Futurism Is Still Influential, Despite Its Dark Side

From Smithsonian:

Articulations-Armored-Train-in-Action-520In 2014 the Guggenheim Museum in New York will open the biggest exhibition ever held on the Italian Futurists; the event has been foreshadowed by an article in Smithsonian, accompanied by an online photo gallery of Futurist masterpieces. It’s a good moment to reflect a bit on what Futurism represents, how it happened and how it has transformed the world we live in. Today we think of Futurism as a visual style—a sort of animated Cubism that endows images and objects with a feeling of windblown movement. Remarkably, however, the movement began with a manifesto, and a series of “happenings,” before the artists associated with it had developed a new style.

The movement was first trumpeted in a manifesto by the poet Filippo Marinetti,which was published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. The intention of the movement, Marinetti explained, was to smash anything old, sentimental or conventional and create a new manly culture based on machines, speed and modernity. Hailing the “beauty of speed,” he argued that museums libraries, academies and “venerated” cities had to be destroyed, since they represented the culture of the past, and were stale and reactionary, as were “morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” In a famous phrase, Marinetti declared that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” (a reference to the second century Greek sculpture of the goddess Victory). Proud of their ability to irritate the public, the Futurists staged performances in Turin, Naples, Milan and other cities, at which they recited poetry and declaimed their manifestos while the audience responded by showering them with rotten fruit and vegetables and other objects. Developing a Futurists style was clearly a necessary next step. In a later manifesto of April 11, 1910, the Futurists argued that “the construction of pictures is stupidly traditional,” but finding an appropriate visual language for their iconoclastic ideas about modern life was not easy. The early works of the Futurists used the techniques of divisionism, which created patterns with colored dots, and Post-Impressionism, which employed bold, decorative shapes. But they seemed to have quickly sensed that they needed to do something more visually exciting.

More here.

the revolution and space

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In 1991, a Libyan thinker exiled in Geneva, al-Sadiq al-Nayhum, published a book of collected essays in Arabic with the provocative title, “Islam in Captivity: Who Stole the Mosque and Where Did Friday Disappear?”[2] The thesis of the book was not novel. A-Nayhum posited that the failure of modernity to take roots in the Arab world was due in large part to it having grown out of Western history and developed in a Western cultural and epistemological context, which is incompatible with the culture and knowledge nurtured by Islam. Al-Nayhum, predictably, advocated a return to the pure, foundational Islam to rebuild the battered and confused Arab societies.[3] This solution has been proposed by many thinkers before and since, especially after modern Arab states failed to achieve the promised socioeconomic development or military parity with Israel, which had scored a resounding victory against them in 1967.[4] Al-Nayhum, however, differed from other likeminded thinkers in his attention to the role of space in framing, sustaining, and ultimately molding the Islamic political tradition. His focus was of course on the quintessential Islamic space, the mosque, hence its appearance in his title.

more from Nasser Rabbat at Critical Inquiry here.

caligula

Caligula

Caligula occupied the Roman throne for just four years, between 37 and 41 AD. He was the son of the glamorous imperial prince Germanicus (who died in mysterious circumstances in Syria in 19 AD), and spent much of his childhood on military campaigns with his father. Hence his name: although he was born Gaius Caesar Germanicus (and his official title was the Emperor Gaius), the soldiers nicknamed him ‘Caligula’ or ‘Little Boots’, after the mini-military uniform, boots included, in which he used to be dressed – and it stuck. At the death of the elderly Emperor Tiberius, he was eased onto the throne, aged 24, ahead of Tiberius’ natural grandson, who was murdered not long afterwards. The popularity of his father – plus the fact that, through his mother, Agrippina, he was a direct natural descendant of Augustus, the first emperor – provided a convenient veil for what must have been a nasty power struggle, or coup. But another coup soon followed. Four years later Caligula was assassinated, and the throne passed to his uncle Claudius, found, as the story goes, hiding behind a curtain in the palace, so terrified was he in the confusion that followed the murder.

more from Mary Beard at the LRB here.

‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ A Blogger’s Response

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Mona Kareem in Al-Monitor:

Eltahawy says “they hate us and we need to admit that!” And then she lists more than three pages of recent violations of women’s rights in the Arab world. The issue at stake here is not whether women are discriminated against in the Arab world, as that argument is well established and is only denied by Islamist maniacs. The issue here is: how the hell can those violations prove an argument of “hate?” Eltahawy argues against Arab claims that Jews or Israelis hate us, but she uses the same logic when she puts Arab men under an umbrella of a single emotion: hate.

