April 7, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 24, or Serpent, Ashes, Rinse, Repeat By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, Canto 24 We’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: a swarm of snakes and a sinner with a sense of privacy. Let’s begin by addressing the fact that these similes are getting out of hand. In the early parts of his poem, Dante’s similes were often only three lines long. Now—just as he did in the beginning of canto 22, when he describes battlefield scenes while traveling with the demons—he presents us with a long, roving simile about a peasant who sees the snow melt and knows it is time to herd his sheep again. At the end of canto 23, Virgil realized there was no longer a way to pass from the realm of the lead-cloaked sinners to the next ditch—the bridge is out. This is one of the few indications (like the sinner crucified to the ground in 23) that the geography of hell changes over time. But soon, seeing that Dante is anxious and scared, Virgil devises a plan to get them over to the next area by scaling a few boulders. Dante, daunted and exhausted, admits that “were it not that on this side of the dike the slope were shorter—I cannot speak for him—I would have given up.” This is the sort of phrase that translators and scholars will laugh at, because it’s an example of Dante’s subtle, ironic sense of humor: he announces that he cannot speak for Virgil, and yet has done so for the entire length of the poem so far. Read More
April 7, 2014 On the Shelf The Original E-Book, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring As obituaries and touching remembrances of Peter Matthiessen poured in this weekend, The New Yorker made some of his travel writing available to nonsubscribers—specifically “Matthiessen’s mesmerizing account of his journey, by ship, to the Amazon and throughout the wildernesses of South America.” Tales of Faulkner in Hollywood: “‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ The quotation from Dante is what Faulkner considered a fitting road sign for drivers to see as they crossed the border into California.” Before Americans loved baseball, we gathered to take in another grand national pastime: competitive walking. It was, if you can believe it, even stranger and blander than it sounds. The irredeemably cheery mascots on cereal boxes are staring directly into your child’s soul, experts say. “Researchers found that children’s cereals are typically placed on the bottom two shelves and the mascots deploy ‘a downward gaze at an angle of 9.67 degrees.’” For the origins of the e-book, look to the floppy disk. Specifically, look to Peter James’s Host, a novel published on two disks in 1993. It “has now become a historical artifact, accepted into the Science Museum’s collection as a very early electronic novel.” Archipelago Books turns ten.
April 5, 2014 In Memoriam Peter Matthiessen, 1927–2014 By The Paris Review Linda Gavin/Courtesy of Riverhead Books We have received word that Peter Matthiessen, a founding editor of The Paris Review, died today after a long battle with leukemia. A Zen priest, novelist, environmentalist, and two-time winner of the National Book Award, Peter was a heroic figure to generations of readers, including our own. He lived a life of adventure but was, even in public, the first to admit his vulnerabilities and flaws. As a writer, he held himself to the highest standards—his own—even in the face of incomprehension or disregard. As the most senior member of our board, and one of the last living founders of the Review, he was unfailing in his encouragement and love of this magazine; we have lost a progenitor, a guiding spirit, and a cherished friend. INTERVIEWER You are one of the few writers ever nominated for the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. Define yourself. PETER MATTHIESSEN I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process—not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower. In reverse order, Far Tortuga took eight years, At Play in the Fields of the Lord perhaps four, and the early novels no doubt longer than they deserved. Anyway, I have been a fiction writer from the start. For many years I wrote nothing but fiction. My first published story appeared in The Atlantic the year I graduated from college and won the Atlantic firsts prize that year; and on the wings of a second story sale to the same magazine, I acquired a noted literary agent, Bernice Baumgarten, wife of James Gould Cozzens, the author of a best-selling blockbuster called By Love Possessed, whose considerable repute went to the grave with him. INTERVIEWER And when did you start your first novel? MATTHIESSEN Almost at once. It was situated on an island off the New England coast. I had scarcely begun when I realized that what I had here at the very least was the Great American Novel. I sent off the first 150 pages to Bernice and hung around the post office for the next two weeks. At last an answer came. It read as follows: “Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this 150 years ago, only he wrote it better, Yours, Bernice.” On a later occasion, when as a courtesy I sent her the commission on a short story sold in England, she responded unforgettably: “Dear Peter, I’m awfully glad you were able to get rid of this story in Europe, as I don’t think we’d have had much luck with it here. Yours, Bernice.” Both these communications, quoted in their entirety, are burned into my brain forever—doubtless a salutary experience for a brash young writer. I never heard an encouraging word until the day Bernice retired, when she called me in and barked like a Zen master, “I’ve been tough on you because you’re very, very good.” I wanted to sink down and embrace her knees. Read Matthiessen’s Art of Fiction interview and his story “A Replacement,” and listen to him on the art of travel writing.
