Roy Miller's Blog, page 266
February 21, 2017
Should You Feel Moved to Wax Rhapsodic at the Mall …
Today’s malls increasingly seem like an endangered species, as the excitement of department store shopping gives way to sealing the deal online with the click of a button.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., which still bills itself as “one of the top tourist destinations in the country,” is nevertheless determined to promote its 25th anniversary with a distinctly old-fashioned gambit.
It’s naming a writer-in-residence.
The residency idea has caught on at a number of corporations and commercial places, like Heathrow Airport in London, as a way to raise brand awareness.
Amtrak has run such a program for the past three years, offering “creative professionals who are passionate about train travel” round-trip tickets on a long-distance route and the use of a private sleeping roomette, “equipped with a desk, a bed and a window to watch the American countryside.”
Not all the musings of these residents have been as bucolic as one might expect. Rachel Monroe of Marfa, Tex., wrote of her experience on Twitter:
“This Amtrak writing residency thing has been cool, except for when the train I’m on just killed someone.”
(A fatal accident involving a train was reported in Fresno, Calif., that day.)
The Mall, for its part, is inviting “a special scribe” to “spend five days deeply immersed in the mall atmosphere while writing on-the-fly impressions in their own words.”
Before midnight Central time on March 10, applicants can submit their pitch in 150 or fewer words, after which 25 semifinalists will be invited to expand on their ideas in a 500- to 800-word essay.
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“Would it be a personal story? A blow-by-blow account of your experiences? The mall as seen through the eyes of a first-time tourist or a regular guest?” the contest asks. “Heck, if you can make the assignment work as a musical-comedy screenplay, by all means make it so!”
The goal of the contest, according to the mall’s news release cited by The Star Tribune, “is to come away from this project with an evocative story about Mall of America that represents the contemporary guest experience after 25 years of evolution as a leading retail and entertainment establishment.”
Of course.
The winner will be treated to a four-night hotel stay, a $400 gift card for food and drinks and a $2,500 honorarium “for the sweat and tears they’ll put into their prose.”
Might audiences soon be flocking to Broadway for “Mall in America: The Musical”? Then again, you could just be an artist-in-residence for the National Park Service and commit to canvas your impressions of sites like Joshua Tree and Mount Rushmore.
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President Trump, One Month Later
Aleksandar Hemon on Donald Trump and Violence
“It’s a lot of fucking work, but in a decent society, most strive to be decent.”
Roxana Robinson on Taking to the Streets—and the Offices of Congress
“I was there to find out what democracy looked like.”
David Ulin on Art and Public Protest
“I am an American patriot and I am part of something bigger.”
Amanda Rea on Growing up Poor and Watching Trump on TV
“Like any red-blooded American, we understood our poverty to be temporary.”
Jeffrey Lependorf on the National Endowment for the Arts
“The arts and the humanities belong to all of us.”
Valeria Luiselli on Darweesh v. Trump
“A lawyers’ meeting is in some ways similar to an assembly of wizards and witches.”
Tom Rosenstiel on the Warnings of Political Fiction
“The news now reads like dystopian satire.”
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A Warm Biography of the Fantastical, Feminist Angela Carter
Like all the best writers, she was incapable of phoning anything in. Her fiction aside, Carter’s thick book of collected journalism, travel writing, criticism and essays, “Shaking a Leg” (1997), is its own erudite stay against dullness.
Now we have “The Invention of Angela Carter,” the first full-length biography, and it will consolidate her position. Edmund Gordon has written a terrific book — judicious, warm, confident and casually witty. The ratio of insight to literary-world gossip, of white swan to black swan, is as well calibrated as one of Sara Mearns’s impossible balletic leaps.
Gordon has had the good fortune to seize upon, for his subject, not only an important writer but one who led a deeply interesting life. This bio unfolds a bit like one of the fairy tales Carter shook to release its meaning. The pages turn themselves.
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Edmund Gordon
Credit
Nick Tucker
She was born Angela Olive Stalker and grew up mostly in London, playing with her brother in the post-Blitz urban rubble. Her father was a journalist. Her mother was a woman who loved too much. She smothered Angela with affection and food.
“It wasn’t easy to become obese” in England in the 1940s, Gordon writes, when milk and butter were rationed. With her mother’s eager assistance, Carter did so. Her nicknames at school included Tubs and Fatty.
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She escaped her mother’s clutches by attending an elite prep school on a scholarship, where the weight fell off. She was an intense reader. She escaped, too, by marrying young, at 19, rather than applying, as she had been encouraged to do, to Oxford.
