Lapham’s Quarterly

>The Fame Machine

Posted on December 18, 2010. Filed under: history, John Tresch, Lapham's Quarterly |

John Tresch considers the technologies of fame from Gilgamesh to Facebook @ Lapham’s Quarterly.

“The Fame Machine,” a brief satire included in French author Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s collection of 1883, Cruel Tales, asks in precise, concrete terms just what celebrity is. Fame—or “la gloire” in the original, which means glory and renown, as well as the halo surrounding an image of Christ’s head—is a vague and vaporous notion, a sort of smoke that emanates from truly sublime works and individuals. The narrator of Villiers’ tale offers the steam engine as proof that elusive and vaporous phenomena can be put to work with very palpable effects. Thus even theatrical success can be reduced to its material components—applause, cheers, stamping feet, sighs, gasps, and well-timed devotional bouquets, as well as the barely stifled guffaw sparking the eruption of laughter and the “wow-ow,” the resonating cascade of bravos launched in close succession.
Although the claque, or paid troop of applauders, is an unshakable institution in the nineteenth-century Parisian theater, its work, paid for by the performance, is too unpredictable and piecemeal for an age that demands certainty and uniform efficiency.

The hero of the tale, engineer Bathybius Bottom, is an inventor and true devotee of the arts, willing to transform, for a price, any theater into a fame machine. No longer will the success of a play be left to chance or to the incompetence of a hired stooge who might miss his cues, laughing at a tragic turn or cheering the villain. At the flipping of a switch, artificial hands flutter gratifyingly together; the legs of the seats lift and strike the ground in exact imitation of appreciative canes and walking sticks; the cherubim adorning the loges and the proscenium reveal themselves to be no mere ornament but rather lung-sized bellows calling out their approval of the author and the actors, confirming the artwork’s sanctification. The machine also can be directed to plant favorable reviews in the press, and if for some reason a negative response is demanded, it will hiss, boo, and make catcalls. Controlled by an operator who must be above any personal interest, Dr. Bottom’s invention transforms the entire theater into a machine for producing glory: a material apparatus that brings about spiritual effects.

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>New Life from ruins

Posted on October 11, 2010. Filed under: Daniel Mason, Lapham's Quarterly |

Chris Payne’s “Asylum” @ Guernica

Daniel Mason on the trees and plants that flourish after a city is bombed @ Lapham’s Quarterly.

Early last summer I found myself in negotiation with my landlady over the loquat tree outside our bedroom window. According to our neighbor, the tree, which rises from a six-inch gap between the wall and the driveway, was imperiling cars with its fruit and power lines with its branches. My landlady wanted to cut it down. I didn’t. The tree wraps the entire northwest corner of the apartment in a dark green canopy, transforming the bedroom into a kind of glassed-in treehouse from which we can look in upon bird’s-nests and conferences of squirrels with the kind of intimacy reserved for a nature documentary. In the late spring, we can reach out and pick its fruit.

Of course, my neighbor’s contention was understandable. No one had planted the loquat. It was an escapee from another garden, strictly speaking a “weed,” and a big one at that. Left unchecked, its roots would buckle the driveway, its limbs burst the windows. Already, in high winds, the branches screeched menacingly across the glass. In the dusty cracks between the concrete, seedlings would germinate, grow.

Whether or not my neighbor had such dramatic images in mind, I don’t know. But the struggle between city and nature is an old conceit. One has but to look to the oaks growing on Caspar David Friedrich’s ruined monasteries or the grass that “o’erspreads” the fallen city of Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” to see how plants have classically been understood as the definition of the city’s demise. When the great fifth-century Chinese poet Bao Zhao wrote with grief of the fallen city of Guangling, he titled his famous Fu, or rhapsody, the “Wu-cheng,” words often translated in anthologies as “ruined city” but which literally means one that is “overgrown.”

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>Wild Skating

Posted on September 28, 2010. Filed under: Jay Griffith, Lapham's Quarterly, skating |

Jay Griffiths muses on the pleasures and virtues of ice skating as a metaphor for life @ Lapham Quarterly.

