October 11, 2012 Arts & Culture The Modern Monastery: Pussy Riot in Prison By Casey N. Cep Philadelphia's Walnut Street Penitentiary “Prison,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said in her interview with GQ, “is like a monastery—it’s a place for ascetic practices.” Member of the celebrated but incarcerated band Pussy Riot, Tolokonnikova gave voice to the belief that prison can be a soul-changing institution: an idea that inspired the American penal system. The same year that America declared its independence from Great Britain, Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail opened. Its first major addition came in 1790 at the instigation of Quaker reformers who proposed “a penitentiary house” of sixteen individual cells for solitary confinement. The penitentiary, unlike jails or prisons, set itself to the task of rehabilitating prisoners. Religious penance became the paradigm for criminal punishment; the monastic chamber served as the model for the prison cell. Walnut Street exemplified the philosophy of what became known as the Pennsylvania System, which separated prisoners from one another while enforcing silence and manual labor as mechanisms for transformation. Read More
October 11, 2012 Nostalgia Drink the Water By Alia Akkam Liquor has never touched my Middle Eastern father’s lips. Or so he claims. In the late sixties, when he lived a spell in Munich, embarked on spontaneous sojourns to Italy, and dated a Finnish broad named Helvi I once saw in a faded wallet-size photo—activities that made him sound so much more alluring than the stern killjoy I remember—I like to think he nursed a few carefree beers just like any lonely expat. When he made his way to New York a few years later, renting a dingy studio on the upper reaches of Broadway, when he was still the man my mother fell for—an Arab version of Adrian Zmed with a rustling gold chain around his neck and swarthy looks that back then meant you were handsome, not a possible terrorist—he used to smoke cigarettes, my mother tells me. Perhaps he also took nips of whiskey from a flask. But the only father I know, the real one, returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia when I was eight years old a sudden gung-ho Muslim. He was no longer the aggressive moderate who was content with me just saying Bissmilah at the start of each meal. Now, every moment he wasn’t holed up in a Hilton for work or stuffing fried eggplant into pita bread at the dinner table was spent hunched over a miniature Koran, recapturing the lost Islam of his youth, of his family, of the native Syria he hadn’t called home for more than two decades. Freshly brewed mint iced tea. Distilled water from the Poland Springs gallon bottles that lined our laundry room. Dr. Pepper, when its effervescence became a salve for the wheezing that permeated my bronchitis-ridden childhood. These were the beverages welcome in our teetotaler home. Although my mother, a Catholic girl from Queens, didn’t have religion propelling her consumption habits, she harbored something worse: distaste for even innocent bubbles. “Champagne burns my ears,” I remember her whining—and she rarely invited company over for anything more than a cup of Earl Grey. Read More
October 11, 2012 Bulletin Mo Yan Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature By Sadie Stein Chinese author Mo Yan—whose pen name translates to Do Not Speak—has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature. A short-story writer and essayist who, says the Nobel citation, “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary,” Mo Yan said he was overjoyed and scared by the honor. Continued the citation, “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
October 11, 2012 On the Shelf Crumb on Bukowski, Rushdie on James By Sadie Stein A match made … well, you decide where! R. Crumb illustrates Charles Bukowski. How to survive an online pan: in this case, persuade the author to remove it. A history of cricket in literature. A new attempt at a Breakfast at Tiffany’s musical is headed for Broadway. “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published.” Salman Rushdie on Fifty Shades of Grey.
October 10, 2012 Bulletin See You There: The Paris Review at the Strand, Tonight! By The Paris Review Join us at the Strand tonight for another installment of our reading series. Readings by actor and filmmaker Alex Karpovsky, currently on HBO’s Girls, and author Ben Marcus, a contributor to our new anthology, Object Lessons. Wine will be served. Wednesday, October 10, 7 P.M. to 8:30 P.M. The Strand Bookstore, third-floor Rare Book Room 828 Broadway at Twelfth Street Admission: Buy a copy of the current Paris Review or a $10 Strand gift card. To reserve your seat, click here.
October 10, 2012 Listen Wallace Shawn Reads Denis Johnson By Sadie Stein Listen to a preview of the inimitable Wallace Shawn read from Denis Johnson’s “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking,” one of the stories included in the new anthology, Object Lessons. The full audio recording will be available shortly in a new book, Three Stories: An Audio Book, only available on the Paris Review app. Play Audio