April 4, 2014 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Dead Poets, Dead Magazines, the Dead Zoo Gang By The Paris Review A still from Jean-Pierre Léaud’s 1958 audition for The 400 Blows. In December of 1891, Walt Whitman contracted pneumonia. He was by then a celebrity poet and his deteriorating health had for a long time been media manna. The New York Times sent a reporter to Camden in 1888, and updates on Whitman’s health were published continually over the next few years—see 1890’s “Walt Whitman Has a Bad Cold.” By 1891, the end was within sight, and the paper published daily dispatches with headlines like “Walt Whitman Slowly Dying,” “Walt Whitman Still Lingering,” and “Walt Whitman About the Same.” Readers were made privy to such personal details as Whitman’s caloric intake (two oysters one day; a mutton chop another), his mindset (“he is perfectly rational”), and his doctor’s solemn belief that Whitman would last but a handful of hours more. He died on March 26, 1892. —Zack Newick The best part of The 400 Blows is when Jean-Pierre Léaud ad libs an intake interview at reform school. Over the weekend a friend sent me the film test that got him the part. You can just feel Truffaut’s excitement at having found the child actor who would become his alter ego. The kid is pure heartbreaking charm. —Lorin Stein Every couple of years, I revisit this documentary on the late broadcaster Victor Packer—hands down, one of the best things I have ever heard on the radio. Packer was, to put it mildly, a man of tremendous energy and varied interests. The portrait that emerges, by the Yiddish Radio Project, is that of an eccentric—but also of another era. It’s twelve minutes very well spent. (Packer, incidentally, is voiced by Christopher Lloyd.) —Sadie Stein In “The Dead Zoo Gang,” a novella-length article published on The Atavist, Charles Homans tells the story of a group of international thieves known for robbing unlikely targets: taxidermists, antiques dealers, and natural history museums. They steal rhino horns to sell to buyers in Asia, and it’s been the work of law enforcement agents across the world to catch them—a difficult task, mainly because the thieves all seem to hail from an impenetrable subset of an already insular and poorly documented community, the Irish Travellers. Homans’s slow-building depiction of this community fascinates me. The Travellers are Roma-like nomads that exist on the outskirts of Irish society; they move from town to town in their trailers, congregating just once a year for, among other things, wedding celebrations so raucous they spawned a reality series, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. They speak a patois of Irish Gaelic and English and are organized in wildly complicated extended-family groups. And, most important, some of them—patriarchs whose net worth is estimated to be between 275 and 690 million dollars—appear to run scams and criminal activities (to say nothing of the odd legitimate business) on every continent except Antarctica. This a deep rabbit hole, but you won’t regret following it to its conclusion. —Tucker Morgan Read More
April 4, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Lonely Hunter By Sadie Stein A still from The Shop Around the Corner, 1940. “That’s it!” someone exclaimed to her friend. “That’s the place where they meet!” She was standing in front of an Upper West Side coffee shop that figures in a pivotal scene in the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail. They snapped a picture, they went in; I guess it was their destination. It takes all kinds, of course, and New York is all about finding your own city within a city. Hadn’t I passed a Friends bus tour in the West Village the week before? I’ve always really disliked You’ve Got Mail, without being sure why. It’s not just that it’s twee and treacly, or feels dated. It’s not merely that it’s such a pale shadow of The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch classic to which it is an ostensible homage. I remember seeing You’ve Got Mail when it came out and stalking out of the theater afterward, surrounded by my bemused high school friends, obscurely convinced that the filmmakers did not understand love. What I knew from love is unclear—I had never had anything resembling a relationship—but it’s certainly true that something about the film got under my skin. And now I begin to see that this something was, and is, about loneliness. Read More
April 4, 2014 Listen, Look Andrew Pekler, Cover Versions By Dan Piepenbring Pause Play Play Prev | Next Andrew Pekler is an electronic musician based in Berlin; Resident Advisor has described his music as the “cold alien groove of a midnight jazz café reemerging in the world of clicks and bleeps.” I came to him by way of a video, “Composition No. 1 for Electronic Toothbrush, Voice, and Synthesizer,” in which he plays a Philips Sonicare toothbrush—with his mouth, in the usual way—to harmonize with a Moog Prodigy synthesizer. It’s an entrancing wash of beautiful, dentally hygienic sound. Pekler works primarily from found materials. His latest album, Cover Versions, draws from the music and imagery of postwar exotica records—those kitschy aural forays to faraway lands, rife with congas, vibraphones, and theremins. With an eye toward a certain aesthetic, Pekler bought dozens of secondhand records and appropriated their music and their covers for his own work. Cover Versions was printed in a limited run of three hundred (all of them, alas, long since spoken for), each with its own individually designed cover; featured here are thirty of Pekler’s favorites. He explains his process: Read More