involving nonsense words: Oxford applicants in classics and oriental studies, among other fields, are asked to translate phrases from invented languages with names such as Dobla and Kalaamfaadi—and the sample texts are full of charmingly, aggravatingly old-world stock phrases. “The scullery-maid loves the footman.” (Pante sirar tomut.) “Does the dowager rebuke the earl?” (Clarut tikehar mage.) For their seeming silliness, though, the tests are a strong indicator of your aptitude with languages. “It’s entirely possible that the kind of intellectual agility such languages call for is a hidden strength in many students who don’t know they have it. The thing that looks most intimidating might be the thing that should inspire confidence.” Fifty years after they were first published on seven-inch vinyl, rare and excellent readings from James Baldwin, John Updike, William Styron, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and James Jones have been rediscovered and reissued by Calliope Author Readings. They date to a time when (a) recording technology was still gloriously analog and (b) giving readings was still a novelty, rather than self-promotional essential: “Calliope began in the 1960s as a pioneering venture in the early days of literary recordings. With little more at their disposal than a passion for books, optimism and sheer nerve, three young entrepreneurs in Boston persuaded some of the most original twentieth century American authors to read from their works.” Toward the end of his life, Francis Bacon had ascended into art-world renown; he spent most of his time drinking and seething. A new memoir from Michael Peppiatt, who became the artist’s “scribe, drinking partner, estate agent, confidante, gatekeeper and admirer, and the recipient of lavish dinners, drinks, flats, paintings and acquaintances,” captures Bacon in decline: “Dazzled by the endless procession of big-name wines in similar bars, Peppiatt seems not to notice that Bacon repeats the same maxims again and again, almost word for word—stock phrases on painting about ‘immediacy’ and the ‘nervous system’ and a rehearsed bit on the nothingness that stretches before and after life—as if prepping his initiate to write about him. Impressive once, cumulatively they are undermining, especially when heard sober.” Italo Calvino loved to go to the movies. And he put forth a convincing case for arriving late, too—an argument I plan to use the next time I’m dragging my friends to a movie fifteen minutes after it started. “Italian spectators barbarously made entering after the film already started a widespread habit, and it still applies today. We can say that back then we already anticipated the most sophisticated of modern narrative techniques, interrupting the temporal thread of the story and transforming it into a puzzle to put back together piece by piece or to accept in the form of a fragmentary body. To console us further, I’ll say that attending the beginning of the film after knowing the ending provided additional satisfaction: discovering not the unraveling of mysteries and dramas, but their genesis; and a vague sense of foresight with respect to the characters.” Like many of us, Dennis Cooper loves GIFs; unlike many of us, he’s written a novel in GIFs called Zac’s Haunted House, and has finished another. “Cooper finds the GIF work ‘weirdly very emotional.’ And with GIFs, he contends, ‘fictional emotional displays and “real” displays are made indistinguishable … There is also, for Cooper—and, it would, seem, much of the Internet-using public—something inherently comic about GIFs. The comedy, he says, is of a particularly physical kind. He has noted before that GIFs in which real-life people fall off bunk beds or have other accidents are often edited so that we don’t see the painful consequences. And yet, as the action is repeated indefinitely, with a ‘kind of heartlessness,’ the implications of the violence seep out nonetheless.”
