June 22, 2010 Arts & Culture “Most Brilliant, Most Highbrow”: New York Magazine By Thessaly La Force Boy, were we thrilled to discover that the Katherine Dunn story from our summer issue has appeared in the top right corner of New York Magazine‘s Approval Matrix! You can buy the issue at your local independent bookstore or on our site. And you can also read a Q&A on the Daily with Dunn and Caitlin Roper, the issue’s editor.
June 21, 2010 Arts & Culture The Poor Man’s Paris Review By Lorin Stein This morning we received a copy of The Paris Magazine, which bills itself as “The Poor Man’s Paris Review” and has appeared exactly four times since its founding in 1967. This isn’t very often for a quarterly magazine. Like a blazing comet with an extremely irregular orbit, issue four of The Paris Magazine is not to be missed. I commend to your attention—just for example—Todd McEwen on growing up Thoreauvian: “It was Thoreau’s slow, almost maddeningly slow, description of leaves, of trees, that drew me in. Right away I recognized in Thoreau a fellow connoisseur of depression … ” (This called to mind a favorite paragraph from Sam Munson’s recent novel The November Criminals.) Instead of answering several important e-mails, I also read Rivka Galchen’s essay on the DSM, Ferlinghetti’s game attempt to translate “Le Pont Mirabeau,” and a rangy essay by Michel Houellebecq on contemporary architecture, including these memorable last lines: A society which has attained an overheated level doesn’t necessarily melt, but it is unable to produce meaning, since all its energy is taken up with the description of its random variations. Every individual is however capable of producing a sort of cold revolution within himself by stepping outside the infomercial flow. It’s very easy to do. It has in fact never been simpler than today to adopt an aesthetic position in relation to the world: all you have to do is take a step to the side. And this step in the final instance is itself useless. It is enough to pause; to switch off the radio, unplug the television; not to buy anything else, not to want to buy anything else. It is enough to no longer take part, to no longer know; to temporarily suspend all mental activity. It is enough, literally, to be still for a few seconds. Which is exactly what I was! Congratulations to the new editor of The Paris Magazine, Fatema Ahmed, and to its publisher, the much-loved Shakespeare and Company. May they too find some momentary stillness—and yet manage to produce their next issue before 2019.
June 17, 2010 Arts & Culture Variations of R. Crumb By Caitlin Roper R. Crumb is the subject of the first Paris Review Art of Comics interview. “I used myself as a character in the introductory page of the first few issues of Zap Comix, showed myself in a wacky cartoon, R. Crumb, the cartoonist.” His self-portraits, like the artist, have aged well.
June 15, 2010 Arts & Culture Cité Soleil By Jeff Antebi Jeff Antebi’s photography appears in the summer issue of The Paris Review. Below, he describes his time in Cité Soleil, Haiti. I went to Haiti for the elections in April, 2009. When I got back home and started showing my work, people were most gripped by the photographs from Cité Soleil. People kept asking me what they could do to help improve the lives of people there. I think it was a profound awakening for Americans to know that only an hour and a half from Miami, people were existing in deplorable conditions. It was the proximity that drew people in. It’s one thing to say “the largest slum in the Western hemisphere.” It’s quite another to show people what it’s like to live on top of eight feet of garbage, where during the day, toxic fumes burn off the plastic bottles and waste. That was really the first time I had ever experienced that kind of reaction from one of my essays—people specifically asking what they could do. I immediately started making plans to go back and focus exclusively on Cité Soleil. I returned three months later. I had put a lot of my photos from my April trip on to my phone. Once I was back in Cité Soleil, I was able to track down a lot of the kids and show them the portraits I’d taken of them. The kids went nuts. I mean, these are kids who are so funny to begin with—animated, humorous, curious, engaging kids. They had a lot of fun scrolling through photos and recognizing their friends. Read More
June 8, 2010 Arts & Culture Watching the Detectives By J. D. Daniels Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe isn’t a man without needs. It’s late. You take Sidney Bechet’s “Apex Blues” off the turntable and switch on the television. The private eye on the screen is doing more or less as you are: Ravel on his record player, his revolver in the open desk drawer, his whiskey in his hand. It is appalling how much of your everyday behavior has been modeled on these clowns and caricatures. You pick up the phone in the dark and call your father to make sure he isn’t missing the movie. The apparent absence of any desire to please in the hard-boiled hero presupposes an absence of any need to please. When Diogenes saw a man drink from his hands, he threw his cup away. A real man doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts, his state is kingly. He doesn’t go to the grocery, he breaks off a hunk of himself and eats it. Adorno’s “Tough Baby” from Minima Moralia: There is a certain gesture of virility, be it one’s own or someone else’s, that calls for suspicion. He-men are thus, in their own constitution, what film-plots usually present them to be, masochists. At the root of their sadism is a lie. In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them. Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe isn’t a man without needs: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” Chandler, a popularizer of this style of overtly wounded heroism—Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid—was a terrific boozehound, and the expertly casual scenes in which his detective is bludgeoned unconscious are extrapolations from a lifetime of research into blacking out. Marlowe’s stigmata demonstrate his fundamental invincibility. There is no man neither tarnished nor afraid: such a creature would be an animal, or a machine—or a god, where each gimlet is another station of the cross in a pornography of suffering that culminates in the hangover, the Crucifixion, the money shot. When I tried to locate a certain phrase in Chandler, I can’t say I was shocked to find it instead in Travis Bickle’s mouth in Taxi Driver: “There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.” Loneliness is a small price to pay for being God’s man of any sort: divine permission to be aggrieved, with an ensuing role as the avenging angel. In the absence of willing persecutors, you flay yourself, accumulating smaller or larger scars like skee-ball tickets on the carnival midway, until you can afford a Taxi Driver–style orgy of violence. I’d like to trade in this used 1974 masochism for a shiny new sadism, please. Adorno again: “Here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure.” Such a man must repress his pain imperfectly: his real aim is to experience it, and to display his experience of it. That is why it isn’t enough to watch the movie by yourself in the dark. You call your father, but his line is busy. He’s calling you. J. D. Daniels lives in Massachusetts. He will contribute an essay on Brazilian jiu-jitsu to the fall issue of The Paris Review.