Dumpster Diving For Posterity

by Dish Staff

On his peculiar blog, The Other John Updike Archive, Paul Moran documents correspondence and personal artifacts lifted from the author’s trash. In a profile of Moran, Adrienne LaFrance considers how the project “raises fundamental questions about celebrity, privacy, and who ultimately determines the value and scope of an artist’s legacy”:

Moran has kept thousands of pieces of Updike’s garbage—a trove that he says includes photographs, discarded drafts of stories, canceled checks, White House dish_updikestrashylegacy invitations, Christmas cards, love letters, floppy disks, a Mickey Mouse flip book, and a pair of brown tasseled loafers. … James Plath, who is president of The John Updike Society, says Updike would have been “appalled” and “horrified” by Moran sifting through his trash. But Plath commends Moran for what he did. “If I was in the area, I would have done the same thing maybe. I think he did the world’s best dumpster diving.” Others, like the Updike estate’s literary agent Andrew Wylie, see it differently. “Anything he has is stolen,” Wylie said of Moran. “He was a dumpster digger. And he would steal the Updike’s trashbags every Wednesday … The family takes the situation very seriously. They have certainly tried to get him to stop but he’s not stopped.” …

“It was disgusting, the actual pursuit of it,” Moran told me. “The immediacy made it seem so wrong, but longterm, if you flash back on virtually any major author or historical artist, you would think, ‘I wish I had Mark Twain’s stuff or Andy Warhol’s stuff.’ The only morality, as somebody said to me, is if you could focus more on the culture than the vulture aspect … I just hope that it enhances his legacy.”

(Image of findings from Updike’s trash via Paul Moran)

Imaginary Eats

by Dish Staff

In a review of Sandra Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination, Bee Wilson traces the history of fictional food:

In a chapter on food in children’s fiction, Gilbert suggests that food fantasies originate in children’s dreams of never-ending bounty. “Lollipop trees and gingerbread houses. Bottles of cherry-tarts mingled with custard, roast turkey, toffee and other goodies. Spoonfuls of sugar.” For most of history, while communities lived in constant fear of the next famine, the culinary imagination was dominated by Rabelaisian excess. In children’s books, we are all still ravenous. We share the hunger of Laura Ingalls Wilder for maple sugar and candy canes. In real life, sugar is now almost as freely available as the gingerbread on the cottage in “Hansel and Gretel,” yet in our bedtime stories it remains a precious commodity. The sweets in the Harry Potter series, whose release coincided with an inexorable rise in childhood obesity, are no less lavish and no less lusted over than those in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Wilson continues, “The nonfiction food writing now aimed at adults contains somewhat different fantasies”:

Gilbert writes of the “postmodern pastorals,” which, rather than inviting us to indulge in rivers of chocolate, create a fantasy of simple self-sufficiency wherein one never eats anything one hasn’t grown or at least cooked oneself, in an imagined recreation of the lifestyle of great-grandmothers. Now the dream is not of plenty but of scarcity: the make-believe idea that we are still governed by the constraints of the seasons. These utopias allow us to pretend that peaches in summer or squash in the fall still have the same force they once did. What is forgotten, Gilbert suggests, is the uncomfortable fact that many peasant great-grandmothers ate “a monotonous and often dangerous diet.”

Why Are Book Reviews So Boring?

by Dish Staff

Elisabeth Donnelly wagers that part of the reason “is that the people doing the reviewing are the writers and people in the book industry who are working in a similar genre”:

Book criticism, unlike other genres, is notoriously insular, like a meeting of Harvard men making Harvard plans for world domination at the Harvard club in NYC. … [T]here are too many vested interests for anything but lukewarm praise and a plot summary. (It is why a website like The Talkhouse, which offers “musicians on music” and “filmmakers on film” is clubby, insular, and boring.) And even if a review is critical, it’s only in the context of a discussion of whether or not the quality of the writing is good. But that’s not the only way to judge a book’s merit — or, crucially, its importance.

