March 12, 2014 On the Shelf Papa’s Risqué Mash Note, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Publicity still of Marlene Dietrich in No Highway. Image via Wikimedia Commons “Drunk and naked I would advance from the rear, or your rear, wearing evening clothes.” A ribald note from Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich is soon to be auctioned—their relationship was, alas, never consummated, but if the price is right, you could own a record of their long flirtation, replete with such swooning phrases as “whore blood,” “foaming at the mouth,” and “Dearest Kraut.” Talking doors, gossip machines, super-duper turntables: here’s what Philip K. Dick, writing from the vantage point of 1966, thought 1992 might have been like. Would that it were. While we’re on sci-fi: the New Museum’s new exhibition, “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module,” plunges you into the old socialist vision of space travel. “Filko has a wall-mounted tablet nearby where, donning a wall-tethered headset that brings your forehead unnaturally close to the screen, you can ponder his ruminations on the fourth dimension.” “Tomorrow starts here.” “One course at a time.” “Be the difference.” The surprisingly vacuous phrases copyrighted by universities. A newly reprinted 1856 essay gives German comedy quite the drubbing: “German humor generally shows no sense of measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come.”
March 11, 2014 Seidelathon Dayley Island By Dan Piepenbring On April 8th, 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: Christoph Michels “Dayley Island” is the first poem Frederick Seidel published in The Paris Review—it appeared in our twenty-sixth issue, from Summer/Fall 1961, alongside work by Norman Mailer, Thom Gunn, Malcolm Lowry, and Tom Keogh, among many others; there were also interviews with Ilya Ehrenburg and Marianne Moore. (“I have a passion for rhythm and accent, so blundered into versifying.”) In the sumptuousness of a line like “My slippers / exhale lamé,” “Dayley Island” bears the traces of what would become, to me, a Seidel hallmark: a certain brand of knowing, luxurious weariness. The poem also makes elegant use of one of my all-time favorite verbs, the arrantly unpoetic “winterize.” But what’s it about, you ask? Well, far be it for me to say. But a brief round of Googling did reveal this amusingly compact summary, from a 1963 edition of The Virginia Quarterly Review: “In ‘Dayley Island’ the slaughter of rabbits on a Maine coastal island becomes associated in the mind of an aging refugee woman psychiatrist with the extermination of her family by Nazi hands.” Sounds like something to add to your Netflix queue. The VQR also notes, approvingly, that “some readers may feel … their decorum outraged” by Seidel’s poems. Gulls spiral high above The porch tiles and my gulf-green, Cliff-hanging lawn, with their Out-of-breath wail, as Dawn catches the silver ball Set in the dried up bird bath To scare the gulls. My slippersExhale lamé. I was egged on by old age—To sell that house, Winterize this house, Give up my practice… Read the whole poem here, and buy your ticket to the Revel here.
March 11, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Disgusting Lives By Sadie Stein From the cover of Goops and How to Be Them, 1900. The other day I visited with a four-year-old friend; we read a book called Manners. As the title implies, this is a guide to basic children’s etiquette, with an emphasis on consideration for others, and it was cute and instructive. But I couldn’t help thinking that it didn’t have quite the élan of The Goops. Created by the humorist Gelett Burgess (also inventor of “the blurb”) in the late nineteenth century, the Goops were humanoid characters with enormous round heads who behaved disgracefully—children could profit from their example and get an illicit thrill from their antics. “The Goops” comic strip was a recurring feature in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas. The book, Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants Inculcating Many Juvenile Virtues Both by Precept and Example, with Ninety Drawings, came out in 1900 to instant acclaim. I can still remember the opening lines: The Goops, they lick their fingers,and the Goops, they lick their knives;They spill their broth on the tablecloth,Oh, they lead disgusting lives! Read More
March 11, 2014 Arts & Culture Growing Up Together By Chris Knapp Love through the lens of Fellini. Fellini and Masina on the set of La Strada, 1954. Photo: Studio Patellani Among the central occupations of Fellini’s work is what he wants from the women in his life. Near the end of 8½, his alter ego speaks of a kind of Ideal Woman: “She’s beautiful … young, yet ancient … child, yet already woman. Authentic, complete. It’s obvious she could be his salvation.” Between the breathy declaiming and 8½’s famous layers of metafiction, you get the idea that even Fellini sees this isn’t exactly a healthy attitude. Still, throughout his work, the search for an ideal of womanhood is represented in a series of large and buxom temptresses: Anita Ekberg, Sandra Milo, Eddra Gale in an especially memorable dance sequence as La Saraghina. But pulling his films off the shelf one by one, my wife and I agreed the problem was most nearly solved, onscreen and in life, by his wife and best collaborator, the tiny and brilliant Guilietta Masina. For any of this to make sense I’ll have to say a little about what Lola, the woman in my life, is like. To start, she’s French. She’s small and she likes to refer to herself as my little wife, but she’s solid too, and fit, with strong legs: in the WNFL she’d be a halfback. When she gets excited she bounces on her toes and hugs me around the waist, looking up at me. She’s far from graceless but she sometimes moves with a child’s gracelessness, like Masina—that physicality, impetuosity of expression and utterance, a mischievous delight in small wonders and small triumphs. On the other hand, when she has to enter or pass through a dark room, she stands for a moment at the threshold looking in with narrowed eyes. Anyway, I’m guessing the comparison to Masina will please her; she’s herself an actress, the kind whose outsize physical presence lends to rather than diminishes the subtlety of her performances. She comes from a family of film people, and all manner of moving image can transfix her: Tarkovsky, or Ozu, or Maya Deren. She sleeps deeply, dreams bodily, and uses cuddle as a transitive verb, one of the few early solecisms she’s done me the kindness of preserving. She cuddles me. Read More
March 11, 2014 Several Men He Was My Closest Friend By David Mamet The second of five vignettes. Photo: Larry Moyer He lived alone in various houses, and moved from one to the next in response to no discernible stimulus. I assumed that, at some point, he felt it was just “time to move.” He had lost his first wife, and their young daughter to cancer. And he told me that the terrible thing was not that they were dead, but that they stayed dead. I thought of it often, and think of it oftener since his death. I’d had a cold and was sleeping in the little guest cubby in the eaves of the attic, and I woke up with an intolerable pain in my chest. I knew I was dying, and thought, Well, this is a heart attack. It subsided, and I went back to sleep, only to be struck, again, some time later. The next morning a mutual friend called to tell me that Shel had died the night before of a heart attack—in fact, of two heart attacks, some minutes apart. My wife sent me to have my heart checked out, and its only defect was that it was broken. Read More
March 11, 2014 On the Shelf Listening to Stonehenge, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: The Stonehenge Stone Circle, via Flickr George Saunders is the first to win the new £40,000 Folio Prize. Joe McGinniss is dead, at seventy-one. Illustrations from international editions of Don Quixote published in the quixotic sixties. “As a teenager, I thought I was the only person who revered Geek Love … Years later, when I was an editor at The Paris Review, I wrote to Dunn, and we became occasional pen pals.” Stonehenge may have been a “prehistoric glockenspiel”; it’s made of “lithophones, or rocks that produce notes when struck.” “His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces.”