October 25, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Marionettes, Ducks, and Connell By The Paris Review I was about to describe Barbara Comyns’s hyper-vivid little novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) as Ivy Compton-Burnett on acid. Then I googled Comyns. Top result: “Barbara Comyns Is Not Anyone on Acid.” Thank you, Emily Gould. But why do so many readers reach for the same cliché? Who Was Changed is trippy from sentence one: “The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had forced the windows open; so the ducks swam in. Round the room they sailed quacking their approval; then they sailed out again to explore the wonderful new world that had come in the night.” The real trippiness of the novel—about an English village struck by a mysterious epidemic—lies not just in its eye-rubbingly bright details, but also in its moral sensibility. Flood, fire, madness descend on Comyns’s characters without any of the usual narratorial handwringing, occasionally accompanied by ducks. Comyns is so matter-of-fact as to be surreal, and irresistible. —Lorin Stein Until recently, I had never read Evan S. Connell; quite the faux pas when you consider that Mrs. Bridge originated as a short story in the Fall 1955 issue of The Paris Review. In this, his first novel, Connell paints a brilliantly handsome and moving portrait of a woman by the name of India Bridge and her unspectacular Kansas City family. We follow the quotidian concerns of a woman plagued by upper-middle-class luxury, and while her obsession with all things bourgeois lends humor to the novel, Connell refuses to pass any sort of judgment on his protagonist. And yet we feel the muted despair of a family divided by perpetual boredom, isolation, and the complete inability to connect. We ache for a mother’s attempt (and failure) to mother, a wife’s desperation to be loved, a woman’s unending struggle with herself. Connell’s prose is decisively, and artfully, quiet; yet the silence he weaves into the novel’s 117 chapters brims with the same fervor and frustration buried in his characters. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
October 25, 2013 Arts & Culture Horror Story By Sadie Stein “First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.” So begins Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury’s 1962 tale of a demonic carnival that descends on a Midwestern town. I’ve long loved the 1983 Disney adaptation (which is way scarier than many a grown-up horror movie, and actually nothing like the synth-heavy trailer) but until this fall, had never read the book. When I did, I was intrigued by the dedication: “With love to the memory of GENE KELLY, whose performances influenced and changed my life.” In his afterward, Bradbury explains the unexpected dedication—altered for the second edition—and also relates the anecdote below, in a talk he gave in Pasadena a few years ago.
October 25, 2013 On the Shelf Authors in Uniform, and Other News By Sadie Stein From Twain to Wolfe to Tartt: authors in uniform. Fittingly enough, fisticuffs at the Norman Mailer: A Double Life party. The Asterix reboot, set in ancient Scotland, is being hailed by (a few, possibly as few as none) Scottish nationalists as an endorsement in the referendum debates. The Iranian culture minister promises a relaxation of book censorship under the new regime.
October 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Snail’s Pace By Sadie Stein I’m told foxes are all the rage right now. Specifically, that “foxes are the new owls.” Owls, of course, were the new squirrels, and I forget what preceded that, but it all started with birds. And birds, as we know, are, in our post-Portlandia world, beyond parody. But the seemingly arbitrary celebration of anointed fauna is nothing new. In the Middle Ages, it would seem, scribes were enamored of knights and snails. The British Library blog notes, “as anyone who is familiar with thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts can attest, images of armed knights fighting snails are common, especially in marginalia.” But why? Throughout history, scholars have floated theories ranging from resurrection allegory, to class struggle, to mockery of the Lombards (apparently the targets of much medieval badinage). At the end of the day, no one knows for sure. What is certain is that the gallery of images on the site is fascinating, and peculiar indeed. Said the philosopher and theologian Albert the Great, If thou wilt forejudge, or conjecture things to come … Take the stone which is called Chelonites. It is of purple, and divers other colours, and it is found in the head of the Snail. If any man will bear this stone under his tongue, he shall forejudge, and prophesy of things to come. But notwithstanding, it is said to have this power only on the first day of the month, when the moon is rising and waxing, and again on the twenty-ninth day when the moon is waning. In the spirit of that Dominican (albeit a few days early), I shall make so bold as to prophesy something: I see no reason why knights and snails, representing either marauding Lombards or rebellious serfs, shouldn’t be the foxes of F/W 2014. You read it here first.
