Features correspondent
The week’s best arts and culture reads – including a guide to gender in India, notes on Pinterest and a classic essay on the rise of Elvis Presley.
“If you have acid thrown in your face, go to the hospital, then later to the police. The doctors will do something. The police will not. Consider suicide, although it is a crime to commit suicide. If you do not commit suicide, start an NGO for women who have had acid thrown in their faces. Teach them to make craft items such as wallets from colorful recycled Tetrapak. Speak internationally to audiences who will feel revulsion and pity.” (Minal Hajratwala, Granta, 1,920 words)
If you are allergic to cultural studies go no further; but these notes on Pinterest are perceptive. “Pinterest lets users shop for images over the sprawl of the internet, turning it into an endless visual shopping mall in which one never runs out of money. Because it is virtual, no one has to wastefully consume products that they want merely for the status implications. It allows for consumerism without consumption.” (Rob Horning, New Inquiry, 2,300 words)
Samuel Johnson’s mid-18th Century essays in The Rambler are reviewed here as if they were the work of a modern blogger: “In Johnson’s schema, most of all we want to feel good about ourselves, and we will overlook inconvenient information if need be. That is why so many things in the world go wrong. We don’t want to know how badly we are doing, how imperfect our reputation is, and how far we are from truly valuable achievement.” (Tyler Cowen, New Rambler, 1,840 words)
Lucy Kellaway and Sir David Tang visit one another’s London houses and snipe at one another’s taste. The luxury-loving Tang, who overloads every surface and stuffs every cupboard, mocks Kellaway’s preference for plain and simple: “Just think of the anticlimax of opening a large drawer only to find, as I did in your set of drawers next to your bed, just a few rolled up bundles of your husband’s monochromatic underpants.” (David Tang & Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times, 1,820 words)
Franz Werfel “worked a miracle for Armenians around the world” by collecting memories of the 1915 genocide and forging them into an epic novel, The Forty Days Of Musa Dagh, which immortalised the Armenian tragedy and foreshadowed the Jewish one. Musa Dagh was published in Germany in November 1933, banned in February 1934; Werfel was a Jew and a “burned author”. He remains to this day “a virtual Armenian saint”. (James Reidel, New York Review of Books, 2,480 words)
Review. “Frank Stanford didn’t live long. He shot himself three times in the heart with a pistol at age 29. But you come through a Frank Stanford poem, you know you’ve lived. Rabbit blood under your nails. The snake handler showing you the fang marks. Now a monster compilation, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, has assembled more than 700 pages of poetry and a little prose like a moon-spattered Bible.” (Dean Kuipers, LA Times, 636 words)
A classic from February 1968. The great Stanley Booth recounts Elvis Presley’s elevation from teenage hoodlum to national hero by way of army service. “His annual income is about five million dollars. And yet, not too many years ago, he was living in a Federal low-rent housing project, working as a truck driver, movie usher, sometimes forced to sell his blood at ten dollars a pint. Elvis Presley, a Great American Success Story.” (Stanley Booth, Esquire, 6,200 words)