How much could a banana cost?
Plus, the trouble with internet novels.
Hello. Since we have last spoken, I:
Watched American Psycho (2000) and Wicked (2024).
Purchased tickets to see Alvin Ailey in December at City Center.
??? Not done much of particular interest, I guess.
Onto the news.
Is the 20th-century novel its own genre? Yes, argues Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review of Books, in his new book Stranger Than Fiction. I enjoyed reading New Yorker critic Louis Menard’s review of the book, in which he thoroughly lays out Frank’s argument. We think, often, about the 19th-century novel as a particular thing. So what about the following century?
Most interesting is Frank’s point that much of the most interesting and experimental art-making—including writing—happened in times of peace. And before, even, the first world war:
What is striking about this period of lively artistic change in Europe and the United States is that it does not seem to have been a response to world events. It may be intuitive to associate movements that undermine traditional conceptions of how a novel should read or what a painting should look like with traumatic change, but we are much more likely to see artistic risk-taking when times are good than when they are bad. New art needs a cultural infrastructure—publishers, gallerists, impresarios, critics, prize juries, little-magazine editors, bookstore owners, even professors—to help create an audience for the scandalous and iconoclastic. It’s hard to mobilize those agents when the bombs are falling.
A very good point, and one that makes me feel quite uneasy about how much more that cultural infrastructure has been decimated compared to the early 20th century. That is perhaps, among other reasons, why Frank doesn’t think novelists today are quite pushing the envelope like their predecessors. (Menard, however, doesn’t quite agree).
So what about the 21st-century novel? Well, one defining trend of contemporary fiction has been the internet novel—which is so full of proper noun references that it captures a flash-in-the-pan zeitgeist. In a piece for The Walrus, writer Greta Rainbow examines the genre in a piece pegged to an upcoming novel, Woo Woo by Ella Baxter.
Internet novels are divisive. And they can be hard to get right. Rainbow writes: “In the hands of a master, a pileup of proper nouns can be a conduit for sharp commentary or satire. It can also easily slide into status signalling, where the book serves to confirm the status and milieu to which the author, and their ideal reader, belongs.”
Dickens and Austen also included timely references in their work that today are best explained by a footnote or a quick Google. But not to the degree that today’s reference novels contain hyper-specific nouns. It can be “a useful tool to cut to the business of plot, expediting establishment of social class and milieu in order to have space to say something about it,” Rainbow writes. But not all writers use that space to do that analysis. Instead, what you end up with is an insider-y communion with writer and reader—if the reader is in the know enough to get the author’s references.
On the flip side are contemporary writers—like Sally Rooney, perhaps most famously—who go out of their way to avoid proper nouns, perhaps in search of universality or even in the attempt to keep the reader at more of an arm’s distance, lest they get seduced by the feeling of exclusivity, reveling in the feeling of being in an elite club with the author, instead of more objectively taking in the narrative at hand. This, Rainbow acknowledges, is even harder to get right.
It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? More than $5 millionm apparently. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 work “Comedian”—which is famously just a banana duct-taped to a wall—sold for $5.2 million at Sotheby’s to crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun. $6.24 million including buyer’s fees. Per The Guardian, the purchase includes: “the banana, a roll of duct tape, instructions on how to install the work—including information on how to replace the banana—and a certificate of authenticity.”
Obviously, everyone has a lot of opinions on this. Hyperalleric editor Hakim Bishara wrote: “It’s only fitting that the mundane banana was bought by a crypto bro who also conjured his fortune out of thin air. But the second the work became a personal investment asset, it lost any shred of irony it might have once possessed.” But Josiah Gogarty points out in British GQ that “Comedian” follows a long line of toll art, stemming back to Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain.” I see both sides. Is it ultimately kind of dumb? Yes. Is it an admittedly poignant commentary on the art market and what is ascribed value for seemingly no reason at all? Yes. Especially because of how the buyer made his fortune.
The new artistic director at Alvin Ailey is Alicia Graf, a former Ailey dancer and current director of the dance division at Juilliard. She steps into the role after Judith Jamison’s death earlier this month. What can we expect from her leadership? According to the New York Times, a continued understanding that Alvin Ailey’s art and social justice were “were one and the same” and that he aimed to “to hold a mirror to society and to show people how beautiful they are.”
In this house, we love Wikipedia. And the free online, editable-by-anyone Encyclopedia is getting better every day. The nonprofit Wiki Education has launched a three-year Knowledge Equity Initiative, which aims to “recruit 16,000 students in 800 humanities courses to improve roughly 16,000 Wikipedia articles with the help of faculty partners whose expertise is in under-represented content areas in the humanities and who will make Wikipedia article editing part of required coursework.”
We have come so far since my high school teachers told us that “Wikipedia is not a valid source.” But in all seriousness, in a time when AI is rapidly making everything on the Internet harder to verify, the Internet Archive receives frequent threats to its longevity, and history continues to be defined, at large, by white male academics, this kind of work stands to make a tangible, lasting difference.
I am open to giving this a chance. It’s true: I did not like the Crime & Punishment ballet. But perhaps I’ll be more open to Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar Wilde-inspired ballet, Oscar, which the Australian Ballet premiered earlier this fall. You can watch it via livestream on December 3, and on-demand for 14 days after.
The real problem with the children’s literacy crisis is not that it’s a sudden crisis, according to standardized testing, writes Anna North for Vox. What is a problem, however, is how much rates of children reading for pleasure have plummeted. That has a fundamental impact on how children learn to digest information and assess its legitimacy; “they’re not reading in the ways that they need to read in order to be prepared for the tasks of learning and critical thinking,” says Catherine Snow, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The solution: Encourage kids to read what they find interesting—and in the medium that most appeals to them. If paperbacks aren’t getting them excited, perhaps there is some room for ebook innovation.
This is just like La Chimera (2024). Italian police have arrested some “amateurish” tombaroli who looted ancient Etruscan artifacts and posted them on Facebook. Dumb of them!
The article everyone is hate-reading is this one in Vanity Fair about the late author Cormac McCarthy and a teenager he groomed. From the few clips I’ve read on Bluesky (where you can find me now), it seems poorly written and annoying. So I will not be reading it. Stay safe. ▲