What should be considered is that we live in patriarchal societies, and the foundations of Middle East-based monotheistic religious texts are established on this patriarchy. Eltahawy’s claim not only degrades Arab culture in general but also patronizes Arab men and women by making the whole struggle for gender equality a conflict between the two sexes based on personal emotions.

Another problem I have with the general speech of “Arab feminism” is the term in itself. I really dislike seeing more than 20 different cultures put under one roof. Eltahawy is not a Pan-Arabist, I am assuming, yet she falls for this very common oriental division imposed by the media and others. Anyone knows how radically divergent the “Arab World” is: the North-African Arab culture is a far different culture from that of the Arabian Gulf.

Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity

Belén Fernández in Jacobin:

ScreenHunter_02 Apr. 24 16.36Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”

Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.”

According to Friedman, the purpose of the auto-interviews is merely to analyze his feelings on certain issues. Given that his feelings tend to undergo drastic inter- and sometimes intra-columnar modifications, one potentially convenient byproduct of such an approach to journalism is the impression that Friedman interviews many more people than he actually does.

For example, while one of Friedman’s alter-egos considered blasphemous the “Saddamist” notion that the Iraq war had anything to do with oil, another was of the opinion that the war was “partly about oil,” and another appeared to be under the impression that it was entirely about oil, assigning the blame for U.S. troop deaths in Fallujah to Hummer proprietors. Despite Friedman’s identification as “a liberal on every issue other than this war,” competing layers of his persona defined said conflict as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” as well as part of a “neocon strategy.”

More here.

How a book about fish nearly sank Isaac Newton’s Principia

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

The-Royal-Society--engrav-007It was a salutary lesson for the Royal Society and made clear that the formidable intelligence of its scientific membership was no guarantee of sound business judgement.

The debacle played out in the 17th century when the country's most prestigious scientific organisation ploughed its money into the lavishly illustrated Historia Piscium, or History of Fishes, by John Ray and Francis Willughby.

Though groundbreaking in 1686, the book flopped and nearly broke the bank, forcing the Royal Society to withdraw from its promise to finance the publication of Newton's Principia, one of the most important works in the history of science.

Today, digital images from Historia Piscium, including a stunning engraving of a flying fish, are made available with more than a thousand others in a new online picture archive launched by the Royal Society.

The images span the society's 350-year history and include highlights from Robert Hooke's 17th century engravings of objects under the microscope; a committee member's doodle of Thomas Huxley from 1882; and the first sighting of a kangaroo, or perhaps a wallaby, by James Cook and the sailors aboard the Endeavour expedition in 1770. Notes accompanying the latter picture state: “it was of a light mouse colour, and in size and shape very much resembling a greyhound.”

More here.

The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets)

Karim Sadjadpour in Foreign Policy:

ScreenHunter_01 Apr. 24 16.22In the early years of the Iranian Revolution, an obscure cleric named Ayatollah Gilani became a sensation on state television by contemplating bizarre hypotheticals at the intersection of Islamic law and sexuality. One of his most outlandish scenarios — still mocked by Iranians three decades later — went like this:

Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let's assume that you're both nude, and you're erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?

Such tales of random ribaldry may sound anomalous in the seemingly austere, asexual Islamic Republic of Iran. But the “Gili Show,” as it came to be known, had quite the following among both the traditional classes, who were titillated by his taboo topics, and the Tehrani elite, who tuned in for comic relief. Gilani helped spawn what is now a virtual cottage industry of clerics and fundamentalists turned amateur sexologists offering incoherent advice on everything from quickies (“The man's goal should be to lighten his load as soon as possible without arousing his woman”) to masturbation (“a grave, grave sin which causes scientific and medical harm”).

More here.

the Knoedler scandal

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The e-mail that brought the art world’s latest scandal to light came to Knoedler last November 29. It disclosed the results of forensic tests done to a Jackson Pollock painting, Untitled 1950, that the gallery had sold in 2007 for $17 million to Pierre Lagrange, a London hedge-fund multi-millionaire. Done in the painter’s classic drip-and-splash style and signed “J. Pollock,” the modest-size painting (15 inches by 281 1/2 inches) was found to contain yellow paint pigments not commercially available until about 1970. This was discouraging, since the painter’s fateful car crash had occurred on August 11, 1956. Lagrange wasn’t just discouraged. He was furious. Fiftyish, given to long brown locks and blue jeans, he had startled London society in 2011 by leaving his wife and three children, only to take up with a 42-year-old male fashion designer named Roubi L’Roubi. Selling the painting had been part of his effort to divide assets in connection with a divorce settlement that might be one of the largest in British history. Now he was giving Knoedler 48 hours to agree to reimburse him or face a lawsuit. To the art world’s astonishment, the venerable gallery simply pulled its brass doors shut. (Knoedler has said that the closing was a business decision unrelated to the Lagrange suit.)

