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The First Children’s Book, and Other News

“The Soul,” from the 1705 English edition of Orbis Sensualium Pictus; image via the Public Domain Review

In 1658, John Comenius published what may have been the first children’s picture book: Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures). “The Orbis—with its 150 pictures showing everyday activities like brewing beer, tending gardens, and slaughtering animals—is immediately familiar as an ancestor of today’s children’s literature.”
Behind Alex Trebek’s veneer of erudition is an everyman, a heavy drinker, a handyman: “Trebek says that when he gets up in the middle of the night—he has terrible insomnia—he will lie awake for hours plotting how to fix the sliver of light peeking through his window, and all the other home-repair projects he wants to tackle next.”
“Throughout cult-movie history, the American cheerleader has come to stand for something demonic, bitchy, slutty, and secretly lesbian, resulting in an archetype as American as apple pie, football, and well, cheerleading itself: the Subversive Cheerleader Genre.”
Cell-phone novels, stories serialized in short bursts, have consistently appeared on Japan’s best-seller lists for years; now a few developers are attempting to popularize them in America.
Amazon puts the squeeze on Hachette: “Hachette, which owns Little, Brown; Hyperion; and Grand Central, says that Amazon is deliberately slowing sales of Hachette’s books in an effort to pressure the French publisher into agreeing to new contract terms on book pricing.”

Own a Piece of Paris Review History

Tonight at nine, American Masters’ Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself premieres on PBS. The documentary “does the man justice,” Variety says. The Newsday nails it: “Famed journalist had fun, and so will you.”

For the next week, to celebrate the documentary and our late, great founder, The Paris Review is giving all new subscribers a copy of our twenty-first issue, published in the spring of 1959. This remarkable issue includes an interview with T. S. Eliot, the very first in our Art of Poetry series; fiction from Plimpton Pals Alexander Trocchi and Terry Southern; poems by Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, and Louis Simpson; and a special portfolio of “Artists on Long Island” including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers.

Subscribe now and we’ll send you a copy of your own—a piece of The Paris Review’s history. And tune in this evening to catch Plimpton!, which is about, as PBS puts it, “football, literature, magazines, fireworks, hockey, movies, presidents, lawn chairs, geniuses, and the true tall tale that brought them all together.”

What We’re Loving: Antrim, Glynn, a Massive Sugar-Woman

Kara Walker, A Subtlety

In the last few years one of my favorite novelists, Donald Antrim, has devoted himself to short stories—not as finger exercises, but with a combined intensity, delicacy, and feeling for tradition that set him apart from any writer of his generation. This morning I finished the galleys of his long-awaited collection, The Emerald Light in the Air, and immediately started reading them again. What is it about Antrim? He writes as if prose were his native language: his sentences have the matter-of-fact pathos and absurdity of dreams. Also, they are often very funny: “An Actor Prepares” remains, after fifteen years, one of the funniest short stories I have ever read. Nowadays the comedy is quieter and darker, with protagonists who struggle to remain within the ranks of the worried well. It’s all up-to-the-minute (you could write a paper about the evolution of cell phones in Antrim’s work), but his themes are the Chekhovian classics—ambivalence toward the life at hand; yearning for the life that might have been—and he evokes unhappy love with a sensuousness and a subtle, plausible magic that recall Cheever at his best. —Lorin Stein

Go see Kara Walker’s massive installation, “A Subtlety,” at the doomed Domino Sugar Factory. The space was once a warehouse for unrefined sugar that arrived from the Caribbean. Now, the air is sticky with molasses; it drips from the ceiling, staining the floor and the factory’s newest resident, a thirty-five-foot sugar-woman in sphinx form, naked but for a headscarf and some earrings. She presides over thirteen boys of molasses and resin who labor on the concrete. And she watches, and whatever she’s watching seems not in this room, seems elsewhere, ahead and behind and beside us. —Zack Newick

Since the death of Thomas Glynn earlier this month, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of sorts: I’ve tried to locate many of the author’s obscure works, including an 1,800-page unpublished manuscript on the first 150 years of the Dannemora prison, a much shorter history of New York State, an array of short stories, and the occasional essay (don’t miss this great 1975 profile of Frank Zappa from Modern Hi-Fi & Music). Glynn self-published A Child’s Christmas in Chicago in 2002, and while the title may come across as more sentimental than most of Glynn’s oeuvre, think twice after reading the novel’s opening line: “Hey, it’s Christmas for Christ’s sake.” With a touch of the raconteur Jean Shepherd and the voice of a young Gulley Jimson, the story is a mix of oddball characters, whimsy, and the kind of heartbreak that only the Christmas season can bring. —Justin Alvarez