Her first husband, Paul Carter, was deep into England’s nascent folk music scene. The couple became known, sometimes sneeringly, as “the Folk Singing Carters.” This marriage lasted nine years. Carter later had cruel things to say about her husband. She told a friend she had had “more meaningful relationships with people I’ve sat next to on aeroplanes.”
She began writing fiction in earnest while married to Paul Carter, though she did not feel supported by him. She wrote a different friend: “Behind every great man is a woman dedicated to his greatness whilst behind every great woman is a man dedicated to bringing her down.”
Carter’s first novel, “Shadow Dance,” appeared in 1966. By 1972 she had published five more. Her life changed when she went to live in Tokyo for two years on prize money from a Somerset Maugham Award.
In Japan she took on a younger lover, the first of several in her life. About one, she commented: “Every time I pull down his underpants, I feel more & more like Humbert Humbert.” Sex was important to Carter and she wrote about it beautifully, in her fiction and in the letters and journals of which Gordon makes use.
In her book “The Sadeian Woman” (1979), she wrote, “We do not go to bed in simple pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances.”
Carter never learned to drive or ride a bike. She was a savage smoker of cigarettes. “When she was writing,” Gordon says, “smoke would curl out from the keyhole in her room.”
She was, oddly, to borrow a phrase from Kingsley Amis, a “mean sod” about alcohol. “Guests often felt frustrated by her habit of pouring them a single glass of wine,” Gordon writes, “then corking the bottle and putting it back in the fridge, never to emerge again.”
She returned from Japan to a changing literary world in London. She assisted her friend Kazuo Ishiguro in finding an agent. She helped usher Pat Barker into print. She befriended Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.
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There was a boom in British fiction in the early 1980s, with Rushdie, Ishiguro, McEwan and Martin Amis at its vanguard. “Angela missed out on all this,” Gordon writes. Her book advances, unlike theirs, did not soar. She always felt she had never quite broken through.
Selling each new book, Gordon tells us, was a struggle. It is hard to see why. Carter wrote some of the 20th century’s unforgettable first sentences. Her novel “The Passion of New Eve” (1977) begins this way: “The last night I spent in London, I took some girl or other to the movies and, through her mediation, I paid you a little tribute of spermatozoa, Tristessa.”
Carter ultimately married again, to a construction worker 15 years her junior, and had her only child, a son, at 43. After her death, Rushdie wrote that “English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent white witch.” This biography is witchy, in the best sense, as well.
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Milo Yiannopoulos’s enablers deserve contempt – and must be confronted | Owen Jones | Opinion
They were fine with his bigotry, his in-your-face, two-fingers-up transphobia, Islamophobia and misogyny. It took his defence of relationships between “older men” and “younger boys” for their queasiness to set in. The case of Milo Yiannopoulos is indeed a parable of our time. But who do I mean by “they”? In this case, both his associates and his enablers. His associates are the ascendant racist and neo-fascist movements of our time. He was a means to repackage their hatred for a certain demographic: as edgy, trendy, cool. Performative fascism, if you like. That’s why they call themselves the “alt-right”, after all: allowing them to cloak themselves not as a renaissance of fascist movements that have produced only human carnage in their previous incarnations, but as a sexy in-group and subculture that all the new cool kids are part of.
You expect that from the associates – the racists and the fascists who have been defeated in the past but only at the cost of tens of millions of lives. But what of his enablers? While his associates deserve only crushing defeat, his enablers deserve only contempt. It doesn’t matter whether they agree with his bigotry, because they almost certainly do not. But they are fine with it – more than fine, in fact, because it is lucrative. The media outlets and, until its belated cancellation of Yiannopoulos’s lucrative book deal, the publisher Simon & Schuster, saw his hateful pronunciations as a commercial opportunity. There was money to be made. Never mind that they were providing him with a platform to menace and incite hatred against already besieged minorities. He was “controversial”, they would say with a glint in their eye. “Provocative”, even. And then the very media outlets that facilitated his rise would provide a platform for chin-strokers to sagely ask: “Why is this phenomenon on the rise and who is to blame?”
Yet now that there is video evidence that he is an apologist for relationships between older men and younger boys, some of his associates (but not all) and his enablers are electing to distance themselves. His past statements, on the other hand, were apparently entirely permissible. From public platforms he denounced trans people as “gay men dressing up for attention”, for being “mutilated trannies”, inciting his audience with statements such as: “Never feel bad for mocking a transgender person.” At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, he projected the photograph and name of a trans student for the purposes of ridicule. “Do you know what it’s like to be in a room full of people who are laughing at you as if you’re some sort of perverted freak?” the student would later ask. “Do you know what this kind of terror is? No, you don’t.” Yiannopoulos was inciting hatred against a group who, in large part because of the bigotry against them, suffer from extraordinarily high levels of mental distress, of suicide, and who are murdered for who they are.
