January 31, 2014 On the Shelf When People Movers Were the Future, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the September 10, 1972, edition of Our New Age, drawn by Gene Fawcette. Via Paleofuture A legible—and quite informative—map of the Internet. Would-be circumnavigators may find themselves buffeted by the trade winds of Spam Ocean. And shame on you if you’re only seeking a passage to the Continent of Porn. For the transit wonks of the seventies, the dream of the day was people movers: the “car-like pods” on rails still seen occasionally at airports. Behold their squandered promise, their sleek mobility, their Velveeta-orange color. Two new poems by Sappho were discovered on ancient papyrus. One of them mentions Sappho’s brothers; “it’s very exciting to have a new Sappho poem that isn’t about erotic love or beauty.” Agree to disagree. “Growth is a greater mystery than death … Not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.” Norman Mailer on the pursuit of prestige. In 1983, Aramco Oil hired someone to photograph oil rigs and gas-oil separation plants. He also kept an affecting photo diary.
January 30, 2014 Arts & Culture O, Youth! By Dan Piepenbring From letters published in the February 1, 1881, edition of Harper’s Young People, a spinoff of Harper’s for readers six to sixteen. Will Mary R., of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, please oblige me by giving her method of cultivating heliotrope, as it is one of my favorites, and I can never succeed in raising it. I have over two hundred plants in my parlor and sitting-room windows, and not one heliotrope. I have a beautiful black goat named Dan, and a complete set of silver-plated harness … Dan will not allow any boy to come near him, but he loves me dearly, and I love him. I am eleven years old. I and my brother used to have such good times fishing on these lakes in our canoes, and hunting deer in the woods, but now I am so lonely, for my only brother is dead. He went out in the woods to hunt deer, and got lost, and froze to death. I am a subscriber to Young People, and although I am not one of the “little folks,” I find the Post-office Box very interesting, as I am very fond of children and of pets. I have a bright, intelligent pony, a Mexican dog four years old that does not weigh more than two pounds, a mocking-bird, canaries, and a lot of fancy pigeons, and two aquaria filled with fish. In my letter printed in Young People No. 62 I intended to say that I would exchange postmarks, not for other postmarks, but for stamps and minerals. I regret that I made the mistake. I am very much interested in “Toby Tyler” and “Mildred’s Bargain.” I spent one summer at Cape May, and there I found a turtle that was so tame it would eat out of my hand, and drink out of a tea-spoon. I fed it on raw meat, soaked bread, and worms, but it ran away.
January 30, 2014 On Food, Our Daily Correspondent Chocolate: A Confession By Sadie Stein A still from Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005. Even at my loneliest and most cynical, I have always liked Valentine’s Day. The commercialized romance bothers me not a whit—I like watching couples being romantic, or awkward, or goofy. But this I will say: for those of us who don’t love chocolate, the onset of February is, well, disheartening. Nowadays, scientists like to point to the fact that eating chocolate somehow mimics the physiological characteristics of female arousal, but one doubts that science is behind the ubiquity of the heart-shaped variety box. After all, the whole connection between chocolate and courtship goes back to the nineteenth century. I’m no historian, but I’d imagine it’s more a “sweets for the sweet” bit of marketing that struck an immediate chord. If we are going to talk about amateur modern chocolate historians, Roald Dahl cannot be ignored. As anyone familiar with his oeuvre knows, the man loved chocolate. But the full extent of his feelings cannot be understood until one has read the manifesto “Chocolate,” in his highly idiosyncratic Roald Dahl’s Cookbook. Talking of what he terms the “Chocolate Revolution” of 1930–37, Dahl declares, The dates themselves should be taught in school to every child. Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one’s life. But 1932 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers, and 1937 the Kit Kat—these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the mind of every child in the country. If I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them. (Not that one imagines he went in much for Valentine’s Day.) Read More
January 30, 2014 Bulletin Time Is Running Out By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Chris Willis, via Wikimedia Commons Today is many things: Vanessa Redgrave’s birthday; the 365th anniversary of Charles I’s beheading; a Thursday. But more than any of these, it’s the penultimate day of our subscription deal with McSweeney’s. You must, in the parlance of infomercials and World War II propaganda, ACT NOW, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! To refresh your memory: this January only, you can get a year of The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for just $75*—a twenty percent savings over individual subscriptions. It’s what known among businessmen as synergy, and among laypeople as a totally white-hot deal. Yes, our two magazines have always appealed to different readers. Our sensibilities, like our headquarters, are a continent apart. But for 2014 we say, vive la différence. You’ll have the most cosmopolitan bookshelf, nightstand, or bathroom on the block, and a full supply of the interviews, fiction, essays, poetry, and humor that keep us reading each other and make us want to spread the love! Subscribe now or risk infinite regret! *US only.