It can be a real relief to read something that isn’t stylized, or even something badly written, after reading Proust, which I have been doing on and off this week. In his excellent essay on volume three of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, Ben Lerner celebrates Knausgaard’s unquotability and his sloppiness. Moreover, Lerner provides the best answer I’ve yet read on what Knausgaard’s writing does to us, and why we’re so obsessed with it, why “we can read it compulsively while being uncertain if it’s good.” —Anna Heyward

I caught a midnight showing of Godzilla last night at the newly-renovated-and-reopened movie theater of my childhood. It must say something that I found Godzilla’s plight and his sad, sometimes bewildered facial expressions more moving than those of the actual people in the film. But maybe I was projecting—perhaps because I was revisiting my youth, I had on my mind an old favorite, Ray Bradbury’s story “The Fog Horn,” about a lonely creature, the last of its kind, summoned from the depths of the ocean by the low call of a foghorn echoing across the sea. Bradbury is not afraid of real sentiment, which can make his stories feel hokey and dated. It’s also a trait I admire deeply in his writing. Godzilla wasn’t bad, really, but I found myself wishing it were a bit more hokey, a bit less self-serious. I guess that era, like Godzilla’s, like Bradbury’s, like the creature’s in “The Fog Horn,” is gone. —Tucker Morgan

Yesterday brought the ridiculous news that Jonathan Safran Foer has arranged to print original writing on bags and cups in Chipotle stores. Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis, and George Saunders have all contributed pieces to the series, which Chipotle calls, with unbearable pretension, “Cultivating Thought.” Safran Foer has framed this as a kind of public service, though whether consumers want a side of A-list pap with their burritos remains to be seen. The critics, I’m sure, are sharpening their knives at this very moment. James Camp has already set the tone in a delightfully sharp piece for The Guardian: “Cultivating Thought,” he writes, makes the galling assumption that we don’t have enough to read. “It transforms writing from a main event into an accompaniment. James Joyce once told an interviewer: ‘The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to my works.’ Joyce didn’t want readers. He wanted hostages. His books aspired to replace the universe. Safran Foer and his collaborators ask only the devotion that is compatible with digestion. At the Chipotle on 42nd Street in New York, the cups and bags had yet to arrive. The public library stood a hundred feet away. Its security guard assured me I wouldn’t be able to take a burrito inside.” —Dan Piepenbring

From Her Palace

Parmigianino, Schiava Turca, c. 1531–34

The Schiava Turca (Turkish Slave) is one of the many mysteries of art history. The painting, a 1530s Mannerist masterpiece by Parmigianino, is considered an icon of the artist’s hometown, but no one is sure of the sitter’s identity. Was it a noblewoman? A courtesan? Or just an ideal of feminine beauty? One thing is more or less certain: nickname aside, the woman pictured was almost certainly not Turkish. The painting acquired its commonly used moniker in 1704, when a cataloguer assumed its subject’s dress spoke of the East. Rather, her sumptuous costume and turban-like balzo headdress would have been characteristic of court dress of the Northern Italian Renaissance.

Aimee Ng, guest curator of the Frick’s current exhibition, “The Poetry of Parmigianino’s ‘Schiava Turca’,” has another theory altogether. As the show’s title indicates, she feels the portrait may have had everything to do with the literary culture of the era. She explains,

In the Renaissance, beautiful women and their portraits were often seen as poetic muses who inspired male poets and painters. This sitter is directly linked to poetry through the ornament on her headdress, which depicts a winged horse, the symbol of poetic inspiration. Perhaps, however, rather than a muse, the sitter is herself a poet. Seen in this light, her twisting pose … and forthright gaze would convey her creative force. She may even be identified with a specific female poet active in the area around Parma in the 1530s, such as Veronica Gambara, whom Parmigianino had many opportunities to meet.

Gambara—herself the descendent of a number of prominent female writers and poets—was a well-educated noblewoman known both for her poetry and her famed Parma salons. Although largely ignored by modern scholars, she is survived by some eighty poems and a vast body of correspondence; throughout her life, she maintained lively exchanges with many of the intellectuals of her day.

Historians have also wondered whether the portrait may portray Giulia Gonzaga, another salonniere, famed for her beauty. (She’s also famed for her scandalous dalliance with a cardinal, an abortive kidnapping plot designed to bring her to a sultan’s harem, and her Inquisition-era correspondences, one of which led to someone’s being burned at the stake for heresy.) Needless to say, she was a popular contemporary subject.

