August 2, 2010 On Politics Letter from the West Bank By Avi Steinberg A bar mitzvah outing—at a West Bank shooting range. Photograph by Scott Pargett. It’s not easy to get directions over the phone from someone who works at a shooting range. I was pretty sure Eran had said that Caliber-3 was accessible by public bus, but it was hard to hear him over the gunfire. So I took the bus into the West Bank, through various IDF checkpoints, down highway 60 with its anti-sniper barriers and razor wire, past the giant, snaking “Wall of Separation,” to a settler outpost, a pleasant little heavily-armed suburb. “You are not in the right place,” Eran is now telling me on my cell. “You are in the wrong place.” The right place, it turns out, is a forty-five minute walk to a remote hill. I embark on a cautious solo West Bank hike along a road where Hamas militants once tried to kidnap a friend of mine. Empty cans of power drinks labeled in Arabic line the road—when these turn into empty cans of power drinks labeled in Hebrew, I know I am close. Caliber-3 is located on a dusty slope of a dusty hill, between the Jewish settlement of Migdal Oz and the Arab town of Bayt Fajar. It is part of a settler industrial park built on land that nearby Palestinian villages claim as their own. Each company housed in the industrial park seems to play a role in the Jewish settlement enterprise: contractors, a land development corporation, a real estate management agency, a shady outfit that calls itself “Google Ranking Experts,” and an even shadier outfit that calls itself “The Society for the Interpretation of the Talmud.” I am here for a bar mitzvah outing. Since the party bus is late, I join three men sitting at a picnic table. They identify themselves as “French businessmen who live and work in China.” Why are they on the West Bank, at this shooting range? They are training for urban combat, they tell me. “We need it for work,” one of them explains. Somehow this segues into an impassioned monologue. The lead Frenchman demands to know why the Americans get away with killing twenty-seven Iraqi civilians a day while the Israelis dispatch a few pirates and are roundly condemned. It’s an outrage! Under the table, I feel a foot cozy up to mine. I try to ignore this. The man, now pounding on the picnic table, continues to decry the hypocrisy of the international community; at the same time, he grows increasingly familiar with me under the table. He is now gently massaging the top of his foot over the top of my foot. According to its website, Caliber-3 “works in close cooperation with the IDF in the field of counter-terrorism” and has “set up security installations in order to train both professionals and laymen in Israel as well as in Africa, Asia and Central America.” They also offer paintball to visitors who are willing to wear the required external jockstrap. Again, from its website, “[we] simulate urban combat using paintball. This is real fun for families and tourists and great entertainment for bar mitzvahs.” At long last, the bar mitzvah bus arrives. It is a large group of men, women and children dressed for a day of golfing. Chinos, polo shirts, belted plaid shorts. Many are also wearing official bar mitzvah apparel: navy blue baseball caps and tote bags emblazoned with a giant Ralph Lauren Polo-brand logo over the words DAVID’S BAR MITZVAH. They are snacking. It is Friday. Today they shoot guns, real guns, not paintball; tonight they pray at the Western Wall, followed by a Sabbath buffet dinner; tomorrow, young David is called to the Torah. Read More
July 30, 2010 Ask The Paris Review To MFA or Not to MFA, Behaving Like a Gentleman By Lorin Stein To MFA or not to MFA. That is the question. —D. G. It depends on how you feel about putting off the inevitable. That’s what writing programs are for—to give young writers one or two years of camaraderie before they face the market, where writing lives or dies according to whether people will pay to read it. You can learn things in a writing program, of course. It can give you the sanction to spend your days reading and writing, if you need that kind of sanction. More important, it can offer a stipend. This is probably the best thing a program can do, beside helping you to realize if you have no talent. (This service tends not to be advertised.) But I find it hard to believe that spending so much time with other young writers—people so much like you—is good for the spirit, or makes you a more interesting person. Most living writers I admire (and most I don’t) have spent some time either studying or teaching in writing programs. So have I. And some, like the excellent Gary Shteyngart, seem to find them useful. At this point, I think, it’s hard to tell: so few young writers go it alone. Read More
