August 8, 2019 Arts & Culture Whither The Golden Penetrators? By Dan Piepenbring Still from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood In Los Angeles, 1968, Dennis Wilson was the beachiest of the Beach Boys, the only Boy who actually surfed. He was the cool guy with the cool car, cool shades, cool hair. When he admired his disheveled reflection in his California-shaped swimming pool, his steely blue eyes must’ve told him: Dennis, you deserve it all. True, his band’s best years were behind him. And true, his divorce tarnished his reputation; his ex had told the court how he used to beat her. But as sure as his Ferrari purred—as sure as that gold-record sun went swanning into the Pacific every evening—Wilson was going to enjoy himself. With his pals Terry Melcher (Doris Day’s son, a cool guy) and Gregg Jakobson (a total nobody, but still a cool guy), he formed a trio called the Golden Penetrators, who fancied themselves “roving cocksmen,” as his ex put it. They vowed to seduce as many women as possible. Likely this oath was at the front of Wilson’s mind when he picked up some hitchhiking hippie girls, escorting them to his mansion for “milk and cookies.” Soon those teens, along with more teens and their leader, Charles Manson, were Wilson’s full-time guests. Having reached peak cool guy, he bragged to the press: “I LIVE WITH 17 GIRLS.” (Now this is just called living in Bushwick.) Ushering Manson, whom he called the “Wizard,” into Hollywood, Wilson and his fellow Penetrators set the stage for some of the most infamous murders in American history. Though the Golden Penetrators, in their caricatured machismo, seem ready-made for a Quentin Tarantino film, they’re strikingly absent from his latest, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. In their place is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), the cool guy with the cool et cetera, a washed-up stunt double who functions as a Wilson stand-in. Booth, too, is a generation behind the times. He is a relic of Westerns, where Wilson was a relic of surf rock. And Booth, too, is clinging to his glory days with rakish ease, trailed by rumors of the violence that ended his marriage. But when, like Wilson, he picks up a Manson girl, Booth does something astoundingly un-Wilson: he declines her advances. Eventually, his sobering encounter with the Manson Family allows him to prevent, with vintage cool-guy, ass-whooping skills, some of the most infamous murders in American history. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is nominally a fairy tale (nominally in two senses of the word), which is why it entertains these counterfactual revisions. In a fairy tale, Cliff Booth can say no to the sex that Dennis Wilson could not wait to say yes to. Cliff Booth can dispatch, with a bit of LSD-induced chutzpah, the same killers who stabbed and shot five people, including Sharon Tate, on Cielo Drive. Critics have found these deviations appealing or appalling; to me they felt inchoate, as if Tarantino had tinkered with the past only long enough to tire of it. Even if he wanted a storybook finale with a flamethrower, he didn’t need to divest himself so completely of the era’s history. Much of the reality would have served his revisionist ends. Read More
August 7, 2019 Arts & Culture The Double Life of Karolina Pavlova By Barbara Heldt Karolina Pavlova. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In the nineteenth century, when its literature equaled that written in any place at any time in history, Russia had no “great” woman writer—no Sappho, no Ono, no Komachi or Murasaki Shikibu, no Madame de Staël or George Sand, no Jane Austen or George Eliot—or so we might say when surveying the best-known works of the age. But we now know this truth to be less than true. Karolina Pavlova, born Karolina Karlovna Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807, died in Dresden in 1893 after having lived outside Russia for four decades. She had abandoned her native country not because of czarist oppression but because of hostile criticism of her poetry and her personal life. She died without friends, without family, without money, without renown (not a single Russian newspaper gave her an obituary) but with an unyielding dedication to what she called her “holy craft,” which had produced a body of fine literary, largely poetic, works. In 1848, when she had completed her only novel, A Double Life, Pavlova was not only devoted to art but also enjoyed other, more transient pleasures like love, friendship, and respect, which she was to lose later on. To judge from the irony that pervades her otherwise romantic description in this book about a young girl who has everything, Karolina Pavlova had come to expect little from the world beyond what her own talents and personality could bring to it. The theme of conflict between poet and society had informed the works of the great lyric poets who were her predecessors, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Read More
