June 8, 2021 Department of Tomfoolery Anatomy of a Hoax By Dan Piepenbring Photo courtesy of Penguin Young Readers. Eric Carle, the author and illustrator of more than seventy books that captivated, amused, and educated generations of children, died last month at ninety-one. Carle’s work, and his seemingly effortless connection to young readers, was motivated by the privations of his own childhood. Raised in Nazi Germany, he was forced to dig trenches on the Siegfried line; his father, whom he adored, had become a prisoner of war in Russia. Carle’s later proclivity for vivid, exuberant colors was a reaction against the “grays, browns and dirty greens” of buildings camouflaged to protect against bombing. After the war, in America, he worked as a commercial artist, developing meticulous collages of tissue paper and acrylics that soon launched his career as an illustrator and children’s writer. His most famous book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, came in 1969, and has sold more than 55 million copies worldwide. “I think it is a book of hope,” he said on its fiftieth anniversary, in 2019. “Children need hope. You—little insignificant caterpillar—can grow up into a beautiful butterfly and fly into the world with your talent.” If you looked at Twitter after Carle’s death, you may not have seen that quotation. It was lost in the din surrounding another remark: My publisher and I fought bitterly over the stomachache scene in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The caterpillar, you’ll recall, feasts on cake, ice cream, salami, pie, cheese, sausage, and so on. After this banquet I intended for him to proceed immediately to his metamorphosis, but my publisher insisted that he suffer an episode of nausea first—that some punishment follow his supposed overeating. This disgusted me. It ran entirely contrary to the message of the book. The caterpillar is, after all, very hungry, as sometimes we all are. He has recognized an immense appetite within him and has indulged it, and the experience transforms him, betters him. Including the punitive stomachache ruined the effect. It compromised the book. This story was drawn from Carle’s interview with The Paris Review for Young Readers, and tens of thousands of people shared it in praise and remembrance. “What a good man,” one wrote. Another posted, “Eric Carle said fuck the system eat cake and be unapologetically hungry.” A third was inspired to go big for lunch: “a chicken Parm and a whole ass order of garlic knots.” Nigella Lawson retweeted the story, Smithsonian Magazine included it in their obituary, and the parenting site Motherly noted that it had “a profound impact … Eric Carle recognized the harm in implying shame should be something a living creature feels simply for eating food they need to eat in order to grow.” On KQED, during a live broadcast, the radio host asked Carle’s son, Rolf, for more details about the stomachache quarrel. “That’s one of the stories I haven’t heard,” Rolf said, “and when you get an answer, please get it to me.” Read More
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
April 18, 2018 At Work The Tragedy of Going Back: An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri By Dan Piepenbring In 2012, having published four books and won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome. There, she experienced what she described as “a radical transition, a state of complete bewilderment.” A set of preconceptions had hardened around her writing, and in Italy, Lahiri hoped to jettison these in pursuit of a new vulnerability. She looked to the Italian language to reinvent herself on the page, restoring the joy and freedom in her work. One consequence of this immersion was In Other Words, Lahiri’s memoir about language, and her first book written in Italian. (An English translation by Ann Goldstein appeared in 2015.) Just as important, in their way, were her first efforts at translation—a pair of novels, Ties and Trick, by her friend Domenico Starnone, the author of more than a dozen books and a winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. Ties, published last year, tells the story of a marriage in extremis and dissects a lifetime of accrued routine, deception, and petty resentment. When it came to light that Starnone is married to the writer who goes by Elena Ferrante, critics returned to Ties, suddenly eager to read it as a counterpart to Ferrante’s own Days of Abandonment. Trick, Lahiri’s second Starnone translation, out in March, is another vivisection of family life, a novel as lean and unflinching as its predecessor. An elderly illustrator, Daniele, visits his childhood apartment, now his daughter’s home, to babysit his four-year-old grandson. The boy’s frenetic energy fills Daniele with foreboding, forcing him to reckon with his past and his senescence—to accept that his creative powers are waning and his body is failing him. In a pair of phone conversations—one last year, after Ties came out, and one more recently, following the publication of Trick—I talked to Lahiri about the raw power behind Starnone’s work; about her approach to translation and her love of the Italian language; and about balconies, which are scary. Read More
December 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Stamp This Book By Dan Piepenbring The rubber stamp is the official weapon of officialdom. Anyone who’s used one knows why: it feels great to smash a carved piece of wood and rubber onto a piece of paper, leaving an imperious mark where once there was empty space. Properly applied, a stamp is almost onomatopoeic, and its satisfying thump is the bureaucrat’s easiest pleasure. It’s a tactile expression of power: with a few fluid motions, you make a neat, loud sound, and maybe, depending on what the stamp says, you’ve just ruined the life of a total stranger. Vincent Sardon, a French artist with a small shop in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, sees the rubber stamp as a kind of talisman of the bureaucratic West. A stamp, he argues, is never an impartial object: It packs a symbolic wallop because of the millions of judges, cops, customs officials—agents of public authority—who use them to validate passports, to turn people away at the border, to pass judgment, to pass laws, to sentence, to record proceedings, to excommunicate—all sorts of evil documents that have the power of putting people in impossible situations. His practice is to reclaim the rubber stamp, and the act of stamping, as something playful, banal, even impolitic. In his shop, he designs and sells stamps in a range of sizes and subjects, many of them vulgar, all of them practically useless. There are insults in many languages: “Eat shit and die,” “Go piss glass,” “T’étais moins con quand tu buvais” (“You were less insufferable when you were still drinking”); remonstrations in commanding block capitals: “SORRY, NOT INTERESTED,” “SHUT THE FUCK UP”; and a parade of naked cowboys, porn starlets, and disfigured homunculi, any of which would make a great gift for someone you hate. Read More
July 14, 2017 On the Shelf I’m Telling You for the Last Time, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A postcard by Alfred Mainzer. First, an announcement: this is my 874th On the Shelf column, and my last. I’m leaving my post at The Paris Review to seek my fortune as a writer, after which, impoverished and bruised, I’ll come crawling back, begging for your forgiveness. I’ll give a more proper farewell in a post on Monday. For now I’d like to say: it’s been a pleasure and a privilege to start my day this way for the past three and a half years. The Internet, as we know, is full of garbage, but it’s also full of profound, inventive, incisive writing (it is very large, this Internet), and I’ve enjoyed using this space to share some of my favorites with you. We’ve had some fun, haven’t we? And some coffee. I’m sorry for all the occasions this roundup kind of sucked: when I was hungover, say, or when I overslept, or when I looked out the window and saw a cop standing at my car writing a parking ticket. But I’ve just checked, and, for the moment, there are no cops at my car. So let’s have one last go at it: Read More
July 13, 2017 From the Archive Aux Armes, Citoyens By Dan Piepenbring Robert Delauney, Tour Eiffel, 1911. The magazine’s called The Paris Review, so you’d think our archive would be lousy with poems about Bastille Day. Like, you couldn’t pluck a back issue from the shelves and point to a random page without coming across some rousing commemoration of quartorze juillet and the indomitable French spirit. Well, you’d be wrong. There are zero poems about Bastille Day in our archive. Not even a stray mention. We’ve failed in our duties as Francophiles. Read More