Agnolo Bronzino, Lodovico Capponi, c. 1550–55

Short of a Basil E. Frankweiler–style revelation, it seems unlikely that the definite identity of Parmigianino’s subject will come to light any time soon. But Ng makes a strong case for the literary overtones of the portrait—as she points out, the artist moved in these circles, and well-educated female intellectuals were by no means unusual in the milieu. (If you get the chance, check out Ng’s talk on the subject.) In sum, whoever they portray, the portraits in the show manage to capture not just a subject, but a moment—and an artist at the height of his powers; not long after, Parmigianino would descend into madness, become obsessed with alchemy, and die in penury at thirty-seven. Sic transit gloriamundi.
As Gambara wrote near the end of her life,

Sono qui al casino, vivendo al solito, e stimando poco la fortuna, poichè per lungo uso ho fatto il callo alle sue molte percosse. Dal mio Casino. Here am I in my villa, all alone, valuing fortune very little because after long usage I have become inured to her many blows. From my palace.

Present and Absent

The art world comes to Mexico City.

Mexico City’s Material Art Fair. Photo: Komplot

In a few hours, a conference room on the fourth floor of Mexico City’s Hilton Reforma will swing open and the third day of the Material Art Fair will commence. But it’s five a.m., and I’m on the sixth floor, in the heated indoor pool, with about five near-naked and naked artists and a bottle of mescal bobbing in the shallow end. None of us has a room here. Lenin said you can’t trust artists because they can navigate all levels of society. In this case, that means all floors of the Hilton.

The evening began yesterday at a Mariachi bar. I proceeded to a store selling giant micheladas that had the mouthfeel of a Papa John’s pizza in a cup. Then I went to a grimy rave. Then to the end-of-the-world wealth of a penthouse party in Polanco where the free sushi meant that at least two people were doing blow off of chopsticks, and where, in line for a marble bathroom indecorously coated in piss, I met a Spanish developer named Iggy who was building an entire village with Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architecture firm, on a stretch of virgin Mexican coast. After that, I picked up more mescal and sat on the desolate, please-abduct-me corner of a Centro Histórico street, pulling from the same bottle now bobbing in the Hilton pool’s shallow end.

I live in Miami, where for weeks the talk had been about Mexico City. When do you get in? Where are you staying? The contemporary art fairs Zona Maco and Material both opened in the first week of February. Why not go? To work in the culture industry is to justify any type of vacation or prolonged period of dicking around as research.

As a supposed arbiter of transcendence, art and its surrounding world has of late succumbed to stasis and homogeny. Things feel the same. An unceasing focus on the contemporary has culture in the doldrums of a present-tense continuous, defined by a million identical white-cube galleries and purple-carpeted convention halls. But it takes a lot of movement to feel like you’re staying in one place. Everyone—collectors, artists, curators, handlers, advisors—is launched into a ceaseless grand tour of the capitals of capital, armed with VIP cards to the nameless Biennials and Fairs wobbling skyward Babel-style.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Miami, which to many seems an art fair with a city attached. The parties and the velvet-rope-divided subjectivities are as much a part of a naturalized cultural terrain as the academy and the museum are in other cities. For artists here, drinking and schmoozing are not just that—they’re praxis. So I booked a flight to Mexico City. Everyone was going.

I split a cab with two other artists into the city. We sat in traffic along Paseo de la Reforma—the same street the hotel was on, hundreds of address numbers away—and watched street children with balloons shoved down their pants clown around in the median. For the past hour, our gallerist friend Alan had been whatsapping us about a VIP tequila brunch. The only thing worse than sitting in traffic in Mexico City is sitting in traffic knowing that you’re missing free tequila somewhere. When we finally pulled up to the Hilton and found the convention room where Material was held, the brunch had finished.

Organized by an American, Brett Schultz, and a Mexican, Daniela Elbahara, Material brought together forty young and alternative spaces from Mexico and the States, with some Europeans thrown in for good measure. Artinfo.com described the fair as “the NADA of Mexico City,” referring to the more established fair, which appears in New York, Miami Beach, and Cologne. Art fairs, which have always been distortions of place—wrinkles in the cultural and geographic fabric as creased as the blazer in your carry-on—have become so normalized that they’re now getting the Paris-of treatment, wherein x is described as the Paris of y. If that sounds confusing, it’s a unique quality of the art world’s relentless pace that spurs this type of bewilderment. Perhaps it begets a certain kind of pride; it is a malady of lifestyle, like tennis elbow or jet lag.

Wandering around, I came to the Komplot booth, in which an upright sheet of Plexi had several holes cut into it, with black latex eels draped through them.

“The artist has a lot of anxieties about the anus,” a man whispered behind me.

“Don’t we all?” I replied.

“See, the eels represent the phallus,” he continued, in an accent I couldn’t place. I told him there was no need for Freud here—that many people just stick eels up there, plain and simple. I brought up an article I’d recently read about a man in China who had died after an eel/anus crime de coeur.

