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Tonight: Elif Batuman and Gary Shteyngart at 92Y

Join us this evening at 92Y, where, snow be damned, Gary Shteyngart and Elif Batuman will take the stage to read from their latest work. They’ll be introduced by Sloane Crosley and our very own Lorin Stein, respectively. The night begins at 8:15; those unable (or unwilling) to face the slush can watch a free livecast here. (If last night’s Super Bowl was any indication, it will be much better than whatever’s on TV.)

 

Candlemas Day

From Poetry of the year. Passages from the poets descriptive of the seasons. With twenty-two colored illustrations from drawings by eminent artists, ed. Joseph Cundall, 1853.

Yesterday, the Seahawks romped to a 43-8 blowout over Denver. The general consensus is that Super Bowl XLVIII was disappointing: tension-free, uncomfortably lopsided, vaguely embarrassing for Manning. The commercials were meh. Bruno Mars kind of brought it, but no one really tuned in to watch Bruno Mars.

The much-ballyhooed winter weather was anticlimactically mild, too, although one assumes the Red Hot Chili Peppers were chilly. After the drama of the polar vortices and the endless gray of this winter, it was almost a letdown when the day dawned mild.

And, of course, on Saturday, Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead in his New York apartment. The Internet erupted with grief and tributes. Everyone wanted to watch Capote and Pirate Radio and The Talented Mr. Ripley (a few bold people even queued Along Came Polly). 

We completely forgot about Groundhog Day; I did, at any rate. But it was Groundhog Day, and, weather notwithstanding, both Punxsutawney Phil and the poor man’s groundhog, Staten Island Chuck, saw their shadows. The mayor dropped Staten Island Chuck.

The origins of the groundhog custom are murky, although it arrived in America via the Pennsylvania German community and is likely rooted in European animal lore, dating back to pagan times. But it also coincides with the ancient feast of Candlemas Day, which was, according to Christian tradition, the date of the presentation of Jesus at the temple and the fourth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary. Like so many things, it may well be some sort of compromise between pagan and Christian calendars.

For many centuries, it was on Candlemas that English farmers removed cattle from the hay meadows and any fields that needed plowing or sowing. To this day, it is a Quarter Day in Scotland, on which debts are traditionally paid and law courts are in session. The following is one of several traditional rhymes associated with the second of February:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.

And, of course, yesterday was relatively fair, at least in Pennsylvania (and, I guess, Staten Island). But it doesn’t seem to matter, does it? The groundhog always seems to predict more winter—Wikipedia notes that he calls it for spring only 13.7 percent of the time—which is probably safer.

On the other hand, there was Shubenacadie Sam, the Nova Scotia groundhog. Because of his advantageous time zone, he is the first groundhog of the year to make a prediction for North America. And despite everything, he foresaw an early spring.

 

Recapping Dante: Canto 16, or the Pilgrim’s Progress

Giovanni Stradano, Canto XVI, 1587.

This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

At this point in The Inferno, as Dante continues to test, stretch, and deplete Virgil’s patience, let us imagine for a moment what Virgil might say given the opportunity to write a performance review for the pilgrim.

Performance Review

Pilgrim name: Dante Alighieri
Occupation: Poet/expert stalker/political commentator (fascist?)
Age: Roughly halfway through the journey of his life

Supervisor’s notes:

Dante has done well on this divine quest so far, especially considering the fact that I found him lost in a forest not long ago. When we reached the end of this most recent section of Hell, Dante confessed that he’d intended to use a belt to fight off the leopard I saved him from—it’s safe to say that he has made considerable progress since he first came on. 

I still worry about him, however. He seems to listen to me almost blindly—I’m fairly certain that if I told him to jump off a bridge, he might actually do it. He can’t think for himself, and he’s not exactly a self-starter; he has middle management written all over him. He’d make a great lifelong employee, though I recommend putting him through purgatory before sending him up high. He still has a lot to learn.

He is prone to pity, and when we passed through the realm of the sodomites, I instructed him to treat the few sinners we would encounter with respect and kindness. This exercise came naturally to him, perhaps because the three sinners we met were fellow Florentines and Guelphs. I’d like to see how he might have handled himself in a room full of Ghibellines. Not too well, I imagine.

