The VIDA (Bean) Count is out. Longtime readers will know that I think VIDA is silly. Simply adding up the number of pieces written by women tells us very little about the state of literature and nothing about how women are represented in it. How many articles written by women, and included in the VIDA Count, trash motherhood or femininity? More than one methinks.

The 2017 VIDA broke down the results by genders and identities with an “intersectional survey,” which distinguished between actual women and men who call themselves women, among other things. In the most recent count, VIDA didn’t have the time, so it’s using the old-fashioned dichotomy of male and female. How quaint. I guess that means that male critics like Stephen Burt, who now mostly goes by Stephanie Burt, is counted as a marginalized female writer. Burt is a white, male Harvard professor and a longtime contributor to our country’s most august publications.

But, really, none of this matters anyway because we’re all just trying to stay alive, you know, “in the present moment”: “It seems unreal that we are gearing up for another presidential election, a day many of us were afraid would never come. And there is still a lot of work to do to ensure we get there, but it’s difficult when we are working every day for survival. We are at the Supreme Court, fighting for trans rights, at the borders, trying to uncage children, trying to support refugees across the ocean, and each of these affects every one of us. We are also concerned for our jobs and for our personal safety in classrooms, where many in the creative writing community work. In our libraries and college campuses, the call for ‘free speech’ has led to abuse and violence, instead of imaginative expression and compassion. Not even our homes are safe.”

Lock yr doors, New Yorker readers, and put a few canned goods in that tote. Apparently, you might need to run for it when the yokels arrive looking for blood.

In other news: It’s the 50th anniversary of Abbey Road. Dominic Green takes stock: “Abbey Road isn’t the worst of the ten Beatles studio albums; that’ll be the posthumous Let It Be. Nor is it the most overrated (Sgt Pepper) or their most creative (Rubber Soul, Revolver or the White Album). It isn’t even the dullest Beatles’ album – the orchestral lashings of Phil Spector can’t mask the lassitude and loathing of Let It Be. It was, however, the last studio album the band recorded, and the biggest selling. By the time it was released in September 1969, the long and winding death of the band had slowed the previously torrential tide of new material. A Beatles-starved public bought it in their droves, and so the album’s 50th anniversary, instead of eliciting a sober chorus of raspberries, has incited one of those delirious outbreaks of cheering that tend to follow the pop critics’ receipt of a well-tempered box-set such as the Abbey Road Anniversary Super Deluxe. In fact, Abbey Road is less a cornerstone of the Beatles’ legend than its tombstone.”

Maureen Corrigan reviews Susannah Cahalan’s The Great Pretender: “David Rosenhan was a professor of psychology and law at Stanford University when in 1973 he published a nine-page article in the respected journal Science called ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places.’ That article rocked the psychiatric world and, Cahalan says, continues to be one of the most cited papers in the field. Rosenhan argued that psychiatry had no sure way to distinguish the sane from the insane. To empirically prove his thesis, he and seven volunteers — including a grad student, three psychologists and two doctors — went undercover in 12 mental health wards. These ‘pseudopatients’ posed as people who were hearing voices that said the words ‘thud, empty, hollow.’ . . . Cahalan takes readers on a mostly journalistic adventure story, describing her lucky discovery of Rosenhan’s personal notes on the experiment and the mental and physical legwork she did to locate and interview some of the still-living pseudopatients. But, then, Cahalan’s investigation hits a snag, and then another snag. Her suspicions are aroused: She can’t confirm some evidence supporting Rosenhan’s landmark essay.”

In The Hudson Review, Laura Glen Louis explains what it’s like to perform Yves Klein’s The Monotone-Silence Symphony: “We rehearsed a five-minute version: two-and-a-half minutes of D major; two-and-a-half of silence. Know this: the forte sustain is not for amateurs. Halfway through, my jaw went into spasms. I dropped it, mooshed it around, fought the rising panic that I couldn’t cut it, even at the baby length. Sucked in the gut. Tucked in the tush. The longest two-and-a-half minutes in history. Leave this to the young singers, all of whom were conservatory trained. Cut to two-and-a half minutes of sitting still. Present. At attention. An equal and opposite demand.”

