Engineer's Daughter

john updike 1932-2009

It seems unbelievable, but since John Updike's name first appeared on bookshelves in 1958 with a poetry collection there have been only five years where he has not published a book of some sort.  The man seemed unstoppable, which is why his death yesterday at 76 of lung cancer came as a shock to me.  Just a few months ago he was reviewing Toni Morrison's new book for the New Yorker, one of hundreds of articles he wrote for that magazine where he got his start in the 1950s.  And of course through his fiction, both his short stories and his novels, he was known as the chronicler of small-town American life par excellence.  Jay Parini describes what he will miss most about the author:

What I prized most about Updike, though, was his marvellous ear for a sentence. In the stories especially, he caught the shimmer of light on the grass, for example, with uncanny skill. He could describe a twitching face, a wrinkled elderly hand, a fond gesture of affection, with shocking ease. I doubt I shall ever forget the painful stories about a family coming apart in Problems (1979); 'Separating' is one story I've read again and again through the years, with increasing admiration.

I currently have an order out for Rabbit Angstrom and The Complete Henry Bech and am also very much looking forward to the Everyman's edition of The Maples Stories that will be published in August.  I love that Updike had these recurring characters that he kept coming back to again and again.  I'm sad that there will be no more new stories.

teenage dirtbag

Last fall Edmund White published a biography of Arthur Rimbaud entitled Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, and the poet's story seems a natural fit for the author of such moving stories of homosexual awakening as A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty.  White distilled a snippet of Rimbaud's famous relationship with the older poet Paul Verlaine into a piece for the Guardian earlier this month, and anyone with overly romantic notions of the young Rimbaud need only read the following pull quote:

Rimbaud was an impossible guest. He took to nude sunbathing just outside the house. He turned his room into a squalid den. He mutilated an heirloom crucifix. He was proud of the lice infesting his long mane and even pretended he was encouraging the vermin to jump on to passers-by. Verlaine was delighted with Rimbaud's antisocial antics, which recalled to him his own younger excesses before his marriage. Verlaine introduced Rimbaud to his friends in the cafés where they congregated regularly. After the first encounter, one of Verlaine's friends, Léon Valade, wrote the next day to an absent member, "You missed a great deal by not being there. A most daring poet not yet 18 was introduced by Paul Verlaine, his inventor and in fact his John the Baptist. Big hands, big feet, a wholly babyish face like a child of 13, deep blue eyes! Such is this boy, whose character is more antisocial than timid and whose imagination combines great powers with unheard-of corruption and who has fascinated and terrified all our friends."

Good thing the boy could write.  White is a such a great storyteller that even though I have already read Graham Robb's excellent (and comprehensive) biography of Rimbaud I'll probably give this new one a shot too.  And I need to hit up Moe's for some volumes of gently-used poetry while I'm at it.

william burroughs at the royal academy

2009 marks 50 years since the publication of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, released by Olympia Press in 1959 after considerable scandal and after even City Lights refused to print it.  To celebrate the anniversary of the book and Burroughs's enduring legacy in literature and art here more than ten years after his death the Royal Academy's Burlington Gardens space in London is currently showing Burroughs Live, an exhibit that collects self-portraits (like the one here, taken in Tangier in '59), video and other ephemera.  Beyond his writing, Burroughs's very presence remains hypnotic to me, and every time I hear a recording of his voice it gives me a delicious shiver.  To get a taste of the Royal Academy show, including Annie Leibovitz's otherworldly portrait taken two years before the writer's death, please click through to the gallery here.

jan tschichold: penguins, paperbacks and posters

You might not be familiar with Jan Tschichold's name, but the evidence of his work in typography is all around us.  In 1928, heavily influenced by Bauhaus and Russian constructivism, Tschichold published The New Typography and laid out rules that, as Richard Hollis reports, are still the foundation of elegant design.  Tschichold was only 26 at the time:

In the words of his subscription leaflet, Tschichold was connecting the new typography to the "total complex of contemporary life". Its title borrowed from Moholy-Nagy, the book set out a series of stern foundational principles for good design: the use of sans-serif fonts, standardised paper sizes, photographs rather than drawn illustrations, asymmetrical rather than centred layouts. Partly as a result of Mondrian's influence, abstract art came to play a large part in Tschichold's work. He used geometrical elements and diagonal arrangements, not only in everyday jobbing printing – business cards, letterheads and brochures – but also in a series of cinema posters. Rarely in more than two colours, these designs incorporate small half-tone photographs, never rectangular, but cut-out as circles or silhouettes. The text, often hand-drawn, was always sans-serif.