September 4, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cats, Cattiness, Correction By Dan Piepenbring From Best of Enemies. I can’t say that I’m much of a fan of Charles Bukowski’s, but I’ve been marveling at our shared love of cats, via a forthcoming collection of short pieces—verse and bits of prose—about or involving his feline friends. It’s endearing to see a grizzled, vulgar street poet bent to the will of a small cat. He recognizes their complexity and frequently shows a candid concern for their opinions of him: “My cat shit in my archives / he climbed into my Golden State Sunkist / orange box / and he shit on my poems / my original poems / saved for the university archives. // that one-eared fat black critic / he signed me off.” But then, cats are the ultimate tough motherfuckers, as Bukowski calls one feline companion, and who better to appreciate the resilience of a stray than another stray: “and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about / life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed / shot runover de-tailed cat before them and I say, ‘look, look / at this!’ ” —Nicole Rudick For those of us who came to political awareness during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, it’s difficult to imagine a time when television news organizations weren’t first and foremost platforms for punditry. But, of course, this wasn’t always the case—a point that lingers in the foreground of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s brilliant new documentary, Best of Enemies. The film, at its heart, is a portrait of William Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal, who, in the words of one commentator, may just as easily have represented “matter and antimatter.” Each was the leading public intellectual for his respective political movement, and each despised the other—so much so that their face-offs, in a series of debates staged during the 1968 presidential conventions, reshaped the landscape of political television. Like any good documentary, Best of Enemies left me eager to devour more of the Buckley-Vidal ideological battle, much of which, thankfully, is readily available online—starting with complete archival footage of the debates themselves. —Stephen Hiltner Read More
September 4, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A Journey of Discovery By Sadie Stein From the cover of South Mountain Road. “My mother killed herself on the first day of spring.” That’s the first line of Hesper Anderson’s memoir, South Mountain Road: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery. Please persevere. And don’t be put off by the subtitle—even if the squishy word “journey” gives you hives, the book won’t. I promise. This is a straightforward recommendation—a prolonged staff pick, if you like. If “September Song”—discussed recently in these pages—feels inherently melancholy, the standard comes by this honestly: its lyricist, Maxwell Anderson, led a life marked by sadness. The autobiographical Morning, Winter, and Night (written under a pseudonym) recounts a gothic childhood filled with abuse. And before he began his long and successful career as a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, Anderson lost a number of jobs over his politics. Read More
September 4, 2015 On the Shelf Flush with Talent, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Minako Nishiyama, Miki Kasahara, Yuma Haruna, Melting Dream, 2014. Photo by Yasunori Takeuchi. Courtesy Toilennale Joy Williams has a new collection out, and a reporter has found her in rare form: “Williams does not have an email address. She uses a flip phone and often writes in motels and friends’ houses on old Smith-Coronas; she brings one with her and keeps others everywhere she stays … Williams now splits her time among Tucson, her daughter’s home in Maine and Laramie, migrating across the country with her dogs in her Toyota, which has 160,000 miles on it but is pretty new by her standards. (Her last car, her old Bronco, neared 360,000.) She eats a lot of Weetabix.” You should be proud of your name: it’s yours. It denotes y–o–u, and no one can take that away from you. Unfortunately, things get a bit complicated if your parents happen to have given you a necronym, that is, a death name: “It usually means a name shared with a dead sibling. Until the late nineteenth century, necronyms were not uncommon among Americans and Europeans. If a child died in infancy, his or her name was often given to the next child, a natural consequence of high birth rates and high infant mortality rates … In their 1989 Dictionary of Superstitions, folklorists Iona Opie and Moira Tatum offer one reason for the necronym’s decline: many parents feared it was a murderous curse.” “Unless ice burns and burning fire cools / No bard could look on you and not speak out / It can not be that I monopolize / The making of the songs that give you praise / Or that such pools as are your dearest eyes / Have just one bather.” These lines, and about eight others like them, are worth seventy-five hundred pounds. That’s not because they’re excellent, necessarily. It’s because Ezra Pound wrote them. They’re from an unpublished sonnet he wrote to the British painter Isabel Codrington in April 1909; it sold at auction earlier this week. “He obviously admired her,” said a perceptive employee at the auction house. Let’s go on an adventure with the passive voice, shall we? Watch as, step-by-grammatically-irksome-step, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” becomes “Speed was involved in a jumping-related incident while a fox was brown.” “We have finally fully arrived at the ultimate in passive voice: the past exonerative tense, so named because culpability is impossible when actions no longer exist. For the most extensive erasure of direct communicative value, the original object can now even be removed entirely.” Duchamp is old hat. The future of toilet art is, like the future of most things, in Japan, where an exhibition called Toilennale “brings together Japanese artists who have transformed sixteen public restrooms into sites for art installations … one park lavatory literally becomes a sweet site, transformed inside and out by a trio of artists into an enormous piece of pink candy titled ‘Melting Dreams.’ ”
