August 24, 2015 On the Shelf The Horror of Philosophy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From This Magazine Is Haunted, April 1952. Newly declassified documents have revealed that the British government spied on Doris Lessing for some twenty years and that they’d thoroughly imbibed the rhetoric of J. Edgar Hoover: “Her communist sympathies have been fanned almost to the point of fanaticism owing to her upbringing in Rhodesia, which has brought out in her a deep hatred of the colour bar,” MI6 wrote of Lessing, whose “plump build” they were also sure to mention. “Colonial exploitation is her pet theme and she has now nearly become as irresponsible in her statements as … saying that everything black is wonderful and that all men and all things white are vicious.” Say what you will about The End of the Tour as a depiction of David Foster Wallace—it is, if nothing else, a smart take on the mechanics and ethics of celebrity profiles, the lifeblood of the magazine industry. “The movie is apt in its insinuation that there is sometimes very little daylight between doing the reporting necessary for a magazine profile of someone and compiling a surveillance dossier upon him or her … the very structure of the reporting process, with its enforced proximity, can engender a precarious intimacy, even while the ultimate purpose of this intimacy—an article that is to be written by one participant about the other—is never forgotten.” Teju Cole saw a photograph by René Burri: four men on a rooftop in São Paulo. He resolved to discover the circumstances of its creation, and—why not?—to replicate it, if possible: “To me, it literally portrays the levels of social stratification and the enormous gap between those above and those below … ‘Those four guys just came from nowhere, and went to nowhere,’ Burri said of the men in his photograph.” On philosophy and horror and the horror of philosophy and the philosophy of horror: “Any reader of difficult philosophy books will have experienced their own kind of horror of philosophy, reinforced today by public intellectuals, who most often use philosophy as a smokescreen for selling self-help books and promoting the cult of the guru … philosophy explains anything and everything, telling us that a horror films means this or that, reveals this or that anxiety, is representative of this or that cultural moment that we are living in, and so on. Perhaps genres such as the horror genre are interesting not because we can devise ingenious explanatory models for them, but because they cause us to question some of our most basic assumptions about the knowledge-production process itself.” If you’re looking for a good way to kill a lot of time at the end of the summer, head to Berlin, where, in a longstanding ritual, a cinema deep underground hosts a complete and unabridged viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography. “International filmgoers book their flights as soon as the schedule is released, some in order to see the same set of films they saw last year. Judging from my seatmates at several screenings, the appeal crosses generational as well as national divides. The people want Tarkovsky, they want him on celluloid, and they want him whole.”
August 21, 2015 Look Beardsley’s Poe By Dan Piepenbring Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, made to accompany Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Beardsley, born on August 21, 1872, favored the grotesque and the erotic in his drawings and had a large influence on the developing the Art Nouveau style, though he lived only to twenty-five. He also illustrated work by Oscar Wilde and Alexander Pope and helped found The Yellow Book. From “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Read More
August 21, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Robot Maids, Airships, Geocities By The Paris Review From the cover of Past Futures. Many of the past’s technological prophesies seem so quaint today—nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners, urban transportation via zeppelins, clean car emissions, robot maids—and sometimes I’m not sure there’s intelligent life on this planet, much less another one. But I’m heartened by the new book Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travels, and Postwar Art of the Americas. It served as the catalogue to a show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art earlier this year, and part of its aim is corrective: though the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in the space race, they didn’t have a monopoly on exploring imagined worlds and ideas. Artists and writers in Latin America in the 1960s and seventies were also giving thought to what might be. Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros imagined the cosmic landscape in paintings like Earth as seen from the stratosphere. Argentineans Ana Kamien and Marilú Marini choreographed a dance spectacle called Marvila the marvelous woman vs. Astra the super sneak from Planet Ultra and her destructive monster. One of my favorites is Paraguayan Carlos Colombino’s Cosmonaut, made from oil on carved wood, in which a spaceman’s face looks like it’s being sucked out, tentacle-like, from his helmet. It’s at once elegant and frightening, old and new—like the future itself. —Nicole Rudick There’s an unexpected coup thirty minutes into Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond. The protagonist—Graham Dorrington, an aeronautical engineer who’s brought his latest airship to Guyana for its inaugural launch—is suddenly and irrevocably overshadowed by Mark Anthony Yhap, a local who’s been hired to help with the project. You can sense it coming. Dorrington’s enthusiastic affect, while endearing, has begun to spoil, and into the film’s growing protagonistic void steps a new—and more true—Herzogian hero. Gazing up at the airship and reclining in a clear-plastic inflatable armchair, Yhap delivers a Dude-esque monologue that completely refocuses the film. And, improbably, his appeal only grows from there: subsequent scenes depict his love for his red rooster and his habit of looking out at Kaieteur Falls through a single droplet of water. (Here, again, he delivers another of his unforgettable lines.) The film might not be Herzog’s greatest work, but Yhap alone makes it worth watching. —Stephen Hiltner From The White Diamond. The Internet, as it matured, was bound to long for its low-tech past. For those who grew up on dial-up, it’s been fascinating to watch the growing nostalgia for the Web of the nineties; what began as a couple of wistful listicles has exploded into an art form, one that critiques the branded monotony of social media by remembering the alarums and excursions of simpler times. Last year, Paul Ford’s tilde.club invited users to unshackle themselves from the tedium of Facebook by building simple, custom-programmed homepages that recalled the unpretentious spirit of early university Web sites; Windows 93 emulated the unstable, rough-edged aesthetic of Microsoft at its peak; and now comes Cameron’s World, a sprawling digital collage that comprises more than seven hundred gifs and graphics rescued from the defunct Yahoo! GeoCities community, which was, in its way, the original social network. Though it’s easy to dismiss as a mere novelty, the collage, designed by the artist Cameron Askin, is a meticulous and weirdly affecting memento: it hearkens back to “a time when a website really was a ‘site,’ ” as Askin told Hyperallergic. “A homepage was thought of as a second ‘home.’ There’s more of a spatial sense to the online world.” Compare that to today, when controlled environments like Facebook “iron out many of the wilder intricacies of personal taste that used to define self-expression on personal homepages.” —Dan Piepenbring Read More