Those posters are objects of beauty, and you can see some examples of them as well as Tschichold's famous update of the Penguin paperback design in the gallery here.  His work isn't flashy, and even a design nerd like myself has to look twice to spot the changes he made to the Penguins.  He just made things look better.  A lot better.

palace of pain

If your childhood was rough imagine what it was like growing up a Wittgenstein, as described in Alexander Waugh's new book The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.  Though the family lived a privileged existence in a Vienna palace, father Karl was known for his brutal temper, and his wife Leopoldine dared not cross him.  The eight children all had physical or mental disorders of one sort or another, and the boys in particular possessed a tragic tendency toward suicide.  But it was this "madhouse" that gave us Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophical minds of the twentieth century.  In his review of Waugh's book for the Guardian Terry Eagleton posits that Wittgenstein's early family life might go some way toward explaining the philosopher's contradictions:

Wittgenstein was an arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic. He was a high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity of life, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy. He could never really decide whether he was a Brahmin or an "untouchable". Much of this makes sense if one sees it as an ambivalent relationship to his family background.

Wittgenstein himself frankly admitted to trouble dealing with "the rough ground of everyday life", and that fits as well.  As for Eagleton, he is uniquely qualified to give his perspective on Waugh's book as he just so happens to have been the screenwriter for Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein.  SFMOMA will be screening the film on Saturday, November 29, as part of their Derek Jarman series, or if you don't mind low-res Web video you can watch the whole thing here.

first, take your snails and your porridge...

I'm proud I actually know someone who has eaten at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's modest establishment in the British village of Bray that just happens to be one of the best restaurants in the entire world.  Blumenthal is a master of molecular gastronomy, crafting innovative and imaginative concoctions that both fool the eye and delight the tongue, and he has just published a brick of a cookbook, pictured right, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook.  Reviewer Jay Rayner says it not only stands as a work of art but as a testament to a chef at the height of his powers, though the recipes themselves might be considered challenging at best:

Next comes the complete Fat Duck recipes, with the glossiest and filthiest of gastro-porn photography. (Who knew the whipping of a pink spiced pickling foam could look so, well, gynaecological?) These recipes are staggeringly long, involve fiendishly expensive pieces of equipment, are extraordinarily detailed and are probably, for the home cook, completely unmanageable, but that's to miss the point. As Blumenthal himself says: 'To change any part of these recipes so that they are more easily achievable would be to compromise - something this book does not do.'

The Big Fat Duck Cookbook also includes Blumenthal's autobiography (illustrated by Dave McKean!) and a section at the end that lays out in detail the science of the restaurant's cooking.  You know me, I'd flip right to the back.

whipping boys

As literary publicity stunts go, this is a good one.  French publisher Flammarion is about to publish a book called Public Enemies that collects correspondence between writers Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy in which they take on their detractors, and, as Angelique Chrisafis reports, both men come out swinging:

France has often delighted in publicly thrashing its literary greats, from Flaubert and Baudelaire's morality court cases to Françoise Sagan's drug busts. But now two self-declared cultural whipping boys have joined ranks to express their outrage at being constantly "vomited on", ridiculed and victimised by their nation.