Hugo Montoya, detail from Black Beach, 2013; clay (harvested from Key Biscayne), wall

Eels aside, there was a lot of anxiety at the fair. Some of its strongest pieces were categorically anti-fair, which was strange, because they were in the fair. In order to decommodify the art commodity, some booths staged performances—such a strange verb for these happenings, which had all the theatricality of QVC demonstrations—or brought in collectibles. The back wall of Regina Rex’s booth was made out of mud dredged from Biscayne Bay, dried, shipped from Miami to Mexico, and then rehydrated. The piece, “Black Beach,” was by Hugo Montoya and going for $7,000.

* * *

Mexico City’s ornately colonial architecture is underscored by a thrumming brutality. It’s as heavy as an Olmec head but as fragile as an eggshell. Myth maintains that Mexico City began on an island in the middle of a large lake—the Indians would weave huge reeds mats and place them in the waters. It took generations, but the mats, after they sank, turned to soil, and then the water disappeared.

Just as the Indians laid down mat after dissolving mat, today’s Mexico City has been created by centuries of struggle between different cultures, with today’s topsoil created from yesterday’s wreckage. As much as the city wants to be new, it is very old. This came into focus at an exhibition called Proxímo, held in the Museo Británico Americano en México, an old Anglican church whose roof had collapsed during an earthquake.

The Museo Británico Americano en México

Inside the church, the works of several young painters had been hung on provisional racks. The rain began to drum on the tarp roof and the faithful pushed through the heavy wrought-iron gate. These paintings were hedge-fund Shrouds of Turin: they indexed the passage of the flesh into spirit, from labor to commodity. All of the work was process-based abstraction—minimal paintings that looked nice, but only became truly present when someone was there to tell you how the artist made them. Ryan Estep, one of the artists in the show, dunks his hands in lidocaine so they’re completely numb before he makes some of his gestures on the canvas. The artist can be both present and absent.

That evening, as my friends and I left one of the VIP parties, a beautiful Spanish woman told me to follow her to a secret after-party. We arrived with a large group at an unmarked building in Centro Historico. A man banged on the door and nobody came. People started to trickle off. He kept banging, a bit nervous now, and embarrassed. Just then a police car drove by and stopped. Out came two cops. The man had been drinking a beer on the street, which was illegal. They dragged him into the car.

This was what I had heard about Mexico—corrupt police, dark cars at night. People disappearing. But then, the crowd started to chant. In Spanish, naturally, they were chanting: “How much for the bribe? How much for the bribe?” It doesn’t sound too special in English, but Spanish is a more passionate tongue, so you have to believe just how exciting this was.

The police pushed the man from their car and sped off just as an older gentleman opened the heavy door to greet the crowd. He led us down the stairs. It was pitch dark. Once again, it got very tense. We stood there, feet shuffled, the door clicked shut. The only reason I didn’t run away is because I wasn’t really paying attention; I was thinking instead of what it would be like to remember the moment later on. But then the lights behind the bar went on. It was the old man. “The beer is free,” he yelled, motioning to a row of sweating chrome taps.

* * *

The next morning we may or may not have been ripped off on our drive to the airport. I was too tired to care. As the plane took off, I half-listened to a retired American woman go on and on about how Mexico City was filthy—“You think everywhere is filthy,” her husband countered. “You thought Paris was filthy!”

“It was, except the Louvre. The Louvre was educational and beautiful.”

Which city was Paris the Paris of? I needed to fall asleep, but since my seat didn’t recline, I leaned forward, my forehead resting against the back of the seat in front of mine, smearing skin oil and al pastor grease on Spirit Airlines’ already smeared interior. I felt like the last sentence of Under the Volcano: “Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”

Hunter Braithwaite has written for Art in America, The White Review, and The Virginian-Pilot. He lives in Miami, where he edits The Miami Rail.

Avoid Cholera with a Healthy Beard, and Other News

A twenty-three-year-old Viennese woman, drawn before and after contracting cholera in 1831. Image via Wired.com

Say Jesus Christ dictates a book to you in a dream—who holds the copyright? Is it you or is it Jesus of Nazareth?
“Donne, in one of his regrettably few statements about how ‘Metricall compositions’ are made, referred to the putting together of a poem as ‘the shutting up.’ An unfortunate term, and we could use a better one; because there can’t be much doubt that the shaping of a poem is also a pressure, in which the binding energy of the poem brings everything inside its perimeter to incandescence.”
Let’s give franchise novels their due: “It’s a plain fact of publishing life that more people will read the latest Star Wars franchise novel than all the books shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize put together.”
Unsurprisingly, nineteenth-century medical texts are full of disturbingly wondrous illustrations.
While we’re on medicine in the nineteenth century: doctors in the Victorian era recommended that men grow beards to stay healthy. “The Victorian obsession with air quality saw the beard promoted as a sort of filter. A thick beard, it was reasoned, would capture the impurities before they could get inside the body. Others saw it as a means of relaxing the throat, especially for those whose work involved public speaking.”

