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I like the story as well as when you told it.

January 20, 2008 in gewgaws

I spent the weekend going through a bunch of bookmarked illustration blogs and found a lot I wanted to share. Will Ashford operates in the fine vein of transforming books from a literary art into a visual art. Whereas much of the book-based art that I’ve seen consists mainly of clever cutting, Ashford draws directly onto the page. He tends mainly towards the manipulation of graphs and artistic statements derived from the text of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The result is both a baffling map of textual nodules and a deeply personal manifesto.

(via Monoscope)

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23rd Street’s Hats

January 20, 2008 in gewgaws

Finally, an answer to the question, “Why are there hat mosaics all over the 23rd St. station?” It’s all because of the Flatiron Building. In that intersection, wind would come whipping down 5th Avenue and Broadway, blowing the hats off of unsuspecting pedestrians. The hats in the subway station represent those of the people who regularly strolled along 23rd St.

Another interesting fact, one I had read from somewhere else—guys would congregate in front of the Flatiron Building because the wind also had the effect of blowing up the skirts of women as they walked outside. Police officers eventually caught on and started shooing away the peepers. This happened so often that the police (or maybe the peepers?) called the chase “23 skidoo.”

(via Drawn!)

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Typewriter Tins

January 20, 2008 in gewgaws

I work for someone who uses a typewriter (exclusively). Sometimes I have to fetch her typewriter ribbons, a rare commodity in the modern office. But I’ve never found ribbon tins as lovely as these.

(via Monoscope)

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Getting Back to Our Roots: The Return of New Criticism

January 14, 2008 in the literary conversation

My first serious English class was on 17th-century poetry, and we were only taught one way of reading these poems: the New Criticism way. Our dissections were extremely formal, and we barely gave any thought to socio-historical interpretations. I had not yet learned about deconstruction, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. And this is exactly the way it should have been. Now lit theory seems to begin with Foucault and Lacan—and if New Criticism is brought up at all, it’s only to point out how far we’ve come. If not for this poetry class, I would have thought that lit theory was an eternal dismantling—and of what, I wouldn’t have been sure. (This isn’t to say that I don’t rely almost solely on critical race theory whenever I read now—guilty as charged!)

In this helpfully chiding essay, Mark Bauerlein identifies what he suspects is a conspiracy to wipe New Criticism from academia’s memory: that is, our negligence in looking back to New Criticism is bolstered by the difficulty in bringing seminal essays to the public eye. These essays are under expensive copyright protection by big publishing houses, and small presses can’t afford to include these essays in their anthologies. We could, of course, wait for a big publishing house like Norton to publish the anthology, but Bauerlein’s endorsement of New Criticism is a sound one. Go on and read the article to see why studying New Criticism was once as integral to literary analysis as the scientific method was to experimentation.

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Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age

January 14, 2008 in gewgaws

For many of us in our 20s, the pressure to make one’s creative debut is on. At my age, T. S. Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Ready to feel a little depressed? Click here.

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The Inheritance of Loss

January 13, 2008 in book reviews

Apologies for all the silence around here—writing down my New Year’s resolutions took some time. As promised, my thoughts on Kiran Desai’s excellent Booker Prize–winning novel.

What a heartbreakingly beautiful book. In this novel of immigration and cultural upheaval, Kiran Desai uncoils three intertwined narratives, each one redolent with a mixture of naïve hopes and bitter epiphanies. Biju leaves his father in Kalimpong, India, to live as an illegal resident of New York City. His big break never comes. His father’s employer, an ex-judge, boils over with self-hating resentment towards his backward culture and country. The judge’s granddaughter, Sai, falls in love with her math tutor only to find that she can’t—and doesn’t want—to cross the caste lines that divide them. She cites an argument that will sound familiar to anyone who’s read Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World:

“Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”

That is, love exists only so long as something prevents the love from being consummated. Sai loves Gyan, her Nepali math tutor, and at the same time, bolsters the social norms that place her so unattainably above him.

Desai’s voice drips with cynicism when she echoes the oft-heard colonialist imperatives to progress, progress. Every character in this novel participates in the competitive individual narrative of moving forward, armed with the knowledge that “if you invested in [modernism], it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.” However, when we step back to comprehend the novel as a whole, we see that the prerogative of progress is actually leaving India behind. The judge observes, “He realized truth was best looked at in tiny aggregates, for many baby truths could yet add up to one big size unsavory lie.” The tiny aggregates of progress add up to the lie of globalization: one country cannot move forward without another country being left behind. No one wants all countries to move forward together—if that were true, why would we so stolidly reiterate the boundaries that separate our nation from others? We benefit from keeping other populations at bay—take for example, the threat in illegal immigrant Saeed’s observation that “one skilled person at the photocopy machine [making fake visas] could bring America to its knees.”

After reading some reviews for The Inheritance of Loss on GoodReads, I was struck by one common complaint: that this book is too much of a “downer.” I have to disagree—although my review of this book makes it sound like some kind of post-colonial tragedy (and it is), in my mind, I kept comparing Desai’s writing to Zadie Smith’s. Desai revels in the immediacy of low culture and possesses the same ear for hilariously accurate dialogue that Smith does. Desai and Smith share a common affection for exhibiting cultural personalities, but where Smith is generally optimistic about globalization’s potential for hybridity, intermingling, and the new people, ideas, and stories it engenders, Desai sees the oppressive hand of the post-colonial arbiters at hand, making decisions on behalf of other countries. Both the optimism and the warnings are essential to understanding the effect of our new world order.

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