Dante can be irritating, but he has strong interpersonal skills—they almost make me wish I were a Florentine myself.  Any Florentine can recognize another by his clothes or by his accent. They’re a loyal group, bound by a love for one another and their city, and an arbitrary hatred for opposing political factions. When the three sinners asked if valor and courtesy still existed in Florence, the pilgrim informed them quickly and poetically about the current state of their beloved city.

I should also mention that Dante has a habit of using similes to describe situations, and he seems to be using them more and more. In one particular instance, he said the approaching sodomites were like “oiled and naked” wrestlers, which I felt was sort of unnecessary.  He also has an unhealthy fascination with rivers. Every time we come to a body of water, he can’t focus on anything else—just recently he stood and made an extended metaphor about a few different rivers, which, frankly, I thought was a bit of a stretch.

Dante admired all of the sinners, but the one who spoke to him, and with whom he seemed most affectionate, was a man named Jacopo Rusticucci, who blames his wife for his damnation. It is still unclear whether Rusticucci turned to sodomy because his wife denied him, or if he engaged in sodomy with his wife in an attempt to indulge her desire for anal play and ended up in hell for trying to keep his bedroom alive. Dante didn’t press the matter: he simply allowed the sinner to go on talking without getting to the, uh, bottom of it. He’s not a detail-oriented worker and gets distracted easily. He also leaps between states of extreme modesty and paroxysms of unrestrained arrogance. Here, for example, he allowed himself to go unnamed before his three fellow citizens, but later he will address an imaginary reader, as though somehow he’s in the middle of telling some epic story. Between these asides and the barrage of similes, I’m beginning to worry that his literary aspirations might get in the way of his future performance.

At the time I would not recommend him for a promotion, but I’m more than willing to train him until we reach the end of the Inferno. Perhaps by then he will think for himself and learn to interrogate the sinners more efficiently. I also recommend that he speak to HR, as he’s in sore need of help for his anxiety. He scares and faints easily, and this job, of all jobs, is not for the faint of heart.

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

 

A Day in the Sun for Beleaguered Librarians, and Other News

Photo: Bill Branson

Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Who are Joyce’s modern heirs? Rivka Galchen and Pankaj Mishra discuss.
No longer shall they toil in obscurity: Lemony Snicket has launched the Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity.
The Hardy Boys face what are undeniably their strangest mysteries yet.
Is Eurostile Bold Extended the most popular typeface in science fiction? A look at the typography in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

The Sportsman’s Code of Chivalry

Two Sundays ago, I watched the AFC Conference game with some friends. Picture a Venn Diagram; label one circle “Fans of the New England Patriots” and the other “People Who Have Studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The person who exists at the intersection of those two circles was sitting on a couch across from me, anxiously eating chips and guacamole. As the Patriots slipped further and further behind the Broncos, talk turned to Arthurian legend, and to knightliness at large.

Peyton Manning, our group quickly agreed, was the Lancelot of quarterbacks. Like Lancelot, he’s unquestionably the most talented of his cadre—a fact confirmed when he was, to no one’s surprise, named this year’s league MVP. He’s also, like Lancelot, doltish and unbeautiful: in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Lancelot is, to quote King Arthur, “the ugliest man I have ever seen”; Peyton can’t claim that honor, but he does have a grotesquely large forehead, scarred by the Riddell helmet he is forced to squeeze over it. And both Lancelot and Peyton are doomed to be surpassed by a dim younger relative—in the former’s case, it’s the unbearably pure Galahad, Lancelot’s son, the only knight allowed to glimpse the Holy Grail; in Peyton’s case, it’s his younger brother, Eli, whose childishly transparent expressions of disappointment have been turned into exemplars of gif art, and who already has two Super Bowl rings to Peyton’s one. Which made Tom Brady his Tristan: not quite as skilled, but achingly handsome.

Metaphors aside, there is a sort of gallantry we expect from our athletes. NFL players do not, of course, swear their troth to a code of chivalry; nevertheless there are rules, largely unspoken, to which professional athletes are expected to adhere. Off the field, if not on, while speaking to the press, if not while concussing one another, we want our athletes, like our knights, “to refrain from the wanton giving of offense”; “to eschew unfairness, meanness, and deceit”; and “to live by honor and for glory.”