Hey, That’s My Snare Drum!

This drum is mine.

Last week, the Times recognized a new trend in vigilantism: do-it-yourself iPhone recovery. When someone finds his phone stolen, he uses the phone’s GPS to locate the thief; the resulting confrontations usually end peacefully, with the phone restored to its rightful owner and the thief shuffling off into the night, cowed and shamed. In one especially rousing case, a man rustled up the thief using OkCupid:

He lured the thief to his Brooklyn apartment building by posing as a woman and flirting with him on the dating service.

When the thief arrived with a bottle of wine, expecting to meet “Jennifer,” Mr. Nirenberg went up behind him, hammer at his side. He slapped a $20 bill on the thief, to mollify him and compensate him for his time and wine, and demanded the phone. The thief handed it over and slunk away.

Instead of giving that man the key to the city, the fuzz have advised against this kind of justice. Of course they have: no one likes to feel redundant. In the supercilious words of an LAPD spokesman, “It’s just a phone … Let police officers take care of it. We have backup, guns, radio, jackets—all that stuff civilians don’t have.” As if LA’s Finest would, in their eminent wisdom, break out the flak jackets and heavy artillery to liberate your telephone.

I’m here to tell you: you can be your own authority.

I’ve never had my phone stolen, but last month someone nicked my snare drum, and I found myself in a similar circumstance. I play in a punk band called Vulture Shit—a not-for-profit enterprise, obviously—and the Shit does not travel light. If you live in the Tri-State area and you’ve seen three groaning young men emerge from a bruised Nissan Pathfinder, their arms swallowed in a silver-black blear of hardware and impedimenta, all of it designed to induce early-onset tinnitus, and all of it in various states of dereliction … that may have been us.

One night, we were playing in Bushwick, Brooklyn, at a high-ceilinged industrial building converted to apartments. The building retains the must and concrete brutalism of a factory: it’s still, after all these years, a great place to chain-smoke and go deaf. We’d unloaded our gear into a rasping, graffitied freight elevator, but when we carried everything to the stage—i.e., some guy’s living room—my snare drum was nowhere to be seen.

It turned up two days later on craigslist. There was no mistaking its gold-sparkle finish, the Sharpied signature on its interior, and the thin Plexiglas strip that runs around its circumference.

The sight of it for sale inflamed my sense of the proprietary. I felt my pupils dilate. There’s a scene in Air Force One where Harrison Ford discovers that the terrorists have nabbed his wife and daughter, and an intent grimace overtakes his face—this was something on the order of that. I’m a pacific man, but I imagined putting this guy (I assumed it had to be a guy) in the hospital. Then I imagined him putting me in the hospital. I didn’t like that, so I went back to the first version.

I wrote him an email: “Hey, would love to meet up tonight about buying that snare drum if possible!” The exclamation point was, I thought, a friendly touch, unless he was somehow able to divine the bloodlust in it. A few long hours later, he called and agreed to meet me off the DeKalb L stop that evening. I alerted my two bandmates: we got him.

Team Vulture Shit met in advance a few blocks away, where we took long sips of iced coffees and assured ourselves we were in control of the situation. The air was thick, the low gray sky about to break with rain. It was perfect standoff weather. All we needed was a piece of tumbleweed to drift across Wyckoff Avenue—

An empty bag of Ruffles sailed through the intersection.

“Just make sure you have the drum in your hands before you…”

“Shoulda brought my brass knuckles…”

“I’ll take pictures of him on my phone while you guys distract him…”

“It’s good that he asked to meet in public, because that means he’s as scared as we are…”

“Do you really have brass knuckles?”

“And then we can show him the pictures of him, and say, ‘If you make a run for it… ’”

“Shoulda brought my knife…”

“Definitely say you’ve filed a police report, even though you haven’t…”

“Don’t accuse him of stealing it, but maybe say, ‘This is a one-of-a-kind drum! Where’d’ja get it?’”

We found the guy leaning against a bodega. His name was John. He was wan and goateed, smirking in camouflage pants, and he looked to me like a thief, though this was mainly because he had my snare drum sitting next to him. John, too, had brought a pair of friends, one of whom had a fresh shiner, as if his clock had already been cleaned today.