They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore!  It sounds like Public Enemies is chock full of salacious personal details too, as Houellebecq in particular takes the opportunity to respond to his mother's recent book in which she calls him, among other things, a "stupid little bastard".  Scandal!  I can't really imagine that either author thinks this venture will rehabilitate their relationship with their critics and make them appear anything but self-obsessed egomaniacs, but that doesn't seem to be the point anyway.  As for me, I can't wait to get my hands on a translation.

the world according to wallace

I haven't written anything about the death of David Foster Wallace mostly because I've been too embarrassed to admit I've never read any of his writing.  Not from lack of interest, and he's definitely been on my list, I just didn't have a sense of urgency about tackling the likes of Infinite Jest.  The news of his suicide hit like a bomb both among many of my close friends and in the literary world at large, and after reading several of the tributes to Wallace published in the last week I understand why.  My favorite piece is novelist Joshua Ferris's recollection of having interviewed Wallace when Ferris was but a young starstruck reporter for the Daily Iowan:

Wallace was 33 at the time, he knew that he possessed talent and that his new book was likely to make a big impact, and he was more adept than the vast majority of thinkers and writers to spot a fraud. Yet he treated me, the nervous imposter, with graciousness and seriousness. His conversation was animated, thoughtful, witty and generous. He was full of qualifications as he attempted to excavate deeper layers of meaning from his words and better formulations of his thinking. He didn't care about the absence of a tape recorder or, for that matter, the absence of a decent journalist. He was concerned about being understood. He was in it for an honest exchange.

Yeah it's high time I read one of his books.  It's just a shame that I could have appreciated him in his lifetime instead of after he's too soon gone.

passing the dormouse test

I discovered my affinity for dead languages in grade school already, so by high school I had inevitably bloomed into a full-fledged Classics Nerd and of course an active participant in my school's Latin Club.  At the end of every year all of the international clubs would come together for an evening of edibles and performances from our chosen cultures, which meant there was usually a can-can from the French Club and Monty Python sketches from us Junior Classical Leaguers.  Ancient Roman cuisine being questionable at best, my mom came up with the brilliant idea of making faux dormice out of radishes and toothpicks, and they always proved a huge hit at the Latin Club booth.  They also winked at the so-called "dormouse test", a term coined by classicist Mary Beard, basically the idea that the sooner a story set in ancient Rome mentions that most stereotypical of Roman delicacies the more likely the rest of it has very little basis in actual historical fact.  I think HBO's Rome made it to the second episode before referring to dormice, which seems about right given its overall respect for history and detail but still allowing a salacious diversion here and there.  Tom Holland says that Beard's new book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town similarly dispels commonly-held misbeliefs about the doomed city while filling in many fascinating details:

Yet if Beard's book is a vivid demonstration that sceptical scholarship can provide as gripping a read as sensationalism, that does not mean that the author shrinks from providing her own exploration of what life might actually have been like. In many ways, it is an extraordinarily vivid one. Her Pompeii is a city in which dogs howl, late-night drunks carouse, and everyone has bad breath. It is a city in which, as Beard points out with some glee, a household of perhaps some 30 people had only a single lavatory between them, and the crowds at the amphitheatre not even that: "20,000 people and nowhere but the stairs and corridors to take a piss." Above all, it is a city that is infinitely messier and less systematised than the guide books ever allow: where the presence of sexually explicit graffiti on a wall does not necessarily suggest a brothel, and where the baths, as well as providing a bather with "a place of wonder, pleasure and beauty", were so polluted that "they might also have killed him".

And no mention of dormice until three-quarters of the way through, apparently.

clowning around

I have never been a fan of circuses, especially ones that use (and sometimes badly mistreat) animals.  However, one of my favorite books of all time, Amanda Davis's Wonder When You'll Miss Me, is a novel about a young woman who literally runs away to the circus, and the picture that Davis paints of life with the itinerant performers matches in my head what I see in the gorgeous images in Taschen's massive new book The Circus, 1870-1950.  There are glamorous, strong women and acts of bravery, but above all the performers seem to exhibit a sense of real belonging to their very unusual family.  Nell Gifford, owner of the Gloucestershire Giffords Circus, weighs in with her perspective:

The people in these photographs have rough hands and swollen ankles, but they squint into the sun and show us their trained snake, their hand-stitched costumes, their acrobatics which are not fearless but fear overcome by skill - with a pure, golden glamour.

I have to admit I can see the attraction.  No trained snakes for me though, on account of my severe phobia.