March 22, 2019 Arts & Culture Blood, Shit, and Sex By Andrew Hodgson While he is best known in his native France as an artist, and perhaps for his turn as Renfield in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979), Roland Topor’s written works are still generally unacknowledged. In the scant body of critical writing surrounding his books, they are classed as “post-surrealist horror” that demonstrate “the same half-sane magnifications that strike home in Kafka.” And yet to read his novels, short stories, and plays is to enter a world far from the sleek poeticisms of Breton’s Nadja (1928) or indeed the safety of a barricaded room in which Gregor Samsa hides his transformation in The Metamorphosis (1915). Topor’s writing, much like his illustrations, plunges the reader again and again into predicaments in which grotesque metamorphoses are encountered already in advanced states of development and resultant crisis. In this way, the narratives lead us in a sense to the ground where Breton and Kafka leave off. Read More
March 20, 2019 Arts & Culture The Myths We Wear By Summer Brennan Illustration by Eleonore Condo. Painting: Cornelis de Vos, Apollo Chasing Daphne, 1630, oil on canvas, 75.9″ × 81.4″. Shoes are humankind’s oldest invention to aid mobility. Thousands of years before a clever Mesopotamian first tilted a potter’s wheel up onto its side to make a chariot, or a nomad tamed the first wild horse on the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe, people began fashioning shoes from leather or plant fiber to make it easier and less painful to get from one place to another. For the earliest humans especially, our survival depended on movement, toward prey and away from predators, for we have long been both. It is not surprising, then, that many of our earliest stories are concerned with flight and pursuit. * From the creations of Vivier, to Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, and Alexander McQueen, so many modern high heel designs embody ideas of metamorphosis. The fashion gods transform women into something other than human. They become plantlike, animallike; elevated, but easier to catch and subdue. Flowers to be gathered and collected on their tall, thin stalks. Beasts to be caught and trophied. In some of the more elaborate incarnations, employing protruding feathers and exotic hides, the wearers appear to be in the process of turning into ravens, or reptiles. There are high heels that resemble paws and hooves. * The original fairy tales are far darker than the cleaned-up versions we have presented to our children since Disney came on the scene. The myths that are their thematic forebears were, of course, even stranger. Before the rejected little mermaid became sea-foam, her tender new feet pained for nothing, Ovid’s nymphs were being turned into fountains. Before Cinderella’s dog and horse were changed into footmen to escort her to the ball, Ovid’s huntress Diana was changing men into prey animals, a bachelor into a buck, as punishment for seeing her naked against her wishes. In Ovid, lovers become lions or flowers. The bereaved become birds. People of all kinds and character become rocks, trees, streams, islands, stars. A peacock’s tail feathers are the eyes of slain Argus. Juno changes Callisto into a bear for bearing her husband, Jupiter, a child; later, they are made into constellations, the she-bear and her hunter son. Read More
March 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Walter Benjamin in Ibiza By Frédéric Pajak When Hitler came to power, Walter Benjamin did not immediately realize what the dictatorship had in store. Like many intellectuals, he counted on an early collapse of the regime. To begin with, he seemed almost serene in the face of events. But events picked up speed, and, even though it was hard to obtain reliable news, by March 1933 it was apparent to him that “there can be no doubt that in very many instances people have been dragged from their beds in the night and beaten or murdered.” In 1928, during an exchange with André Gide, Benjamin compared Gide’s thought to a fort, “vast in its overall structure, replete with protective ramparts and protruding bastions, and above all strict in its forms and perfect in its deliberate dialectical construction.” Was this a self-portrait of Benjamin himself? Benjamin wrote that Gide had quoted Louis Antoine de Bougainville: “When we left the island, we called it Île du Salut” (Salvation Island). And Gide added that “it is only when we leave something that we name it.” Read More
March 18, 2019 Arts & Culture The Genius of Terry Southern By David L. Ulin On April 2, The Paris Review and its supporters will meet at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Spring Revel, an annual celebration of the magazine and the enduring power of literature. That evening, Elif Batuman will present the Terry Southern Prize for Humor to Benjamin Nugent for his story “Safe Spaces.” Terry Southern, the namesake of the award, was the novelist and screenwriter behind the success of, among other things, Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove. He acted as a crucial influence in the early years of The Paris Review; “The Accident”—an excerpt from Southern’s debut novel, Flash and Filigree—appeared in the first issue. This week, Grove Atlantic will reissue Flash and Filigree with a new introduction by David L. Ulin. This introduction appears below. Terry Southern. Terry Southern hit me like a drug. He wasn’t the first—before him, there was Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Joseph Heller—but he was certainly the weirdest, or maybe just the most intent on subverting the dominant narrative. He seemed to want to take the piss out of everything, writing novels that were fiercely and deliriously ironic, disdainful of material obsessions and the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. I first discovered him through the copy of Candy my father kept stashed in his bureau, as if Southern were a rumor or a ghost. But it was only after I made my way to college that I began to understand. One evening, in the row house I rented with six friends in West Philadelphia, I caught the 1969 film adaptation of his novel The Magic Christian (Southern had cowritten the screenplay) on after-hours TV. There was an image of a ten-pound note, so large it filled the screen, and then the voice of Peter Sellers, who played the billionaire Guy Grand, announcing in a clipped Oxbridge accent: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is commonly known as money. It comes in all sizes, colors, and denominations, like people. We’ll be using quite a bit of it in the next two hours. Luckily, I have enough for all of us.” Southern was a genius, can we just say that? He was a vivid mimic, a writer of outlandish set