January 9, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Beautiful Hide By Sadie Stein Jane Powell and Howard Keel in a poster for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Not that long ago, I was walking down a Brooklyn street and encountered an elderly woman surrounded by grocery bags. I offered to help carry them into her apartment, and I was sort of disappointed when she said yes and I saw what a long staircase it was and how heavy the bags were. After several trips we’d gotten them all in and she thanked me. “I was worried I was going to miss the beginning of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on TV,” she explained. “It’s my favorite movie.” “You know,” I said, “it’s out on DVD now. I’d be glad to loan it to you.” “Oh, I have the DVD,” she said blithely. The film inspires such irrational devotion. Whenever I am down, I go to YouTube and watch the barn-dance scene, which is famous not just because of the number of accomplished dancers in the cast but also because of the sheer, exhausting athleticism of Michael Kidd’s choreography. As a child, I decided that my wedding party would replicate the entire number—I was going to be Milly and do the pas de deux in the middle—but then you grow up and realize that unless you are a dictator on an international scale, this kind of thing is impossible. Nevertheless, I defy anyone to watch it and not get just a little bit cheered up. Read More
January 9, 2014 Quote Unquote Simone de Beauvoir Would Have Been 106 Today By Dan Piepenbring Simone de Beauvoir arriving in Israel with Jean-Paul Sartre, 1967. Photo: Milner Moshe, via Wikimedia Commons. INTERVIEWER Some critics and readers have felt that you spoke about old age in an unpleasant way. DE BEAUVOIR A lot of people didn’t like what I said because they want to believe that all periods of life are delightful, that children are innocent, that all newlyweds are happy, that all old people are serene. I’ve rebelled against such notions all my life, and there’s no doubt about the fact that the moment, which for me is not old age but the beginning of old age, represents—even if one has all the resources one wants, affection, work to be done—represents a change in one’s existence, a change that is manifested by the loss of a great number of things. If one isn’t sorry to lose them it’s because one didn’t love them. I think that people who glorify old age or death too readily are people who really don’t love life. Of course, in present-day France you have to say that everything’s fine, that everything’s lovely, including death. —Simone de Beauvoir, the Art of Fiction No. 35
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