Advertisement
The Paris Review
Subscribe
Sign In
Remember me
Forgot password?
Sign In
Subscribe
The Daily
The Latest
Columns
The Quarterly
Issues
Interviews
Fiction
Poetry
Letters & Essays
Art & Photo
graphy
Authors
Podcast
About
History
Opportunities
Masthead
Prizes
Submissions
Media Kit
Bookstores
Events
Donate
Donate to
The Paris Review
Institutional Support
THE SPRING REVEL
Newsletters
Store
The Paris Review
The Daily
The Latest
Columns
The Quarterly
Issues
Interviews
Fiction
Poetry
Letters & Essays
Art & Photography
Authors
Podcast
About
History
Opportunities
Masthead
Prizes
Submissions
Media Kit
Bookstores
Events
Donate
Donate to
The Paris Review
Institutional Support
THE SPRING REVEL
Newsletters
Store
Sign In
Remember me
Forgot password?
Sign In
Subscribe
Sign In
Remember Me
Forgot password?
When Nacre Was Lucre, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
May 20, 2015
On the Shelf
An undated book from the mother-of-pearl craze.
On the cover of a 1598 book,
The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes
, a historian claims to have found “
the only demonstrably authentic portrait of Shakespeare made in his lifetime
”; the editor of
Country Life
magazine is calling this “the literary discovery of the century.” The century, thankfully, is young.
Pause to remember
the garish bookbinding trends of yesteryear
: “For a few years in the nineteenth century … papier-mâché books adorned with mother-of-pearl were part of a gift book fad, wherein a decorative tome of sentimental or religious poetry was bestowed upon a loved one, often around the winter holidays. The text was usually secondary to the gaudy cover, which was decorated to the extreme.”
Is photography merely a matter of chance?
“By the end of the nineteenth century, after Kodak has arrived … much of the role of chance migrates from the processing phase to the moment of exposure. That moment was always prone to chance—in the long exposures of early photography, a dog might wander in a street scene, or a young portrait subject might sneeze and blur the image. But with fast shutters and films, the so-called instantaneous photograph arrives, and chance takes on a new prominence in composition—to the point that even the word
composition
seems questionable.”
Everett Fox is translating the Hebrew Bible—a tricky effort, given that the original is rooted in a deeply aural tradition. “I heard it, too.
Short vowels twinkled and long vowels streamed by with showy tails
. Consonants held crisp and true. The overall effect was of a simultaneously dense and sprawling thing, layered and alive and capable of surprising you. Fox has dedicated his life to giving the Anglophone ear a hint of that Hebrew drama … [He] uses every poetic means at his disposal: phrase length, line break, puns.”
The glam
SAHM
s (stay-at-home moms, if you’re new to this) of the Upper East Side await
wife bonuses from their husbands
: “A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance—how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a ‘good’ school—the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks.”
Last / Next
Article
Last / Next Article
Share