more from Michael Shnayerson at Vanity Fair here.

the madness of art

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THE USUAL interpretation of the phrase “the madness of art” conjures up an attractive cliché: the writer as a creature possessed, spilling out words in a divine frenzy. This isn’t the normal experience of the practicing fiction writer, the writer who’s found a way to keep going over the long haul, and it isn’t the idea of the artist that James had in mind. Let’s listen again to Dencombe: “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” I love the fact that he uses the word “passion” and the word “task” in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace. More than this, I love that he equates them. Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-to-earth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence. Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion.

more from Brian Morton at Dissent here.

European Turmoil, American Collateral

Eurozone-fears-and-politi-008Robin Wells in The Guardian's Comment is Free:

In the Netherlands, the center-right government of Mark Rutte fell, unable to cobble together a coalition to pass budget cuts required by EU fiscal rules – rules that mandate that eurozone countries run annual deficits no more than 3% of GDP, which would force stringent austerity upon the Dutch to bring down a deficit that is currently projected to be 4.6% of GDP in 2012. Rutte, along with Merkel of Germany, was a hardline advocate of the 3% fiscal discipline rules.

But given that the sober Dutch are in no danger of defaulting on their AAA-rated bonds, why the turmoil and panic? Because, perhaps, the Dutch are indeed sober – and a significant number of them have said “enough”. Having seen the devastation inflicted on the Greek, Irish and Spanish economies by tough austerity measures, many have concluded that the pain is simply not worth it to meet an arbitrary 3% deficit rule.

Moreover, Greece, Ireland and Spain have shown that meeting a deficit number in a depressed economy is akin to chasing a moving target: because budget cuts depress the economy, to achieve a one percentage point of GDP reduction in the deficit requires cutting by more than one percentage point. And when one misses one's target, even more cuts are necessary. Better, then, not to go there at all, reason the Dutch.

When markets contemplate that it's likely that another austerity-skeptic, François Hollande, will win the presidency in France, then the pattern becomes impossible to ignore: the “core” eurozone countries are fragmenting. While it would be foolish to make predictions, what is probable is that Germany's political isolation within the eurozone will deepen, leaving German taxpayers unwilling to continue backstopping the whole system.

Unthinkable as it seems, the logical conclusion is that the eurozone cannot continue to exist, at least in its present form. Markets, which hate unquantifiable uncertainty, are sensing this. We are likely to be in for an extended period of gut-wrenching turbulence.

What are the implications for the US, economically and politically? Direct links between the US and eurozone economies are fairly minor: we don't export that much to them, they don't import that much from us, and US banks have had an extended time to cut their exposure to eurozone risk. Yet the collateral damage could still prove significant.

Our Workhouses: 21st Century Chain Gangs

Chain_gang-460x307Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman in Salon:

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses or manufacturing textiles, shoes and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the 19th century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide. Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system. More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.

What some historians call “the long Depression” of the 19th century, which lasted from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, was marked by frequent panics and slumps, mass bankruptcies, deflation and self-destructive competition among businesses designed to depress costs, especially labor costs. So, too, we are living through a 21st century age of panics and austerity with similar pressures to shrink the social wage.

Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way for business to address these dilemmas.

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

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Ross Andersen interviews Lawrence Krauss (who may be obliquely referring to David Albert's review), in The Atlantic:

Your book argues that physics has definitively demonstrated how something can come from nothing. Do you mean that physics has explained how particles can emerge from so-called empty space, or are you making a deeper claim?

Krauss: I'm making a deeper claim, but at the same time I think you're overstating what I argued. I don't think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. I try to be intellectually honest in everything that I write, especially about what we know and what we don't know. If you're writing for the public, the one thing you can't do is overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you. They see I'm a physicist and so if I say that protons are little pink elephants, people might believe me. And so I try to be very careful and responsible. We don't know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might.

But I am certainly claiming a lot more than just that. That it's possible to create particles from no particles is remarkable—that you can do that with impunity, without violating the conservation of energy and all that, is a remarkable thing. The fact that “nothing,” namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore.

But debating physics with Augustine might not be an interesting thing to do in 2012.

Krauss: It might be more interesting than debating some of the moronic philosophers that have written about my book. Given what we know about quantum gravity, or what we presume about quantum gravity, we know you can create space from where there was no space. And so you've got a situation where there were no particles in space, but also there was no space. That's a lot closer to “nothing.”