We all shook hands and as the contours of social space seemed to warp around us—as my posture and the width of my stance took on exaggerated significance—I understood, for a moment, the compulsion that makes men join gangs or start wars or bloody one another’s faces. But the threat of violence, insofar as I felt it at all, was fleeting. In another second, I just felt like a weenie.

I made a show of inspecting the drum. I unzipped the padded black case—my case. Out tumbled a Vulture Shit set list.

“Hey, you get a free set list,” John said.

“This is a one-of-a-kind drum!” I said. “Where’d’ja get it?”

John told of a mysterious friend who owed him a couple hundred bucks but had instead paid with this drum—and then he’d decamped to Florida. How generous of John, I thought, to accept material goods in place of currency, and to let his friend skip town.

His friend’s name, John said, was John.

I had decided in advance to avoid using the words “stole,” “thief,” or “reprobate” if I could help it; I wanted to preserve John’s dignity, and in the unlikely event of the second John’s existence, I wanted to preserve his dignity, too. Everyone in John’s orbit, it seemed, needed to catch a break. They all had the uniquely downtrodden look of those to whom New York City has dealt a bad hand. Even the fictional John could find no better escape than a trip to Florida.

Without meeting his eyes, I told the real John that I had a dozen pictures of myself playing this drum, and as many videos, and that the free set-list was my set list—I’d had the drum not forty-eight hours ago a few blocks from here. “It is,” I concluded, “my drum. And I’ve filed a police report…”

I tightened my grip on the drum, which I held in front of my chest as a kind of shield. John, who was now in an aggressively casual slouch, sighed, exchanged what seemed to be a knowing glance with his friend, and feigned a surprised laugh, as if to say, Gosh, what’re the odds!

“Damn,” he said. “I’m gonna kill my friend.”

“Yeah, he fucked you over,” my bandmate said.

I found myself apologizing, reflexively. But the tension in the air had dissipated—it was clear that I’d leave with the drum, that no one was going to kick anyone’s ass, though for hours after the fact we would debate whether or not we could’ve “taken them.”

“We never would’ve put it on craigslist so soon after stealing it,” said John’s black-eyed friend. “We’re not idiots.”

“But now I’m still broke!” John said. We all laughed. He’d intended to spend some of the four hundred dollars I’d offered him on a bottle of Fireball, everyone’s favorite cinnamon whiskey. “Any chance I can get a finder’s fee?”

We gave John a few more bucks than we should’ve—more than zero, in other words—and parted ways.

It’s increasingly plausible for the victim of a theft to solve his own crime. Involving the police, in my case and many others, would have complicated what was a civil, if tense, public exchange. I had a mildly unpleasant encounter with a guy who’s kind of an asshole and needs money. Of course, a future glutted with traceable personal property will bring other problems. But that LAPD spokesman encouraged us to construe a world without cops as a Hobbesian state of nature—to assume our communities are so frail, our capacity for empathy so limited, that we could never assert ourselves without sundering the fabric of social justice.

The Times caught up with a young woman who went directly to her thief’s doorstep. He was a large man, and she had to repeat herself—“I think you have my phone”—before he finally conceded. “When she was asked by text message if she would pursue a future pickpocket, she typed an unequivocal reply on her recovered phone: ‘Yes, def.’” I would like to tell her that Vulture Shit has her back, even if the LAPD does not.

Lisa

John Singer Sargent, A Dinner Table at Night, 1884

Last week, I was invited to a fancy dinner in honor of a personage in the international art scene who had curated an interactive installation in an urban high school. More specifically, my rather more impressive friend was invited, and he asked if he might bring me. Not being much of a personage in the international art scene or otherwise, I was both excited and nervous. The night before, I tried on and rejected several dresses before deciding on a black lace vintage frock I had picked up at a thrift store some months before, and had altered but never worn. Having had a haircut four days before, I decided to eke a little more mileage out of my increasingly mangy blowout, and I put on my old denim jacket as a sort of security blanket.

The dinner was held in the private room of an austerely chic downtown restaurant. It was already filled with people when we arrived—some recognizable, many beautiful, all looking like personages. The room contained several long tables bedecked with place cards. I accepted a glass of wine and tried to look less anxious. But when my friend went outside for a cigarette, I went with him.

When we returned to the room, everyone was seated. Someone called to my friend to come sit next to her; he had been placed near some famous people in the center of the table. I looked around, but I already knew: there was no place card for me. Everyone else was seated. A waiter murmured in my ear that someone hadn’t shown up; I could sit in her seat for the moment.

“You work at the high school?” said the very elegant gentleman to my right. It seemed the person whose seat I was borrowing worked at the high school. Her name was Lisa.