In practice, this means the language that players—and therefore coaches and columnists and journalists—use to talk about a complicated and dangerous sport has been voided of meaningful content. Some rebel against the code: on one end of the spectrum we have Bill Belichick, head coach of the Patriots, who so stubbornly refuses to say anything quotable that his press conferences resemble performance art. Back in October, he was questioned about the probability of his star tight-end Rob Gronkowski returning after having sustained a string of injuries:

Question: How much closer do you sense we are to seeing Gronkowski in a game?
Belichick: Day to day.
Question: Is it safe to say he’s making progress?
Belichick: He’s day to day.
Question: Do you feel like he’s closer to a return now than he was at this time last week?
Belichick: He’s day to day.
Question: Physically, how did he look in practice last week?
Belichick: He practiced.

On the other end of the knightly spectrum is Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who chooses instead to violate the sacred contract forged between the athlete and the fan by speaking his mind. Later that Sunday, for instance, the Seahawks won the NFC conference game on an interception caused by Sherman, who tipped a ball that might otherwise have been caught by San Francisco Forty-Niners wide receiver Michael Crabtree. Had Crabtree caught the ball, it would have been a game-winning touchdown for the Niners; instead, Seattle is headed to the Super Bowl. In his interview with Erin Andrews after the game, Sherman’s excitement was obvious. “I’m the best corner in the game!” he declared. “When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you’re going to get.”

The reaction to Sherman’s adrenaline-fueled boasts was so immediate, vicious, and racially tinged—on Twitter, words like “thug” and “monkey” were thrown around; Deadspin rounded up the more offensive responses—that he felt compelled to address the controversy in a column for Sports Illustrated.

There were several other thoughtful ripostes—from Grantland, The Guardian, and Salon—and in The New Yorker, Amy Davidson sounded a somber note: “Some people might find it convenient to dismiss players as thugs. Discussions about the ravages of the game often come around to questions posed mostly to give fans some dispensation, such as: Given where these guys come from, how good were their other choices? What worth did their futures hold away? That sort of rationalizing serves only to make watching a beautiful but violent game less uncomfortable. And that’s the most thuggish thought of all.”

A few days after the Conference Championships, my friend—the Pats-loving Gawain enthusiast—announced he wouldn’t be watching football next season. “For which of the many excellent reasons?” I asked. His reply was blunt: “The physical and mental damage that is integral to the game.” This is precisely the kind of honest answer that adherence to the code of chivalrous clichés prevents most ESPN reporters from giving.

It’s also an answer I’m not quite ready to give. I grew up watching football. I was five when the Niners, my home team, traded Joe Montana to the Chiefs, and if I don’t actually recall the event, I’ve nevertheless deemed it important enough to fabricate memories around. In late childhood, I became a Green Bay Packers fan. My father, also a Packers fan, and my grandfather, a Niners fan, and I would watch football together every week: always Monday night, sometimes an afternoon game on Sunday too. Voice is supposed to be one of the first things you forget about a person when he dies, but I can still hear my grandfather on my answering machine late on a Sunday evening, in my early adolescence; I’d missed the Niners-Packers game earlier that day, and he felt duty bound to report that those bums I so loved had triumphed. There are lots of reasons I enjoy football—the moments of surprising elegance, made all the more remarkable because they are set against a backdrop of grinding brutality; the expression on a bro’s face when I, the brunette in glasses, yell at the television about a blown pass interference call—but that message from my grandfather is the closest I can come to explaining why I keep watching it despite a host of reasons not to, many of them increasingly convincing.

One of the players who will suit up today is a thirty-two-year-old wide receiver for the Broncos named Wes Welker. He’ll be easy to spot: at 5’9”, he’s smaller than most of the other guys; plus, he’ll be wearing an unusually large helmet. The helmet is supposed to provide his head—his brain, really—with the extra protection he desperately needs after suffering two concussions in four games at the tail end of the regular season. Undaunted by injury, Welker is a man who seems comfortable with the chivalric ideals encoded in the media circus that precedes the Super Bowl. Like a good knight, he’s determined “to persevere to the end in any enterprise begun.” Asked on Tuesday whether he would play in the Super Bowl if his doctors advised against it, he replied, “You want to be out there. It’s the Super Bowl. Like, this is what you dream about. You’re gonna be there. I don’t care what it takes.”