September 3, 2015 Books The Citadel By Sasha Abramsky In his ninety-three years, Chimen Abramsky amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. Here, his grandson Sasha explores some of the rarities. From the cover of The House of Twenty Thousand Books. Much later in his life, Chimen turned his eye to cataloging his library. It was a task he stubbornly refused to finish, despite having cataloged many of the world’s most important Judaica libraries for Sotheby’s, despite having even compiled a catalog of catalogs that he would occasionally show to fellow bibliographers. “It takes the magic out of it. It becomes a thing to sell, not a real collection. Once you catalogue the book, it becomes a dead object almost,” was how the rare-books dealer Christopher Edwards, who knew Chimen decades later, interpreted this reluctance. Chimen loved being courted by would-be buyers; adored being taken out to restaurants and clubs, such as the Garrick in central London, where dealers could flatter him by talking about the importance of his collection. But when push came to shove, he did not want to admit that, apart from a few missing pieces (he bemoaned the fact that he did not have any original issues of Marx’s newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne during the revolutionary year of 1848 and into 1849), his collection—his life’s project—was complete. Even when his insurance agent, Will Burns, repeatedly wrote him letters requesting that he provide a catalog of his library, Chimen managed to find one excuse after another. He was too busy; he was traveling; he was ill; he would do it next month. “I had hoped to do it during the summer vacation,” he informed Burns in late October 1981, “but unfortunately, as Miriam had an accident in Israel, I was unable to do so. I hope to complete it towards the end of January.” He did not, and Burns wrote him several more letters on the matter before eventually giving up. The collection remained insured only as general contents; had disaster struck and the House of Books burned to the ground, Chimen would have found, to his horror, that his inability to provide a catalog was a costly oversight. What Chimen did do, though, was pen a series of memoranda about how he had acquired some of his rarest prizes. He wrote, for example, about how, in the early 1950s, he had managed to buy William Morris’s complete collection of the Socialist League’s journal, The Commonweal, along with the wooden box, with a rexine cover dyed blue and lined with a white feltlike material, that Morris himself had constructed to house a 1539 Bible, and in which, ultimately, he kept his copies of the revolutionary newspaper. The pages of the publication—its words printed in double columns originally on a monthly basis, then later weekly, from 1886 until 1895, and filled with the revolutionary musings of Morris, Marx’s daughter Eleanor, and other radical luminaries of the late-Victorian years—had passed from Morris to his close friend, the typographer Emery Walker; from Walker to his daughter; and from her to a poet named Norman Hidden. Chimen eventually bought it from Hidden for £50. And there they stayed, in their Bible box, high on a wooden shelf in the upstairs hallway at 5 Hillway, for more than half a century. Read More
September 3, 2015 From the Archive How to Name Your Baby By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Elmar Ersch Whenever anyone frowns upon the Daily for publishing work they find obscene, frivolous, or otherwise undeserving of the prestigious Paris Review name, I want to direct their attention to our seventies issues. Readers who think we’ve published sixty-two years of Hemingway interviews and gentle sestinas will be surprised by the magazine’s irreverence. The Review of the seventies was, if the archive is any indication, a relaxed, profligate, and singularly fun place to work. It published some great literature. It also published, in the Summer 1976 issue, fourteen pages of silly names. John Train’s “How to Name Your Baby,” republished in full below, is one of my all-time favorite finds from the archive. Referring to the work of a certain Office of Nomenclature Stabilization—an office that has since lapsed into obsolescence, I regret to learn from Google—it’s gloriously inessential, though I guess you could argue that it predicted the rise of the listicle. Train, who is eighty-seven now, cofounded the magazine and was its first managing editor; this piece only burnishes his legacy, and in the eighties he turned it into a line of books, including John Train’s Remarkable Names, Even More Remarkable Names, and Remarkable Names of Real People. Read More