I find when I meet people who consider “liking books” as an important part of their identity, they’re not always acutely verbal as to the hows and whys of how a book can touch your life, heart, and brain. They’re good, fluent writers, but not good critics. They can enthuse on something for 1000 words, but they can’t get to the actual point: why the book matters, how it could change your life. Naturally, these people are often professional book reviewers, and their requirements when they’re freelancing at the occasional publication is to take what the editor assigns, and then to produce a piece that has some sort of thesis and is smart enough to impress people. … The result is boring, because nobody’s being pushed out of their boxes. When you meet people reading popular fiction, by contrast, you find that they’re excited about their books. They read voraciously. They may not be bragging about it online on a cool site, with photos of their long-lasting TBR pile. But they’re reading.

A Poem For Saturday

by Alice Quinn

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Evenings of these balmy August days, while riding my bicycle, I glimpse deer stepping out from the edges of thickets—including fawns and young bucks with delicate horns. This poem by Edmund Spenser springs naturally to mind, although it’s sweetly clear that he had something else on his. It’s one of ninety about his courtship of his wife, Elizabeth Boyle, published in 1595 with his Epithalamion, celebrating their marriage.

From Amoretti by Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599):

Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds beguyld of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
the gentle deare returnd the selfe-same way,
thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke,
sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:
till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld,
so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

(Photo by Jereme Rauckman)

Words For The Wasted

by Dish Staff

Planning to get blotto, schnockered or plonked this Labor Day weekend? David Crystal reflects on assembling an “almost complete list of every word we’ve ever used to mean ‘drunk'”:

Being drunk cuts across barriers. The list … shows only the occasional indication of a class preference (such as genteel whiffled vs thieves’ cant suckey), and occupational origins are seen only in some nautical expressions (three sheets, oversparred, up the pole, tin hat, honkers), though the etymology is not always definite. There are very few formal terms in the list, apart from a few expressions fostered by the law (intoxicated, over the limit), and some early scholarly words (inebriate(d), temulent, ebrious). Local regional variations are sometimes apparent, such as from Scotland (fou, strut, swash, blootered, swacked), England (bottled, pissed, rat­arsed), and Australia (blue, rotten, shickery, plonked, on one’s ear); and since the eighteenth century most new words in this semantic field have started out in the United States. But it’s rare to find a word that stays in one country for long, and these days online slang dictionaries have largely broken down geographical boundaries.

Why has this field developed to the extent that writers regularly make a special collection of these words?

We see it early on in John Ray’s collection of proverbs (1678) or Benjamin Franklin’s Drinker’s Dictionary (1737), and artful classifications of degrees of drunkenness antedate these (see fox­drunk, 1592). It’s tempting to think that the linguistic innovation is a direct result of the uninhibited behaviour which follows a bout of drinking. Certainly there are some highly idiosyncratic (and often inexplicable) coinages in the list, such as pepst, pottical, fap, paid, muckibus, stocious,and schnockered. Many words are represented by just a single citation. And several seem to be motivated by the sound of the word as much as by any meaning it might have: jingled, whift, whiffled, squiffy, whittled, spiflicated, zonked. 

Beauty As Investment, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano has more to say on the social significance of beauty-product consumption, turning from high-end splurges to the relatively affordable world of “masstige” creams and cosmetics:

[T]he temporary self-esteem boost one gets from bargain shopping becomes exaggerated when the shopper is able to attribute the bargain to her own skills—for example, proffering a coupon, or bargaining for a lower price, as opposed to simply purchasing a low-cost item. Another way a shopper might attribute a bargain to her own skills is recognizing a good deal when she sees it. Enter “masstige” products, i.e. products meant to be seen as prestige products that are sold at price points affordable to the masses. For New Yorkers, masstige is most evident in the aisles of Duane Reade drugstores, which in the past few years has revamped its beauty section to look more like something you’d see at Sak’s Fifth Avenue—softer lighting, island displays, skin care consultants. Along with that comes products that are more expensive than usual drugstore fare but still less than what you’d pay were you actually at Sak’s. (I’m a fan of a retinol cream I buy at Duane Reade that features sleek packaging and sounds all fancy but is just a brand of L’Oréal. A brand that costs three times as much as products labeled “L’Oréal,” mais oui.)