Miranda Popkey is on the editorial staff of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Inch by Inch

When we graduated sixth grade, in the skirts and ties we had laboriously sewn—mine was apple-green gingham—with the corsages and boutonnieres our teachers had made to match, I was the first to receive my diploma. This was not a particular distinction; it was just because I was the shortest person in the entire grade. And at the end of the ceremony, we sang “The Garden Song,” aka “Inch by Inch, Row by Row,” and I remember being very conscious that this was the last time we would ever sing it, and that now everything would be different. And not just because we were moving to the Upper School Campus a few hundred yards away. Because we would not be allowed to be kids in the same way ever again. I remember blinking back tears.

All week, I have wanted to write about Pete Seeger, but every time I sit down to do so I have been overcome with emotion and affection for my progressive elementary school with its earnest devotion to the tenets of secular humanism and folk music, and have wanted to write hundreds of pages. I want to write about City and Country and the Weed Wallow and the holiday assembly and the apple assembly. And Mary and Sally and Joyce and Colleen and and Mrs. English and Betty (teachers) and Mr. Schwartz (the principal) and Mr. Ellis (the custodian).

In fifth grade, in June, we donned costumes and did sword dances and played recorders and invited our parents to the medieval feast. At the third grade cookout we wore the Native American garb we had sewn and beaded and dyed with onionskins and cooked fish and oysters in a fire behind the upper-school library. Then, there was the endless work on those skirts. I also know that none of this would mean anything to anyone who didn’t attend my school, and that we all have our own early memories, tender as a bruise, and that unless one is Proust, it really doesn’t much matter.

But I also can’t write about his death without recalling those years, because Pete Seeger was so beloved at my school. His older brother, John, was principal from 1960 to 1976, but Pete continued his involvement for many years after, playing at assemblies and hosting day campers upriver in the summer. And his songs featured prominently in our collective childhood sound track: not an assembly went by that we didn’t sing “This Land Is Your Land,” “Soma el Barco,” “Abiyoyo,” and, of course, “The Garden Song.”

When I was home, I found that gingham skirt, impossibly tiny, in a box in the basement. I never wore it after that day, and after we started middle school, I would learn to be embarrassed about my tiny size and my piping voice and the way I dressed and a hundred things I had never thought about before. We had learned a lot about social justice and ethics and how to treat one another in elementary school. But we had never learned self-consciousness; I wonder if maybe we should have, a little more. I imagine nowadays, kids probably do.

As one alumna wrote on the spontaneous memorial page that sprang up on the school’s Web site, “Thank you, Pete Seeger, and all those that passionately walked with and sang with you. I do indeed have a hammer, and I have a bell. I have a song to sing all over this land! It’s the hammer of justice. It’s the bell of freedom. It’s the song about love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land!”

Then again, there is a lot to be said for unself-consciousness.

 

What We’re Loving: Pragmatism, Professional Consultants, Pubic Crests

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Walter Battiss, Wandering Nude 1, 1978, oil on canvas.

Pop quiz! Which American philosopher coined the following expressions: pluralism, time-line, healthy-minded, live option, stream of consciousness, and the bitch-goddess success. Hint: he counted among his most devoted students Gertrude Stein, Theodore Roosevelt, and W.E.B. DuBois. Last hint, from a letter he wrote to his little brother Henry, in 1902: “You have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean).” If you guessed William James (correctly), you probably remember him as the main inventor of “pragmatism,” the can-do philosophy that professional philosophers love to hate. But as Robert D. Richardson shows in his 2006 biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, it is hard to imagine a livelier, more lovable mind. As a scientist, James did original work on everything from evolution to spiritualism. As a philosopher, he anticipated everyone from Bergson to Wittgenstein to Austin to Daniel Kahneman. As a person, James is the most appealing kind of genius, continually inspired by his family, by his friendships and romances, and by communion with what he called “the hidden self,” where we are most vulnerable and alive. —Lorin Stein

The latest issue of Granta includes “Nudity,” an essay by Norman Rush about his youthful encounters with the body au naturel. Rush’s parents dabbled in a kind of functional nudism, which we might today call “letting it all hang out.” “The nudity of my parents did not assuage my ripening interest, but inflamed it,” he writes. “I wanted to see other naked female humans, and I wanted my father to keep his bathrobe on.” Though the piece mostly chronicles the young Rush’s quest to see live nudes, it takes an astonishing, affecting swerve in its final paragraph, which I won’t spoil here. It also includes, of course, those quintessentially Rushian terms for the female anatomy, “escutcheon” (the pubic crest) and “introitus” (just look it up). —Dan Piepenbring