January 30, 2014 At Work Visible Man: An Interview with Mitchell S. Jackson By Tim Small A still from the book trailer for The Residue Years. Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years, was published last fall and drew immediate notice for its amazing use of language and voice, the cadence of its sentences, and the authenticity at its center. It tells the sweet, sad story of Grace, a recovering drug addict, and her drug-dealing son, Champ, as they both struggle in an African American Portland neighborhood that was ravaged by crack in the nineties. Critics said the novel was about race, or poverty, or America’s failed war on drugs. Big, social themes. Personally, I disagree: to my mind, The Residue Years is a personal story, a novel about love, redemption, and freedom. Interspersed throughout are a blank form for a rehabilitation center, a police report, a Baptist church member registration form, a petition for child custody—subtle reminders that this novel is also about all the ways in which we are held captive by institutions that, more often than not, fail us. Between these pauses lie some three-hundred pages of beautiful sentences that mix urban slang with pitch-perfect lyricism, resulting in a new way of expressing American English—at least to my European eyes. Victor LaValle agrees: “It’s tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.” Amy Hempel has said that Grace and Champ are one of the fictional families she has cared about the most. And that’s at the heart of Mitchell’s novel: family. Last month I fired up Skype and talked to Mitchell for more than an hour—I was in Milan, and he in Brooklyn—about his novel, his writing, and the dangers of how books are marketed today. Your language is a fantastic mix of literary, poetic, lyrical English, and urban slang—it goes up and down and back and forth. I’m curious to know if you tried to bring together those worlds consciously. I do feel like I’m in the middle there. I have my preliterary experiences in the urban world, listening to a bunch of hip-hop and listening to my uncles, my friends. When I got in school and started reading, I found people who were writing about a similar kind of experience, and whom I thought the canon respected. But I don’t feel like I’m in a tradition. I don’t think I read deeply enough in either field to really know about a tradition. I do have influences—James Baldwin, of course, and John Edgar Wideman. But also Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah. I like to stay in the middle. I think that that tension lets me play around with voice. What was your starting point for the novel? I started writing autobiographical scenes and tried to string them together. I didn’t understand the characters’ motivations. It took me years to figure out what they really wanted. I had a premise—mother on drugs, son sells drugs—but that’s not human. Those are just things people do. It took me some time to figure out what the humanity in the characters was. I saw that this story was really about a mother and a son, about their will to redeem themselves from the hurt they’d caused. Once I realized that, I went back and rewrote a lot of stuff. When I started, the characters were so close to my own life that I felt like they had to speak and act and behave like the people they were based on. Champ and Grace began as avatars of you and your mom? At the beginning, and then they became composites. But the origin was in truth. Once you realize the characters have a life of their own and you let them do what’s right for them, the work opens up. I wish I were as smart as Champ, but I’m not as smart as him. Read More
January 30, 2014 On the Shelf The Tragic Diary of a Lunar Rover, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a NASA presentation slide, 1963. Image via Wikimedia Commons “My masters discovered something abnormal with my mechanical control system … I might not survive this lunar night … I am not fearful … Goodnight, Earth … Goodnight, humanity.” In the heartrending tradition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a Chinese lunar rover has live-blogged its own death. Meanwhile, in Russia, a man was stabbed to death for having declared, to a very fervid admirer of verse, that “the only real literature is prose.” There now exists a digital version of the Gough map, “one of the earliest maps to show Britain in a geographically recognizable form.” It dates between 1355 and 1366, when roads were a novelty. (Not that they aren’t today.) If you’d planned on watching the Super Bowl “just for the ads,” you might be able to skip the game entirely: you can watch many of the ads ahead of time, because Capitalism Cares™. Now get out there and shop! Under the cobblestones, the beach. Under Versailles, some magnificent subterranean reservoirs.