But of course then people say that's not “nothing,” because you can create something from it. They ask, justifiably, where the laws come from. And the last part of the book argues that we've been driven to this notion—a notion that I don't like—that the laws of physics themselves could be an environmental accident. On that theory, physics itself becomes an environmental science, and the laws of physics come into being when the universe comes into being. And to me that's the last nail in the coffin for “nothingness.”

Why Do They Hate Us? The War on Women in the Middle East

Sex_elthaway_reuters-stringerMona Eltahawy in Foreign Policy:

Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many “Western” countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,” all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing — or divorce either.

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries. Morocco, often touted for its “progressive” family law (a 2005 report by Western “experts” called it “an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society”), ranks 129; according to Morocco's Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.

From paralysis to prose

From The Independent:

JessicaJonesbyJDKelleher-smaller-199x3001987 – I was twenty-five years old and holed up in the intensive care unit at the National Neurological Hospital in London, stricken from head to toe with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Symptoms: total paralysis. Prognosis: uncertain. Guillain Barré Syndrome is a bizarre illness. It attacks the myelin sheath that transmits messages along one’s peripheral nerves. One day my toes went numb. A week later I found myself in hospital, unable to move, breathe or speak. An unscratchable itch on my leg could propel me to the brink of insanity. Dust fell into my eyes and I couldn’t blink or wipe it away. I could not call out for assistance. Upon learning of my perilous condition, my mother had dropped everything, packed a suitcase and flown from Sydney. Now she sat by my bedside for twelve hours a day, every day. Each night mum grabbed a few hours sleep at her friends’ house; Chrissy and Ralph were devotees of an Indian guru by the name of Swamiji. When Swamiji heard of my situation he began to call my mother and tell her of his visions for me. ‘I see yellow,’ spake the guru. The next day mum arrived at the hospital laden with armfuls of daffodils and yellow tulips. She filled all the vases in the room with them. Two days later, Swamiji called again: ‘I see purple.’ Out went the daffodils, replaced by swathes of irises. Mum herself was dressed in a purple silk kimono that she’d borrowed from Chrissy. Then Swamiji made a personal appearance at the ICU, without shoes. Through his flowing grey beard he blew into my chakras. Matron tried to hustle him from the room but Swamiji resisted her. At that point Sister Mary entered the scene.

Sister Mary had been hospitalised for an acute attack of Multiple Sclerosis but was now on the bounce back. She busied herself by ambling from ward to ward with her walking stick, rescuing the souls of fellow patients. Some of those ingrates did not wish to be saved but in me she found a compliant mark. Being fully paralysed I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

More here.

The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

SisWhen first we meet Hannah, the wondrously mopey mid-20s heroine of HBO’s new hit series “Girls,” she seems to have more strikes against her than a bowling alley at Fenway Park. Her parents have cut off her monthly stipend. Her literary-magazine boss refuses to turn her unpaid internship into a real job. Her atonal lover explores his sex fantasies on her awkwardly untitillated body. She lives in New York City. She majored in English. Yet offsetting all those slings and risk factors is a powerful defense system: girlfriends. Hannah has a tight-knit network of three female confederates, one best friend and two sturdy runners-up; and while none of the girl-women can offer much material support, no spare bedroom in a rent-controlled apartment, they are each other’s emotional tourniquets. You, fat? Don’t make me laugh. An unpleasant doctor’s appointment? We’re going too. Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the series, has said that while her titular characters may all date men, female friendship is “the true romance of the show.”

As in urban jungles, so too in jungle jungles. Researchers have lately gathered abundant evidence that female friendship is one of nature’s preferred narrative tools. In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, longlasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turn out to be the basic unit of social life, the force that not only binds existing groups together but explains why the animals’ ancestors bothered going herd in the first place. Scientists are moving beyond the observational stage — watching as a couple of female monkeys groom each other into a state of hedonic near-liquefaction — to quantifying the benefits of that well-groomed friendship to both picking partners. Researchers have discovered that female chacma baboons with strong sororal bonds have lower levels of stress hormones, live significantly longer and rear a greater number of offspring to independence than do their less socialized peers.

More here.

