Seduced Yet Again by Colonel Sanders, and Other News

 

• You know that Borges story, “Library of Babel,” where he imagines a world containing all possible books? Perforce, one such book would have to be a romance novel in which a Kentucky-born fried-chicken magnate—the very same one whose face and name are emblazoned on fast-food franchises around the world—seduces an errant noblewoman at a dockside bar. And now, I’m happy to report, that book actually exists. True, it was a statistical inevitability. Someday, someone would sit down and string together the letters properly, and a Colonel Sanders romance would come to be . But who would’ve thought we’d have the good fortune to be alive for it? Kate Taylor writes, “To celebrate Mother’s Day—the chicken chain’s best-selling day of the year—KFC published ‘Tender Wings of Desire,’ a novella following the love affair between Lady Madeline Parker and Colonel Harland Sanders … ‘The only thing better than being swept away by the deliciousness of our Extra Crispy Chicken is being swept away by Harland Sanders himself,’ George Felix, KFC US’s director of advertising, said in a statement.” (As for the novella itself, here’s a representative passage: “They were so consumed that it took every ounce of their restraint not to give into the first right then and there. The flames would continue to rage throughout the night until the fire was too much, and at last they could let it engulf them.”)

• Speaking of things I’ve always wanted, here’s another one: a museum that gives American writers their due, but that makes literature seem so anodyne and boring that no visitors get any bright ideas about becoming writers themselves. (I don’t want the competition, you see.) And here, too, my dreams have come true. Witness the American Writers Museum, which makes a protean, deeply expressive art form seem like a neat self-improvement project. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing ‘Word Waterfall,’ in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations … Head from the entrance in one direction into a gallery called ‘A Nation of Writers’ and you get what might be called the logical, left-brain approach to literature, anchored by an eighty-five-foot-long wall that tells the chronological story of American writing through 100 significant writers. (The museum is careful not to say ‘best.’) … Visitors have to dig to get past the overall mood of inspirational uplift and moral progress and find knottier currents. Those who skip [the NPR critic Maureen] Corrigan’s video commentary on literary experimentalism, for example, may not realize that Lolita is more than a novel that ‘hinges on a road trip—a classic American genre—and riffs on motel and teen culture,’ as the brief wall text dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov puts it.”

• Vinson Cunningham reads John McWhorter’s new book Talking Back, Talking Black, which mounts a compelling linguistic case for Black English: “McWhorter offers an explanation, a defense, and, most heartening, a celebration of the dialect that has become, he argues, an American lingua franca … In five short essays, McWhorter demonstrates the ‘legitimacy’ of Black English by uncovering its complexity and sophistication, as well as the still unfolding journey that has led to its creation. He also gently chides his fellow-linguists for their inability to present convincing arguments in favor of vernacular language. They have been mistaken, he believes, in emphasizing ‘systematicity’—the fact that a language’s particularities are “not just random, but based on rules.”

• In Vienna, Owen Hatherly celebrates the Gemeindebauten—apartment blocks of public housing from the 1920s and 30s that realized an ambitious vision of working-class life in the city: “The Gemeindebauten were a response not only to the housing crisis but also to a more existential dilemma. What would be the identity of the city, now that it no longer ruled an immense land empire that extended from Trieste on the Adriatic to Lviv beyond the Carpathians? To the Social Democrats the answer was clear: Vienna would be a metropolis dedicated to the welfare and edification of its inhabitants, particularly the long-neglected working classes … the Hofs can be understood as not merely practical but ideological. No less than Gothic churches, they are absolutely loaded with rhetoric: massive mid-rise superblocks articulated with towers, archways, loggias, and bays; embellished with bas-reliefs, tiles, metalwork, and sculptures depicting workers and worker families. The labor-intensive construction was itself an integral part of the program: a means of employing as many workers as possible … Over the decades the Gemeindebauten of Red Vienna have continued to function as vital and attractive housing, with accessible and attractive public spaces that remain a respite and a pleasure.”

• Andrew Kay went on the academic job market and the dating market at the same time, and was dismayed to find that the two have eerie parallels: “My life was shortly to become an unremitting series of auditions. However neatly I inhabited the performative guises my life now demanded, some kernel of my inmost being remained, straining toward some affirmation of itself—some lasting connection through which it could take root and fructify. And it kept seeming to find this. Kept encountering signs of apparent interest, forming linkages that flourished a moment and then—in a stroke of that blithe cruelty unique to digital culture, where rejection gets conveyed in haphazard texts, or no texts—were choked off. In time the soul curls back on itself, ingrown.”

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2pyXfaF