January 9, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Be More Assertive By Dan Piepenbring Library of Congress Sometimes it’s hard to say how you really feel. You want to be accommodating. You want to be kind. Above all, you want to be liked, but nobody likes a pushover. This is the year to stick up for yourself! We intend to lead by example. Just last week, for instance, some wise guy tweeted, “They can’t fool me. Everyone knows The Paris Review has been just a McSweeney’s Twitter sock-puppet since Plimpton passed away.” Well, that sort of hurt our feelings. We let it slide at the time, but now we’ve grown a pair—AND WE ARE NOT A PUPPET! True, we’ve been touting our subscription deal with McSweeney’s for a week now. We’ve been tireless, not to say relentless, in promoting our association with that fine publication. Why? Not because we’re pushovers, but because—and this is the sound of a literary magazine putting its pedigreed, pedicured, sixty-year-old foot down—it’s one hell of a deal. Think about it. For just $75, you get a full year of McSweeney’s and The Paris Review—that’s a 20 percent savings on all the interviews, fiction, essays, art, poetry, and humor a discerning reader could want. Subscribe now!
January 9, 2014 On the Shelf The Best-Seller Algorithm, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Scientists have developed an algorithm for writing a hit novel. Go easy on the verbs and the clichés, and you, too, may see the best-seller list. (Consider calling your book “The Best-Seller Algorithm,” which has the bold ring of a blockbuster.) An endearingly earnest infographic defends librarians in the digital age. Look out for such phrases as “portal to archive” and “techy-savvy librarianship.” Strange things are afoot in New Mexico, where Cormac McCarthy’s ex-wife has been arrested for threatening someone with a gun after “a domestic dispute over space aliens.” Apologies for burying the lede, but: she produced the gun from her vagina. Earlier this week, an arsonist burned Tripoli’s Al Sa’eh Library, destroying an estimated fifty thousand books.
January 8, 2014 Arts & Culture Divine Wisdom By Kaya Genc Photo: Schezar, via Flickr On May 28, 1453, the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI entered Hagia Sophia, “the church of the divine wisdom,” to pray. Constantinople was under siege, and the fate of the great basilica was unclear. The emperor prayed there before returning to the city walls, where he coordinated the defense effort against the army of Mehmed II, who would be christened conqueror by day’s end. As the two armies struggled to outmaneuver each other, those caught inside Hagia Sophia waited anxiously, fearful of what might happen if the capital of Greek Orthodoxy fell into Muslim hands. Emperor Justinian had commissioned the church in 532 A.D.; planned by the mathematician Anthemius of Tralles and the physicist Isidore of Miletus, and built by more than ten thousand laborers, it was intended to symbolize the magnificence of Christianity and become the seat of the Orthodox patriarch. Twenty years after its completion, two major earthquakes shook Hagia Sophia and destroyed its eastern arch. After extensive renovation, it reopened in 562 A.D. to the delight of Justinian, who, three years before his death, saw his great church survive one of nature’s worst calamities. On May 29, 1453, Mehmed II and his army entered the city, immediately marching on Hagia Sophia. In their book Strolling Through Istanbul, John Freely and Hilary Sumner-Boyd describe how Mehmed “dismounted at the door of the church and bent down to take a handful of earth, which he then sprinkled over his turban as an act of humility before God.” Read More
January 8, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Charmed, I’m Sure By Sadie Stein Contestants for Miss New York City at the Grace Downs Airline Hostess School in New York, 1960. Library of Congress. While visiting my parents over the holidays, I spent a few hours looking over my dad’s extensive magazine archive. He happened to have a copy of the first-ever 1963 New York magazine, Clay Felker’s then Sunday-magazine supplement to the New York Herald Tribune. The articles, by Tom Wolfe, Barbara Goldsmith, and Jimmy Breslin, among others, were fascinating enough. But the thing that captured my imagination was the classifieds section—and one classified in particular. Nestled among the ads for military schools, summer camps, and tutors was the following: I was torn between natural horror—was this some kind of coded reprogramming for “tom-boys”?—and envy for the awkward girls who’d spent three months on said manor and returned to school in September not merely poised, slim, and well groomed, but also proficient equestriennes. One can easily imagine wistful mothers trembling on the brink of the 1960s feeling exactly the same way. Read More
January 8, 2014 Look Ice—It’s More Than Just Frozen Water! By Dan Piepenbring Lower Glacière of the Pré de S. Livres, 1865, an illustration from Ice-caves of France and Switzerland. If ice has lost all its wonder and the world feels to you like little more than a refrigerated truck, spend a few minutes with Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland: A Narrative of Subterranean Exploration, George Forrest Browne’s 1865 account of his journeys into the glacières of Chappet-sur-Villaz, La Genollière, and other such exotic Continental locales. The book’s tone is, as its title might suggest, implacably British, and Browne makes for an almost risibly agreeable narrator. The man simply loves to describe ice. It did not separate under the axe into misshapen pieces, with faces of every possible variation from regularity, that is, with what is called vitreous fracture, but rather separated into a number of nuts of limpid ice, each being of a prismatic form, and of much regularity in shape and size. A contemporary reader might expect some harrowing brush with fate, but this is not Into Thin Air. Browne is largely content to stay out of harm’s way: It would be very imprudent to go straight into an ice-cave after a long walk on a hot summer’s day, so we prepared to dine under the shade of the trees at the edge of the pit, and I went down into the cave for a few moments to get a piece of ice for our wine. And lest you tire of his meticulous accounts of ice formations, you’ll find relief in the more mundane details of his travelogue: A counter-irritant appeared in the shape of a fellow-traveller, whose luggage consisted of a stick and an old pair of boots. The man was not pleasant to be near in any way, and he was evidently not at all satisfied with the amount of room I allowed him. He kept discontentedly and doggedly pushing his spare pair of boots farther and farther into my two-thirds of the seat, and once or twice was on the point of a protest, in which case I was prepared to tell him that as he filled the whole banquette with his smell, he ought in reason to be satisfied with less room for himself.
January 8, 2014 On the Shelf Because, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The American Dialect Society—how do we join?—has voted because the word of the year. They chose because because because “exploded with new grammatical possibilities in informal online use.” In the Midwest, towns are living without Borders. (The defunct bookstore chain, not the metaphorical limitation.) Some independent bookstores have even cropped up in its place. How did Reddit’s brilliant AMA series go from geeky to mainstream? (Did you know The Paris Review did one last year?) “Of course, my definition of evil is not everybody else’s. Evil is being involved in the glamour and charm of material existence, glamour in its old Gaelic sense meaning enchantment with the look of things, rather than the soul of things.” An expansive interview with the singular Kenneth Anger.