April 16, 2014 On the Shelf Damn the Kafkaesque, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Franz Kafka: he’s more than just an adjective. “The Pulitzer Prize is a human enterprise. Editors, past winners and a few Columbia University pooh-bahs comprise the board that awards them. Like all such collections of human beings, Pulitzer Boards are capable of brilliant good sense, and egregious errors.” Cynthia Ozick’s stirring defense of Kafka, the man: “Whoever utters ‘Kafkaesque’ has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.” Was the first-ever emoticon in a seventeenth-century poem? Maybe! But probably not. Thoughts on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mazda Miata: “I was frequently stopped while driving. Fellow Miata owners waved enthusiastically. Clubs were formed. People constantly made offers to buy my car. Miata is a car that’s worn like a jacket. The lithe driving dynamic is a second skin.” But the Miata was never endorsed by a man who’s walked on the moon: the only car to claim that honor is the Volkswagen Beetle, which found an unlikely advocate in Buzz Aldrin.
April 15, 2014 Look Happy Motoring By Dan Piepenbring Pause Play Play Prev | Next Rand McNally published its first road atlas on April 15, 1924. It was called—in a touching testament to the marketing of yore—the Rand McNally Auto Chum. Many hours of intrepid googling have failed to yield a photo of the Chum, but I did find a retrospective of atlas covers, and this commemorative press release, which catalogs some of the decidedly unchummy features of the 1924 atlas. A few of the things it didn’t do: Did not identify roads by number; instead roads were listed by their names, such as Roosevelt Highway. In fact, the atlas depicted zero miles of interstate, as those roads did not yet exist. Did not include an index for cities, or other places. If a driver didn’t know where a town was located, he or she would have to page through the atlas to find it. Did not appear in full color. The 1924 atlas was printed in only two colors, dark blue and red. The first full-color edition was printed in 1960. One can only imagine the faces of so many vexed motorists as they tossed their unindexed, two-tone Chums out the windows of their stranded Model Ts. As with so many reference texts, the road atlas has fallen into desuetude, for reasons obvious to anyone with an Internet connection. In its coverage of the Rand McNally anniversary, Yahoo! News already presumes that its readership knows nothing of atlases past; their tone is that of a nostalgic grandfather. “Before there were smart phones and Google Maps,” the story begins, “people relied on road atlases and paper maps stored in their glove boxes.” Gee! We’ve also lost the complimentary road maps once offered by gasoline companies, a few of which are pictured above. (Look closely for the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story in one of them.) It was the gas giants who helped to underwrite the cost of the first atlases: better maps meant more people on the road, and more people on the road meant more gasoline sold. The Yale University Library hosts an old but serviceable guide to early road maps, and its text, by Douglas A. Yorke Jr. and John Margolies, provides an excellent précis on the importance of oil-company cartography, which, with its flashy art and sloganeering, amounts to a kind of petrol propaganda: The oil-company road map became the primary medium through which Americans found their way on the ever-growing network of the national roads and highways … By the twenties, most major oil companies had some form of promotional map program. The covers often featured a man and a woman discovering the joy of driving through the countryside, enjoying the freedom and mobility the automobile offered … The 1927 Standard Oil map of Ohio compares the motorist to the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon, blazing trails and discovering new lands. The Kentucky Standard Oil map of the same year has a three panel spread, depicting a motorist using a free map to plan their descent into the rolling valley below. Oil companies were encouraging the automobile owner to travel and explore the country—using their gasoline.
April 15, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Hate-Reading By Sadie Stein Frederic Leighton, Study at a Reading Desk, 1877 I am a rereader by nature. Like most rereaders, I have a few beloved favorites—Sisters By a River, or We Think the World of You, or A Girl in Winter—that bring me comfort as well as pleasure. Then there are a few books that I know just as well as these, and revisit just as often, but which I loathe. The writing is not bad; that would make the reading a chore instead of a sick pleasure. Usually I despise the narrator in some way—for being out of touch or oblivious or solipsistic. I particularly hate certain culinary memoirs and novels with leaden dialogue. The irritated satisfaction these books give me is akin to the irresistible pain of worrying a sore tooth. I never hate-read work by someone I actually know. A few times I have gone on to learn too much about the writer of one of these books, and the pleasure went away. The wealth of available information may feed some kinds of animus; mine depend on the hermetic isolation of my own obscure prejudices. They must not be humanized. Read More
April 15, 2014 Bulletin Read Zadie Smith’s Story from Our Spring Issue By Dan Piepenbring Not pictured: Miss Adele, the corsets. Zadie Smith’s story “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” appears in our latest issue, and we’re delighted to announce that, as of today, you can read it online in its entirety. But “Miss Adele” won’t be gracing the Internet in perpetuity; it’s only available while our Spring issue is on newsstands. Subscribe to The Paris Review and you’ll have constant, round-the-clock, 24/7/365 access to this story and a wealth of others, anytime, anywhere, anyhow—digitally, in print, and perhaps in media yet to be invented. “Well, that’s that,” Miss Dee Pendency said, and Miss Adele, looking back over her shoulder, saw that it was. The strip of hooks had separated entirely from the rest of the corset. Dee held up the two halves, her big red slash mouth pulling in opposite directions. “Least you can say it died in battle. Doing its duty.” “Bitch, I’m on in ten minutes.” “When an irresistible force like your ass … ” “Don’t sing.” “Meets an old immovable corset like this … You can bet as sure as you liiiiiive!” “It’s your fault. You pulled too hard.” “Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give, SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE.” “You pulled too hard.” “Pulling’s not your problem.” Dee lifted her bony, white Midwestern leg up onto the counter, in preparation to put on a thigh-high. With a heel she indicated Miss Adele’s mountainous box of chicken and rice: “Real talk, baby.” Read the whole story.
April 15, 2014 On Film The Dadliest Decade By Willie Osterweil Why were the nineties so preoccupied with fatherhood? Some decades are summed up easily, the accretion of cliché and cultural narrative having reached such a point that we hardly need say anything at all. The sixties: hippies, drugs, revolution, rock-and-roll. The eighties: Young Republicans, greed is good, massive perms, Ronald Reagan. This is reductive, obviously, but it’s also helpful cultural shorthand. The nineties, like the seventies, have a less unified narrative: there’s gangster rap, Monica Lewinsky, Columbine, Kurt Cobain, O.J., MTV, white slackers on skateboards, and the LA riots, but they’re all disparate, disconnected. There was no counterculture powerful enough to write the narrative from below, no one mass-cultural or political trend hegemonic enough to make itself the truth. Some enjoy calling this diffusion postmodernism, though most everyone else agrees those people are assholes. But there was, I contend, a current that ran through the culture of the nineties, a theme that has not to my knowledge been recognized as such. That theme is the heroic dad. Read More
April 15, 2014 On the Shelf Bob Ross by the Numbers, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A publicity still from Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s latest piece is a masterful look at two musicians who have fallen into obscurity: “In the world of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it … there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley.” A statistical analysis of the paintings of Bob Ross. (Ninety-one percent contain at least one tree; 39 percent contain at least one mountain; 21 percent contain cumulus clouds.) Taking stock of today’s art world: “The artist has undergone an enormous increase in value, to the point of idolization. But success has come at a high price, with the power of the art system, the adjustment to taste guidelines, and the dependence on galleries and curators. To create something new all one’s own, while remaining in the game, is a balancing act that only few succeed at mastering.” An interview with Black Dog Bone, the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Murder Dog, hip-hop’s most “potent” underground magazine. “The original designs for the cubicle came out of a very 1960s-moment; the intention was to free office workers from uninspired, even domineering workplace settings.”