August 2014 – Page 43

Quote For The Day

by Dish Staff

“What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable… It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly…. whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent.

That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us,” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

(Hat tip: Sage Mehta)

A Poet Gets The James Franco Treatment

by Dish Staff

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In May, we featured the poetry of Spencer Reece, who worked at Brooks Brothers clothing store for nearly a decade before his first collection of poems won The Bakeless Prize and subsequently was published as The Clerk’s Tale. The title poem from that volume begins this way:

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call “Sir.”
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped–
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.

James Franco recently released a short film, seen above, that’s based on the poem. In an interview about the project, Franco reveals what he was trying to convey:

Despite this lack of explicit dramatic action, there is a deep despair and intensity underneath the surface of the poem.

But it is also difficult to trace that effect down to any single line—it’s more of a cumulative effect. That’s what I wanted to achieve in the film: a seemingly mundane atmosphere that will accumulate into a sense of weight and depth.

As far as the look of the film, I was very influenced by the cover of Spencer’s book, which is a Sergeant painting of a young man. I thought that it had the right qualities of stasis, sorrow, and depth. I looked to the Dardenne brothers for their fluid shooting and blocking style, although I eventually broke this up by using a very powerful zoom lens. In the opening scene, I played out a full scene of the Clerk fitting a customer. This scene was inspired by the section of the poem that describes the interaction with the straight and married customers. I didn’t want the dialogue to address these issues too directly—instead I wanted to feel the tension through behavior and shot composition.

All that happens in the scene is a man buys a suit, but the shifting focus and size of the frame makes it feel like something bigger is happening. The fluidness of the dolly combined with the rough feeling of the zooms and the shifting focus contrast and blend with each other in the same way that I wanted the material and staid surface to contrast with the depth of the character’s feelings.

A Zoolander Award? Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So many contenders for the Zoolander Award for fashion absurdity!

One reader nominates “The Kanye West $120 plain white t-shirt. Not absurd for the look but for the price and claiming it is somehow ‘fashion’. Not sure there is a better example of how much of a con the industry can be at times.”

This has potential. The only problem is the one the reader notes, namely that the shirt itself is inoffensive:

https://twitter.com/WayUpHere/status/361213679905157120

Another reader nominates some boat shoes that look as if oil – specifically, BP oil – had spilled on them. This does visually prefigure the mud shoe, but because the proceeds apparently went to charity, it seems somehow wrong to give it the Award. And yet, boat shoes (said as someone who does, in fact, own a pair). The preppy-filthy combination does have a whiff of Derelicte about it.

But I think we have our winner:

From a swanky lingerie shop in NY:

Because we all need $525 Mickey Mouse ears. Because they’re sexy? Ummm…

What did it for me was the e-commerce site’s product description:

Fantasy-inspired couture headpieces made by hand in New York City by milliner Heather Huey. Custom sizing available upon request.

Hand-wrapped vinyl wire headband

Vinyl covered fur felt mouse ears

One size

“Vinyl covered fur felt mouse ears,” for $525. Yes.

From Pulp To Proust?

by Dish Staff

Does genre fiction act as a gateway to the hard stuff, to Woolf and Nabokov? Tim Parks challenges the conventional wisdom behind the “‘I-don’t-mind-people-reading-Twilight-because-it could-lead-to-higher-things’ platitude”:

[W]hy do the right-thinking intellectuals continue to insist on this idea, even encouraging their children to read anything rather than nothing, as if the very act of reading was itself a virtue? …

What no one wants to accept—and no doubt there is an element of class prejudice at work here too—is that there are many ways to live a full, responsible, and even wise life that do not pass through reading literary fiction. And that consequently those of us who do pursue this habit, who feel that it enriches and illuminates us, are not in possession of an essential tool for self-realization or the key to protecting civilization from decadence and collapse. We are just a bunch of folks who for reasons of history and social conditioning have been blessed with a wonderful pursuit. Others may or may not be enticed toward it, but I seriously doubt if E.L. James is the first step toward Shakespeare. Better to start with Romeo and Juliet.