Sunday is Groundhog Day (fingers crossed!), but I’ve been heralding the arrival of spring for days now, however futile my attempts may be. Perhaps that’s why I picked up Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book this week. I’ve read Jansson’s Moomin comics and her children’s books, but I haven’t ever delved into her prose. This book—a series of interrelated vignettes about a girl and her grandmother on a quiet island in the Gulf of Finland—is a treasure. Its stories are miniatures not just in length but in perspective as well: sometimes literally, as when the grandmother lays down near the beach and studies a blade of grass, a fluff of down, and a piece of bark in the sand by her face. Through her examination, their minute details are writ large; the bark, for instance, becomes “a very ancient mountain.” And when she finally gazes past them, to the wider world, it no longer looks so big. —Nicole Rudick

The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish is a paean to that now-extinct species, the “dress doctor,” a professional consultant who helped average citizens navigate questions of style and economy in a rapidly changing landscape. How should a working girl look professional on a budget? How might a farm wife stretch a yard of fabric and still be chic? And how to incorporate principles of harmony, proportion, balance, rhythm, emphasis into every aspect of aesthetic life? The author, Linda Przybyszewski, is an academic, and the book serves as an informative cultural history. But more than this, it is a tribute to a time when style—and maybe even life—felt more straightforward, and however arbitrary, there were definitive answers. —Sadie Stein

As my Netflix queue attests, my taste in on-demand film skews toward camp and quirk. In the recent past I’ve taken in Norwegian Ninja, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and The History of Future Folk, all highly recommended—but I’ve never seen anything more bizarre than the newly released documentary Mitt. Greg Whiteley, the director, has managed to humanize Romney; politics aside, I threw my coworkers off when I mentioned that, after watching the film, I actually kind of liked the guy. How can you not fall for someone who irons his shirt while it’s still on? He’s just like us! —Justin Alvarez

Retronaut, which calls itself a “photographic time machine,” is always worth checking out. But the site outdid itself this week, with this horrifying, fascinating image of an 1866 children’s production of Bluebeard’s Wives. The composition of the shot and its macabre beauty are both arresting, but it’s the kids’ total commitment that I really love. —S.O.S.

Whenever I start to feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day, I read “Thinker on Horseback,” a 1958 Sports Illustrated profile of my hero William Steinkraus. Says Steinkraus of his daily grind, “By the time I work four or five horses a day, practice the violin for a few hours, work on some articles I’ve promised, and write some letters and try to keep up with my reading, there isn’t much time left.” Did you work five horses this morning? Better get to it. —Abby Gibbon

It’s a harsh winter indeed when one goes looking for relief in seventh-century Britain. But relief is exactly what I’ve found in Nicola Griffith’s dazzling new novel Hild, which imagines the childhood of Saint Hilda of Whitby and her first years as a preteen seer for her uncle, King Edwin. Griffith’s lyrical prose emphasizes the savagery of the political landscape, in which religion, sex, and superstition are wielded mercilessly for personal gain. The plot would be engaging enough on its own, but Griffith’s impressive descriptions of seventh-century production techniques—for textiles, beer, gold, and weapons, among others—make Hild a complete escape from city slush and crowded subways. —Rachel Abramowitz

We’re Telling You for the Last Time

Photo: eefeewahfah, via Flickr

Last call! Our subscription deal with McSweeney’s ends at midnight tonight. As you now probably know by heart, you can get a full year of McSweeney’s and The Paris Review for just $75, a 20 percent savings on all the interviews, fiction, essays, art, poetry, and humor a discerning reader could want.

The end of January grows nigh. Has the promise of the new year already lost its luster? Has your resolve faltered vis-à-vis exercise, temperance, or chastity? Don’t fret. With this deal, you still have time—not much, though—to stoke the embers of hope and change in your life.

Take it from us: we’ve kept our resolutions. And you can, too—at least until the stroke of midnight, when February begins and our offer vanishes, like so many human ambitions, into the sands of time.

Subscribe now! You won’t be sorry.

 

It Lurks

The creature in question, ostensibly terrifying.

Today is the Chinese New Year, and as you prepare to celebrate, I entreat you to remember the reason for the season. It’s a tale of not inconsiderable woe, and for this reason children are cautioned against reading it, though they’re also, paradoxically, commanded to heed it.

