February 28, 2014 Arts & Culture Maximum Sentence By Sabine Heinlein How prisoners perceive—and misperceive—life in the outside world. Richard Robles’s self portrait, 2013 I mailed a copy of my book Among Murderers, about the struggles three men faced when they returned to the world after several decades behind bars, to Richard Robles, a pen pal serving an indeterminate life sentence in New York’s Attica Prison. Prison reading and mailing policies are designed to reinforce the feeling of punishment. Family and friends cannot simply send books; they have to come directly from the publisher or an online bookstore. Most prisons only allow paperbacks—Attica, a rare exception, permits hardcovers. I couldn’t find detailed mailing instructions on Attica’s website, so I called the prison. “Send it through the publisher—and don’t hide no weapon in it,” the employee blurted. Richard wrote me that he almost had to return the book. [My] name wasn’t on the “buyer’s side” of the invoice. The guard said something about a new rule that prisoners have to buy the book. But as you can see I did get it, after another guard said something to him. Miracles, right? I did consider it a small miracle when, a few weeks later, I began to receive letters from men who had borrowed the book from Richard. Prison is a dark world far away from ours, and communications travel slowly. We may have forgotten “them,” but they never forget us. My book quickly made its way around Richard’s cell block; several prisoners mailed me their reviews, chronicling their ambitious attempts at self-improvement and their struggle to prepare themselves for a world that doesn’t want them back. Read More
February 28, 2014 On Film, Our Daily Correspondent Tearjerkers By Sadie Stein Looking at this year’s Best Picture nominees, I realized that while I had liked three, nine out of nine had made me tear up—including The Wolf of Wall Street. Fellow movie criers will understand. Especially for those of us who might hesitate to cry in the light of day, there is a singular pleasure to letting tears flow, even—or maybe especially—when what’s happening on screen is really stupid. I come by this honestly. My father refuses to see any movie in which a child dies. This outpouring of emotion is not limited to the cinema; after watching Audra McDonald and Norm Douglas perform “Bess You Is My Woman Now” in the recent revival of Porgy and Bess, my mom and I were so overcome that we had to skip the second act and go get a drink across the street. And the list of songs I can’t listen to dry-eyed is so long that I’ve had to quarantine them in their own Spotify playlist. But movies are the biggest culprit. The first movie that made me inconsolable was Dumbo—“Baby Mine,” of course, after he’s been taken from his mother—and the second, I believe, was Chipmunk Adventure, after the baby penguin is taken from his mother. My brother and I both sobbed so loudly in Land Before Time (after the baby dinosaur is taken from his mother) that we had to leave the theatre. Thank God we were never exposed to Bambi. (My mother, traumatized to realize that she was “Man,” resolved at age five to spare her own kids the same shock.) Read More
February 28, 2014 Bulletin Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Prude By Dan Piepenbring We at The Paris Review Daily do not ordinarily see fit to intervene in matters of geopolitics. But the Times brings news too dismaying to ignore: in a ham-fisted effort to tighten national security, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has intercepted millions of images from Yahoo webcams. And what have they gotten for their troubles? Not sensitive documents, hot tips, or even shifty conversation—just eyeful after eyeful of amateur porn. Worse still, they’re not even turned on by it. “Unfortunately, there are issues with undesirable images within the data,” one GCHQ document reads. “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.” An internal agency survey of 323 Yahoo usernames found that 7.1 percent of those images contained “undesirable nudity.” “Undesirable” our asses! (Which would, if bared on Yahoo webcams, provide only the most desirable foreign intelligence in the world.)
February 28, 2014 On the Shelf February’s Shocking Secret, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The astounding, filthy origins of our second month. A derelict tank in mud, c. 1917; photo via the Canadian Dept. of Defense. You won’t BELIEVE February’s dirty, hidden past! “Before we adopted the Latin name for the second month, Old English used much more vibrant names to describe it. The most common Old English name was Solmonath, which literally means ‘mud month.’” You won’t BELIEVE what a steady dose of antidepressants and benzodiazepines did to this writer’s creativity! You won’t BELIEVE who offered these kind, pizzalicious words about our magazine! “I have every issue of The Paris Review, and I only read them when I feel like I’ve worked really hard and deserve a reward. It’s like New York pizza—hard to find a bad slice.” You won’t BELIEVE how far your jaw drops when you look at these eleventh-century illustrations of the Book of Revelation! You won’t BELIEVE how this parrot helped solve a crime in India! “Whenever Ashutosh’s name was mentioned, the parrot would start screeching.” You won’t BELIEVE how lame this writerly T-shirt is!
February 27, 2014 Events Tonight: Join Us for an AWP Happy Hour By Dan Piepenbring Continuing last week’s westerly trend, our digital director, Justin Alvarez, and our associate editor, Stephen Hiltner, have descended upon Seattle for the AWP Conference. (I’ve never been to Seattle, so I won’t even try to set the scene for you. Insert clichéd quip here—about the Space Needle, Starbucks, the grunge scene, flannel, Microsoft, rain, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, etc.) If you’re around, be sure to stop by table N18, where Justin and Stephen will be all weekend with discounted subscription deals, tote bags, selected back issues from our archives, endless charm, easy smiles, and more. Oh, almost forgot: booze. There are few things writers and publishers enjoy more than drinking on the cheap; we know this. Thus, from six to eight this evening, The Paris Review is co-hosting a happy hour at Linda’s Tavern with A Strange Object, Electric Literature, and Guernica. Stop by for first-rate hobnobbing and, yes, alcohol.
February 27, 2014 First Person It’s My Party By David Pablo Cohn How many hotheaded academics does it take to solve a riddle? Andrew Stevovich, Hat Party, 2012, 7″ x 8″. I don’t know what the best thing was about Jim Propp’s parties. They were a crystalline picture of the specialized, rarefied company I kept when I lived in Cambridge in the midnineties, parked on Mass. Ave. halfway between Harvard and MIT. Profs, postdocs, and assorted academic keepsakes from the cream of Boston academia all piled into Jim’s Victorian four-square house in Somerville for an evening of … well, we never quite knew what the evening would bring. Technically, these were “word game” parties. Each was planned around a series of intellectual challenges arranged around the house more or less like evil wizards, ax-wielding dwarves, or more mundane impediments in a typical game of Dungeons & Dragons. You’d team up with a couple friends (or the pretty redhead who was probably dating one of your professors, if you could), and make your way from room to room, solving bits and pieces of puzzles that—if you were lucky—you could string together for the grand solution. The prize was bragging rights until the next party, six months down the line. In any case, it all began with the invitation. Twice a year, a mysterious envelope would appear. I remember the first one I received: a single sheet with nothing but a swirling Spirograph flower on one side, and the letters RSVP below it. Where, when, and how were left to the recipient, presumably after he or she had coaxed the secret out of the cryptic drawing. Read More