December 26, 2018 Best of 2018 Thomas Bernhard, Karl Kraus, and Other Vienna-Hating Viennese By Matt Levin We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was unaccommodating and gruff in a manner that seemed, at the time, a piece of old-world charm. Across the street, washed hospital white, the Secession Building, house of Gustav Klimt’s luminous Beethoven Frieze, was wrapped in a mesh tarp and looked like the depression of a pulled tooth covered in gauze. Read more >>
December 26, 2018 Best of 2018 A Darker Canvas: Tattoos and the Black Body By Bryan Washington We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! One time in New Orleans, during an annual music festival organized by Essence magazine, a lady flagged me down from her car. I was walking through the French Quarter. The air was sufficiently drenched. In a neighborhood that has been steadily losing black folks, the block was suddenly full of us—glowing in bright clothes, and laughing entirely too loud. But this woman was pretty pissed. When I reached her window, she gave me another nod. She squinted at my tattoos, and asked where the nearest parlor was. “But one for us,” she said. “I’ve already been to four today.” I pointed her to a guy I knew, up the road and around the corner. When she asked if he was black, I winced, because he was not. “He’s good though,” I said. “I mean it. He’s done me twice.” The lady looked deeply skeptical. But then she said, “Okay.” “Listen,” she continued. “I don’t know about that. But I’m going to trust you.” Read more >>
December 26, 2018 Best of 2018 The Most Unread Book Ever Acclaimed By Meghan O’Gieblyn We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. Critics complain that they’re exasperating or impossible or not worth the time. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. They feel less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). The online reader reviews I found vary between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. One Amazon reviewer claims he gave a copy of the twelve-hundred-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he writes. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaims it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.” Read more >>
December 25, 2018 Best of 2018 Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less By Donald Hall We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. His Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 1991 issue. Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, an excerpt from which appears below. Donald Hall, 1977. When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster—but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn’t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and six huge volumes of Henry Adams’s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize I haven’t finished reading a book in a year. Read more >>
December 25, 2018 Best of 2018 Eau de Nil, the Light-Green Color of Egypt-Obsessed Europe By Katy Kelleher We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds, 1963, still from a color film, 119 minutes. In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home decor of the upper classes. For Flaubert, like for many of his fellow Frenchmen, the Orient, as it was often called, was a source of endless fascination, but visiting wouldn’t be easy on his wallet or his waistline. It was an arduous journey: from mail coach to riverboat to railway then finally to a room aboard an ungainly and fragile boat named Le Nil, which was equipped with a sail, a tall funnel, and a pair of paddle wheels. “The ugly little ship staggered the length of the Mediterranean like a drunkard,” writes Geoffery Wall, author of Flaubert: A Life. After eleven days on board Le Nil, Flaubert arrived in Alexandria, where he found himself overwhelmed by the noise of the animals, the scents of the food, and, above all, the colors. “I gobbled up a bellyful of color, like a donkey filling himself with oats,” he writes. In another letter, dated 1850, he compares the country to being alive in “the middle of one of Beethoven’s symphonies … For the first few days, may the devil take me, it’s an astounding hubbub of color, and your poor old imagination, as if it were at a fireworks display, is perpetually dazzled.” Read more >>
December 25, 2018 Best of 2018 To Be At Home Everywhere By Drew Bratcher We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! On Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home. What Novalis says about philosophy—that in reality, it is a homesickness—is true also of country music, though philosophers and country singers have different ideas about what home is. In philosophy, home is a state of perfect understanding. Philosophers, Novalis writes, long to “be at home everywhere.” Country singers, on the other hand, long not so much for the outside world—or, for that matter, the world to come—but rather for the world as they once knew it, typically in childhood. The philosopher hopes for a home she’s never seen while the country singer mourns for the home she may never see again. Of all the homesick country albums by all the homesick country singers, few explore homesickness more searchingly than Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home. In eleven bittersweet songs, lasting a little over thirty-three minutes total, Dolly revisits the fraught days after she first moved to Nashville, when the future was a stranger, the past a dear friend, and the present a disorienting swirl of memories and dreams. Read more >>