Indeed, masstige beauty is growing, with CVS entering the market, and with other major drugstore chains already in it. It’s gotten to the point where premium beauty brands are seeing masstige as a threat that supposedly confuses consumers into thinking they’re getting a higher-quality product than they actually are. Which brings us back to square one: The more that high-end beauty brands try to set themselves apart by seeming exclusive and catering to a consumer who sees purchasing that brand as evidence of her good taste, the more that reinforces the appeal of masstige products to a somewhat different consumer, who sees purchasing a masstige brand as evidence of her good sense. The masstige consumer might look at the prestige buyer and think, What a fool; the prestige buyer might look at the masstige buyer and think, Poor thing, or simply assume that the masstige route is a financial choice, ignoring or oblivious to its nonfinancial rewards.

Here Today, Gone Forever?

by Sue Halpern

 

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Buried – sorry – in Biz Carson’s fascinating obituary of Hal Finney, who died this week from ALS, is a small aside with large implications. Finney, who was 58, was the first owner of bitcoins besides developer Satoshi Nakamoto (not his real name). This was in 2008, in a somewhat serendipitous turn of events, which Finney chronicled last year, typing via an eye tracker.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them. After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running… I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me.

So the question is, now that he has died, what happens to Finney’s virtual currency?

It’s the same question any one of us can ask, looking ahead, about our virtual “possessions,” whether they are documents stored on Dropbox, or passwords to our email accounts, or game characters.

Finney, who has been cryogenically preserved, was clearly a forward-looking guy. Before he died, he secured his bitcoins in a safe deposit box. But will it be enough to ensure that his son and daughter inherit them? And what about our stuff, stored “up there,” somewhere, “in the cloud,” where there is no safe deposit box?

Last month, in an unprecedented move, Delaware became the first state to enact a digital inheritance law. The Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act is meant to give authorized individuals brief, “peek and copy” access to third-party accounts. Apparently, the tech companies are not pleased and have formed the “State Privacy and Security Coalition” to fight it. They will be even less pleased when some version of the law is adopted in other states, as it is expected to be:

Jim Halpert of DLA Piper, a law firm that represents the coalition, told the Wall Street Journal that the group opposes the laws because accounts may contain information the deceased do not want to disclose, and because they may “conflict with a 1986 federal law forbidding consumer electronic-communications companies from disclosing digital content without its owner’s consent.”

But Jeff John Roberts thinks this is weak:

Neither of these explanations are particularly convincing, however. Despite the companies’ profession of privacy concerns for their late users, the reality is that people have been dying — and leaving behind artifacts for relatives and others to find — for a very long time. The digital dimensions of our personal lives don’t change that.

[Note to self: do not leave will on iCloud.]

(Photo of bitcoins by Steve Garfield)

 

 

Mixing With The Classics

by Chas Danner

A reader responds to Wednesday’s Mental Health Break:

Mozart Rap is nothing new – see the above version by Turkey’s rap superstar, Ceza. The text is not quite as wholesome as the one you showed, but it is a trenchant comment on the ills of Turkish society and politics today. Mozart’s Turkish March is something like the secret anthem of Turkey (at least for the secular Westernized part of society), and has been taken up several times by Turkish musicians. My favorite is this one, showing how music is a truly global art in a unique way:

Another reader senses an opportunity:

I feel compelled to turn this into a “dudes rapping to classical music” thread, because yes please. That clip reminded me of one of my favorite rap songs, Jedi Mind Tricks’ “Animal Rap”:

Although not Mozart (sounds like it though), the actual sample is a bit more obscure: Dave Grusin’s 43 second “Coma” from the Bonfire of the Vanities soundtrack.

As far as featuring more examples from the genre, challenge accepted. Here’s the almighty KRS-One:

Know some good classical-driven raps or remixes? Send them in: dish@andrewsullivan.com