Here is a man who encouraged hatred against Muslims as they suffer the sort of widespread and publicly acceptable bigotry Jews suffered in the last century. “Look what’s happening in Sweden,” he said. “Look what’s happening anywhere in Germany, anywhere there are large influxes of a Muslim population. Things don’t end well for women and gays.” Never mind that Sweden’s crime rate has been static for many years, or that Malmö – the cause celebre of the racist right – has a slightly lower crime rate than it did a decade ago. This is about inciting hatred and nothing else.
Feminism is a “cancer”, he proclaims as he writes articles for Breitbart entitled “Does feminism make women ugly?” It was his online harassment of Leslie Jones, a black actor, that finally had him banned from Twitter. But you don’t need Twitter to be a troll. Yiannopoulos became ever more lucrative. When he was offered a slot on US talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, the US journalist Jeremy Scahill withdrew. “Milo Yiannopoulos is many bridges too far,” he wrote. “There is no value in ‘debating’ him. Appearing on Real Time will provide Yiannopoulos with a large, important platform to openly advocate his racist, anti-immigrant campaign. It will be exploited by Yiannopoulos in an attempt to legitimise his hateful agenda.” In doing so he showed integrity that the enablers of Yiannopoulos never had.
For years, feminists and trans commentators and activists and others targeted by his bile spoke out, but they weren’t listened to. But they were right. Both his associates and enablers have no excuses. They should be held responsible and accountable. Whether Yiannopoulos disappears or not – I suspect not – there will be others who make bigotry sexy in exchange for commercial success. But there is nothing sexy about racism and fascism. It is a menace to be defeated – and that means confronting not just its sympathisers, but its enablers too.
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Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Overhauls Membership Model
The Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on Chicago’s South Side sent an e-mail to its 61,000 members last week, informing them that the bookstore – which includes nearby 57th Street Books -- will implement changes to its co-op membership model in a continuing effort to improve efficiencies, and thus the bottom line, without sacrificing too much of the essence of the bookstore’s fabled quirky culture.
According to the letter, from Seminary Co-op director Jeff Deutsch, the bookstore is changing its member-shareholder program into a two-tiered structure that will streamline governance by separating it from membership benefits. In the future, to become a shareholder in the Seminary Co-op and to have a voice in its governance, members – who already pay a fee to receive a 10% discount on their purchases and will continue to do so –will have to purchase stock in the Co-op in addition to the membership fee.
Under the current system, Deutsch noted, members are considered shareholders with voting rights, but only .5% of members attend the annual meetings. “We have valid e-mail addresses for only 15% of our membership, making it almost impossible” to discuss, much less “receive majority approval on any initiative,” he pointed out, including a conversation on whether or not to vote on re-incorporating the Seminary Co-op as a nonprofit, which would require more than 40,000 votes under the current by-laws.
“We believe in the Co-op, we want a co-op, but we want it to be a functional co-op,” Deutsch told PW , noting that there are people on the Co-op’s membership rolls who haven’t made a purchase in years, “That’s what it all boils down to: figuring out a way to have a functional co-op.”
The Seminary Co-op, which last year celebrated the 55th anniversary of its founding near the University of Chicago campus, at one time included three bookstores and reported up to $10 million in sales. In recent years, sales have dropped to $3 million for the two remaining Co-op stores. This has resulted in an ongoing operating deficit, which currently stands at $205,000, down 18% from the previous year's deficit. Disclosing that the latest sales figures mark the first signs of growth in a decade, the Seminary Co-op reported in last Tuesday’s letter that sales were up 5.3% for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016 and are up 4% to date, halfway through the current fiscal year. The Seminary Co-op generated $1.8 million in sales in FY2016, and 57th Street Books generated $1.1 million.
Deutsch attributed more than 40% of the rise in sales this past year to the store’s “galvanizing the membership base” with a late-spring appeal to them to shop at the store, supplemented by a month-to-month rewards program that expired at the end of last June.
But the store has also made changes to its business model that have pushed up sales. It has scheduled significantly more author events this past year (348 events in FY2016 vs. 188 in FY2015), and has committed to partnering with local cultural organizations in its programming, resulting in new customers. It is also selling more used books adopted in courses at the nearby University of Chicago and is stocking them earlier. And the 57th Street location, which is less scholarly in terms of its offerings and store vibe, has both increased its inventory of children’s books and expanded the children’s area of the store.
Deutsch ascribed much of the store’s continuing operating deficit to its philosophy of ordering books for its inventory of 100,000 titles on merit rather than on commercial appeal, thus “[privileging] the love of learning over the bottom line.”