Responding to Parks, Emily Temple calls out a snobbery she sees as unique to literary types:

We don’t have to argue about the fact that trash is a gateway to better tastes in [television, film or music], we just accept that most people discover Ace Ventura before Godard and Top 40 … before Lou Reed and Wagner. And we don’t have to dissect what it means to continue consuming both — there’s much less of a stigma attached to watching The Wire and The Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Inferno II in the same sitting than there is to reading both Silas Marner and The Da Vinci Code. Literary fiction used to be the province of the people, and somehow, over the years, it has become deeply alienating to many would-be readers.

True, there are music snobs, but the world of literature is uniquely snobby, and the art of literature is elevated to a kind of pedestal that no other entertainment-based art form is expected to reach (I’d put performance art and painting in another category) — hence the alienating quality. But it does early readers a disservice to suggest that once a Twilight reader, always and only a Twilight reader. Such snobbery can turn off or intimidate readers, and despite the fact that, as Parks says, literature is not the key to life, it is a pretty good and important thing. So beginning readers of all sorts should be encouraged.

How Zambia Rocks

by Dish Staff

Chris A. Smith navigates the tumultuous political history of post-independence Zambia through the prism of Zamrock, the 1970s psychedelic rock scene that produced bands like The Witch (an acronym for “We Intend to Cause Havoc”), heard above. Smith describes The Witch’s sound as “incendiary, all crystalline guitar lines and supple rhythms, topped by [singer] Jagari’s plaintive voice”:

Zamrock was the energetic sound of a nation that had just thrown off the British colonial yoke. Though Zambia is now one of the poorest countries in the world, at independence it had the second highest GDP on the continent thanks to its copper industry. Zambians expected great things—prosperity, modernization, and equal standing with the West. With its fuzzed-out guitars, propulsive beats, and cosmopolitan outlook, Zamrock provided the soundtrack to this hoped-for future.

That future never arrived. Instead the country was brought low by a series of crises, external and internal, that would render it a ward of the international community by the 1980s. The Zamrock scene, devastated by economic collapse, the AIDS epidemic, and changing musical trends, withered and died.

Last summer, Jagari, once Zambia’s biggest rock star, made his debut concert appearance in North America:

In San Francisco, Jagari opens for the indie beatmaker and DJ Madlib, and the nightclub is packed. Most of the crowd probably doesn’t know who he is, but they go nuts anyway. In response, Jagari turns back the clock. He jumps and screams, flirts and teases, runs in place like Mick Jagger and duckwalks like Chuck Berry. The closer, “October Night”—a song about the band’s 1974 arrest for playing too loud—sprawls into a nine-minute, Latin-infused space jam. He exits the stage, and it feels like a triumph. … He is philosophical about his late resurgence. “I had hoped for this much earlier,” he says. “But that’s the human point of view. God saw it differently. He was grooming me for the challenge.”

(Video: The Witch performs on 1975’s Lazy Bones)

“I was punished because a man had touched me.”

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

College may be experienced almost exclusively by (legal) adults, but the decision if and where to go is, for a traditional-age student, one made while still living at home, often as a minor, with tremendous parental input. And when you fill out that roommate-matching form about your lifestyle, mom, dad, someone is looking over your shoulder, rounding many a freshman up to more straight-edge (is that term still used?) than they are, and still more up to more so than they will be a few weeks into the school-year.

Thus, then, the awkwardness of taking what are, for non-student adults, the guiding lifestyle principles of a religion, and making them, for college students, school rules, or really student rules, to be followed on-campus and off. If an adult voluntarily signs up for four years of chastity, that’s that adult’s business. But if someone does who’s still essentially a kid at the time?

All of this is my longwinded way of preempting the question likely to addressed to Keli Byers, the Brigham Young University student campaigning in Cosmopolitan against the school’s sex ban: Why, if she knew she was “a sexual person” in her mid-teens, did she go to a college where sex isn’t allowed?

Byers, to be clear, doesn’t just object to the ban because rah rah sex. She identifies as a feminist, and sees the sex ban as part of a broader culture of misogyny, which she witnessed even before starting college:

Around [age 15], a guy in his 20s, who had just come home from his Mormon mission, sexually assaulted me. I’d never kissed a boy. It was scary. I told my parents and our bishop, and I was banned from church for a month. I was punished because a man had touched me.