In the land called China, during a period called the shànggǔ—which translates roughly to “a very long time ago”—a fearsome creature-beast once roamed the land. It was known as the Nian, because rather than howling or roaring like your more conventional monster types, it emitted a cry that sounds like the Chinese word nián. Accounts of the beast’s appearance vary, but in many depictions, it resembles the stone lions sometimes seen outside Chinese restaurants: flat faced, with a dog’s body, prominent incisors, and a barrister’s powdered wig. Some have even described it as a lion with the heart of a bull. All of which suggests that it’s fairly effete and underwhelming, with very high blood pressure.

And yet it struck terror into the hearts of men. Every year on the night of the second full moon after the winter solstice, the Nian would come down from its home in the mountains to harass people and eat their chickens and children. In order to escape its wrath, the villagers would evacuate their homes and flee into the forest. This went on for centuries, presumably, until one year the people devised a plan. They sent an emissary up through the mountains into the Nian’s lair. Quaking with fear, he approached it and he said, “Nian, if you think you’re so big, go and kill all the other monsters in the world.”

And so it was that the Nian killed all the other monsters in the world.

The next year, it descended from the mountains again with the intention of harassing people and eating their poultry and progeny, as was its wont. But the feast was not to be. As the Nian approached the village, some children were wearing red and setting off firecrackers, as all good children should. It scampered away in horror.

The Nian, they learned that day, has a pronounced fear of loud noises and the color red. The people began at that time of year to put up red banners and papers and such, and also to set off firecrackers all the goddamn time. As the years passed, and as it became increasingly clear how utterly ineffectual the Nian was, this time became an occasion to gather with one’s family and revel in his defeat, basking in the joyous, mellifluous sound of constantly detonating firecrackers. This celebration came to be known as the Chinese New Year.

I’ve lived in China for five years, and I’m concerned to report that Chinese belief in the Nian is on the wane. There has not been a confirmed Nian sighting in China in living memory, and the current generation, having spent their lives ensconced in a vibrant cocoon of red things and loud noises, is inclined to see it as no more than a myth. The period surrounding the Chinese New Year, called Spring Festival, is, like Christmas in the West: increasingly adrift, unmoored from the events that gave rise to it and lend it meaning.

Granted, the Nian appears, even to a circumspect fellow such as myself, to be a pretty hapless monster. But my fear is this: that the intervening centuries have blunted our memories of its animus and that now, when so many consider it a legend, the Nian is prepared to make a comeback.

Think about it. China still protects itself, albeit unwittingly. But in the West, the second full moon following the winter solstice passes every year unnoticed, and no precautions whatsoever are taken against marauding creatures of the night. Too infrequently is it observed that outside China the Nian could easily pass unrecognized—mistaken for, depending on context and culture, say, a juvenile chupacabra, or the result of a genetic experiment gone moderately awry, or an old classmate. Not many of us in postindustrial society are raising chickens, which means the Nian is far more likely to prey on humans—on children, especially.

We are vulnerable. Our youth are at risk. I thus humbly beg you: Bar your doors! Hide your chickens! Make frequent percussive sounds! If you absolutely must go out, wear red and mace all leonine strangers in powdered wigs.

Beware the Nian!

Ben Flake lives in Suzhou, China, where he is vigilant.

 

When People Movers Were the Future, and Other News

From the September 10, 1972, edition of Our New Age, drawn by Gene Fawcette. Via Paleofuture

A legible—and quite informative—map of the Internet. Would-be circumnavigators may find themselves buffeted by the trade winds of Spam Ocean. And shame on you if you’re only seeking a passage to the Continent of Porn.
For the transit wonks of the seventies, the dream of the day was people movers: the “car-like pods” on rails still seen occasionally at airports. Behold their squandered promise, their sleek mobility, their Velveeta-orange color.
Two new poems by Sappho were discovered on ancient papyrus. One of them mentions Sappho’s brothers; “it’s very exciting to have a new Sappho poem that isn’t about erotic love or beauty.” Agree to disagree.
“Growth is a greater mystery than death … Not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.” Norman Mailer on the pursuit of prestige.
In 1983, Aramco Oil hired someone to photograph oil rigs and gas-oil separation plants. He also kept an affecting photo diary.