pieces; just think of the demonically twisted “Mrs. Joyboy” scene he wrote for the film The Loved One. He liked to start simply, in something close to believable reality. Then he would push the boundaries, until the whole world seemed to explode. Take his first novel, Flash and Filigree, published in 1958. Influenced by his great hero Henry Green, the book opens as a young man, Felix Treevly, visits the “world’s foremost dermatologist,” Dr. Frederick Eichner, at his clinic on Wilshire Boulevard. Treevly is pretentious, arrogant; “a small boil,” he sniffs, referring to his ailment, “actually a cystic mass—or wen if you like, extremely small, no larger than the common variety of facial pustule.” He is, in other words, an almost perfect Southern target, so full of himself he is aware of little else. “Yes, of course,” the doctor murmurs, then slams a padded paperweight into the top of the patient’s skull. The act appears to have erupted out of nowhere, as if the poles of the narrative have been reversed. Protagonist? Antagonist? What’s the difference? In Southern’s universe, how would we know? This is the point, a world without, in any real sense, heroes, in which the disrupters (Treevly, Guy Grand in The Magic Christian, Blue Movie’s Boris Adrian) and the disrupted are equally complicit. Read More
March 18, 2019 Arts & Culture Isaac Bashevis Singer from Beyond the Grave By Matt Levin VIDEO STILL OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, BY TETSUO KOGAWA, 1977. The Isaac Bashevis Singer of public consumption—the elderly, distinguished, Yiddish, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer—projected an air of oblique, quizzical humility, as if he were bemused by the grandiose esteem in which he was held. He endearingly told The Paris Review in his 1977 Art of Fiction Interview, the year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, that “a story is still a story where the reader listens and wants to know what happens,” and that he knew so few American writers “because here in America I find there is no place to meet them.” The younger brother of a celebrated Yiddish author, Israel Joshua Singer, he relished slotting himself beneath Israel’s long-dead shadow. According to that Paris Review interview, he listed himself publicly in the Manhattan phone directory, and “would invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee.” He enjoyed “feeding pigeons from a brown paper bag.” The interviewer, Harold Flender, writes: “The first impression Singer gives is that he is a fragile, weak man who would find it an effort to walk a block.” That public persona—inviting, avuncular, warm, and unpretentious—was played with such confidence that the private Singer was able to stand just beside it, unhidden but unnoticed. Despite his appearance of overwhelming physical frailty, Flender tells us, Singer actually “walks fifty to sixty blocks a day.” In nearly every promotional photo of Singer, he seems to have been caught slightly unprepared, standing in the middle of the street, hands clasped awkwardly, like a maladroit foreign uncle. In portraits, he appears caught in the midst of composing himself, midsigh, midgrimace, midsmirk, his face, when in motion, a garden of widening, branching lines: deep-riven forehead wrinkles when the eyebrows arch, cheeks bunched up in a smile, overhanging like mountain crags, casting thick shadows. Yet in these photos his eyes belie the rest—they are steady and very still. They are the eyes of a seer. The joke he is smiling at is also quite serious, his eyes say, that joke is the molten core of his being. Running beneath his genial exterior, feeding it, is a soaring religious notion, unflinchingly held, as if he had seen it with as little ceremony as a cloud or a car. It bursts into the open near the end of his Nobel Prize lecture, when he addresses Yiddish, his native tongue: “There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way … Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world.” Singer has reverted to prophecy. He was not an orthodox Jewish believer, but in the end he, like his rabbinical forefathers, did not believe in death. The universe and time were too vast, too wide, too kaleidoscopic, for finality. That is the extent of his prophecy. It is an extension of his humility. Read More
March 14, 2019 Arts & Culture The World Association of Ugly People By Rebecca Brill This year’s contestants at the Festival of the Ugly (Photo: Rebecca Brill) In order to become a member of the World Association of Ugly People, you need to be assessed. In the clubhouse of the Association, known by locals as Club dei Brutti, the president, a stocky man named Gianni with a lopsided goatee, produces a card featuring the official Club dei Brutti ugliness rating system: non definita (undefined), insufficiente (insufficient), mediocre, buona (good), ottima (great), straordinaria (extraordinary). Gianni examines my face and body quickly but thoroughly. Then, on a membership card on which he has written my name, he checks off the box marked “insufficiente.” At first, I’m confused by this designation and the ranking system as a whole. I can’t tell whether insufficiente means I am insufficiently attractive (and therefore ugly) or insufficiently ugly (and therefore not eligible to join the organization). As it turns out it’s the latter. Gianni signs my card anyway, thereby designating me the 31,310 member of Club dei Brutti. “Time makes us all ugly,” he explains. I have not really come to Piobbico, a small village between two mountains in central Italy, to join the organization. Rather, I’m here for Club dei Brutti’s annual Festival of the Ugly, where thousands of self-identified ugly people gather in the town square to celebrate ugliness and cast their votes for the club’s president. But it is hard to observe life in Piobbico, whose ties to the hundred-and-fifty-year-old organization are inextricable, without inadvertently becoming a participant. This is in part because Piobbico is small, in terms of both its geography and its population of just under two thousand. But the more time I spend here, the more I attribute this feeling of inherent involvement to something else about the village: a panoptic sense of being watched. The people in Piobbico look at each other: women hanging laundry call out to passersby from flung-open windows; men sit in front of bars in long rows rather than circles, ogling local women as they smoke; children shout “Ciao!” from their bicycles to people they appear not to know. (I realize that all of this sounds too picturesque to be true, but indeed, Piobbico feels like something straight out of an Elena Ferrante novel.) There is nowhere to hide here; no action goes unseen. To be in Piobbico is to be on display, to perform, to be known. I wonder how anyone stands it. Read More