March 19, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Trading Places By Sadie Stein An illustration from the Betsy-Tacy series. Repeating compliments to a third party is a bit like giving money: everyone’s glad to get them, but the giving can be awkward. It was not always so. Time was, the passing on of compliments was so ritualized a part of life that the practice had a name: trade-last. Merriam-Webster’s defines it as “a complimentary remark by a third person that a hearer offers to repeat to the person complimented if he or she will first report a compliment made about the hearer,” and dates the first recorded use of the term to 1891. Read More
March 19, 2014 From the Archive A Philip Roth Bonanza By Dan Piepenbring The birthday boy, looking decidedly more bored than he’d be if he were reading our back issues. Philip Roth turns eighty-one today. You must be wondering: How can you, little old you, partake of such an historic occasion? Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You could masturbate into a piece of raw liver, à la Alexander Portnoy; you could masturbate on your mistress’s grave, like Mickey Sabbath; or you could masturbate into your beloved’s hair, as David Kepesh does. Then again, there’s no law saying life must imitate art. If you’re absolutely set on not paying tribute through masturbation, there is one other option: you can peruse our archives, where you’ll find a whole host of work by, about, or otherwise in the orbit of Philip Roth. Read More
March 19, 2014 First Person Unhousing By Colin Dickey Foreclosed homes as haunted houses. Photo: Casey Serin My wife and I began searching for a house in 2008, just as the market was crashing, just as those first waves of foreclosed homes and short sales were hitting the market. Priced out of Los Angeles real estate for so long, we were finally able to afford houses whose prices had been ridiculously inflated only six months earlier. Occasionally we went to those open houses with smiling realtors and bowls of candy set out, where owners had recently landscaped or repainted to enhance value, but we could never seriously consider any of these. The homes that mattered had lock boxes, were abandoned or in the process of being abandoned—the ones that reeked of disrepair and despair. We spent the summer touring nearly every distressed property in the neighborhoods East of Hollywood: Los Feliz, Silverlake, Echo Park, and Atwater Village—every abandoned or half-abandoned monstrosity and beloved ruin, looking for a home. I still have a hard time articulating the sense of dread and fascination those houses stirred in me. The feeling of moving through these spaces—particularly as we were visiting seven or eight of them in an afternoon—was indescribable. A sense of wrongness pervaded so many of these homes. I’m not superstitious—I don’t believe in spirits or forces or haunted houses—but much of our lexicon in these cases depends on notions of the supernatural; in the end, the only word that seems useful for talking about the houses is unheimlich—a German word, literally “unhomely” or “not of the home,” “unfamiliar.” It’s more idiomatically translated as “uncanny”: a word that Freud plucked and repurposed from the realm of the supernatural. Read More
March 19, 2014 On the Shelf Youth, Eternal Life, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Garuda, the “vahana” of Vishnu, returning with a vase of Amrita, a nectar thought to bestow immortality. A drawing by an unknown artist, ca. 1825. Some writers—the white male ones, mostly—expect to attain immortality through their work. Others simply write about eternal life. And others still must wait for the afterlife for their work to get the attention it deserves. Walter Benjamin, for instance, was “all but forgotten in the years leading up to his death … his name had been kept alive by a small number of friends and colleagues, the kind of trickle of a readership that hardly suggested he would one day be counted among the most significant and far-ranging critics, essayists, and thinkers of the past 100 years.” But the ebb and flow of critical reputation is almost a given these days, when we’re always developing provocative new rubrics with which to classify our writers. E.g.: “As novelists spend much of their day watching the grass grow, it is only logical that they can be defined according to their landscaping technique. Thus Donald Antrim is a push-mower novelist, while Rachel Kushner is a ride-mower novelist.” There were not always “teenagers.” A new documentary examines the peculiar history of the concept, which was “the result and invention of adolescent girls … There is a kind of sexist quality to it as well, a crucifixion of the young female figure.” As Ukraine becomes the nexus of geopolitics, pickup artists worry about the implications for getting laid. Would EU membership make Ukrainian women more independent, and thus more difficult to seduce? “Kiev’s pussy paradise potential has been permanently damaged … It’s very sad.”
March 18, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Baby Talk By Sadie Stein A still from War Babies, 1932. Since I wish to spare you the disappointment I myself experienced Sunday morning, I’m going to give it to you straight. Despite what the New York Times headline—“A Star Was (Recently) Born: A Play Boldly Casts Babies”—may imply, the current production of A Doll’s House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music does not feature an all-baby ensemble. The baby in question plays Nora’s youngest child, and merely makes a brief cameo, apparently sporting a sheepskin vest. It’s not that I don’t understand the risks inherent in having a real baby onstage, or the novelty of going for verisimilitude in a role customarily played by a doll. But having had five seconds of imagining baby Ibsen, it was hard to go back. Those five seconds were some of the most glorious of my life. Read More
March 18, 2014 Seidelathon Flame By Dan Piepenbring On April 8, at our Spring Revel, we’ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we’re looking back at the work Seidel has published in The Paris Review throughout his career. Photo: Shreyas Joshi, via Wikimedia Commons “Flame” appeared in our Spring 1981 issue, which included stories by Faulkner, Carver, and Gass; poems by Amiri Baraka and Maxine Kumin, both of whom died earlier this year; and an interview with Rebecca West. With its images of fireflies, moonlight, and waves, the poem finds Seidel at his most earnest; a muted sadness, almost romantic, permeates “Flame,” which is devoid of the wry, lacerating ironies that usually mark his work. And it finishes with one of the most quietly perceptive descriptions of, well, a flame that I can remembering encountering. Here, best to read it for yourself; the poem is more beautiful than any writing about it will be. The honey, the humming of a million bees,In the middle of Florence pining for Paris;The whining trembling the cars and trucks humCrossing the metal matting of Brooklyn BridgeWhen you stand below it on the Brooklyn side—High above you, the harp, the cathedral, the hive—In the middle of Florence. Florence in flames.Like waking from a fever … it is evening.Fireflies breathe in the gardens on Bellosguardo.And then the moon steps from the cypresses andA wave of feeling breaks, phosphorescent—Moonlight, a wave hushing on a beach.In the dark, a flame goes out. And thenThe afterimage of a flame goes out. Buy your ticket to the Revel here.