February 28, 2014 Bulletin Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Prude By Dan Piepenbring We at The Paris Review Daily do not ordinarily see fit to intervene in matters of geopolitics. But the Times brings news too dismaying to ignore: in a ham-fisted effort to tighten national security, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters has intercepted millions of images from Yahoo webcams. And what have they gotten for their troubles? Not sensitive documents, hot tips, or even shifty conversation—just eyeful after eyeful of amateur porn. Worse still, they’re not even turned on by it. “Unfortunately, there are issues with undesirable images within the data,” one GCHQ document reads. “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.” An internal agency survey of 323 Yahoo usernames found that 7.1 percent of those images contained “undesirable nudity.” “Undesirable” our asses! (Which would, if bared on Yahoo webcams, provide only the most desirable foreign intelligence in the world.)
February 28, 2014 On the Shelf February’s Shocking Secret, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The astounding, filthy origins of our second month. A derelict tank in mud, c. 1917; photo via the Canadian Dept. of Defense. You won’t BELIEVE February’s dirty, hidden past! “Before we adopted the Latin name for the second month, Old English used much more vibrant names to describe it. The most common Old English name was Solmonath, which literally means ‘mud month.’” You won’t BELIEVE what a steady dose of antidepressants and benzodiazepines did to this writer’s creativity! You won’t BELIEVE who offered these kind, pizzalicious words about our magazine! “I have every issue of The Paris Review, and I only read them when I feel like I’ve worked really hard and deserve a reward. It’s like New York pizza—hard to find a bad slice.” You won’t BELIEVE how far your jaw drops when you look at these eleventh-century illustrations of the Book of Revelation! You won’t BELIEVE how this parrot helped solve a crime in India! “Whenever Ashutosh’s name was mentioned, the parrot would start screeching.” You won’t BELIEVE how lame this writerly T-shirt is!
February 27, 2014 Events Tonight: Join Us for an AWP Happy Hour By Dan Piepenbring Continuing last week’s westerly trend, our digital director, Justin Alvarez, and our associate editor, Stephen Hiltner, have descended upon Seattle for the AWP Conference. (I’ve never been to Seattle, so I won’t even try to set the scene for you. Insert clichéd quip here—about the Space Needle, Starbucks, the grunge scene, flannel, Microsoft, rain, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, etc.) If you’re around, be sure to stop by table N18, where Justin and Stephen will be all weekend with discounted subscription deals, tote bags, selected back issues from our archives, endless charm, easy smiles, and more. Oh, almost forgot: booze. There are few things writers and publishers enjoy more than drinking on the cheap; we know this. Thus, from six to eight this evening, The Paris Review is co-hosting a happy hour at Linda’s Tavern with A Strange Object, Electric Literature, and Guernica. Stop by for first-rate hobnobbing and, yes, alcohol.
February 27, 2014 First Person It’s My Party By David Pablo Cohn How many hotheaded academics does it take to solve a riddle? Andrew Stevovich, Hat Party, 2012, 7″ x 8″. I don’t know what the best thing was about Jim Propp’s parties. They were a crystalline picture of the specialized, rarefied company I kept when I lived in Cambridge in the midnineties, parked on Mass. Ave. halfway between Harvard and MIT. Profs, postdocs, and assorted academic keepsakes from the cream of Boston academia all piled into Jim’s Victorian four-square house in Somerville for an evening of … well, we never quite knew what the evening would bring. Technically, these were “word game” parties. Each was planned around a series of intellectual challenges arranged around the house more or less like evil wizards, ax-wielding dwarves, or more mundane impediments in a typical game of Dungeons & Dragons. You’d team up with a couple friends (or the pretty redhead who was probably dating one of your professors, if you could), and make your way from room to room, solving bits and pieces of puzzles that—if you were lucky—you could string together for the grand solution. The prize was bragging rights until the next party, six months down the line. In any case, it all began with the invitation. Twice a year, a mysterious envelope would appear. I remember the first one I received: a single sheet with nothing but a swirling Spirograph flower on one side, and the letters RSVP below it. Where, when, and how were left to the recipient, presumably after he or she had coaxed the secret out of the cryptic drawing. Read More
February 27, 2014 Fashion & Style, Our Daily Correspondent Live Long and Prosper By Sadie Stein Milton Glaser Collection Box 57 Folder 14: mechanical for Bloomingdale’s advertisement, c. 1970; image via Container List. Saturday is a special day for buying and doing beautiful things. A whole day stretching ahead. It’s a new lifestyle. A man. A woman. Art exhibits. Antiquing. Movies. Cocktails. Shopping. … together. You’re searching for a special gown. You want something different. You find it at Regalia, a fully-lined chiffon and velvet gown with matching hot pants. You know fashion. You’re a member of Saturday’s Generation. —Schenectady Gazette ad for Regalia Boutique, 1971 Recently, Gothamist featured a 1976 60 Minutes story on said “Saturday’s Generation”—a short-lived term for the young people who “walk and glide, trip and mince, and stride” through a Bloomingdale’s of a Saturday, doing and buying beautiful things and picking each other up. In the segment, Blair Sabol (of the Village Voice) describes Saturday’s Generation in terms that, today, may as well be a foreign language, but that seem to spell out proto-yuppie. “I think of a couple, and they live on the Upper East Side, and they have chrome and glass furniture, and they’ve got the brie cheese, and they’re wearing the Famous Amos T-shirt, and they’ve got the right patch jeans … that’s a very heavy identity.” Read More
February 27, 2014 Look A Most Searching Examination By Dan Piepenbring Image via Pop Chart Lab Pop Chart Lab, whose laudable ambition is “to render all of human experience in chart form,” is offering a print consisting of twenty-nine first sentences from novels, including one of my favorites, from David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress: “In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.” Of course, a print comprised of nothing but text would be not much of a print at all, so Pop Chart Lab has done us the favor of diagramming every sentence according to the Reed-Kellogg System, color coded and all. Plotting out the beginning of Don Quixote is, as you can see, complicated. As a pedagogical device, sentence diagrams have fallen out of fashion; I never had to draw them (if that’s even the right verb) in school, nor was I made to study any grammar beyond the rudimentary parts of speech. This makes me feel like a fraud whenever I pretend to be a grammarian, as I often do. In fact, before today, I’d never heard of the Reed-Kellogg System; it sounds to me like a proprietary method for processing and packaging cornflakes. Actually, it dates back to 1877, when it was invented by two men with great names, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg. Though the Don Quixote sample is intimidating, diagramming sentences turns out to be fairly intuitive. (“And fun!” adds a sad, sorry voice in my head.) You begin with the base, a horizontal line; write the subject on the left and the predicate on the right, separated by a vertical bar. Then separate the verb and its object with another mark—if you have a direct object, use a vertical line, and if you have a predicate noun (had to look that up) or an adjective (that one I knew), use a backslash. Modifiers of the subject, predicate, or object “dangle below the base.” Read More