August 21, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Courtesy Counts By Sadie Stein The MTA takes a stand against clipping and primping. Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story. —E. A. Poe With time to kill before my train, I moseyed into the New York Transit Museum’s shop at Grand Central Station. A train-mad little boy was going wild, and a clerk spoke to his mother sharply about not touching, which seemed to me tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. There were lots of T-shirts with the logos of different subway lines on them. The shop was also selling merchandise bearing images from the MTA’s recent “Courtesy Counts” campaign—cheeky subway posters prohibiting “man-spreading,” in-car performances, incivility. My favorite is the one that portrays a female figure brushing her hair while a nearby male clips his nails. “Clipping? Primping?” it says. “Everybody wants to look their best, but it’s a subway car, not a restroom.” Read More
August 21, 2015 On the Shelf Britain’s Best-selling Sex-Ed Guide, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Aristotle’s Masterpiece. First published in London in 1684, Aristotle’s Masterpiece is “one of the best-selling books ever produced in English on sex and making babies.” Aristotle, at the time, had assumed a role in the popular culture as an ancient sex expert; “his” sex guide reads in parts like the Kama Sutra in cheeky British doggerel, and it’s complete with a woodcut of a woman in dishabille, so teenagers probably masturbated to it. “But the book also provided a solid framework of contemporary knowledge about the basics of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant health, detailing topics such as the signs of pregnancy, how to tell false labor from true, the various positions the baby might present in, et cetera. Not surprisingly, since it was plagiarized from another midwifery book, this information was largely unexceptional.” It makes a cameo in Ulysses. “I attend a diplomatic soiree and as I am leaving my pants fall down (Is it desire?) … Cannibals. You were on an island and some black cannibals jumped out and they put you on the grill and poured oil on you. You, so peaceful. They ate you and they reported saying that the meat was hard and had to fatten more.” Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered the neuron and hypothesized the function of synapses—which was a boon for science and all—but more important, he kept a dream journal, and it is piquant. Art has come to valorize depression, clearly, and to see genius in melancholy—but in the culture at large, thanks to pharmacology, depressives are still stigmatized. “Stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person … On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself … The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head.” Considered as a text, the Nashville music industry’s collected lyrics have one clear idée fixe: adultery. Even in the twenties, tunes like “The Jealous Sweetheart” and “The Mountaineer’s Courtship” wept over the wayward heart; by the time “Jolene” came around, the style had become an archetype, if not a formula. “Cheating songs have a lot of moving parts. All of them have at least three characters, each of which can be the narrator or the person being addressed … Country music has a somewhat limited palate, and adultery is one its primary colors. ‘To say something fresh and literal is the hardest thing’ … But if you have a mess of variables to slot into your tried-and-true story structure, it gets a little easier.” The refined songcraft of one James “Jimmy” Buffett, meanwhile, focuses its talents almost exclusively on epicurean pleasures. “Food and drink are central to the ethos of Jimmy Buffett, and even the most casual fan can rattle off a handful of songs that orbit around seaside eats. There are lesser known gems like 1994’s ‘Fruitcakes’ (Half-baked cookies in the oven / Half-baked people on the bus / There’s a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us) and 1970s classic ‘Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit’ (Grapefruit, a bathin’ suit, chew a little Juicy Fruit / Wash away the night).”
August 20, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Peckish By Sadie Stein Ludwig Knaus, Mein Napf ist leer, 1886. I dislike the term hangry, a neologism conflating hungry and angry and thus describing the rage induced by hunger. Like PMS, it seems to conveniently dismiss any legitimate anger that may arise in the course of a blood-sugar crash. And for those of us who are both frequently ravenous and frequently furious, it doesn’t allow for the possibility of much reasonable irritation. Besides, it rests on the supposition that there is such a thing as unclouded judgment, and that feels potentially very dangerous. Aside from that, the word itself is ugly. It evokes airplane hangars and chewy steaks and public executions and boring games played on pieces of scratch paper. It does not trip off the tongue. Hunger and anger, as words, both have such dignity, such grace—they are serious feelings in response to real stimuli. They are noble marble statues. Hangry, by contrast, is a Shoebox greeting card. But it is spiritually ugly, too. To be hangry is a luxury. The very use of the term suggests that hunger and suffering are so remote as to be irrelevant to the conversation. I don’t mind telling you that now that I think about it, it gets me absolutely furious. That said, only the other day, in the supermarket, I felt an almost overwhelming wave of rage crash over me because someone happened to already be standing in front of a spice I wanted to inspect. The intensity of the rage alarmed me, and I had to give myself a little talking to, and a bag of gummy bears besides. It is, after all, this sort of behavior that leads to charges of irrationality. Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review and the Daily’s correspondent.