“On any given day, we sell anywhere from 200-1,000 books,” he noted, “Of those, up to 75% are single copies of books. Some we sell just once a month, once a quarter, once a year, or once every other year. This means that, from a purely profit-driven perspective, we stock books we ‘shouldn’t.’” He acknowledged that could operate streamline its business, but said “[Implementing] a model of efficiency at the expense of thoughtful curation is the antithesis of everything we believe about the profession of bookselling.”
“In bookselling, a modicum of inefficiency is in order. This doesn’t mean that we want to be inefficient in the wrong ways, or for the wrong reasons. We want to run this ‘foolish’ business with intelligence and savvy.”
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What Makes a President Great? Clipping? Sipping? Slashing?
Politics ain’t bean bag, so when things get really tough, don’t you want a blade-wielding maniac in your corner? That’s the premise behind a classic blog post “In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?”
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The post, written in 2009 by a Canadian named Geoff Micks, started as a comment in a Reddit forum, but quickly outgrew that site’s length limit. He has updated it a few times, including this year, when Vice asked him to collaborate on an animated version, which brings Donald J. Trump into the fray.
“I really wrote it as a joke,” Mr. Micks, an industry conference planner in Toronto, said in a telephone interview. “But then it really took on a life of its own.”
Mr. Micks’s bet is on Theodore Roosevelt, imperialist brawler and butcher of many animals. (Also, he writes, “anyone who gets shot at the start of a long speech and delivers the whole thing anyway,” as Roosevelt did in 1912, “has the tenacity to endure more than a few knife wounds if he thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong.”) But he wouldn’t count out other members of the “Holy Trinity”: Jackson — a likely “murder machine” — and Lincoln, a “big guy who knew how to wrestle.” Besides, “who wants to be the guy to stab Honest Abe?”
Among the wussier are William McKinley (“famous for sitting on his porch and letting the party machine do the heavy lifting”), and Thomas Jefferson, who would probably go out “somewhere in the middle” of the fighting, though his dying words would be “incredibly quotable,” Mr. Micks wrote.
Mr. Obama would “probably try to negotiate an end to hostilities, and while seeking a middle ground, some loon would get the better of him,” Mr. Micks writes. “In an arena full of knife-wielding war veterans, I don’t hold out a lot of hope that he’d make it through the first few minutes.”
And President Trump? Suffice to say that his braggadocious style — and firsthand experience with professional wrestling — would serve him well. “Even if he got stabbed over and over, he’d say that it was fake news, and that he was making knife fights great again,” Mr. Micks said.
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Chester A. Arthur tops in 19th-century facial hair.
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Ullstein Bild, via Getty Images
Tippecanoe and Mutton Chops Too
Here’s something they don’t teach you in school: Only 12 American presidents have had beards, mustaches or other notable facial manscaping. If you don’t believe me, believe Wikipedia, which devotes a page to the subject. Or better yet check out GQ’s “Official Power Ranking of American Presidential Facial Hair.
Lincoln is there, of course, though his “strictly chin-beard situation” keeps him in the middling ranks. So are Chester A. Arthur, above, hailed by GQ for “that absurdity going on on his jaw,” and Martin Van Buren, whose prodigious mutton chops — more of a side Mohawk, actually — made him “the Bernie Sanders of the 1800s.”
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But GQ’s top marks go to Ulysses S. Grant: “Well-trimmed, yet not overly manicured, jawline? Check. Smattering of gray hairs, alluding to years spent on the battlefield reuniting a nation? Check. Slight hair wave, for added effect? Check.”
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Richard Nixon: vintage wine for me, plonk for thee.
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Harvey Georges/Associated Press
Drunk History?
President Trump has said he never drinks. How history will judge him for his abstinence remains to be seen, but until then, there are 43 other imbibers-in-chief to ponder. Which is exactly what the website VinePair has done.
The list puts Franklin Roosevelt on top, for repealing Prohibition (duh). Wilson is No. 2 — not because he vetoed the Volstead Act, but because he rode into office in 1912 on a campaign song borrowed from an insidiously infectious whiskey jingle. (And you thought “Fight Song” was bad.)
Mr. Obama, the sometime beer-summitteer, is at No. 5, thanks to his penchant for serving a special honey ale, fortified with nectar from the White House beehives, while the wily Lyndon B. Johnson is cited for liking his drink weaker than everyone else’s, to better outwit them. Rutherford B. Hayes is dead last, thanks to his habit of serving guests punch with rum flavoring instead of the real stuff.
Hayes was apparently deferring to his teetotaling wife, but what was Richard Nixon’s excuse? Nixon, a near-Jeffersonian oenophile, reportedly “hoarded $700 bottles of vino for himself and served cheap red to the guests.”
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Andrew Johnson: Worst. President. Ever?
