January 3, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Travel More By Dan Piepenbring Mallet compound locomotive of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway (Frisco) via Wikimedia Commons. We know: it’s hard to leave home. Your showerhead gets great water pressure; the guy at your bodega saves you the last copy of the Post; the coffee people remember your name. Why skip town? Indeed, we’re so irredeemably tethered to Manhattan that we haven’t bothered to have a foreign office in forty years. And we’re The Paris Review. But it’s a new year, time to cast off our parochialism and see the world. Riches may lie in store. Legend tells, for instance, of a land called San Francisco, where paupers pan for gold, used bookstores line the streets, and the buses run on electricity. What is the state of letters in this paradise? Which fashions are in vogue among its citizenry? How’s the ceviche? We can’t say. But we know who can: McSweeney’s, a San Francisco institution since 1998. This January only, you can get a dual subscription to The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for just $75—20 percent less than two individual subscriptions. In other words, you’ll have the comforts of home and a year of bicoastal exploration for less than it would cost us to get from Penn Station to Philadelphia, if that were something we were inclined to do. Get transcontinental with McSweeney’s and the Review.
January 3, 2014 Look Truth in Advertising By Dan Piepenbring As the Northeast is battered by “Winter Storm Hercules”—a nor’easter all but destined to enter Wikipedia’s list of notable nor’easters—one public library has provided succor, sort of. In Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a redditor came across this sign; to its great credit, it suggests neither burning books, nor reading erotica aloud, nor any other heat-generating gimmickry. Rather, it stands as a stark, charmingly blunt reminder that though literature may warm the soul, it will never warm the body. Curl up with a good book today, but don’t try to be a hero: curl up with a blanket, too.
January 3, 2014 On the Shelf Art and Literature Are Teeming with Monsters, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Art credit Hieronymus Bosch. Behold, art and literature’s greatest monsters! Plenty of welcome departures from the norm here—Frankenstein and Dracula didn’t make the list. Neither did Chuck Palahniuk. In a synergistic turn worthy of the greatest CEOs, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch has caused a spike in attendance at the Frick, where its namesake painting resides. (There’s a tote bag now, too.) An intrepid sociologist gets at the roots of uptalk—the irritating tendency to inflect every sentence as if it were a question—by watching Jeopardy! Disparaging nondisparagement agreements: Byliner canned editor Will Blythe, and he’s not going quietly. Or rather, he is going quietly, but he would prefer to reserve the right not to.
January 2, 2014 At Work The End of the Internet: An Interview with Matthew Thurber By Sam Frank I met cartoonist and musician Matthew Thurber six-odd years ago somewhere in Prospect Park (a séance? a picnic?), and then saw him play alto saxophone in his Muzak-jazz-punk trio Soiled Mattress and the Springs at the New York Art Book Fair. We kept running into one another in odd places; or, since New York City is now lacking in odd places, at places where subculture obsessives go to convince themselves there’s still oddness in the world. Soiled Mattress broke up in 2008, but Thurber’s “Anti-Matter Cabaret” act Ambergris has continued, and sometimes he plays with artist Brian Belott as Court Stenographer and Young Sherlock Holmes. In 2011, after years of publishing minicomics, zines, and books on tape, Thurber collected his serial 1-800-Mice in graphic-novel form. It’s about a messenger mouse named Groomfiend, a peace punk named Peace Punk, and a cast of thousands. More recently, Thurber wrote a culture diary for this blog, and started Tomato House gallery with his girlfriend, Rebecca Bird, in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn. Thurber’s new graphic novel, Infomaniacs, is about the singularity and the end of the Internet; it’s also the final book from the great comics publisher PictureBox, which serialized parts of Infomaniacs online starting in 2010. The book’s heroine is Amy Shit, a punk rapper who sometimes lives off the grid—in a subway tunnel, even. Her brother’s a neo–Ned Ludd who goes around smashing iPhones. Meanwhile, Ralph is an Internet addict who escapes from reality rehab, then embeds in an immortality cult run by a libertarian oligarch who wants to eat the brain of the last man who’s never seen the Internet. A horse and a bat, both intelligence agents for the ATF (Anthropomorphic Task Force), wonder what the singularity will look like—a 1950s computer, a crystal, a cell phone, a tree branch? Thurber’s video trailer offers a sense of the comic’s raucous hugger-mugger and subterranean surrealism, but doesn’t touch on its Underground Man againstness. For that, perhaps this quote, from an early, uncollected strip: “All bundled up and no place to go … The man who hates the Internet is a man who hates the world.” Thurber and I met in the office I share with a puppet theater, near the Barclays Center. Giant heads hung from the walls. I don’t have Wi-Fi and don’t know anyone’s password. Read More
January 2, 2014 Fiction Selections from Graveyard of Bitter Oranges: The Bloody Boar By Josef Winkler Art credit Anthony Cudahy. This week, we will be running a series of excerpts from Josef Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. Inspired by the author’s stay in Italy after leaving his native Carinthia, the novel was first published in 1990 by Suhrkamp Verlag and its English translation will be published by Contra Mundum Press in 2015. The first night after we had moved into a sublet room in Rome, I dreamed of a girl who had a swatch of blood resembling a Hitler moustache on her upper lip. As she approached me, and I kicked my legs at her frantically, blood ran from down over her mouth and chin. I sprang awake, and tried to awaken Andrea, but I seemed to be paralyzed, and it was only minutes later that I could once more move around the bed. I said nothing, and waited more than an hour for sleep to return. After that dream followed a second. Bishops and cardinals in their vestments were dying in a hail of bullets; though they stayed dead in their seats, I could not distinguish a single wound on their bodies. I approached a cardinal and looked long at his body. Then I was jarred awake once more by the clangorous bell of the Convent in the Via Tolmino, which tolls every quarter of an hour and which had only allowed me, my first few nights there, to sleep in fifteen-minute increments. You no longer show any sign of life? But I write about death, my friend! I like to be among the dead, they do me no harm, and they are people, too. Read More
January 2, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Stop Watching So Much Fucking TV By Dan Piepenbring Family watching television, c. 1958, via Wikimedia Commons Two thousand thirteen was the year that introduced binge-watching to the lexicon. In a new poll by Netflix, sixty-one percent of respondents conceded to having binged on one show or another, meaning they’d watched upwards of three episodes a single sitting. The message, dear reader, is clear: we’re gorging ourselves on serialized dramas and slick on-demand entertainment. It’s time to step away from the fucking television. This should be the year we all read more. And because our resolve can sometimes waver, we’ve enlisted our friends at McSweeney’s in a call to action. Until the end of January, you can subscribe to The Paris Review and McSweeney’s for only $75—that’s 20 percent less than the price of individual subscriptions. Your 2014 will be so stuffed with the best in fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays that you’ll forget where you put the remote, forever.