October 24, 2013 Quote Unquote With the Rushes By Sadie Stein ELSA I was naïve. I was eighteen. I’d only had one boyfriend and never got over being shy with him, so I didn’t think of myself as holding court. I just thought, Gosh, this is fun! No good dates in high school and now all of these conversations, with clever men asking my opinions about philosophy to show how sophisticated they were. At some point a mysterious stranger appeared in the doorway, wearing a black coat. He stood and listened for a minute, and when someone asked me a question—I wish I could remember what; I’ve thought of it many times—this man in the doorway said, “You don’t have to answer that.” RUSH I thought the question was intrusive. ELSA I actually wasn’t upset by the question, though I did understand what this man in the doorway meant. Then one of my couch suitors said something provocative, and the man gave a reply that infuriated them all. He said—instead of arguing, he said— RUSH I gave them a reading recommendation. ELSA And they hated it. He said, Why don’t you read such-and-such? Which is very annoying, of course. It’s a way of saying, “You’re not equipped to have this conversation with me.” I wish I could remember the book he recommended, though in a way it doesn’t matter, because Norman has done that so many times in his life. RUSH She means that I’ve often been aggressively, unpleasantly authoritative. ELSA Correct. Though at the time, I was smitten. I went back to my dormitory and told everyone that I’d met the man I want to be with forever. I was completely taken by his gestalt. And even later, after we’d married and departed Swarthmore, I remained this way, though when I disagreed with him, I certainly said so. When he wanted us to live in a commune, for instance. —Norman Rush, the Art of Fiction No. 205 This Friday, Norman Rush reads from Subtle Bodies at Brooklyn’s BookCourt. A Q&A with Paris Review interviewer Joshua Pashman, and possibly birthday cake, will follow. Event details here.
October 24, 2013 On Music Beached By Nathan Deuel There is something brutal about Philip Glass’s opera. The way it stops and starts, the taunting tease of a story, then the way it’s anything but narrative. Composed of nine twenty-minute scenes, the whole of Einstein on the Beach—first produced in 1976 and shown in L.A. for the first time this month—is interspersed by five so-called “knee plays,” in which two women sit or stand or writhe around on plastic platforms, or search dreamily inside gently moving glass boxes. It’s not easy to watch. “This was a very American month.” It’s thirty days since we moved to California after five years in the Middle East and in the darkened pavilion I start memorizing lines. I’m sitting beside one of my oldest friends. I am fearful my glasses will fall from my head. I picture my phone tumbling from my hand—possibly injuring Jack Nicholson, who is seated below—and I think about the car I am borrowing from my mom, parked deep underground, at least until the show is over, a car that is mine until we buy one of our own, or decide to go back. We started eight levels down, in an auxiliary parking lot under a mall. Space for thousands. Walking to the opera, I’m dazzled by simple things, like the cool hush of an elevator, the absence of tanks, and the clothes people in L.A. wear when they aren’t going to a Dodgers game. The lights go down and two women in black suspenders and white shirts begin to murmur about Toyotas and the price and a certain number of coins. I think about our house in Venice, with its brittle wooden walls and a heater the size of a VW, glowing hot under the floorboards. I think about Beirut, and how far we’lve come since a brutal spring. Dancers curl through the smoke, scissoring around on a dimly lit stage. A boy throws paper airplanes from a metal aerie, and a violinist with grey hair scratches across the strings, both as long as it should be, and about as beautiful as it could be. So far. “Any one asks you please it was trees it it it it it it it it it it is like that.” Read More