April 2, 2015 On the Shelf Strandelion, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a 1960 German postage stamp. The politics of genre fiction: “the current preoccupations of the crime novel, the roman noir, the krimi lean to the left. It’s critical of the status quo, sometimes overtly, sometimes more subtly. It often gives a voice to characters who are not comfortably established in the world … The thriller, on the other hand, tends towards the conservative, probably because the threat implicit in the thriller is the world turned upside down.” Mark Strand’s final interview takes a fittingly existentialist turn: “I don’t know why I was born … here I am: a sentient being, talking about life. I had the luck to be born a human being who can speak. I might have been a dandelion or a goldfinch. I might have been a buffalo in the zoo. A fly! I don’t know why I’m here.” Philip Pullman has a transcendently simple (and hyperrealist) way of working through writer’s block: “If you’re stuck, if you’re really desperate—dialogue: ‘Hello.’ ‘Oh hello.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Not too bad, thanks. How are you?’ ‘Not too bad.’ Half a page already.” Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “was one of the only books that James Joyce, his eyesight fading, allowed himself to read while taking breaks from Finnegans Wake.” (Other admirers: Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, E. B. White, Sherwood Anderson, William Empson, and Rose Macaulay.) Before he decamped for England and a lifetime of Anglophilia, T. S. Eliot “spent his formative childhood summers in a wood-shingled, seven-bedroom seaside house on Gloucester’s Eastern Point, built for his family in 1896.” The T. S. Eliot Foundation plans to turn the house into a writers’ retreat.
April 1, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Juvenilia By Sadie Stein From the April 1923 issue of St. Nicholas. The introduction of The Paris Review for Young Readers seems like a good time to think about one of its predecessors: St. Nicholas Magazine, which was published from 1873 to 1940. Though it wasn’t the only children’s magazine of its time, during its heyday St. Nicholas was generally considered the best—a showcase for fine adult writers and a lab for young ones. Scribner’s, a magazine run by the famous publishing house, approached the successful children’s author Mary Mapes Dodge to be St. Nicholas’s editor. At its inception, Dodge wrote that her publication would not be just “a milk-and-water variety of the periodicals for adults. In fact, it needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other.” She felt that because children spent their days at school, “their heads are strained and taxed with the day’s lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine.” Read More
April 1, 2015 Bulletin Introducing The Paris Review for Young Readers By The Paris Review This piece was published as part of a series of April Fool’s posts in 2015, intended purely as a parody. It is not intended to communicate any true or factual information, and is for entertainment purposes only. “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E. B. White told this magazine in 1969. “Children are … the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.” We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’re proud to announce The Paris Review for Young Readers, the first magazine that writes up to children. (No offense to Cricket or Highlights.) Imagine a space for children’s literature that doesn’t condescend, cosset, or coarsen; that’s free of easy jokes and derivative fantasy; that invites open discussion and abundant imagination. A space, in other words, that offers the same caliber of fiction, poetry, art, and interviews you expect from The Paris Review, for readers age eight to twelve. Today marks the release of TPRFYR’s first issue, and we think the table of contents below speaks for itself. Among its poetry and fiction, you’ll find old classics and new favorites—plus some puzzles, quizzes, and advice columns inspired by literature. There’s a portfolio of drawings from Richard Scarry’s lost years, and, at the center of it all, an interview with Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “A child is an almost platonic reader,” Carle says. “His imagination remains unbounded.” Read More
March 31, 2015 Look Pictures with Problems By Dan Piepenbring Peter Saul, Personal Disease, 1966, acrylic and pen on canvas, 49″ x 65″. “I think I was way oversensitive as a kid, very much easily frightened,” Peter Saul said in an oral history for the Archives of American Art in 2009: I was frightened of movies, very scared. My mother was quite a fan of film noir and mystery stories by Ellery Queen and things of that type. And she took me to these movies, which by today’s standards would be not only harmless, it would be impossible to imagine any child or human being being scared of. Dressed to Kill [1941] was the first one I remember … The reason I was scared was because it took place in an old Victorian building like my parents rented at that time. And there was a dumbwaiter that went from the basement, where there had been some servant kitchen, up to the dining room. And in the movie, a hand comes out of the dumbwaiter with a gun and shoots somebody at the dining table. So anyway, we come into the dining room in the evening. The maid is going to serve the stuff and everything is fine. I realize that my position is with my back to the dumbwaiter. If it were to happen, of course, you know, imagination takes over, you know. I thought, oh, my God; I could be killed this evening. You can see the aftereffects of this fear in his work, and it’s contagious. To look at a Peter Saul painting is to think, I could be killed this evening—but, you know, I’m kind of looking forward to it. “From Pop to Punk,” a show at Venus over Manhattan featuring his work from the sixties and seventies, brims with candy-colored violence and lush, vibrant grotesqueries. Hundreds of hands (and eyes and tongues) with guns emerge from the dumbwaiters of the mind. Things writhe, stab, choke, and unravel, often simultaneously. Saul, who’s eighty now, describes these as “pictures with problems.” “Since I’ve become old, I’ve become much more interesting to most people,” he said in his oral history. “I haven’t given up on painting. I think it has to have a good story, and I think that the story was banished from painting too quickly at the end of the nineteenth century.” And Saul is definitely a storyteller—the most interesting one at the campfire, an antic, willfully offensive bard. The narratives in his paintings hover just on the right side of inscrutability, and his fondness for labels (“combined rich and poor asshole” is a personal favorite) helps to demystify, though not, of course, to solve: these are pictures with problems, not solutions. “From Pop to Punk” shows through April 18. Read More
March 31, 2015 On Translation Novels Are Made of Words By Damion Searls More on automated sentiment-analysis, and Moby-Dick. Leroy Neiman, Moby Dick Assaulting the Pequod. Paul Valéry tells the story: The painter Edgar Degas was backhanded-bragging to his friend Stéphane Mallarmé about the poems that he, Degas, had been trying to write. He knew they weren’t great, he said, “But I’ve got lots of ideas—too many ideas.” “But my dear Degas,” the poet replied, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made of words.” Paintings, for that matter, are not made of pretty ballerinas or landscapes: they’re made of paint. Which brings us to Syuzhet, Matthew Jockers’s new program that analyzes the words of a novel for their emotional value and graphs the sentimental shape of the book. Dan Piepenbring has explained it all here and here on the Daily, with links to the original postings and the various outcries, some of them in the comments, that have blown up around Jockers. Many people apparently find Jockers’s research the latest assault of technocratic digitocracy on the citadel of deep humanistic feelings, but that’s not how I see it. What the graphs reveal about potboiler narrative structure versus high-literary arcs, for instance—Dan Brown’s higher average positivity than James Joyce’s, and his more regular cycle of highs and lows to force the reader through the book—is insightful, useful, and great. Read More
March 31, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent On Being Blue By Sadie Stein Vicky Leandros performing “L’amour est bleu.” Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling. ―William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Sixty years ago, the camp spectacle we know as the Eurovision Song Contest was born. And in 1967, said Eurovision contest was the site of one of the most shocking miscarriages of justice in international pop-music history. The competition is famously political—some would say corrupt—and the winning songs have often raised a cynical eyebrow. So maybe no one was surprised when Luxembourg’s ’67 entry—“L’amour est bleu,” performed by the Greek singer Vicky Leandros—didn’t win. No one could have taken out the UK juggernaut “Puppet on a String.” But Luxembourg came in fourth! Behind the Irish entry, “If I Could Choose,” and France’s “Il doit faire beau là-bas”! It was arguably the biggest outrage since 1958, when “Volare” lost out to the insipid “Dors, mon amour.” Read More