August 7, 2019 At Work Please Fire Jia Tolentino By Brian Ransom Jia Tolentino. Photo: © Elena Mudd. Is there any topic Jia Tolentino can’t tackle? Since becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2016, she’s written features about the electronic cigarette brand Juul and the culty athleisure company Outdoor Voices; commentaries on the disastrous Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the violent rise of incels; and examinations of the “large adult son” meme and the YouTube phenomenon of remixing popular songs so they sound like they’re echoing in abandoned malls. In the early years of her professional writing career, she conducted a series of funny yet deeply sympathetic interviews with adult virgins at The Hairpin, and her work as deputy editor at Jezebel helped shape online feminist discourse as we now know it. She also has an M.F.A. in fiction, and the first short story she ever submitted won Carve magazine’s Raymond Carver Contest. “If I got fired tomorrow,” she told me, “I would probably go to the woods and try to write a novel.” Even her tweets are good; for what it’s worth, my introduction to her work came via the occasional dog photos and thoughts on music she posts, which are often the bright spots in my feed. What unites these wildly disparate threads is Tolentino herself. Although she’s been called the voice of her generation, her writing is sharp, clear, and utterly her own. Tolentino’s first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, vibrates with her presence. Over the course of nine long original essays, she turns inside out the fast-casual restaurants, pricey exercise classes, and dubiously simple narratives we use to propel ourselves through our overmediated lives. The result is a sort of revision of Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” for the late-capitalist horror show that is the twenty-first century. Read More
August 6, 2019 In Memoriam Remembering Toni By The Paris Review Fran Lebowitz, Danez Smith, and Pam Houston reflect on the impact Toni Morrison had on their lives. Toni Morrison (Photo © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders) I met Toni in 1978. The Academy of American Poets sent me a letter. They had a reading series where they put two writers together and the guy asked me, “Do you know who Toni Morrison is?” She wasn’t that well known then. I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you like her work?” I said, “I love her work!” Then he asked if I wanted to read with her, and I said, “That’s ridiculous! I can hardly think of a writer I have less in common with.” But we became best friends instantly. I mean instantly. Right afterward, Toni said, “We should go on the road together!” I always knew how old Toni was. She was exactly twenty years older than me. Here’s a thing that most people don’t know about Toni: Toni was one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. And I am an expert on fun. When Toni won the Nobel Prize, she took a bunch of people with her, including me, and she called us the Nobelettes. When I got to Stockholm, there was a message at the front desk: call Toni immediately. I said, “Okay, I’ll call from my room,” and they said no, you have to call her immediately. They were very excited that she was there. So I called from the desk and Toni said, “Fran, I need your help.” She had two things. “You have to help me with my speech, and I don’t know which gloves to wear.” I went to her room and it was just a sea of clothes and gloves. I mean clothes everywhere. The Nobel Prize ball, which you may never attend, is white tie, and, at least at the time, women wore opera gloves. The gloves were the first thing, the most important thing. Toni loved clothes. Manolo Blahnik was a friend of mine, so I arranged for her to get some shoes from him for the ball. I don’t think he knew her writing, but he loved her. Sue Newhouse once gave Toni a Judith Leiber bag—do you know what those are? You can look it up on your device. She made these extremely expensive bags, bejeweled, in the shape of raspberries or the Queen of England. And this was something that Toni just adored. She said, “Why don’t other people think of this?” I said, “Well, Toni, these things cost thousands of dollars!” But the best thing to give Toni was dessert. Read More
August 6, 2019 Redux Redux: The Thread of the Story By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, The Paris Review is celebrating Women in Translation Month! Read on for Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Hiromi Kawakami’s short story “Mogera Wogura” and Iman Mersal’s poem “A Celebration.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228 Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones. Read More
August 6, 2019 In Memoriam Toni Morrison, 1931–2019 By The Paris Review Toni Morrison. Photo: Angela Radulescu. We are deeply sad to report that Toni Morrison died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Over the course of eleven novels and several essay collections, children’s books, and plays, she reshaped the American literary landscape and influenced just about every English-language writer currently working. The Paris Review was lucky enough to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with Morrison on the eve of her 1993 Nobel Prize win. Born to a family of talented musicians, Morrison came late to the realization that she wanted to be a writer, but in her interview, she is clear about her intentions: “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books.” For twenty years, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, where she published Gayl Jones, Nettie P. Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Once she finally did begin writing, she kept relatively quiet about it; when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, her coworkers learned of the book’s existence from a review in the New York Times. “It was by the time I was writing Song of Solomon, the third book, that I began to think that this was the central part of my life,” she says. “Not to say that other women haven’t said it all along, but for a woman to say, I am a writer, is difficult … It isn’t so difficult anymore, but it certainly was for me and for women of my generation or my class or my race.” Read More