I suffer from a seasonal illness that was once very common in Britain but is now rare. It still afflicts the Dutch, though, in the thousands. It strikes me like delirium, when the lakes nearby freeze over and the ice issues an imperative: Carpe diem! Get your skates on! Love, yawns, and suicides, they say, are all infectious. So is play, and skate fever is a highly contagious form. The industrious, beware.

In the Welsh hills where I live, years can pass without the waters freezing, but this one and last were both skating winters—a few precious days of frost and rapture. If joie de vivre could be distilled to one image alone, it would be a skating party sliding down the hill to wake the lake. Last year on a clear night, I skated with friends by moon- and starlight, lanterns scattered around the edge of the lake like fireflies, and we wore full evening dress plundered from charity shops: feathers, fascinators, and fake furs. Wrapped up and amazed, the wrigglers and rugglers (small children and puppies) stayed at the edge, near the soup and the wood fire on the lakeshore. Though the “ecstasy”—in its root “standing apart from”—comes from skating out to the lake’s center and farther to its far and silent shores, across the Zuiderzee.

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>Striving toward the moment of waking

Posted on September 20, 2010. Filed under: Charlotte Gray, George Packer, Lapham's Quarterly, Lydia Davis, Paris Review, The Walrus, Walter Benjamin |

>In his essay “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” Walter Benjamin reflects on the specific qualities of the city as it emerged as the center of cultural and economic life–from the flaneur to the arcade, from Hausmann’s rational plan of the city to Daguerre’s panoramic visions. He writes a powerfully prophetic comment at the conclusion of the essay: “Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it–as Hegel already saw–with ruse.” In this intriguing idea, the very vision of the future holds in it the demise of the present. The grandeur of Paris, the capital of a colonial empire and the center of art and culture and to a great extent technology, held in it a certain decay.

I thought of this as I was walking near the Eiffel Tower the other day, itself a monument to the modern 19th century, when a stream of men, African immigrants mostly, came rushing toward me, bearing sacks of tourist trinkets, running from a barrage of police cars that has swarmed on the sellers in the shadows of the tower. As I got closer to the police cars, they were rounding up a number of men, handcuffed and empty of possessions. While the men rushing towards me were boisterous and chatty, talking to each and calling others on cell phones, the ones in handcuffs were quite and reserved. For the tourists, the scene of arrest was less spectacular than the monument they traveled to see.

“Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking.” The 19th century may also be a fantasy dream that we return to at moments as we, in the West, continue to wake from that past.

At The Paris Review, Lydia Davis is writing a series of short essays about her work on translating Flaubert’s 19th century masterpiece Madame Bovary. Davis’s new translation is due out this month.

But in the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

At Lapham Quarterly, George Packer finds Charles Dickens in the industrializing city of Rangoon.

Two years ago in Rangoon, I met a toothpick-thin, boisterous young Burmese man called Somerset. He had conferred this nickname on himself at age sixteen, after renting a collection of stories by W. Somerset Maugham from one of the bookstalls on Pansodan Road. By memorizing sentences from the collection, Somerset taught himself a somewhat formal and archaic English. Then he moved on to Charles Dickens. His identification with the works of these long-dead British writers was total. “All of those characters are me,” Somerset explained. “Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone is dirty. That is Dickens. In that Dickens atmosphere I grew up. I am more equipped to understand Dickens than modern novels. I don’t know what is air conditioning, what is subway, what is fingerprint exam.”

Charlotte Gray at The Walrus rediscovers the life and times of Sam Steel, one of Canada’s pioneering figures of the late 19th century.

The story of Sam Steele and the race to secure his record raise two difficult questions: How was he forgotten so quickly? And why does Canada do such a poor job of securing its history? Both questions cause Dr. Merrill Distad — the associate university librarian at the University of Alberta who threw his considerable energies into the Steele papers acquisition — to roll his eyes with frustration. “If this were an American hero,” he insists, “every schoolchild would have heard of him, and there would already be a television series and several movies about him. He is our Wyatt Earp.”

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