“No,” I said apologetically. “I—”

But he had already turned away. He and the person on his right spoke in German about the Frieze Art Fair. The seat to my left was empty. I sat and sipped my wine in silence. I was blessedly relieved when the waiter took my order; I decided I would try again with my neighbor.

“What did you order?” I said. “I think it’s pretty bold, making veal an option.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” he said. And turned away from me again.

I sat in silence for perhaps ten minutes, trying to look like I was having fun. When my friend caught my eye, I smiled gaily. His neighbors were all laughing and talking.

A woman several seats down took pity on me. “Lisa,” she said. “I understand you work in the high school.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, what do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Do you write anywhere I’d have seen?”

While I was deciding how to answer this, someone else engaged her in French and she too turned away.

My veal came and I ate it, doggedly, in silence.

I felt tears threatening. I would have excused myself, but I knew no one would care. I got up and went into the bathroom, where I went into a stall and cried for several minutes, then splashed water on my face and repaired my eye makeup.

I told my friend I wasn’t feeling well and left during the toasts. When I tried to claim my denim jacket from the coat check, I found that I had lost my ticket stub. The young woman working there said she couldn’t let me have my jacket without the manager’s approval. It was a new policy. I stood and waited for about ten minutes.

“May I please have my jacket?” I said. “It’s just a jean jacket.” I told her the brand name and the size.

“This is definitely yours,” she said, “but I can’t let you have it.”

We waited for another five minutes. Then the manager arrived and released the jacket into my custody.

“Try not to lose your ticket next time,” he said.

“I won’t,” I muttered.

The Rebirth of Colombia

A team emerges from the shadow of its past.

The Colombia National Football Team, 2014

Teams in the World Cup are generally split among three tiers. The top one consists of those that year in and year out field the best squads in the world—including most of the previous World Cup winners and finalists, such as Brazil, Germany, and Argentina. The bottom tier consists of those from whom no one expects much, other than that they show up on time for matches. Among that group this year are Iran, Australia, and Algeria. But most teams fall somewhere in that second tier, where fans begin the tournament holding out hope that—through a perfect storm of lucky bounces, mistaken calls, beneficial match draws, and brilliant overachievement—their team will cobble together a World Cup championship. Colombia, who have qualified for the World Cup for the first time in sixteen years, is one of these teams.

“We qualified for the 1962 World Cup, and the best thing you could say about the Colombian team from then until 1990 was that we tied with Russia in 1962 … It wasn’t even a victory,” said the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, forty-one, the author of the highly acclaimed 2011 novel The Sound of Things Falling, and an avid soccer fan who has closely followed the Colombian team his entire life. “Football is a very big element of the national unity. So the importance that football has had for Colombia has not been really reflected in the results on an international scale.”

That all seemed about to change with the emergence of the Colombian teams of the 1990s. Under its coach Francisco Maturana, the team developed a style of play known as “toque toque,” or “touch touch.” “It’s like the tiki-taka style we see today in Barcelona,” said Sarah Castro, a sports reporter for Caracol Radio in Bogota, referring to the style of possession soccer that won Spain the 2010 World Cup.

The Colombian teams of the nineties centered around the midfield genius of Carlos Valderrama. With his lion’s mane of wild orange curls, Valderrama looked top-heavy, but his feet seemed to rotate on a dancer’s pivot. No defender could keep track of him. “He could do unbelievable stuff in just one square meter and dominate the field from there with incredible passes,” Vásquez said.

Valderrama was surrounded by other flamboyant figures, including the powerful attacking midfielder Freddy Rincón; the deadly, unpredictable striker Faustino Asprilla; and the goalkeeper René Higuita, who created the scorpion kick, a ridiculous move in which he saved a ball sailing toward him by doing a standing backflip and kicking it free in mid-air with the soles of his feet. The team made Colombian soccer history when, in a World Cup qualifying match in 1993, it beat Argentina, in Argentina—something no team had ever done before—5-0.

“When you refer to this match in Colombia, you don’t even need to mention the rival,” Castro said. “Colombians just say, ‘El 5-0.’”

“That game is like a national holiday for us,” Vásquez said.

But the team never achieved the greatness that games like El 5-0 prefigured. In 1990, Colombia was knocked out of the World Cup by Cameroon in the round of sixteen, after a famous Higuita blunder, when he’d come far out of his goal and mishandled the ball, leaving an empty net for Cameroon to score into. In 1994, the team didn’t even make it that far. In place of great soccer achievement, those Colombian teams are largely remembered for their link to the Two Escobars, the drug lord Pablo and the soccer player Andrés, a story well told in a 2010 ESPN 30 for 30 film of that title.

