Loose Flyers

★ The part of daylight put aside for saving was the color of a bruise. Out in the dark morning, it was either starting to rain or finishing. A parent and child disembarked from an Escalade outside the school with an elaborate poster project wrapped in plastic. The four-year-old thrust his hands in his pockets against the chill, making him move along that much more slowly. The rain no longer was ambiguous: It was building to a gutter-filling downpour. As it blew by the windows, something in it looked like snowflakes or peach petals. Outside again they proved to be raindrops fat enough to flash white, confirmed when one splatted on the thumb. A wind-vented umbrella flipped inside out regardless. The apartment building made its hollow moaning. Near six o’clock seemed brighter than any of the rest of the day had been.

A less charitable way to view Airbnb’s forthcoming app that will allow neighbors of noisy, inconsiderate, or generally terrible hosts to report them directly to the company is that it will funnel complaints away from the authorities—like, say, in New York City, where the city government just budgeted $10 million to crack down on illegal hotels—and keep them in the Airbnb family.

In 1977, Lorraine Brown, a professor at George Mason University, sat down with retired director, teacher, playwright, and actress, Mary Virginia Farmer, to ask whether a play she directed and helped write nearly forty years earlier, The Sun Rises in the West, contained communist propaganda. Rather than answer the question, Farmer asked Brown to shut off the recorder.

For Farmer, such questions were frustratingly, perhaps even terrifyingly, familiar. In 1951, a full fifteen years after The Sun Rises in the West became a huge hit for the Los Angeles Federal Theatre Project, Farmer was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to testify whether she had ever participated in anything “subversive,” the committee’s code word for Communism. The committee questioned eighteen witnesses the day they called on Farmer. Four of them, including Farmer, went into the record as “unfriendly” for refusing to answer their questions. She never worked in Hollywood again.

Farmer’s story isn’t told in Trumbo, the recent film starring Bryan Cranston that chronicled the resistance of the Hollywood Ten, a group of men working in the film industry as screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted and jailed for their refusal to cooperate with HUAC. It isn’t told anywhere; Farmer’s work as an artist and political agitator has been relegated to literal footnotes in academic treatments of the history of American political theatre and Hollywood’s blacklist, if mentioned at all. But her work is worth remembering. Her achievements—including an acting and teaching position in New York City’s famous Group Theatre, the company that nurtured the talents of Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Clifford Odets—were shot through with political activism during a time when the labor movement, for all its gender-equality rhetoric, still reinforced traditional gender roles among its constituents. That activism ultimately ended her career.

Millicent Dillon is the author of four novels and biographies of Jane and Paul Bowles. At ninety, the nuclear-physicist-turned-writer is hard at work on a memoir—excerpts of which have been published by The Believer and Narrative—as well as a new novel. In the words of Lynne Tillman, “Millicent Dillon’s fiction is superb, so intelligent and clear-eyed. She’s not ruthless, but honest.” What follows are highlights from our email correspondence from the past few months.

How did your work as a nuclear physicist affected your writing?

When I decided to major in physics in 1940, I didn’t have any real sense of why I was doing what I was doing. Now I think the science itself was an escape from the difficult emotional world of my childhood and youth. Physics itself gave me great satisfaction because of the accuracy of the answers that told me how and why things in the physical world behaved as they did. That must have been very reassuring to me in terms of the stability of the world and also in terms of the protection the mind afforded in life, as I must have though of the mind at the time.

When I went to work in a laboratory during the war, the work was dull and repetitive and not demanding of intelligence in any way. At that point, I think I threw myself into trying to learn something about life. I was only eighteen at the time and my judgment was not at all developed.

When the announcement was made of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, I was stunned. That this science, which I regarded as rooted in logic, and at the same time capable of a certain mysticism, could produce something so shattering and so destructive had a profound effect upon me. Several years later I went to work in Oak Ridge and there I became involved in the scientists’ movement opposed to any further development in atomic research. That movement was not successful. So that was one part of my life.

“The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz held its annual guest-list-only party Saturday night at Bob’s Steak and Chop House with generous pours of wine; a pair of haiku writers hired to bang out on-demand poems on Royal typewriters; and Go Cubes, the chewable coffee created by startup Nootrobox. At a party hosted by Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, two rubber unicorn masks were passed around. The night before, as the crowds thinned, a woman dressed as a fairy rode a white horse with a unicorn horn past the Hilton hotel.”
—Can you imagine how sweaty and gross those unicorn masks must have gotten?#

Is Felix Salmon the reason journalism has no future? Sure, why the hell not.#

We are two years out from the 20th anniversary of Air’s Moon Safari. Death draws closer every day and yet you still have to contend with taxes and weather. Here’s Air’s Nicolas Godin with an homage to Danny Elfman. Enjoy.

★★★ The confusing sky at some uncertain hour of the early morning looked gray more than blue, yet it seemed to have a white contrail on it. A man and boy played catch in the forecourt as the four-year-old and the eight-year-old scootered around them. A stumpy, bat-eared dog strained at its lead to try to run with the younger boy as he rolled by. In the afternoon, the heater, sitting dormant for who knows how long in obedience to its thermostat, kicked on once more. The four-year-old turned away from the door on the way back from his brother’s piano lesson, simply to go running some more around the plaza. The sky had gone ashen; it was still not not-nice out, but it had stopped looking nice.

“[W]e can define ostranenie as a cognitive-emotional state, the renewed awareness produced when the habitual is depicted in an unusual way. What is habitual differs from reader to reader, from spectator to spectator. The intended effect can fail to manifest itself; conversely, one can experience ostranenie where it was not intended: say, reading a description of one’s country written by an astonished foreigner. There are a great many ways of making things strange – for instance, adopting the perspectives of aliens and animals; naming directly what is usually couched in euphemisms; or describing in minute detail what is usually summed up in a single word.”
—I really enjoyed this essay about Viktor Shklovsky and his idea of ostranenie, and I am someone who cannot hear the phrase “literary theory” without making the “jerking off” motion so violently that I do damage to my rotator cuff. If you feel strong enough today to make it through something that addresses formalism, “schema-focused therapy” and a bunch of other concepts that require a strong gag reflex, you might want to give it a shot. THIS IS ME RECOMMENDING THIS PIECE BTW. #

Let’s face it, most mornings you feel out of sorts. It’s because life is absurd and the things you do lack all meaning and even the occasional moments in which you are fully conscious of the absurdity and meaningless cannot compete with your brain’s belief that it is better to pretend that the useless things you struggle to do each day won’t be completely erased very shortly after the inevitable end of your journey into nothingness. This morning, however, you have a better reason than usual to feel out of sorts, because the stupid setting of the clocks stole an hour away from your rest. By the end of the week you will have adjusted and the cloud of confusion hovering over your head will once again result from your denial of death, but today you can let yourself feel a little better about being so blurry. Here’s ten minutes of techno that has all the right influences and doesn’t care to disguise them. Enjoy.