On eggs and cooking

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

ScreenHunter_03 Apr. 23 11.13Harold McGee's book, “On Food and Cooking”, changed the ways I cook and think about food (as it seems to have done for many people). Cooking can often seem obscure and unsystematic: recipes and tattered bits of kitchen wisdom abound, but general principles seem harder to come by. And learning to cook is a process of moving from recipes treated as self-contained procedures and rituals to be reenacted to seeing a collection of principles and techniques that can be deployed in various ways. “On Food and Cooking” is a book on the science of cooking: what happens when you brown meat, what happens when you cook asparagus, how dough rises, why coriander tastes the way it does. And its primary value, at least to me, was in dramatically moving me along the road to understanding some of the principles lying behind what we do with food. It's immediately liberating and almost exhilarating to look back on a number of recipes and times in the kitchen and realize what I was actually doing when I was following a particular set of instructions. Most of this food science information existed before but it was scattered through journals and history books. “On Food and Cooking” collects and curates it, and aims it at a broader audience than just the scientist or the historian or the professional cook.

The best example for how this book changed my thinking is its sections on the role of the egg. It is almost universally acknowledged that eggs, even accompanied by little else, are sublime and need not justify their ubiquity. But eggs also play supporting roles in a bewildering parade of dishes (especially in the cuisines of Europe), and in these they take on a variety of structural roles: changing the shape and form of food in addition to changing how it tastes. Making sense of this diversity of uses was enlightening: it allowed me to replace a number of disparate pieces of knowledge with some general principles and these principles then allowed me to think more creatively, beyond the confines of particular recipe patterns. And looking at the roles of eggs in food is also a wonderful lesson in chemistry and the strange hybrid states of matter that live everywhere in food.

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Dismantled Chandeliers

by Mara Jebsen

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Love in A Time of Supermen

Images-6Where does all this yearning come from?

—Pina Bausch, choreographer

A set of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels has come out from Penguin classics, and they look exactly as they ought. They are small, hard-backed volumes in thick cream paper lined with flashy stripes of silver or gold. Some men of my acquaintance—especially those with big hands—might feel silly reading them on the subway.

But that’s as it should be. There’s a sequined fustiness hanging around the idea of Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe there’s something exhausting about the eternal waltzing of debutantes in white linen; and of tall, stiff-stomached boys getting drunk to distraction. Or really what’s exhausting is imagining all those high-school students across America sailing their way through the bright sadness that is “The Great Gatsby.”

The idea of his work gives me this exhausted feeling because his stuff is both classic and a glam cash-cow, categorized in the same cloud of atmosphere in my head where I keep the Titanic. Soon we will have Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrman’s film version of Gatsby adding his entire DiCaprio-ness into the circle of atmosphere that surrounds Fitzgerald, both deepening and cheapening whatever is this peculiar quality down at the middle of it. Luhrman and DiCaprio, I’m sure, will extend the bright circle of frost that allures, but obscures the filament at the center.

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Brevity and the Soul

by Tom Jacobs

There is the apocryphal story in which Hemingway, sitting in a bar somewhere in Key West, is asked by an antagonistic admirer to follow his minimalism to its logical outcome and to tell a story in six words. As the story goes, Hemingway picks up a napkin and writes out the following words:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This is a pretty good story. The reader has to kind of inhabit it and fill in all that is unsaid (which is pretty much everything), but there’s an inexhaustible sadness there in the spaces between the words. Everything pared away until there’s almost nothing left. The iceberg theory of fiction.

The genre of short short fiction (or microfiction, or whatever one might want to call it) is itself kinda small, and little of it is worth reading. But there are exceptions.

There’s this: “Sticks,” by George Saunders, perhaps the greatest super short story I’ve ever read:

Sticks

Originally published in Story, Winter 1995.

Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod's helmet and Rod had to clear it with Dad if he wanted to take the helmet off. On the Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veteran’s Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was Dad's only concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup saying: good enough good enough good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first I brought a date over she said: what's with your dad and that pole? and I sat there blinking.

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile he lay the pole on its side and spray painted a rift in the earth. Mom died and he dressed the pole as Death and hung from the crossbar photos of Mom as a baby. We'd stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base: army medals, theater tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of Mom's makeup. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and the sticks and left them by the road on garbage day.

Here there is an entire novel’s worth of intrigue and emotional complexity and backstory and difficult familial relationships and unhappinesses and losses and redemptions. One can’t help but think of all those homes run by inexpressive and angry fathers who know something of love’s austere offices, these homes that suddenly erupt in holiday decorations that go waaay beyond the normal or expected. Rudolphs and Santas and baby Jesuses and lights and holly all over the place. This phenomenon…the phenomenon of the middle-to-lower-class father who has no creative outlet but finds an avenue in his front yard…this is an important aspect of contemporary life in the U.S., and one that needs more examination. There are dissertations here. And Saunders’ story is a most excellent jumping off point.

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