“Those footballers were the products of a very difficult moment in our history,” Vásquez said. “In the eighties, the Medellin cartel and the Cali cartel had begun investing in football because they loved the sport. This legendary team of Colombia was in part a collateral effect of those drug years, the years in which Pablo Escobar, the Medellin cartel, and the Cali cartel were basically dominating Colombian life in all aspects.”

Six days after Colombian defender Andrés Escobar scored an own goal in the 1994 World Cup, he was murdered outside a bar in Medellin. Pablo Escobar had been killed eight months earlier. The drug war within Colombia would soon begin to recede. “It is like a myth that Andrés Escobar’s death was related to the own goal in the World Cup,” Castro says.

“The nuance is not interesting, and the whole thing is despicable,” Vasquez said. Essentially, it was a bar fight gone wrong—one in which the well-mannered Escobar, known in Colombia as “the Football Gentleman,” wanted no part. “We all remember where we were when Andrés Escobar was killed, much in the same way we remember where we were when presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was murdered in 1989. It’s one of those big moments of unreasonable violence that sticks in your mind,” Vasquez said. “It was the last big murder to happen in a series of big murders that constituted the war between the drug dealers and the mafia against Colombian citizens.”

It may have had a lasting effect on the soccer team as well. The Colombian team made it to the 1998 World Cup, in France, but it couldn’t get out of the group stage there, either. “We thought we were here to stay,” Vásquez said of the country’s three straight World Cup appearances in the nineties. “And then for sixteen years, there was nothing.”

In January 2012, Colombia was once again near the bottom of the South American qualifying standings. Over the five previous years, the team had essentially failed with four different coaches, most of whom had links with the teams of the nineties and none of whom lasted even two years in the job. For the first time since 1982, the Colombian soccer federation hired a foreign coach, the white-haired Argentine José Pékerman, who had led Argentina to the quarterfinals of the 2006 World Cup, where it suffered a heartbreaking loss on penalties against the host nation, Germany. He turned things around quickly.

“Pékerman is independent of all the media and the whole sphere of sports in Colombia,” Castro said. “You cannot link him with anyone in the Colombian soccer federation. He has started a new story with the Colombian national team.”

That new story has focused around the team’s striker, Radamel Falcao, twenty-eight, who suffered a serious knee injury in January and may not be fully fit in time for the World Cup; and the twenty-two-year-old playmaker James Rodríguez. Both play for the club Monaco. Like Pékerman, as well as the Colombian team as a whole, Falcao and Rodriguez are distanced from the corruption of the nineties by more than just sixteen years. “They have become normal stars,” Vasquez said. “That is something that can exist. This team hasn’t grown up with the drug money. It hasn’t grown up in a league where teams are owned by drug lords.”

Pékerman has tried to balance the youth and vitality of his team with experience. The team’s captain, the defender Mario Yepes, thirty-eight, is the third-most capped player in Colombian history (behind Valderrama and Leonel Leonel Alvarez, the coach Pékerman succeeded), and he is partnered in central defense with Luis Perea, thirty-five. The backup goalkeeper, Faryd Mondragón, a fan favorite and the only remnant of the Colombian teams of the nineties, will turn forty-three during the World Cup. If he sees action, he’ll become the oldest player ever to play in the tournament.

For a team that has lived in the shadow of its past for so long, this World Cup could become its defining moment. “This is part of the story,” Vásquez said, “that there are no stories about this team. These guys now are really so regular. They’re just good footballers. There’s nothing much you can say about them.”

Next month in Brazil, they hope to change that.

David Gendelman is research editor at Vanity Fair. Follow him on Twitter at @gendelmand.

It’s Plimpton! Time

Tomorrow night at nine, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself premieres on PBS as part of their American Masters series. The documentary tells of our late founder’s many exploits—fireworks commissioner, Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser pitchman, libretto writer—and features new interviews with, among others, his family, Robert Kennedy Jr., Hugh Hefner, Gay Talese, Graydon Carter, and his colleagues here at The Paris Review. American Masters has also put together a history of Plimpton’s work with the magazine.

But if you’re a true, incorrigible Plimptomaniac—and who among us is not?—PBS has two gifts for you. The first: an extended preview of the film, streaming live tonight at seven. The second: a series of George Plimpton trading cards. Collect ’em all!

These cards capture the Plimp in his various guises and pay tribute to his storied career. They have fun Plimp facts, pithy Plimp quotes, and rare Plimp pix—they’re Topps! (Bubblegum not included.) Here’s our man as a boxer; here, as a pitcher; here a goalie, a trapeze artist, and a friend to the Kennedys. You can print these out and trade them with your friends, unless they’ve also printed them out, in which case you’ll all have a full set already. But there’s nothing wrong with that.