A short survey of Neorealism: “Produced under Fascism in 1943, Visconti’s Ossessione (an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s hardboiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice) is generally considered the first Neorealist film, but it was Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the first movie made after the war to represent the recent Italian past, that planted the flag. It was planned during the Nazi occupation and based on actual events, including the execution of a priest. Shooting, sometimes using the locations where these events had actually occurred, began in January 1945, six months after the liberation of Rome; the movie wrapped in June, just as the war in Europe was ending. The production was hand to mouth. Because Cinecittà, the enormous studio complex built by Mussolini, had been damaged by Allied bombing, Rossellini made a makeshift studio out of a building that had once housed a dog track; the rest of Open City was shot on the streets of Rome using piecemeal 35mm film stock, some of it bought from street photographers. The mismatched shots and varied quality of the footage gave the movie an urgent documentary quality. Many thought it was a clandestine newsreel begun during the German occupation. The film opened in September 1945 at two large theatres in Rome, and despite a lukewarm critical reception, was the largest-grossing Italian movie of the year – praised by left and right alike.”

Thomas Kidd’s Who Is an Evangelical? is “a scholarly rebuke to a generation of journalists and pollsters who abuse the term ‘evangelical’ in service of tidy ideological narratives,” Samuel D. James writes.

A secret shop of forgotten New York treasures: “How a meticulously crammed sewing-machine repair store became an accidental museum.”

Essay of the Day:

In Wired, Brendan I. Koerner writes about the “strange life and mysterious death” of coder Jerold Haas:

“Eric Meyers stayed silent as he trained his rifle on the eight-point buck. He fired once and watched the deer shudder from the bullet’s impact. But the wounded animal turned and fled through the woods north of Clarksville, Ohio, spattering autumn foliage with blood as it ran. Meyers followed the buck’s trail for hours before finally suspending his pursuit well past sunset. But he set out again the next afternoon, November 3, 2018, this time with two helpers: his father, William, and a family friend named Bill O’Bryan, a Cincinnati logistics magnate who owns the estate where the hunt was taking place.

“The three men were scouring a thicket on the edge of a soybean field, hoping to stumble across the buck’s carcass, when Eric noticed a peculiar stonelike object lying on the ground. He knelt down for a closer look and saw that it was a human skull, its jawbone missing but its upper teeth still a healthy shade of white. He and his fellow hunters left the forest at once to call 911.

“A dozen investigators from the Warren County Sheriff’s Office used ATVs to search the area around the skull. They soon spotted a headless skeleton slumped against a honeysuckle tree, its right leg bent sideways at a 90-degree angle, its left still flecked with strands of muscle. Nearby was a rib and a jumble of arm bones that had evidently been gnawed off by coyotes and foxes. There were no man-made objects in the vicinity that might indicate an obvious cause of death: no gun, no knife, no rope, no drug paraphernalia.

“A few feet deeper into the forest, the crime scene unit found two black sneakers, a dark shirt, and a pair of black pants with a vine threaded through its belt loops. The clothes’ tattered condition suggested that they, like the skull and loose bones, had been removed from the body by scavengers. Inside a pants pocket was a wallet containing a wad of waterlogged cash, rewards cards from Subway and a chain of erotic boutiques, and an Ohio state ID for Jerold Christoper Haas, born September 30, 1975.

“By running the name through an Ohio law-enforcement database, the investigators learned that Haas had been reported missing seven weeks earlier. Haas had lived in Columbus, 80 miles from where his remains were discovered, but he’d last been seen at a gas station one county over from O’Bryan’s sprawling property. He’d disappeared along with a black backpack in which he carried the tools of his career as a computer programmer: three smartphones, two Dell laptops, an Amazon tablet, and an array of USB sticks and cables. He never let the backpack out of his sight; even on trips to the office bathroom, the bag stayed glued to his shoulder. But the backpack was nowhere to be found in the woods.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Quedlinburg Castle and Collegiate Church

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