Unfortunately, unless extra measures are taken that somehow prevent this, both puritanical and libertine approaches to sex can end up affirming the status quo, with the former restricting women but staying relatively silent on the behavior of men men, the latter freeing men but not women.

Amanda Hess argues that the puritanical approach is worse, specifically when it comes to reporting rape on campus:

As schools across the country are being criticized for failing to intervene in cases of sexual assault on campus, Byers reminds us that some American students are still contending with what seems like the opposite problem: Their schools aggressively ban all sexual contact, and that approach can be just as damaging to victims, if not more so. In 2009, I wrote about the sex ban at the Catholic University of America, where, in the student code of conduct, consensual sex and sexual assault were outlawed in the same sentence; both masturbation and rape were sins that could trigger disciplinary action.

It’s already… complicated when colleges try to police rape on campus (no room for my thoughts on that in this post), so it’s not surprising that bringing religious laws into the mix complicates matters further.

Hess continues:

Predictably, Catholic’s rule failed to prevent harmless sexual contact among its students. (And today, as Byers notes, students at schools with similar rules have as much access to Tinder as everyone else.) But the policy also created a situation where students were so afraid of running afoul of the chastity rules that they didn’t speak up even in cases of sexual assault. For victims and bystanders, reporting rape meant requiring students to admit that they had engaged in perfectly legal sexual encounters, or had appeared in an opposite-sex dorm against the university’s rules, or had consumed alcohol—all of which was regarded, according to the school code, as just as bad as raping another student.

Indeed. Even if it turns out that there’s less rape at sex-ban-having colleges (let alone sex-and-alcohol-banning), the tremendous challenges facing those who are sexually assaulted at these schools suggest that demanding chastity of 18-22-year-olds, in the smartphone age at that, isn’t what’s going to end campus rape. For some thoughts on what might, see Elizabeth here.

The View From Your Window Contest

by Dish Staff

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries tocontest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

What Happens When You Like Absolutely Everything

by Dish Staff

Matt Honan went on a 48-hour “campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me”:

I liked one of my cousin’s updates, which he had re-shared from Joe Kennedy, and was subsequently beseiged with Kennedys to like (plus a Clinton and a Shriver). I liked Hootsuite. I liked The New York Times, I liked Coupon Clipinista. I liked something from a friend I haven’t spoken to in 20 years—something about her kid, camp and a snake. I liked Amazon. I liked fucking Kohl’s.

The results, he says, were “dramatic”:

My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.

Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post. As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi’s ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.

Honan adds, “Eventually, I would hear from someone who worked at Facebook, who had noticed my activity and wanted to connect me with the company’s PR department.”

A Poem For Saturday

by Alice Quinn

Vaness Vitiello Urguhart’s feature in Slate this week, Butch is Beautiful, put me in mind of a poem entitled “Old Friends”, written by Anne MacKay, who from childhood on—she was born in 1928 and died two years ago—had a home in Orient on the easternmost tip of the North Fork of Long Island. Anne was a graduate of Vassar College and was Drama Instructor and Theater Director at two distinguished New York schools, the Dalton School , from 1953-1972, and Horace Mann, from 1972-1992.

Later in life she devoted her energies to poetry and to preserving lesbian voices and experiences through her work with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, where her own papers are now archived.

She is the author of Wolf Girls at Vassar: Lesbian and Gay Experiences 1930-1990 (St. Martin’s Press, 1993) and the poetry collections, Field Notes of a Lesbian Naturalist, Gifts, Salt Water Days, Fields, and Sailing the Edge, from which the poems we’ll post are drawn. (For a copy of Sailing the Edge or Field Notes of a Lesbian Naturalist, send a check or a money order for $20 to MG Soares for each book along with your address to PO Box 97, Orient, NY 11957.)

Anne’s snug cottage on the side of a hill overlooking Hallock’s Bay evoked Moley’s digs in The Wind and the Willows, its charm captured in her poem “Housemates”:

Silverfish along walls and ceilings,
sow bugs in the bathroom, mosquitoes, ants,
August flies—I share my house with one and all.
Spiders with soft pale webs, all sorts of hard
black bugs that creep or fly—mean-spirited biters,
moths who rush to the bed lamp, visiting wasps.
Most behave, rushing or crawling on separate rounds,
this old, warm home a perfect hunting ground.

