March 13, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Small Wonder By Sadie Stein “Bond always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big—bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.” ―Ian Fleming Every class has one, or maybe two: a child so improbably small that this becomes his or her identity. There he is, on the end of your class picture year after year, forced to play a pawn in the fifth grade human-chess game (wearing a teacher’s old velour shirt as a tunic), any child role in a play, and later the deadweight in a freshman year trust exercise. He humbly takes this as his due. He does not need James Bond proto-Godwin-ing to make him feel the sting of his lowly position. I have come across many treasures on the giveaway table of my building’s lobby, but my most recent acquisition is perhaps the greatest. Short Chic: The everything-you-need-to-know fashion guide for every woman under 5’4″ could have come from the apartments of literally half my neighbors, but now it is mine. The cover features a petite woman dressed in the height of 1981 style: slouchy heeled boots, what looks like a leather duffel coat, a large woolen scarf, and some kind of bulbous cap that (the helpful height chart next to her informs us) brings her to a towering 5’1″. The two authors, according to their back-flap bios, are, respectively, 5’3″ and 5’2″. Read More
March 13, 2014 Several Men Scotty By David Mamet The fourth of five vignettes. Photo: M. O. Stevens, via Wikimedia Commons M. F. K. Fisher had a magic gardener. This fellow, she wrote, understood the daily weather, the seasons and the various planting cycles, the necessity of encouraging or discouraging bird and insect life, landscape arrangement, grafting, and everything associated with the garden. He was an old Scotsman who, she discovered, in an earlier life, had written extensively on horticulture; and here he was, in his retirement, working for her, and quietly teaching her to tend her garden. He was the Platonic ideal of the gardener. And, of course, she wrote, he did not actually exist. But I did not believe her. I knew not only that he somewhere existed, but that I might be lucky enough to meet him face to face. Those besotted by an interest long for the perfect teacher. He who would be not only the complete master of his craft, but of himself: capable of leading the student, through a brilliant mixture of silence and misdirection, to reach his own, practicable conclusions. Read More
March 13, 2014 On the Shelf Opera As It Used to Be, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Lodovico Burnacini, Il Pomo d’Oro, Act I, Scene V, Jupiter and His Court at Banquet with Discord Floating in a Cloud above the Table, hand-colored engraving, 1668. Image via the New York Review of Books. The world’s twenty most stunning libraries. How many have you been shushed in? Bill Cunningham’s early photographs of New York. These illustrations from From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging elucidate the finer points of things you didn’t know you cared about, such as stagecraft and lighting techniques in seventeenth-century opera. The late philosopher Bernard Williams knew what to look for in a role model: “glistening contempt for philosophy … it is only by condescension or to amuse himself that he stays and listens to its arguments at all.” “Hilma af Klint was an old-school spiritualist who believed that she channeled psychic and esoteric messages from the so-called High Masters—who existed in another dimension—into abstract paintings.”
March 12, 2014 Bulletin Emma Cline Wins Plimpton Prize; Ben Lerner Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review Photo of Emma Cline by James Williams; photo of Ben Lerner by Matt Lerner Each year, at our annual Spring Revel, the board of The Paris Review awards two prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It is with great pleasure that we announce our 2014 honorees. The Plimpton Prize for Fiction is a $10,000 award given to a new voice from our last four issues. Named after our longtime editor George Plimpton, it commemorates his zeal for discovering new writers. This year’s Plimpton Prize will be presented by Lydia Davis to Emma Cline for her story “Marion,” from issue 205. The Terry Southern Prize is a $5,000 award honoring “humor, wit, and sprezzatura” in work from either The Paris Review or the Daily. This year’s prize will be presented by Roz Chast to Ben Lerner for “False Spring” (issue 205) and “Specimen Days” (issue 208). Both are excerpts from his forthcoming novel 10:04. From all of us on staff, a heartfelt chapeau! (And if you haven’t bought your ticket to attend the Revel—supporting the magazine and writers you love—isn’t this the time?)
March 12, 2014 Arts & Culture Big as Life By Luke Epplin E. L. Doctorow’s prescient, forgotten sci-fi novel. Photo via Wikimedia Commons No living novelist has written about New York City with as much historical insight as E. L. Doctorow, this generation’s bard of the five boroughs. It seemed only a matter of time, then, before Doctorow grappled in his fiction with 9/11. But the recently released Andrew’s Brain is an unlikely 9/11 novel, at least from Doctorow. For one, it’s deliberately narrow in scope, structured as a claustrophobic dialogue between the titular character, a hapless titular scientist, and his faceless interlocutor, presumably a psychiatrist. Like his contemporaries—Don DeLillo with Falling Man, John Updike with Terrorist—Doctorow approaches the event not on a grand scale but in miniature. In rambling, unreliable anecdotes, Andrew cycles through the devastating events of his adult life. As a sleep-deprived graduate student, he accidentally poisons his newborn daughter with faultily prescribed medicine. After his wife divorces him, Andrew, wracked with guilt, decamps for a small college in the Wasatch Mountains. There he meets Briony, a buoyant undergraduate gymnast—a manic pixie dream girl if ever there was one. Her improbable love lifts Andrew from his self-pitying grief cycle and allows him to experience happiness, at least fleetingly. She and Andrew marry and move to New York City, where Briony gives birth to a baby girl. Shortly thereafter, on a routine morning jog through downtown Manhattan, Briony dies in the September 11 attacks. In helpless despair, Andrew drives to his ex-wife’s suburban home and hands her his infant daughter, seemingly as a replacement for the one he had neglectfully killed years earlier. Read More
March 12, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Micromégas By Sadie Stein Photo: Axel Pixel, via Wikimedia Commons Many of my closest friends are sick of hearing my “theory of aliens.” This is not a political stance, but rather a strong opinion about extraterrestrials. For much of my life, I’ve had a faint aversion to aliens. I didn’t like movies or X-Files episodes that dealt with them; I avoided science-fiction stories featuring life on other planets; I couldn’t even get into the campy, genre-defying sidekick on Futurama. (And yes, we all understand that from the time of Voltaire, and later Wells, the alien invasion narrative has been an allegory for the threat of military hegemony—from Eastern powers, specifically.) This was not about whether or not aliens existed. If pressed, I guess I would have said probably not, but that wasn’t even the issue: they could have existed, and shown up, and done a bunch of amateur proctology, and I’d still have been averse. From what I could gather, aliens had no sense of humor, and no interests besides probing and machinery. Then I was watching Gravity, and I thought, Hmm, even though these are pretend astronauts, I could never be an astronaut. And then I thought, But maybe most of the aliens on other planets couldn’t be astronauts either! And then came the real revelation: Maybe the aliens we meet are just the nerds of outer space! Read More