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Associated Press
Sheer Badness
The day after the inauguration of President Trump, millions of anxious Americans poured into the streets to protest what they saw as his incompetence and nefariousness. But Jeremy Derfner, a former doctoral candidate in history and freelance writer in Seattle, got cracking on something more productive: creating a website called Crummy Presidents. (O.K., it’s actually called something stronger, but we must have respect for the office.)
The idea is to write one entry a week, covering all the presidents, focusing on parallels between Mr. Trump’s missteps and outrages, as Mr. Derfner sees it, and those of his predecessors. “Presidents stink,” Mr. Derfner said in a telephone interview, again using a saltier term. “It’s this unique office that people come into with no experience by definition doing it. What I’m finding out is that almost all of them are terrible at the start.”
The first entry was for Grover Cleveland, whose taste for “tuzzy-muzzy” or “crinkum crankum,” as the Victorians put it, makes Mr. Trump’s locker-room talk look tame. (Cleveland “is lucky they hadn’t invented the hot mic in 1884,” Mr. Derfner writes.) The anti-immigrant Coolidge is chided for trying “to flash freeze the ethnic composition of the country,” while the sainted Dwight Eisenhower (No. 5 per C-Span) is described as presiding over the moment “when our health system learned its neat trick of costing twice as much to give care that’s half as good.”
Mr. Derfner is looking forward to lighting into some real baddies, like Andrew Johnson (second to last in the C-Span rankings), who in addition to bungling the aftermath of the Civil War held a disastrous round of rallies, called the Swing Around the Square, that helped lead to his impeachment. “He was drunk half the time, and a raving lunatic,” he said.
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Mr. Derfner said he wasn’t looking forward to finding mean things to say about George Washington. But the real challenge may be the mere mediocrities. “I mean, what did Millard Fillmore even do?” he said. “I’m going to have to do a lot of research.”
Correction: February 21, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of individuals who have held the presidency of the United States — qualifying as “imbibers in chief.” There were 43, not 44. (President Trump does not drink and Grover Cleveland was elected twice nonconsecutively.)
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Ruth Levitt obituary | Society
My friend Ruth Levitt, who has died aged 66 from cancer, put into practice her strong beliefs in the public good and the importance of culture in a varied career that included posts in the NHS, academia, publishing and management consultancy.
Born in London, she grew up in a secular Jewish family, the daughter of Harry Levitt, a GP, and his wife, Herma (nee Lang). Ruth attended Camden school for girls, then started social science studies at Sheffield University before switching to LSE.
She began her working life with the NHS, and became an expert on the then new community health councils established in 1974 to provide a voice for patients. Ruth published a widely used textbook, The Reorganised National Health Service (1976), which went to six editions. Her next move was to an academic appointment in public policy at Bristol University. Then, inspired by the formation of the Social Democratic party, she moved into politics, working for David Owen and standing, unsuccessfully, for Nuneaton in the 1983 general election.
After a spell in social science publishing with Routledge, her interest turned towards art and she took a PhD at UCL on the 17th-century Dutch painter Albert Cuyp, learning Dutch on the way. She then went to work for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and translated Dutch authors, including Tessa de Loo and Marga Minco.
Deciding to combine art with an interest in management, she took an MBA from the Open University. This led her into her next career – management consultancy for a range of arts organisations including the V&A and Ashmolean museums.
In later years she returned to research. As a visiting academic at King’s College London she worked with Bill Solesbury on projects including the role of policy tsars. She also worked on Jewish history. After adding German to her repertoire, she translated Holocaust testimony for the Wiener Library and edited a book, Pogrom November 1938 (2015), about Kristallnacht.
Ruth was a keen musician, playing the violin in amateur string quartets and the piaino. She displayed enormous determination in everything and did not compromise. After her diagnosis with bowel cancer, having always cycled, she continued to do so, to and from her hospice. She maintainrf her inquiring mind and keen interest in the world.
She is survived by her brother, David.
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Getting Lost Before the Internet
Twenty-six years ago I quit high school, emptied my bank account of the 500 dollars I’d saved working in a bookstore, gave my things away, and left the country. I had no intention of coming back. My plan was to travel for as long as possible, finding under-the-table work so that I could keep going.
After six months of eating one meal a day, sleeping in hostels and parks, train stations, and church vestibules, hitchhiking to ruins, and standing before images I’d seen only in books, I had yet to find a job. I ended up in Venice, sleeping on the steps of the train station at night, stowing away on water taxis and wandering the streets during the day. The city was steeped in elegance and squalor, a maze of fascinating streets and alleys, narrow bridges, dead ends that dropped abruptly into glimmering black water, piazzas washed in sunlight, and long shadows stretching across the cobblestones as in a Dichirico painting. I lived there until I was nearly broke, then took my last 50 dollars and headed to Athens because a Dutch busker told me it was a good place to find illegal work.