“Old Friends” by Anne MacKay:

We saw an older girl
wearing a white, men’s
shirt at school—collar
open, sleeves folded up,
shoulders loose and free.
“Sexy!” we said—meaning
“cool!” Mother frowned,
“Don’t use that word!”
But it was handsome, and
looking back it was sexy,
a bridge between genders,
the comfort, the swagger
of the open-shirt sailor or
double-shirted woodsman.

It was the first present
I ever bought myself.
A dollar-fifty spent at
Lipton’s store set me free.
The colors, the makers,
changed and changed
but, loyal as a barnacle
on a wooden pier,
these comfortable shirts
remain my friends, still
with me, after sixty years.

(From Sailing the Edge © 2003 by Anne MacKay. Used by permission of the Estate of Anne MacKay, 2014. Photo by Flickr user Jackie)

The Fate Of The Syrian Rebellion

by Dish Staff

Robert Ford disputes the conventional wisdom that the non-jihadist rebels in Syria are more or less finished:

The death of moderate armed opposition elements has been greatly exaggerated. These groups — whom I define as fighters who are not seeking to impose an Islamic state, but rather leaving that to a popular decision after the war ends — have recently gained ground in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, and have nearly surrounded the provincial capital. If the rebels are ever to demonstrate military capacity, it should be in Idlib, where the supply lines from Turkey are easily accessible.

Their advances over the past month also extend beyond Idlib. Notably, moderate armed groups repelled regime attacks in the vicinity of the town of Morek, in west-central Hama province, and also advanced on the Hamidiyah air base there. They even damaged aircraft at the air base, with some reports claiming that they used surface-to-air missiles. Moreover, they launched renewed rebel incursions into Damascus from the nearby eastern suburb of Jobar on July 25 and 26.

But Charles Lister paints a very different picture of the rebels’ condition, warning that they appear to be losing the long battle for Aleppo and its environs to both the Assad regime and ISIS:

The military has followed air bombardment with methodical but effective ground incursions that, over time, have enabled it to re-capture territory and force a rebel retreat to the city’s northern districts. As such, the opposition is now in its weakest position in Aleppo city since mid-2012. … But although regime advances in Aleppo city are extremely significant, the most immediate threat comes from ISIS and its rapid advance north of the city.

Controlling Dabiq, one of the villages that AFP reported was seized Wednesday, is already extremely symbolic for ISIS, whose official magazine is named after the town for its role in the hadith — the teachings, deeds, and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed — as the site of a major battle before the end of the world. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded ISIS’ precursor group, once said the capture of Dabiq would represent the first step towards conquering “Constantinople” and “Rome.” With those villages in hand, ISIS now seems likely to move forward on two primary fronts — northwest towards Sawran and eventually Azaz and southwest to Liwa al-Tawhid’s stronghold in Marea.

Zaher Sahloul zooms in on the regime’s targeting of hospitals and health care workers:

According to Doctors Without Borders and other human rights organizations, the Syrian regime and some of the military groups have systematically targeted health care professionals, facilities, and ambulances. Physicians for Human Rights said government forces were responsible for 90 percent of the confirmed 150 attacks on 124 facilities between March 2011 and March 2014, which have devastated the country’s health care system. Of the more than 460 civilian health professionals killed across Syria, at least 157 were doctors, followed by 94 nurses, 84 medics, and 45 pharmacists. Approximately 41 percent of the deaths occurred during shelling and bombings, 31 percent were the result of shootings, and 13 percent were due to torture.

The crisis has forced many doctors to flee to neighboring countries. I heard of a doctor from Aleppo who decided to take the risky trip from Libya to Malta with his wife and three children by boat, trying to reach Europe, but they all died when the boat sank in the Mediterranean.

(Photo: A view of a damaged buildings after barrel bomb was dropped. At laest 17 people were killed and wounding dozen others after Syrian regime helicopters dropped barrel bombs on an opposition-controlled areas at Bab al-Nairab district in Aleppo, Syria. (Photo by Karam Almasri/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)