January 14, 2015 On the Shelf The Bleared White Visage of a Sunless Winter Day, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Karl Hagemeister, Havelufer mit Kahn im Schneetreiben, 1895. Which Thomas Hardy novel is the bleakest? A data-driven study looks at such criteria as “bleak events” (unrequited love, grinding poverty, animal genitalia-related injury), “bleakest words” (poor, alone, dead), and “bleakest quotes” (“The bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child”). Let’s keep things bleak and remind ourselves that the Internet isn’t killing the culture—it’s always been next to impossible to make a living in the arts. “‘You can make a killing in the theatre, but not a living,’ the playwright Robert Anderson is reported to have said in the mid-1950s—at the height, in other words, of government intervention and middlebrow respect for art.” Bleaker still: “ ‘Brand’ may be an ugly word when applied to an author, literary agent Jonny Geller acknowledged, but it is only a shorthand for a way in which publishers are attempting to hold on to the reading public at a time when sales of print books are flat and electronic gadgets vie for readers’ attention.” Because we’ve got a theme going, let’s investigate the history of influenza. “Some medical historians say that the virus goes back even further than the sixteenth century and into antiquity. They point to a suspiciously flu-like illness mentioned in writings dating as far back as 412 B.C. Reports of ‘a certain evil and unheard of cough’ spreading through Europe in December 1173 cause some to believe flu pandemics have been around since the Middle Ages.” And just to send it on home, it’s time to learn about anthropodermic bibliopegy, the art of making books from skin. For instance, “Burke and Hare were two serial killers in the early nineteenth century. They killed seventeen people. Essentially they were posing as body snatchers, but actually they were just killing everybody and selling the bodies to anatomists for dissection. So they’re caught, and Hare turns King’s evidence and Burke goes down for the crime. As added punishment, he is publicly dissected … They also took his skin and created all of these objects from it. One of the objects is a pocketbook.”
January 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Bring Up the Bodies By Sadie Stein Photo: Golden Globes Last night—or early this morning, I guess, around four A.M.—I woke up from a dream. I’d been reading a Hilary Mantel novel and watching red-carpet recaps before bed, and the two apparently melded in my brain in the most literal way imaginable. In my dreams, Thomas Cromwell attended the Golden Globes. Or Mantel chronicled them. I’m not sure which—but this is how it went down. It is the awards season. Lupita in silks and nosegays, Felicity stately in Dior. Photographers line the strip of crimson worsted like so many starlings on a line: here a Michael Kors, here a Givenchy. Lacquered hosts prattle now of jewels, now with furrowed brow of news from abroad. “Alchemy,” says George Clooney, boyish and urbane. He is at his ease, of a mind to talk of brass rings and love. Kevin Spacey is at the podium, eyes narrowed in a mockery of evil, bent on revenge. Jeremy Renner stands at his ease and leers, “You’ve got the globes, too.” Virgins win, and Birdmen. Cromwell stands with the others and prices the finery, an old habit not easily lost. “There was a time,” he says, “when the carpets were not ruled by the stylists. There was Marlee Matlin then, and Bonham-Carter. We knew risk then, and yes, folly, too. I saw once a woman dressed in the plumage of a swan.” And around him, etched in jewels, he sees the motto: “Je suis Charlie,” they say. “I stand with France.”
January 13, 2015 On Language You Get What You Deserve By Damion Searls Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me” and the history of the word deserve. Angelica Kauffmann, Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus, 1774. The best I-just-got-dumped pop song ever, beating out such classics as “Wild World,” “Don’t You Want Me,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “You Oughta Know,” and “Irreplaceable,” is six hundred years old: Sir Tom’s “Runaway,” known to poets and scholars as “They Flee From Me” by Thomas Wyatt. You can read the original lyrics here (old spelling, modern spelling), but the structure and arc couldn’t be simpler: three verses, no chorus. Wait, what? They used to come running after me. Especially this one girl. Man, she was so hot. It’s true. Now she won’t even talk to me. I must have been too nice. At least she’ll get her comeuppance: “But since that I so kindly am served / I would fain know what she hath deserved.” To paraphrase: since she was so nice to me (sarcastic!)—and/or the now-obsolete meaning: since she treated me so in keeping with her kind, just the way you’d expect her to act (that bitch!)—I’d like to know what she has coming. The strange word to modern ears is the last one. Doesn’t the singer already know what she deserves, just not what she’s going to get? Read More
