Sculpture in a pool at the outdoor deck of the Tower Garden restaurant in Vahrn, South Tyrol.
Month: October 2023
Wild about Harry: Diaries and memoirs at the end of history
by Brooks Riley
Ems, 17 June 1880
“This morning I took a long walk with Papa . . . judging by this morning, a more awfull profusion, diffusion, infusion and confusion of colours it is difficult to imagine . . . the Britishers especially excell in this art and their colours are put together as they might be on the dirty palette of an inexperienced painter.. . .”
Count Harry Kessler was born to write it all down. In this excerpt from his second ever diary entry, written at the German spa town of Bad Ems where Kaiser Wilhelm also summered, the 12-year-old French-born German boy has a high old time stretching the limits of the English language, in preparation for matriculation at a prestigious British boys’ school. An incipient snob and precociously intelligent, Kessler offers us a nutshell preview of the diabolical pleasure with which he will mash words, sounds and images for the next 57 years—savaging inanity wherever he sees it—but more importantly, promoting and nurturing great artists and thinkers along the way, including Rilke, Beckmann, Seurat, Grosz, Maillol, van der Velde, Max Reinhardt, Gordon Craig, von Hofmannsthal, Stravinsky, Rodin, Kurt Weill, Strauss, Nijinsky, Munch, Walther Rathenau and many others.
“. . . the promenade is a crowd of dresses so short and tight one might take them for underpetticoats or so long and loose you could mistake them for dressinggowns, of cloaks most certainly copied from the assyrian bas reliefs or from the cloaks found with the mummies in the pyramyds (with which they have a strong resemblance,), . . . of projecting stomacks, of very flatt and long feet, of red faces and other accomplishments. . .”
Nota: In coming to Ems we had 19 trunks and 18 parcels in the whole 37 things, Rien que çà!
Harry takes a walk with his Papa, but he won’t tell us what they talked about. What matters to Harry is reporting what he saw on that walk and how he saw it—as journalist, critic, satirist, diarist and outsider. His nota, thrown in for fairness, adds his own family to those guilty of excess.
In this opening salvo, we learn that beyond the omniscience of his observations, Kessler is not terribly interested in writing about himself. The less he tells us, the more we want to know about him. The less he tells us, the more we will start to feel that we know him, warts and all, as the mists around his persona slowly begin to lift. It is this indistinct but discernible sum of a man who will become as fascinating as the many famous people he writes about during his whirlwind European lifetime. At ease in five languages (two of them dead), he manages to combine a phenomenal intellect with the social ease that made him a lively addition to any dinner party. Read more »
The Literary Canon Today, Part 3: The State of Publishing Canonical Literature
by Joseph Carter Milholland
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost
my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of
myself, and what remains is bestial.
– Cassio (Othello, Act 2, Scene 3)
So far, my focus in this series of essays (see part 1 here and part 2 here) has been how we write and talk about the literary canon. The canon is a rather abstract subject, but when we talk about how the canon has changed, we are wont to talk about something even more abstract: a writer’s reputation.
“Reputation” – read enough literary essays, and you’ll see that word appear again and again. “In recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now,” a writer in the New Yorker explains. “A century after his birth, and more than half a century after his death, Wilde continues to enjoy a reputation that can hardly be justified by his mere literary achievement,” alleges another writer in the New Republic. “In the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate (not counting writers from other countries who became American citizens), Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure,” a third writer in Slate asserts.
Reading all this concern over reputation can be a bit dispiriting; the literary critic who records the minute changes in a writer’s reputation begins to look drearily like that of a day trader obsessing over the small variations in corporate shares (only, the literary critic makes a lot less money). What, after all, does reputation have to do with serious literary criticism? If a writer is good, why bother at all about their reputation? Read more »
Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings
Merve Emre in The New Yorker:
In 2019, the literary magazine NOON published a story by Lydia Davis called “The Language of Armagnac,” a quietly comic meditation on the difficulties of translating “the patois of the city of Auch, which is a local form of the language of Gascon, which is in turn a dialect language of Occitan.” A second version of the story much like the first was included in Davis’s “Essays Two,” a collection of her writings on translation, a career that parallels her work as a writer of fiction. A third and notably different version appears in her story collection “Our Strangers,” under the title “Bothered Scholar on Train.” It refashions Davis’s elaborate philological commentaries as the tirade of a scholar whose attempt to read in the language of Armagnac is disrupted by noisy passengers. Davis designed the story to open with an exclamation—“Oh, can’t you quiet down, please!”—and end with an exclamation mark, too (“So, please!”). This symmetry would clue readers in to an irony underlying the scene. The bothered shouts at others to be quiet. He—or she—annoys strangers while insisting that they are the annoying ones.
