August 26, 2013 Bulletin Radio Days By Sadie Stein Photo courtesy of Flickr. Friends! We are thrilled to announce that this fall, when you pledge to support WNYC, you can get a subscription to The Paris Review! That’s right: keep public radio going strong, and while you’re at it receive four issues a year of poetry, fiction, interviews, and more. Just choose The Paris Review as your thank-you gift at the $100 pledge level. As always, you can pledge at a monthly level, or all at once. And yes, you can re-up an existing subscription, too!
August 26, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles, Part 2 By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? My 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 five weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. We all do and make to deal with oblivion. The conceit that art can ward off death is something we’ve been wrestling with since Greco-Roman times. The Theban lyric poet Pindar didn’t crave actual immortality, but still he wanted to reach out to the limits of the possible. Horace put it more bluntly in an ode: “I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids’ royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy … I shall not altogether die.” Ovid shared that aim, boasting of how his couplets would outlive his lifetime, “so that in every time and in every place I may be celebrated throughout the world.” All creative efforts, what the ancient Greeks called poiesis, were done with immortality in mind, whether unconsciously or not. Socrates distinguished between three main forms of poiesis. The first is sexual reproduction, which provides immortality in the sense that a genetic lineage will survive the parent’s own bodily existence. The second category of poiesis is the attainment of fame through art or heroic accomplishment, which leaves a posthumous legacy. The third, and highest, expression of poiesis, according to Socrates, is philosophical, and it occurs when our pursuit of wisdom results in an experience of the soul’s indestructibility. Read More
August 26, 2013 On the Shelf New Salinger, and Other News By Sadie Stein We like this slideshow of images from the Hargeisa International Book Fair, but are somewhat confused by the headline “Somaliland goes crazy for books.” According to the upcoming Salinger documentary, the famous recluse instructed his estate to publish at least five posthumous books, starting in 2015. When he was a carpenter, Harrison Ford worked on Joan Didion’s beach house. Says she, “I was happy with his work—and even happier with his presence in the house because he was a great moral force.” He’ll present her with a lifetime achievement award at the PEN Center USA dinner in October. Here are all of Elmore Leonard’s opening lines.
August 23, 2013 First Person The Faint, Gray Areas By Lisa John Rogers “‘It’s not black and white,’ a young doctor from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles had told me, in 1982, about the divide between life and death.” —Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking I had been avoiding the research, the further reading, about my father’s death. After discovering that the Detroit Police kept appealing the lawsuit, trying to pin the “accident” on the fourteen-year-old they were chasing before he crashed into my father’s car, I became depressed, and stopped digging. This was two days before Detroit declared bankruptcy. Before I heard about a man, Dwayne Provience, who was suing the city of Detroit for “accidentally” convicting him of a crime he did not commit. Now the city was bankrupt and his lawsuit was frozen, like the nine years of his life spent in prison. Provience’s lawsuit is for police misconduct, similar to the one that my mother filed after my father’s “accident,” but that was the late nineties. Provience said he wanted to use the potential money to pay off the child-support debt that had accumulated during his time away and to help pay for his children’s education. The insurance cities rely on in incidents like this, “accidents” like this, is exactly what allowed me to afford college. Read More
August 23, 2013 Look Nabokov on Joyce By Sadie Stein Of teaching Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” Below is his.
August 23, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: ABCs, Akrasia, Antiquity By The Paris Review “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do / How can I ever change the things that I feel?“ This sentiment—so memorably expressed by Fleetwood Mac in 1977—is as old as philosophy itself. The ancients struggled to explain akrasia, or why we love and do certain things against our better judgment. Who’s in charge of our desires? As the NYU philosopher Jessica Moss points out in this Q&A, the latest psychological research can sound a lot like Aristotle’s Ethics. —Lorin Stein I found the cover of Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics—the torso of a marble Adonis that, at a cursory glance, looks sort of like an Abercrombie and Fitch bag—so off-putting that I took it off. (The British iteration, which features a bust of Athena in a pair of red sunglasses, is hardly more dignified.) But I understand that the publisher was grappling with the very same issue Beard, an eminent classicist, addresses in this book: how to engage with the classical tradition in a modern world. The book is both a survey of classical antiquity and a compelling argument for the classics’ contemporary relevance; Beard bridles at those who champion the canon from a romanticized or ideological standpoint. Anyone who has read Beard’s work in The New York Review of Books knows how funny and passionate a writer she is, and how convincing. (You can only imagine how much fun her Cambridge classes must be.) In her hands, the classics really do argue for themselves. So does this book. Sexy cover not required. —Sadie O. Stein Read More