November 12, 2014 Books Everyday Blasphemies By Paul Murray Dubliners at one hundred. An illustration by Stephen Crowe for de Selby Press’s new edition of Dubliners. It was a priest who first convinced me to read Dubliners. On the face of it, this might seem strange. Joyce had a lifelong hatred of clergymen, and claimed the sight of one made him physically ill; in “The Sisters,” the opening story of Dubliners, he chose a senescent priest as the first, and arguably most disturbing, of the many images of decay and paralysis that pervade the book. But in the Dublin of my teens, the priests were running the show; it was even possible for priests to be celebrities, and it was the most famous of these who took my class on retreat at the end of Transition Year, in June 1991. Joyce writes about a religious retreat in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which an unnamed preacher terrifies the boys with a lengthy description of the torments of hell. Ours wasn’t like that. There were beanbags and unlimited biscuits; the celebrity cleric, who had become famous in the sixties as the Singing Priest and latterly hosted a hugely popular radio show, spoke to us like we were his friends. Even though the retreat consisted for the most part of the usual list of prohibitions—don’t do drugs, don’t have sex—his gravelly voice and inner-city accent gave him a convincing authenticity. Then, for reasons I still can’t quite understand—modernist literature was not at that point high on our list of temptations—he started talking about James Joyce. According to the Singing Priest, Joyce was one of the greatest hoaxes ever to be perpetrated on the Irish people. Far from being a genius, he was a charlatan, a phony, a false prophet. Furthermore, the priest continued, nobody in the world had actually read his famous novel Ulysses, and anyone who claimed otherwise was a liar. Well, this came as a surprise. My father was a professor of Irish literature at Joyce’s alma mater, University College Dublin; in his study at home he had multiple copies of Joyce’s books, including Ulysses, as well as innumerable books about Joyce’s books. Had he been pulling the wool over our eyes for all these years? Read More
November 12, 2014 On the Shelf Getting at the Gothic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Terror, published 1808. In France, 40 percent of TV programming comes from America, which means dubbing is a major industry, and voice-over actors have enough work to collect a following of their own: meet the French Jennifer Lawrence and the French Daniel Radcliffe, for instance. The Brothers Grimm published seven editions of their famous tales—the last edition is best known today. But the first edition sounds a lot more fun: “Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince, the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child, and a hungry mother in another story is so ‘unhinged and desperate’ that she tells her daughters: ‘I’ve got to kill you so I can have something to eat.’ ” In the nineties, Bob Dylan pursued a gutsy alternative career: “After binge-watching Jerry Lewis movies on his tour bus, Dylan came to the conclusion that slapstick comedy was where he wanted to put his artistic stamp … ‘We finally wrote … a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff.’ ” HBO bought the show, but Dylan’s interest waned soon after. The Gothic is “having a moment” now—and a new exhibition at the British Library explores 250 years of the Gothic tradition. But what does it mean to be Gothic, anyway? “The term suffers from its implicit pluralism: Are we talking about novels, horror films, flying buttresses, Alice Cooper, black-painted fingernails or a specific period in North-European history? On the one hand, it seems fair to say that John Ruskin’s famous comments on the architecture—that most of us know Gothic when we see it, without being able to identify exactly what makes it so—still have something to say about the thing as a whole. On the other, the Gothic really does just mean the spooky and the titillating.” “I’m not a cynic. I prefer irony, which depends on the ability to hold contradictory ideas, which probably springs from ambivalence. People confuse and conflate irony with insincerity and dishonesty; they believe an ironist isn’t serious. But saying the opposite of what is meant allows for at least two meanings to fly. Irony couples and uncouples statements, while revealing the hidden agendas of language and its conventions.”
November 11, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Veterans Day By Sadie Stein Photo: Davidd, via Flickr Little green army men—they don’t have a more specific name—are now in the National Toy Hall of Fame, which exists, in Rochester, and held its 2014 induction ceremonies last week. For those of you who have never played Marble War or seen any part of the Toy Story franchise, I give you Wikipedia: Army men are sold in plastic bags or buckets, and often include different colors such as green, tan, or gray, to represent opposing sides. They are equipped with a variety of weapons, typically from World War II to the current era. These include rifles, machine guns, submachine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, grenades, flame throwers, and bazookas. They may also have radio men, minesweepers, and men armed with bayonets. The traditional helmets are the older M1 “pot” style that were given to US soldiers during the middle to late 20th Century. Army men are sometimes packaged with additional accessories including tanks (often based on the M48 Patton tank), jeeps, armed hovercraft, half-tracks, artillery, helicopters, jets, and fortifications. Their vehicles are usually manufactured in a smaller scale, to save on production and packaging costs. Army men are considered toys and not models due to this fact historical and chronological accuracy are generally not a priority. Invented in 1938, little green army men went out of fashion during Vietnam, but they’ve never been off shelves. If you haven’t looked lately, they can be readily found at any dollar store. They’re mostly made in China. At the 2014 induction, the men in uniform were joined by sort-of-toy bubbles and five-time nominee Rubik’s Cube. It frankly would have been an outrage had the Rubik’s Cube lost out to either the Slip ’N Slide—one of the least fun things in existence and also not a toy—or the craven commercialism of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But who knows? It’s a cruel game. Flexible Flyer has never won because of its lack of snow-related geographical distribution, and the soon-to-be-discontinued sentimental favorite Hess Truck just lost out in its final run. But in the words of a Hess spokesperson, “We are honored that Hess Toy Truck was nominated.” I don’t think he or she was joking. If next year’s Nobel Prize is anything like the National Toy Hall of Fame, we hope Philip Roth proves a Rubik’s Cube, and not a Hess Truck.
