January 8, 2013 History Kleist’s Crime Blotter By Michael Lipkin and Sophie Pinkham On the afternoon of October 1, 1810, people started gathering in front of Berlin’s Hedwigskirche, where a new paper would be selling its first issue. By evening the crowd had grown so large that guards were posted to maintain order. The whole city, it seemed, had turned out for the launch of the paper, the Berliner Abendblätter. Even the king had asked for a copy. Officially, the Abendblätter was edited anonymously. Among the city’s literary elite, however, it was widely known that the paper was written almost single-handedly by Heinrich von Kleist, a young writer. Kleist’s plays and novellas were written with exceptional elegance, but were preoccupied with rape, war, and natural disaster. Kleist had once enjoyed the patronage of Goethe, but after a disastrous theatrical collaboration the two writers found it impossible to continue working together. Goethe admitted that his protégé filled him with revulsion and horror, “as though a body nature had intended to be beautiful were afflicted with an incurable disease.” Read More
January 8, 2013 On the Shelf 1984, and Other News By Sadie Stein Check out the new 1984 cover. What do you think? The Thomas Pynchon rumors: a breakdown. How should Shakespeare really sound? New Yorkers are spending more time in libraries … but not to read. Love it or leave it, this is our world: Neruda Cats.
January 7, 2013 Bulletin Save the Date: The Paris Review Revel By The Paris Review Variously described as “the best party in town” and “prom for New York intellectuals,” the legendary Spring Revel is legendary for a reason. Tuesday, April 9, Paris Review readers, supporters, and writers will gather at Cipriani 42nd Street for an always unforgettable evening of cocktails, dinner, and revelry. This year we celebrate our sixtieth year in print and honor Paula Fox with the Hadada Award.
January 7, 2013 Listen Zora Neale Hurston on Zombies By Sadie Stein In honor of Ms. Hurston’s birthday, this fascinating clip from a 1943 interview.
January 7, 2013 The Poem Stuck in My Head “Psalm 139” By Lorin Stein If you grew up going to church, you already know Psalm 139. Even if you didn’t, parts of it are floating around your brain. It is a favorite of pro-life people, because it talks about God recognizing us in the womb, taking care of us, and knowing how we’ll turn out. (It is also—I’d bet money on this—the source of our hundred-year-old American expression “search me.”) Psalm 139 gets my vote for being the most beautiful of the psalms in the King James version. The other day I happened to read it in French and it left me cold—it conjured up surveillance—whereas the high-low diction of the King James translators sings and is intimate, because you would only sing this way to a God you loved: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me.” It’s like an advertisement for the English language. Read More
January 7, 2013 Arts & Culture CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface By George Saunders We loved Joel Lovell’s profile of George Saunders in yesterday’s Times Magazine. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders’s preface to the new edition of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. By special arrangement with the publisher, we bring you the preface in full. 1. This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story. I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived. We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book. This book. Read More