It was. I found a job before I got off the train. A runner for a hotel near the station approached me, and I asked if I could do what he did. I could, he said. But I’d have to pay for at least one night at the hotel, four dollars—50 cents if I wanted to sleep on the roof.
The job consisted of riding trains out to small towns and suburbs of Athens and taking them back to Larissis Station so we could ride along with tourists approaching the city, hand them leaflets, and tell them the hotel was comfortable, safe, and had a view of the Acropolis. None of those things were true. I made about six dollars a day and got to stay for free on the sweltering top floor with a small group of other teenagers from England, Ireland, and South Africa. We’d all had similar ideas of expatriation, and no one wanted to go home again.
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When we weren’t working, we were out in the radiant, glamorous, filthy heat of the city, slipping into the Acropolis to wander the ruins, walking sunburned and sandaled in our only change of clothes through the flea markets near Monastiraki, drinking tall, dark pints of 50-cent Amstel or Fix Hellas at outdoor tables beneath vine covered trellises. The days smelled like diesel exhaust, baking bread, and grilled meat. The nights smelled like ouzo and cigarettes and rang with bouzouki music and the hard rap of dancing heels hitting the floor. It didn’t matter that we washed our clothes in a little sink in our room and brushed our teeth with a bar of soap. It didn’t matter that we lived in the red light district, had to walk home at night in groups to avoid assault, made the occasional trip to the hospital.
We wanted to disappear. Back then, disappearing was simple. There was one telephone in the lobby of the hotel, which couldn’t make international calls. There were no cell phones. There was no internet, no social media—no way to “check in.”
To keep in touch while traveling, we exchanged addresses of the places we anticipated we’d end up and made plans to meet at specific monuments or bars or stations at specific times. If we didn’t have maps (and we never did because they were an unnecessary expense) we got lost until we knew where we were. Athens was a sprawling, radiant, dangerous city. Learning to navigate it was one of the last acts of my adolescence.
I continued to travel this way for years, working and getting lost, drinking and writing letters. Eventually I returned to the United States, a decision with which I’m still trying to come to terms. And last year, for the first time, I came back to Athens.
On the train from the airport to the city, I thought I might not be able to leave again. White light poured in through the windows of the train as I drifted through a landscape of yellow grasses, gnarled olive trees, and wasted graffiti-tagged concrete structures; a landscape that is not really Europe, not really the Middle East; a dying thriving place, a hybrid. I felt a feral zeal I’d not known since I was 18, like the land was opening up around me, as though I might bolt again to freedom, might disappear.
Athens now seemed like a dream landscape, dislocated, displaced. The sense of still knowing where to go after all that time away was unnerving. I walked through the city at dusk, up whitewashed paths into the ruins to look out over the lights and the dense terraced architecture, the hillsides rising dark and black like an ocean at night. I strolled by upscale tourist restaurants near the Roman Agora, through the crowded, brightly lit shopping district, and made my way toward Larissis station past a corridor of boarded-up shops and dark streets.
Greece was (and still is) in a state of financial collapse; people were leaving the city to return to family homes on the islands, and refugees had begun teeming to Piraeus and Lesbos. But the city itself—even the neighborhood where I had lived as a teenager—shined with the gloss of gentrification. On the streets near the Plaka, the well-heeled shopped and dined; on tours through the ruins, people snapped selfies beside the temple of Athena. Nothing gives perspective like standing in the ruins of modern Athens, where an austerity plan has been instituted, watching a German tourist photographing a temple that was built by slaves in the 5th century and is currently being rebuilt by massive cranes.
I looked for the hotel where I had once lived on Yelp. It had two stars and many warnings about bathrooms flooding, dirt, theft, and the dangerous neighborhood. The WiFi connection was apparently unreliable.
But standing on the street, the neighborhood did not seem unsafe to me, especially compared to my recollection of it. Where there had been prostitutes sitting in doorways beneath red bulbs there was now a police station. Where there had been abandoned buildings there was now a car dealership. A Holiday Inn rose square and dull two blocks away. This place that had been unchanged in my mind, the static, drunken scene of my becoming, had loped into the sanitized, mundane future. The hotel had an internet café on the bottom floor.
I slipped past the reception desk pretending to be a guest and climbed the winding staircase to the top to see the cramped and squalid room I’d shared with my friends. It was still dingy, still resonating with a sense of neglect and potential threat.
I could have taken a picture of the hotel. I could have taken a picture of the strangely familiar interior and sent it to the only other person I know from that time who is still alive. But I stood instead outside the door with my hand pressed against it. I had long ago disappeared, and there was nothing I could take from that place that wasn’t already mine.
