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How about that Lenin? Big reader. Loved books. Tolstoy: loved him. Goncharov: couldn’t get enough of him. Chernyshevsky: the best. But Tariq Ali notes that Lenin couldn’t hang with the avant-garde, and that this had surprising ramifications for the Russian Revolution: “Lenin found it difficult to make any accommodations to modernism in Russia or elsewhere. The work of the artistic avant-garde—Mayakovsky and the Constructivists—was not to his taste. In vain did the poets and artists tell him that they, too, loved Pushkin and Lermontov, but that they were also revolutionaries, challenging old art forms and producing something very different and new that was more in keeping with Bolshevism and the age of revolution. He simply would not budge. They could write and paint whatever they wanted, but why should he be forced to appreciate it? … Shortages of paper during the civil war led to fierce arguments. Should they publish propaganda leaflets or a new poem by Mayakovsky? Lenin insisted on the first option. Lunacharsky was convinced that Mayakovsky’s poem would be far more effective and, on this occasion, he won.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

If shitlessness is too taboo for you, there are other ways to jar and unnerve your potential readers. Take pains to pepper your prose with irregardless, for example, and watch the hate mail pour in. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Irregardless is one of those words that people love to hate. No one is lukewarm about irregardless. I don’t use it, but what I love about it that it has hung around on the periphery of English for over 200 years. It’s like this barnacle that you can’t get off the hull of the language, and I think that’s great.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image: Tony Luong for The New York Times)

Looking for a fun, easy way to spice up your writing? Try throwing in a fecal intensifier or two. They’re the shit, and you’ll be thrilled shitless with the results. As the translator Brendan O’Kane writes, fecal intensifiers are the idiom of the moment, but it’s hard to follow their logic: “A certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus … noted that ‘people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.’ This cracked the room up, naturally, but it also seemed slightly off …I might be scared shitless, but I’m unlikely to be amused, bored, delighted, outraged, or annoyed shitless. This is curious, since shitlessness would seem to be the natural result of something scaring, boring, or annoying the shit out of me—all distinct possibilities, according to my understanding of the idiom. In particularly unexpected circumstances, one might even shit oneself—as a response to fear, outrage, amusement, or surprise, rather than delight or (unless as a last resort) boredom.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got an old friend kicking around—the barf bag. In these uncertain times, Hollywood’s horror filmmakers still turn to sick bags as a primo promotional gag. For there is still vomit in this realm, and still a need to contain it in the face of extreme spectacle. Cara Buckley writes: “After a moviegoer apparently vomited during a Los Angeles screening of the French coming-of-age cannibal flick, Raw, the theater began handing out barf bags … The move is a vintage publicity stunt going back some fifty years. Among the standout bags in movie history: The keepsake vomit bag from the 1963 splatter film Blood Feast came with an encouragement, ‘Spill your guts out!’ ‘Guaranteed to upset your stomach!’ proclaimed the bag from the 1981 Italian film Cannibal Ferox. The bag for The Beyond (1981) came with the thoughtfully worded warning, ‘Individuals with sensitive constitutions may experience stomach distress,’ and advised that the bag be used only once and not overfilled.”

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While we’re swinging for the fences, here’s Lewis Lapham pondering the unfathomable immensity of the cosmos: “Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease? The limitless expanse of human ignorance … rouses out the love of learning, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. We have no other light with which to see and maybe to recognize ourselves as human … To bury the humanities in tombs of precious marble is to deny ourselves the pleasure that is the love of learning and the play of the imagination, and to cheat ourselves of the inheritance alluded to in Goethe’s observation that he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth. Technology is the so arranging of the world that it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing. Machine-made consciousness, man content to serve as an obliging cog, is unable to connect the past to the present, the present to the past. The failure to do so breeds delusions of omniscience and omnipotence.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credit: Autopsy of the First Crocodile, Onboard, Upper Egypt, by Ernest Benecke)

It’s not just that the concept of Western civilization is bankrupt, racist bullshit … it’s that it’s much fresher bullshit than you might think. Kwame Anthony Appiah provides an excellent primer: “European and American debates today about whether Western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the West … If the notion of Christendom was an artifact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape during the Cold War. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that premodern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe—something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called Western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if Western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.”

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(Image Credit: The Plumb Pudding in Danger, James Gillray)

Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, Saunders, Whitehead: the literary luminaries of the nineties made their names on a fantastical escapism, more determined to entertain than they were to provoke. Now that the world’s gone even more to shit, Sam Sacks wonders if their appeal has worn thin: “the central dilemma of the nostalgist’s aesthetic: Can a novelist both recapture the innocent pleasures of storytelling and at the same time illuminate the complex realities of experience? In stable and prosperous times, truth and entertainment can overlap. But periods of crisis wedge them apart, and being faithful to one compromises the other … I find myself missing ambivalence—a quality that rarely squares with entertainment. There must be precious few readers who don’t already feel well disposed to tales of World War II heroes, fugitive slaves, and Abraham Lincoln.”

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(Ilustration: Nathan Fox)

Literature loves a hoax—the Daily itself may have perpetrated one as recently as yesterday, though you didn’t hear it from me. Clifford Irving, who’s responsible for one of the great written ruses of the past fifty years, isn’t given the credit he deserves as a creative liar. Paul Elie tells his story: “Irving, while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving, a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, high-adrenaline stunt, a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to get away with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That ‘stunt’ turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, and Life magazine’s editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. ‘I was a writer, not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, testing what people will believe, and once you get going you say, They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this … ’ ”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

(Image Credits: By Nick Cunard/Rex/Shutterstock (Lehrer), Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images (Albert), Schiffer-Fuchs/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images (Frey), Steve Helber/A.P./Rex/Shutterstock (Erderly), from Bettmann/Getty Images (Irving, Cooke).)