September 4, 2013 Bull City Summer Seventeen Innings, Twenty-Nine Years By Adam Sobsey The old Durham Athletic Park. Photo: Kate Joyce. Should anyone flatter us by asking us what we are searching for, we think immediately, almost instinctively, in vast terms—God, fulfillment, love—but our lives are actually made up of tiny searches for things … Add them together, and these things make up an epic quest. —Geoff Dyer The playoffs begin in Durham tonight. It’s tempting to dismiss minor-league championships as dubious, if not entirely factitious, especially in Triple-A: major-league rosters expanded on September 1, so the Bulls and their competitors have been raided for some of their best players. The post-Labor Day games draw tiny crowds anyway. So who cares? I do. The most exciting game I’ve ever seen was a Durham Bulls playoff game. September 4, 1984. Twenty-nine years ago today, the Durham Bulls beat the Lynchburg Mets, 8-7 in seventeen innings, in game two of the Carolina League Championship series. I was at the game in a nominally official capacity. That year I was the “statistician” for Steve Pratt, the Bulls’ radio broadcaster. My job was also factitious: Steve kept his own stats; he was just carrying out a favor for the team owner, who was collegially friendly with my stepfather and humored him by taking me on. My pay was a free sandwich after the fifth inning. I had a calculator and crunched some numbers, but mostly I sat there all summer and watched baseball. Read More
September 4, 2013 On the Shelf Fifty Shades of Rage, and Other News By Sadie Stein Joey Ramone sings John Cage adapting Finnegans Wake. Got that? Paul Muldoon’s eulogy for Seamus Heaney. Fans of the Fifty Shades series are outraged at the casting for the upcoming film adaptations; a petition is circulating and already boasts 7,300 signatures. The producer has taken to Twitter to defend himself. The Agatha Christie estate has granted permission to author Sophie Hannah to write a new Poirot mystery.
September 3, 2013 On Translation Franzen on Kraus: Footnote 3 By Jonathan Franzen Oskar Kokoschka’s 1925 portrait of Karl Kraus. Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. This week, to celebrate the launch of our Fall issue, we will preview a few of our favorite footnotes from “Against Heine,” Jonathan Franzen’s translation of the Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Click here to get your subscription now! Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads.3 (p. 189) 3 You’re not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the blogosphere and the billion (or is it two billion now?) “individualized” Facebook pages may make you want to say them. Kraus was known, in his day, to his many enemies, as the Great Hater. By most accounts, he was a tender and generous man in his private life, with many loyal friends. But once he starts winding the stem of his polemical rhetoric, it carries him into extremely harsh registers. (“Harsh,” incidentally, is a fun word to say with a slacker inflection. To be harsh is to be uncool; and in the world of coolness and uncoolness—the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests—the highest register that cultural criticism can safely reach is snark. Snark, indeed, is cool’s twin sibling.) As Kraus will make clear, the individualized “blockheads” that he has in mind aren’t hoi polloi. Although Kraus could sound like an elitist, and although he considered the right-wing antisemites idiotic, he wasn’t in the business of denigrating the masses or lowbrow culture; the calculated difficulty of his writing wasn’t a barricade against the barbarians. It was aimed, instead, at bright and well-educated cultural authorities who embraced a phony kind of individuality—people Kraus believed ought to have known better. It’s not clear that Kraus’s shrill, ex cathedra denunciations were the most effective way to change hearts and minds. But I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter. Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, n+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the Internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the Internet’s accelerating pauperization of freelance writers. Or when good lefty professors who once resisted alienation—who criticized capitalism for its restless assault on every tradition and every community that gets in its way—start calling the corporatized Internet “revolutionary,” happily embrace Apple computers, and persist in gushing about their virtues.
September 3, 2013 In Memoriam In Memoriam: John Hollander By Jeff Dolven and Lorin Stein During his five-decade career as a poet, the late John Hollander was a frequent contributor to The Paris Review. He was also renowned as a scholar and critic. Here he is remembered by two former students, our contributor Jeff Dolven and editor Lorin Stein. John Hollander once told me a story that served him as a kind of ur-scene of explanation. As a boy he was sitting with his father at the breakfast table, and he asked, apropos of nothing he could later recall, “Dad, what is a molecule?” By way of an answer, his father reached into the sugar bowl and lifted out a cube. “So what is this?” his father asked. “Sugar,” said John. Next his father set the cube down on the table and rapped it sharply with a teaspoon, so that it broke into coarse crystals. “And what is it now?” “Sugar,” said John again. “Well then,” said his father, “a molecule is the smallest piece of sugar you can get that’s still sugar.” The grown-up John delivered the last sentence like a punchline, laughing and widening his eyes and spreading his hands. Read More
September 3, 2013 On the Shelf William Faulkner’s Unexpected Art, and Other News By Sadie Stein William Faulkner’s drawings from his Ole Miss days are wonderfully Deco. Random House UK launches The Happy Foodie, described thusly: “Bringing cookery books to life, helping you get happy in the kitchen.” In other slogan-y UK books news, Books Are My Bag (which supports bookstores and features a tote bag bearing exactly those words) attracts celebrity adherents. Cairo’s iconic German-language bookstore, Lehnert & Landrock, faces closure amidst the nation’s turmoil. “Beckett had a lifelong interest in chess and was a keen player, following many of the big matches, says his nephew, Edward, who oversees the Beckett estate.” How chess influenced Samuel Beckett’s work.
September 3, 2013 Bulletin Introducing Our Fall Issue! By The Paris Review Since 1953, a central mission of The Paris Review has been the discovery of new voices. Why? It’s not just a matter of wanting to lead the pack or provide publishers with fresh blood. In “The Poet” Emerson wrote, “the experience of each new age requires a new confession.” That’s our idea, too. Even by TPR standards, our Fall issue is full of new confessions. Readers will remember Ottessa Moshfegh, the winner of this year’s Plimpton Prize. We think our other fiction contributors—and most of our poets—will be new to you. They certainly caught us off guard. We also have new kinds of work from writers you do know—a photography portfolio curated by Lydia Davis, and a project more than twenty years in the works: Jonathan Franzen’s translation of Karl Kraus, including some of the most passionate footnotes we’ve encountered since Pale Fire. Find an interview with groundbreaking writer Ursula K. Le Guin: A lot of twentieth-century— and twenty-first-century—American readers think that that’s all they want. They want nonfiction. They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before. The Art of Nonfiction with Emmanuel Carrère: Your first impulse is to be terribly embarrassed by the other’s suffering, and you don’t know what to do, and then there’s the moment when you stop asking yourself questions and you just do what you have to do. All this plus new poems by former Paris Review editors Dan Chiasson, Charles Simic, and Frederick Seidel. Subscribe now!