September 2, 2013 On Food The Snack By Molly Hannon I first considered the meaning of the word snack in fourth grade while reading the children’s book The Giver. The main character, Jonas, remembers elementary school, when the proper pronunciation of the word eluded him. He says “smack” instead and is punished with the literal smack of a ruler until he learns to pronounce the word correctly. The author uses Jonas’s confusion to highlight the book’s main theme: that knowledge and pain should never be tied together. Though the “snack” incident plays only a minor role in The Giver, it made me realize that prior to pre-school there had been no such thing as a snack. There were three meals a day that were prepared and consumed rather formally. Meals were pleasurable and nourishing and that was that. They had purpose—they knew who they were, followed a routine schedule, had a role, and happily filled their recipients. They gave context to a day and helped quell any hint of insatiable hunger, or bouts of melancholy. They maintained a steady daily course from kitchen to table to belly. They delivered. Read More
September 2, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles, Part 3 By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner’s research into the endless ways we’ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Every Monday for the next four weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. Is immortality real? Depends on your definition of real. Eternal life isn’t into proof. It’s unverifiable. Intangible. In the hiddenness, as they say. That isn’t deterring anyone. The majority of Americans (between 74% and 81.1%, depending on the survey) believe in life after death. One subsection of the unbelieving minority also believes in the possibility of everlasting life, albeit in a different, fleshly guise: they are hot for physical immortality. Those feverishly pursuing technological attempts to never die—the transhumanist billionaires and radical Plastic Omega life-extensionists, the cyborgian robot-cultists and extropian illusion-peddlers—are convinced that scientific breakthroughs will soon end aging and render us capable of living forever. Will we evolve into immortal data-people? Or is the singularitarians’ desire for Human Version 2.0 simply another way to assuage our innate fear of finality? Whatever the narrative, stories about immortality are always attempts to manage death, to make sense of its loamy unknowability, to dispel uncertainty. Freedom means we can align ourselves with whatever mythology resonates, from pearly gates to nanobot foglets to nothing at all. Either way, immortality isn’t something we can fully resolve. It can’t be known; only believed in. Read More
August 30, 2013 Listen Frederick Seidel’s “Widening Income Inequality” By Hailey Gates Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (based on a WPA photo by John E. Allen) At our last issue launch party, Frederick Seidel, looking over a throng of people, turned to me and asked, “What do you make of all this?” There were summer thunderstorms that night, which kept people from going home and in turn encouraged a sort of athletic drinking. Before I could answer him (not that I would have even had the gall to answer), a stranger embraced me in a very sudden, shapeless goodbye. I turned back to Mr. Seidel, who scoffed, “There you go like all the ‘other girls,’ sticking your butt out as you hug a poor fellow, god forbid your pelvises touch!” “But that’s what I make of it, Seidel! All of my goodbyes are hinged at the waist.” Strangely enough, Frederick Seidel is what brought me to The Paris Review. I was asked to do a reading of his poems in honor of Bastille Day, which I am sure he found too crass of an idea to actually attend. I was told it would be a “big deal” because they were all “debuts,” as Seidel never reads his poetry out loud. Of course, I reveled in the bawdy reality of a young girl reading the poems of Fred Seidel. I still do. This may seem like I am campaigning to become Frederick Seidel’s exclusive reader; make no mistake, that is exactly what I am doing. So here I am, Fred, hinging at the waist, bawdily reading your poem. What do you make of all of that?
August 30, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Wittgenstein, Hopper, Strangers By The Paris Review Edward Hopper, Office at Night Here, in no particular order, are things I hate about historical novels: exposition, walk-ons by famous people, anachronistic dialogue, imaginary letters from actual figures, physical comedy, the looming shadow of war/horrors of trench warfare/Nazi menace, “heated debates,” and Cambridge dons asking after one anothers’ small children—in the nineteen-teens—as if they taught Communications at Pomona. All of these things may be found in Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It, a fictionalized life of Ludwig Wittgenstein first published in 1987. Why on earth did I pick it up? Because at 558 pages, it was the longest New York Review Classic for sale at the Strand, and because if the New York Review decides to reprint an historical novel, I want to know why. Within three pages, I was addicted. Within three days, I was babbling about it to my friends. Here’s Bertrand Russell with his bad breath, phlegmatic G. E. Moore, and Wittgenstein—saintly, sympathetic, an angel of intellectual destruction—a hero so well written I kept forgetting he was real. —Lorin Stein I haven’t been to see the show yet, but the catalogue for the Whitney’s exhibition of Edward Hopper drawings is itself pretty fantastic. The studies for his best-known paintings—Nighthawks and Early Sunday Morning among them—are fascinating windows into his process, and the spare sketches of, say, a man’s suited back are strangely riveting, but my favorite works in the book are his watercolor portraits from 1906–1907 of various “characters” from the Paris streets: La Pierreuse, Le Militaire, Fille de Joie, Le Terrassier. In the figures’ heavy brows and deep shading, they strike me as a strange combination of William Pène du Bois’s drawings of bears and of Eric Powell’s The Goon. Hopper’s rather fashiony pen-and-ink sketches—pages of Figures in Hats, Man with Moustache and Women in Dresses and Hats, Diver, Sailors, Male Figure, and Arm—are also wonderfully chaotic and occasionally bizarre. —Nicole Rudick Read More
August 30, 2013 In Memoriam Seamus Heaney, 1939–2013 By Sadie Stein “I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people’s necks.” —Seamus Heaney, the Art of Poetry No. 75
August 30, 2013 On the Shelf RIP Seamus Heaney, and Other News By Sadie Stein Seamus Heaney has died, at the age of seventy-four. The Guardian brings us a number of his inimitable recordings. The Nuyorican Poets Café celebrates its fortieth birthday. In yet more poetry news: Alberto Rios is Arizona’s first poet laureate.