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Milo Yiannopoulos book deal cancelled following outrage over child abuse comments | Books
Simon & Schuster has cancelled the publication of Milo Yiannopoulos’ book, and his fellow Breitbart employees have reportedly threatened to quit if he is not fired.
A statement from the publisher late on Monday said: “After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.”
Yiannopoulos confirmed the report on Facebook with a post: “They canceled my book.”
He added: “I’ve gone through worse. This will not defeat me.”
The book was reportedly secured for an advance of US$250,000 (£200,000) and was to be published by Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint, Threshold Editions.
According to Yiannopoulos’ Facebook page, the book – an autobiography titled Dangerous – was due out on 13 June.
It is the third book that Yiannopoulos has announced that has not eventuated, after he flagged forthcoming titles on the Gamergate controversy and Silicon Valley that never appeared.
Threshold Editions has been contacted for comment by the Guardian.
Simon & Schuster’s decision follows outrage over a recording that appeared to show Yiannopoulos endorsing sex between “younger boys” and older men. The remarks were made during an internet livestream and circulated in an edited video on Twitter.
In the clip, Yiannopoulos said the age of consent was “not this black and white thing” and that relationships “between younger boys and older men … can be hugely positive experiences”.
The American Conservative Union subsequently rescinded its invitation to Yiannopoulos to speak at its annual CPac conference over the “offensive video … condoning paedophilia”. Matt Schlapp, the ACU chairman, said Yiannopoulos’ response was “insufficient” and urged him to “immediately further address these disturbing comments”.
The Washingtonian also reported that employees at Breitbart in the US, where he is a senior editor, were threatening to quit if Yiannopoulos were not fired.
In a video that was on his Facebook page for a few hours on Monday, Yiannopoulos said, of reports that he had endorsed child abuse, that “nothing could be further from the truth”.
“I find those crimes to be absolutely disgusting. I find those people to be absolutely disgusting.”
He did not contest the recording but said his comments were “stupidly worded” and that it had been edited to remove context.
“In most cases – you guys know – if I say something outrageous or offensive, in most cases my only regret is that I didn’t piss off more people, but in this case if I could do it again I wouldn’t phrase things the same way. Because it’s led to confusion.”
The video was no longer available on Facebook three hours after it was posted. Yiannopoulous later publicised that he would hold a press conference in New York on Tuesday afternoon.
Yiannopoulos’ book deal with Simon & Schuster was condemned by many who perceived the publishers to be giving him a mainstream platform for his often offensive and controversial views.
Color of Change, a US organisation for racial justice, had campaigned online against Simon & Schuster since the book was announced. Its petition against their spreading “hate speech” had 50,000 signatures and it said it had directed nearly 1500 calls to the publisher’s offices in recent weeks.
Rashad Robinson, the executive director, told the Guardian that its decision to publish the book had said “racism sells”, adding: “They were willing to cultivate hatred and racism in order to make money.”
He hoped the decision to pull the book would send a message to other media platforms “that you should be careful who you stand beside”.
Roxane Gay, the author and feminist commentator, wrote on her website: “In cancelling Milo’s book contract, Simon & Schuster made a business decision the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish that man in the first place.””
She said that her decision to pull her forthcoming book How to be Heard from Simon & Schuster in protest at Yiannopoulos’ book deal stood.
“Simon & Schuster should have never enabled Milo in the first place. I see what they are willing to tolerate and I stand against all of it.”
Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter in July 2016 for instigating abuse of the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.
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In a Walt Whitman Novel, Lost for 165 Years, Clues to ‘Leaves of Grass’
The 36,000-word “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,” which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, is being republished online on Monday by The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts.
“This is Whitman’s take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the ‘upper 10 thousand’ — what we would call the 1 percent — against the lower million,” said David S. Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
But it also, Mr. Reynolds and other scholars who have seen it say, offers clues to another mystery: how a workaday journalist and mostly conventional poet transformed himself into the author of the sensuous, philosophical, wildly experimental and altogether unclassifiable free verse of “Leaves of Grass.”
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A small ad that ran in The New York Times on March 13, 1852, for what turns out to have been an anonymously published Whitman novel.
“It’s like seeing the workshop of a great writer,” said Ed Folsom, the editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. “We’re discovering the process of Whitman’s own discovery.”
That transformation was one that Whitman himself wished to obscure. He said little about the early 1850s, when he hung a shingle as a carpenter in Brooklyn and published almost nothing, working instead on what became the 1855 first edition of “Leaves of Grass.”
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Later, he all but disowned his successful 1842 temperance novel “Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate,” and had little interest in seeing his short fiction revived.