As always in Davis’s fiction, an almost imperceptible line divides pedantry from precision, enthusiasm from solipsism. When I met Davis at her house in East Nassau, New York, this August, she eyed the galley of “Our Strangers” that I had brought with me and noticed that, in it, the final exclamation mark was missing from “Bothered Scholar on Train.” “You’ve got to have the exclamation mark there,” she said. When we looked at a finished copy of the U.K. edition that she’d been sent, we discovered that someone had blundered: the exclamation mark was still missing. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “That was important.”
More here.
Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works
Marcela Valdes in The New York Times:
‘We’re getting no support on this national crisis,’ Mayor Eric Adams said in September at a town-hall-style gathering on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He was talking about the influx of transnational migrants who have landed in the city’s shelter system: more than 118,000 since the spring of last year, with about 10,000 more arriving each month. There are now about 115,000 people in the city’s care, and more than half of them are migrants. In August, the city projected that it would spend $5 billion caring for migrants during this fiscal year.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams told his audience. “Every service in this city is going to be impacted.”
Responding to the sense of crisis in New York and around the nation, the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that it would grant temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans, allowing them 18 months to live and work in the United States. This measure may help New York because many of the migrants there have traveled to the state from Venezuela (via Texas). But as Adams pointed out on the Upper West Side, New York now also shelters migrants from “all over the globe,” including Ecuador, Eastern Europe and West Africa — so the Biden administration’s decision on temporary protected status is, at best, a partial and fleeting solution.
More here.
“Albert Houtum Schindler: A Remarkable Polymath in Late-Qajar Iran” by DT Potts
David Chaffetz in the Asian Review of Books:
In 1868, as now, the Middle East seemed to be a place where fortunes could be made from the region’s mineral resources and from its central location between Europe and India. The Persian empire was slowly recovering from decades of invasion, civil war, banditry, and plagues. A new monarch, Naseroddin Shah, made a good impression in the capitals of Europe, which he visited frequently beginning in 1873. Yet “the well-protected realm” remained mysterious. A lack of information about its people and geography challenged international investors, who still relied on John Chardin’s accounts of 150 years earlier. They were greedy for up-to-date insights into the country. Albert Houtum Schindler was their providential man.
Daniel Potts calls him a polymath. He started off as a simple telegraph engineer in 1868. But he had to learn everything about Persia.
More here.
How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick?
Tara C. Smith in Quanta:
This varies by pathogen and is known as a microbe’s “infectious dose.” Usually it takes quite a few, but some microbes require an incredibly small number of organisms to start an infection. Take norovirus for example, the stomach bug notorious for spreading whenever people are in close contact and touch the same surfaces, such as on cruise ships. Its infectious dose can be as small as 18 individual viruses, making it incredibly easy to transmit. It is also very hardy even outside the body, so an infected person who’s oozing the virus may leave a large amount of it behind — enough to easily infect others, even several days later.
More here.
What America Left Behind In Afghanistan
Lynzy Billing in Undark:
Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land.
Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war.
Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.
More here.
The Cross-Dressing Superstar of the Belle Époque
Emily Zarevich in JSTOR Daily:
Flamboyant, swashbuckling cross-dressing was nothing new in late nineteenth-century France. Paris’s unique and bohemian lesbian subculture allowed these women to thrive, though it was still illegal for French women to wear pants in public. Yet despite the dangers and the occasional assaults, Belle Époque aristocrat and performer Mathilde de Morny (1863–1944)—better known by her alias “Missy”—still committed to her daring butch look, cutting her hair short, donning tailored three-piece suits, and smoking as many cigars as she pleased.
Missy built her artistic career on the publicity raked in from her mannish attire and character, her queer-coded tendencies, and her adoption of masculine nicknames.
More here.
Sunday Poem
Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 P.M., the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punchclock.
Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.
by Martín Espada
from Alabanza
W.W. Norton, 2003