November 11, 2014 Look Damage Control By Dan Piepenbring Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 16, twelfth century. Between the fifth and thirteenth centuries, most books were made of skin—calfskin, sheepskin, or goatskin, typically, that had been soaked, limed, dehaired, and stretched. The resulting parchment was resilient and often astonishingly consistent, but imperfections could creep in. Over at Medieval Books, Erik Kwakkel explores a few of them: Preparing parchment was a delicate business … If the round knife of the parchment maker (the lunellum) cut too deep during this scraping process, elongated rips or holes would appear … We encounter such holes frequently in medieval books, which suggests that readers were not too bothered by them. Many scribes will have shared this sentiment, because they usually simply wrote around a hole. Some placed a little line around them, as if to prevent the reader from falling in. Scribes would sometimes stitch up the holes with silk or colored thread. They’d also turn them into adornments: a particularly inventive scribe turned three holes in the page into the face of a laughing man. When the parchment was of especially poor quality, large swaths of hair follicles would be visible; the scribe would have to write around these. Studies suggest that parchment was sold in four different grades, which implies that sheets with and without visible deficiencies may have been sold at different rates. If this was indeed the case, an abundance of elongates holes in a manuscript may just point at an attempt to economize on the cost of the writing support. In other words, bad skin may have come at a good price. Read the whole piece (with plenty more images) here. Read More
November 11, 2014 On the Shelf Loose Lips Make the World Go Round, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From U.S. World War II–era propaganda. Last week, our editor Lorin Stein spoke at an event in San Francisco about Édouard Levé, whose work he’s translated—the audio from the discussion is now online. Flannery O’Connor has been inducted into the American Poets Corner at New York’s St. John the Divine, the “only shrine to American literature in the country.” “Inducting O’Connor this year was a fairly easy consensus decision. More contentious was the selection of the quotation for her plaque. The challenge was to tread a line between what Nelson called O’Connor’s ‘grand pronouncements’ and what Alfred Corn called her southern ‘cracker-barrel humor.’ The quote they settled on is from a 1953 letter that O’Connor wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell … ‘I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.’ ” John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man is banned at Guantánamo, and he’s altogether pretty psyched about it: “In banning my novel, the custodians of Guantánamo have once again demonstrated their sensitivity and respect for human dignity. No prisoner who has not been found guilty of any crime should be subjected to cruel and degrading literature.” Today in bold claims from evolutionary psychologists: “Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.” Tell all your friends. The long, strange birth of Fundamentalism in America: “The term itself was coined in the 1920s by American Protestants who resolved to return to the ‘fundamentals’ of Christianity. Their retreat from public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused on biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so, their enemy was no longer social injustice but the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems.”
November 10, 2014 Windows on the World Points of View, Points of Origin By Lorin Stein This essay prefaces Matteo Pericoli’s Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views, out this week. We’ve featured Matteo’s work for years on the Daily, and his sketch of the view from our old office graced the cover of our Summer 2011 issue. To celebrate his new book, we’re offering that issue for only eight dollars, and only until Thanksgiving. We’re also holding a Windows on the World contest—submit a photo of your view and you could win a sketch by Matteo. Pericoli’s drawing of The Paris Review’s view from our former office on White Street, as seen on the cover of Issue 197. Can you picture John Kennedy Toole, the author of A Confederacy of Dunces? I can’t. Say his name and I see his hero, Ignatius Reilly. How about Willa Cather? What comes to mind isn’t a person at all—it’s raindrops in New Mexico “exploding with a splash, as if they were hollow and full of air.” What did Barbara Pym look like, or Rex Stout, or Boris Pasternak, or the other writers whose paperbacks filled our parents’ bedside tables? In most cases we have no idea, because until recently, the author photo was relatively rare. You could sell a million copies and still, to those million readers, you’d be a name without a face. Things are different now. Nearly every first novel comes with a glamour shot, not to mention a publicity campaign on Facebook. The very tweeters have their selfies. We still talk about a writer’s “vision,” but in practice we have turned the lens around, and turned the seer into something seen. Read More