“My serious wish,” he wrote in 1882, “were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp’d in oblivion.” In 1891, when a critic was planning on republishing some of his early tales, he was blunt: “I should almost be tempted to shoot him if I had an opportunity.”
That doesn’t faze Zachary Turpin, the graduate student at the University of Houston who found the “Jack Engle.” In fact, this is the second time archival lightning has struck Mr. Turpin. Last year, he announced the discovery of “Manly Health and Training,” a previously unknown 47,000-word self-help treatise that Whitman published in The New York Atlas in 1858.
“A friend joked that that’s what would be on my gravestone,” Mr. Turpin said.
The library of lost American literature includes many “known unknowns,” as Mr. Turpin put it (channeling Donald H. Rumsfeld), like Herman Melville’s “The Isle of the Cross” (the eighth and final novel he may, or may not, have finished) and Whitman’s “The Sleeptalker,” a seemingly completed 1850 novel he discusses in his letters, but which does not survive.
Mr. Turpin has made a specialty of looking for the “unknown unknowns,” using vast online databases that compile millions of pages of 19th-century newspapers. One day last May, he entered some names and phrases from fragmentary notes for a possible story concerning an embezzling lawyer named Covert and an orphan named Jack Engle — one of many entries in Whitman’s voluminous notebooks that the online Walt Whitman Archive had deemed to have no clear connection to any known published material.
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Walt Whitman’s handwritten notes for what became the novel “Jack Engle” contain “some remarks about the villainy of lawyers.”
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Library of Congress
Up popped the advertisement that included the name Jack Engle. The serial was to run in The Sunday Dispatch, a New York paper Whitman was known to have contributed to. “My spider-sense was really tingling,” Mr. Turpin said.
Mr. Turpin ordered a scan of the first page from the Library of Congress, which held the only known (and as yet undigitized or microfilmed) copy of that day’s Dispatch. A month later, he was stunned to open a file showing a yellowing page containing “Jack Engle” and other names from Whitman’s notes.
“I was at my in-laws’, setting up a Pack ’n Play, when the email arrived,” he recalled. “From that day until now, I’ve had this simmering inside me.”
The 36,000-word tale, published in six typo-ridden installments, may not belong in the American literary canon. “It’s not a great novel, though it’s not a bad read either,” said Mr. Reynolds, the author of “Walt Whitman’s America.”
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Mr. Turpin called it “rollicking, interesting, beautiful, beautiful and bizarre,” with antic twists, goofy names and suddenly revealed conspiracies that recall “a pre-modern Thomas Pynchon” or even, he ventured, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
This may sound a long way from “Leaves of Grass.” But Jack Engle and the other raffish young male characters, Mr. Reynolds said, are reminiscent of the man-of-the-streets persona — “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs” — he created with “Leaves of Grass.”
And then there’s Chapter 19, which Mr. Folsom called “a magical moment.” Here, Jack enters the cemetery at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and the madcap plot grinds to a halt in favor of reveries about nature, immortality and the oneness of being that strikingly echo the imagery of Whitman’s great work.
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Zachary Turpin, a graduate student at the University of Houston who found the unknown Whitman novel.
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Bryan Schutmaat for The New York Times
“Long, rank grass covered my face,” says Jack, the first-person narrator. “Over me was the verdure, touched with brown, of trees nourished from the decay of the bodies of men.”
Jack wanders among those bodies of men, copying out the inscriptions of the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton, the War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence (of “Don’t give up the ship!” fame) and other lost lives. Then, he exits onto the streets, where “onward rolled the broad, bright current” — and quickly and rather indifferently wraps up his own story.
“Throughout the novel, you constantly see Whitman wandering off the plot, looking for life in all the nooks and crannies of the city,” Mr. Folsom said. “With the visit to the cemetery, where all plots end, it’s as if he’s suddenly lost interest in all plots — or at least this plot.”
Today, we think of the radically expansive free verse of “Leaves of Grass,” with its wandering “I” who “contains multitudes,” as one of the fixed signposts in American literary history. But in his notebooks from the early 1850s, Mr. Turpin noted, Whitman was toying with other forms for his great work.
“You see him asking, Should it be a novel? Or a play, with thousands of people onstage, chanting in unison?” he said. “It’s amazing to think that ‘Leaves of Grass’ could have taken a different form entirely.”
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Mr. Turpin said the graveyard chapter put him in mind of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” one of the most famous poems in “Leaves of Grass,” where Whitman declares, “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.”
But when asked how it felt to be the first in many generations to read Whitman’s now-resurrected novel, Mr. Turpin reached for another near-mystical line.
“Whitman said something really great: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,’” he said. “You really do start to believe it after a while.”
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