November 28, 2016 First Person Plimpton, Papa, and Cuba By James Scott Linville George Plimpton (center, top) and Ernest Hemingway (center) at a bullfight. Castro’s death has renewed an open, vibrant, and sometimes heated debate about his regime and its treatment of Cuban citizens. Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the Cold War, much less was known in the U.S.—these were not things the American media dwelled upon. An incident while working at The Paris Review with George Plimpton in the early nineties opened my eyes, especially to Che Guevara’s supervision of the detention of political prisoners at La Cabana prison in Havana. One day, at the office on East Seventy-Second Street, perusing the catalog of Grove Press’s forthcoming books, I spotted a title about which I’d heard nothing—The Motorcycle Diaries, by Che Guevara, which had been published in Cuba in the sixties but had never appeared in English. It seemed a long shot, but from the description of it as a travelogue with an unusual provenance, I thought a piece from it might be something for the Review. Read More
November 22, 2016 First Person His Frown By Adam Valen Levinson The Yale Institute of Charts. The other day, an Uber driver asked me to come join his church. I told him I was relatively busy being a nonpracticing Jew but that I’d think about it. He said, You don’t need to do anything. You just need faith. And my first thought was, Well, that sounds pretty swell. And then I thought, Hold on, WTF? Read More
November 1, 2016 First Person Killing Dirk’s By Bryan Washington Photo: Houston Streetwise Since I moved to Louisiana, every few months I’ve met someone who’s spent time in Montrose. It’s this trendy suburb in Houston, the kind the South’s accused of lacking, and the folks who bring it up are usually bemoaning the neighborhood’s changes. They’re always white. Always a stone’s throw away from rich. Rocking flannel and Converse, or a leather jacket and boots, or a floral-print skirt just this side of tattered. One guy, a tattooed teacher, told me he missed the block’s grit: Montrose used to be this place where you never knew who’d beat the shit out of you. Now the notion’s less plausible, which really is a shame, or at least that’s what this guy said. That’s usually how those conversations go. But every now and again somebody brings up Dirk’s. It was this coffee shop on the corner, one that’s been closed for a minute. But it felt like the neighborhood’s nexus, the thesis of the place, and its phantom still hangs between West Main Street and Branard. Read More
October 27, 2016 First Person Infiltrating Wrigley By John Paul Rollert Wrigley Field is a little over a mile north of where I live, close enough that on summer nights when the “Friendly Confines” hosts a concert (August saw both Billy Joel and Pearl Jam), familiar ballads fill the courtyard of my prewar walk-up, prompting tenants to abruptly open, or close, their windows. Technically I don’t live in the same neighborhood as the Cubs—that would be Wrigleyville, the residential enclave surrounding the 102-year-old park—but for more years than most Chicagoans care to think, a steadfast devotion to the team has had a way of uniting the various neighborhoods on the North Side in a shared community of suffering. In the seventies, when the team consistently flirted with the worst record in baseball, the Cubs earned the nickname the “Loveable Losers.” The qualifier is a tribute to the loyalty of the fans, but it hardly redeems the category. Say what you will about history, tradition, and heroic team players—and the Cubs have all three in abundance—this is still sports, and sports is about winning. The Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908. They have not even gone to the World Series since 1945. When Saturday night began, these records remained, though it looked as if, at long last, at least one of them might finally be broken. Read More
October 26, 2016 First Person My Strange Friend Marcel Proust By Philippe Soupault Marcel Proust in Cabourg, 1896. Next month, City Lights will publish Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, a series of reminiscences and miniportraits of modernist writers and artists—Blaise Cendrars, James Joyce, Pierre Reverdy, and others—by Philippe Soupault, a Dadaist who, with André Breton, wrote Les Champs magnétique in 1919, kicking off the Surrealist movement. Soupault’s sketches in Lost Profiles were originally published in French in 1963; this translation, by Alan Bernheimer, marks their first appearance in English. The personal impressions Soupault provides of these “great” men, who comprise his contemporaries and his heroes, elucidate their individuality, the nature of their friendship, and essential qualities that underpin their artistic reputations. He writes, for instance, that critics’ use of the terms primitive and Sunday painter in describing Henri Rousseau perpetuated a misunderstanding of the man, despite his artistic success. The cause of the misunderstanding is simply that “no one has yet tried to depict the true personality of Henri Rousseau.” In his afterword, Ron Padgett recalls meeting Soupault in the seventies, when he performs the same service for his own literary hero, observing that Soupault’s “personal manner was a reflection of the lightness of touch of his best poems, a delicacy that is so artful that it never calls attention to itself.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
October 24, 2016 First Person Collector’s Item By Chantal McStay What was the Princess Diana Beanie Baby? In the midnineties, my older sisters and I collected Ty Beanie Babies, as most of our peer group did. When I think of Beanie Babies, I think of the piles. Big piles saturated with every color and texture of fuzz, dotted with shiny black eyes and noses. They had a nice weight to them, too, a little heavier than stuffed animals. The pile became a classic image in the Beanie Baby mythos: the collector buried in Beanies. My sisters kept their collections (numbering several dozen) safely stowed in the pockets of over-the-door shoe organizers with plastic tag protectors and careful inventory lists, while I played with mine, ripping their tags off with abandon and allowing them, despite their Ty-brand prestige, to mingle with my other stuffed animals and dolls. Not that I had any objection to them as a commodity: I enjoyed collecting them, too, lining up at Pink’s or Hallmark—the two local authorized Beanie dealers in my New Jersey town—in anticipation of new releases. I read the trade rag, Mary Beth’s Beanie World. I called my local McDonald’s answering machine to hear which Teeny Beanies they were offering with Happy Meals. I searched in vain for rare, highly sought-after defective Beanies: a Spot with no spot, an albino elephant. Today the Internet, with its relentless nostalgia mill, won’t let us forget how worthless our Beanie Babies have become. “Remember When Everyone Was Going to Re-sell Their Beanie Babies and Become Millionaires?” a piece on E! asked. I can’t help but feel vindicated by articles like these. My sisters were convinced that their Ty collections would be worth a lot of money someday; they had to be protected. But: a toy you don’t play with? It sounded dumb. It sounded dumb because it was dumb, and I somehow got that right—this at a time when I was wrong about many, many things. This at a time when I thought that Titanic was the most culturally important, most pornographic, longest movie ever made. (I had not actually seen Titanic, but I knew from my own careful taping that you could fit six hours of video on a VHS tape, and Titanic took up two tapes, so it had to be, like, twelve hours long.) Still, I can’t escape some weird feeling about Beanie Babies: about the bizarre hysteria they generated and the prescience with which they foresaw the Internet as a vast archive for our personal ephemera and its emotional baggage. Read More