January 13, 2015 Bulletin Dear Critics: You Heard It Here First By Lorin Stein Illustration: Samantha Hahn Although Rachel Cusk’s Outline has not been available in hardcover until today, it’s already enjoyed a wild succès d’estime with some of our favorite critics. Last Wednesday, in the New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “transfixing … You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit.” In The New Yorker, Elaine Blair used Outline as the occasion for a trenchant essay on fiction and autobiography: The novel is mesmerizing; it marks a sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk’s previous work … Cusk’s insight in Outline is that, instead of trying to show two sides of a marriage, she might do the opposite: focus on the inevitable, treacherous one-sidedness of any single account [which] surely has something to do with why marriages themselves come apart. In the Guardian, Hilary Mantel described Outline as “fascinating, both on the surface and in its depths.” Bookforum’s Hannah Tennant-Moore called it “lovely … smart, ascetic”; and in the most recent New York Times Book Review Heidi Julavits raved: “Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced [Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive.” None of this will come as news to readers of The Paris Review—because, starting with our Winter 2013 issue, we published Outline in its entirety, with exclusive illustrations by Samantha Hahn. Here’s a slide show to celebrate the U.S. hardcover publication, and to remind our colleagues in the reviewing business where they can find the most transfixing, mesmerizing, fascinating, lovely fiction of 2016. Read More
January 13, 2015 On the Shelf Rimbaud Inspires Bank Robbery, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “You should get out there and rob a bank,” Rimbaud apparently urges his readers. Illustration by Paterne Berrichon, ca. 1890s. Inspired by Rimbaud—“who essentially believed a poet had to descend into the depths of all that was bad and report back”—an MIT visual arts and film professor held up a bank in Chinatown. “I stood outside the bank talking into the camera for quite a while … going over the different reasons to do it and not to do it.” In the mid-nineteenth century, on the other hand, women were scarcely allowed to visit the post office, which was “frequently made rendezvous for interdirected communication and illicit pleasures.” But today, in the age of big data, everyone is welcome in museums—especially if you bring your smartphone. “From the minute you enter the building—before, if you bought tickets online—you are also contributing personal information to the museum’s newly minted ‘engagement’ department. Don’t be surprised if, while you linger in front of a Caravaggio, a coupon for a cappuccino in the museum café pops up on your phone … When data mining turns a museum into a frequent-flier program, the result is commerce, not culture.” In 1966, a British magazine illustrator went on the set of 2001 and drew what he saw. “Kubrick [wanted] illustrated production stills of what happened on his set, rather than having a photographer take noisy and distracting photographs. The illustrations … would then be sent out in press kits to publications and other media outlets that could promote the film.” None of his images were published at the time, but now you can see them here. Don’t just judge a book by its cover—judge it by two. Compare U.S. and UK editions of last year’s books.
January 12, 2015 Look A Kind of Sleaze By Dan Piepenbring The New York Observer has an excellent new interview with Robert Crumb, whose response to the Charlie Hebdo attack appeared in Libération this weekend. Crumb has lived in France for a quarter of a century—in typical fashion, he was moved to respond not by any sort of ethical imperative but because he worried what people would say about him if he stayed quiet: “Where’s Crumb? Why doesn’t he come forward? What the hell’s the matter with him?” And, as he makes clear in the interview, his aim was not to be controversial, but personal: Libération called me and said, “Crumb, can you do a cartoon for us? About what you think about this, you know, you are a major cartoonist, and you live in France.” So I thought about it. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I’m doing the dishes, or whatever, I was thinking, “What should I do for that cartoon … ” I had a lot of ideas. Other people come up with these, you know, clever cartoons that comment on it, like … This one guy did a cartoon showing a bloody dead body laying there, and a radical Muslim standing over him with a Kalashnikov, saying, “He drew first!” Stuff like that. That’s good, that’s clever, you know, I like that. But, me? I gotta like, you know, when I do something, it has to be more personal. I said, first: “I don’t have the courage to make an insulting cartoon of Muhammed.” Then I thought, “OK, I’m the Cowardly Cartoonist … As a Cowardly Cartoonist, I can’t make some glib comment like that, you know? I have to, like, make fun of myself. So instead of drawing the face of Muhammed [laughs], I drew the ass of Muhammed. [Laughs.] But then I had myself saying, in small lettering, “Actually, this is the ass of my friend of Mohamid Bakshi, who’s a film director in Los Angeles, California.” So if they come at me, I’m gonna say, “No, look, it’s not Muhammed the Prophet, it’s this guy, Mohamid Bakshi.” So, you know. […] So, then Aline [Crumb’s wife] had this idea for another cartoon, which we also sent to Libération, a collaboration, that’s showing her looking at the drawing saying, “Oh, my God, they’re going to come after us! This is terrible … I want to live to see my grandchildren!” And then she has me saying, “Well, it’s not that bad. And, besides, they’ve killed enough cartoonists, maybe they’ve gotten it out of their system.” You can read the whole interview here. (Mohamid Bakshi, by the way, is a pointed reference to Ralph Bakshi, a director and animator with whom Crumb has feuded for some forty years over the rights to Crumb’s iconic Fritz the Cat character.) Crumb also gave the first interview in our Art of Comics series in 2010, in which he remarks on the reputation of cartoonists and comic-book artists, who in the not-so-distant past were not regarded as artists at all: Read More