July 30, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Papa, Pig Earth By The Paris Review What we’ve been reading this week. I wrapped up A Farewell to Arms just in time to enjoy the Hemingway look-alikes at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, Florida. Kudos to Charles Bicht, Papa 2010. —Stephen Andrew Hiltner First published in 1935—but set in the 1880s—A House and Its Head is a late, obsidian instance of Victorian Survivor Literature. It concerns a tyrannical father, his idle grown children, and the young second wife he brings home to them. Imagine The Way of All Flesh written by a woman under the influence of Oscar Wilde. What I and everyone else especially like about Ivy Compton-Burnett is her dialogue. Her characters make asides, they soliloquize, they turn epigrams, and yet the effect isn’t exactly stagey. (As Oscar liked to say, “Art doesn’t imitate life; life imitates Shakespeare, as best it can.”) —Lorin Stein I visited Cuba for the first time in January. On Revolution Day, July 26, I read about Fidel Castro’s surprise appearance in public and the rest of the coverage of the holiday I could find. Unsatisfied, I found and read “Cuba—A Way Forward,” the riveting, deeply distressing report from Daniel Wilkinson, Deputy Director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch and Nik Steinberg, a researcher there, in the New York Review of Books. It makes me desperately sad to think about the amazing people I met in Havana that have almost no chance of reading Yoani Sánchez’s incredible blog, even though they live in Havana, as she does. Wilkinson and Steinberg are forceful and eloquent on the reality of the political situation in Cuba: “It is hard to think of a US policy with a longer track record of failure. The embargo has caused much hardship to the Cuban people but done nothing to loosen the Castros’ hold on power. Instead it has provided the Cuban government an excuse for the country’s problems.” —Caitlin Roper I’ve been following the debate surrounding Odyssey, Andrew Wylie’s latest venture in publishing e-books with Amazon. As an observer, I find it upsetting that the publishing world is squabbling over backlist e-book rights. But do I blame them? The pie is shrinking for everyone. Except Amazon. —Thessaly La Force I’ve been reading Pig Earth, John Berger’s cycle of stories, essays, and poems about peasant life in the Savoyard village where Berger settled with his family in the mid-seventies. This cycle is also a study in oral tradition, and of life in a place where nobody has any secrets. It is also—according to Wikipedia—a novel. But I’ll keep you posted. —L. S.
July 29, 2010 On Television Are We Afraid of Daria? By Marisa Meltzer A week ago, I asked where all the Darias had gone. The Internet, much to my delight, provided a litany of suggestions as to where to find the intelligent, prickly, but lovable teen archetype in pop culture. There were characters mentioned from shows of the recent past: Veronica Mars, Maeby from Arrested Development, Rory of the Gilmore Girls, Lindsay from Freaks and Geeks, Claire of Six Feet Under, Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You. More currently, there’s Will from Huge, Alex on Modern Family, Alex on Wizards of Waverly Place, Becca from Californication, April from Parks and Recreation, Darby from Hung, or any character played by the Twilight actress Kristen Stewart. Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon was even thrown out by a few commenters as a grown-up version of Daria. But Daria was the protagonist and the show was about her. While it’s reassuring to know that wry, disaffected teen girls do exist on screen, nearly all of the characters mentioned here are ancillary to a peppy, pretty protagonist. They’re the token angry girl who provides a laugh or needs a makeover. MTV had its own Daria-type in its recent reality series My Life As Liz, though my twelve-year-old pen pal Bella told me the show rang false because Liz “is only an ‘outsider’ and an ‘underdog’ because she shops at Goodwill, listens to indie music, likes Star Wars, and reads comic books.” Daria didn’t identify with outcasts as some kind of hollow aesthetic choice—like shopping at Urban Outfitters as opposed to Abercrombie and Fitch. She was an outsider because she didn’t fit in at school, in her family, or in the world at large. And yet, it was her outlook that defined her position, because none of her problems were situational. As our commenter AAP212 notes, “The best part of Daria was always the subtext that her life really wasn’t bad at all. She had a great best friend. Her family was together and at least half-cared…The cool kids were annoying, but entirely harmless. The joke beneath the surface always seemed to be that Daria really didn’t have that much to complain about.” Daria’s greatest enemy might have just been her own angst. “Teen girl snark has softened, yes, but it’s still there,” Claire Grossman wrote, in her response to me, on Double X. I would argue that it’s the softening that’s the problem. Daria was allowed to show off an extraordinary amount of bitterness that, while true to the teen experience, is almost never reflected in mass culture. Perhaps part of that was because she was a cartoon. Like Enid Coleslaw, the ornery heroine of Daniel Clowes’s nineties-era comic (though later adapted into a live-action film), Ghost World, teen girls are afforded more cynicism when it’s colored in between the lines. Of course, Daria herself was something of an anomaly even in the nineties. There was no Daria on Friends or E.R. or Seinfeld, some of the era’s most highly rated television shows. As commenter itsonreserve rightly noted on Jezebel’s post: “I was a Daria when Daria was a Daria, and I don’t recall living in happy paradise where logic and sarcasm reigned supreme and life was full of candy canes.” She’s correct. There is no golden age where Darias reigned supreme, which is why so many of us can catalog every sarcastic teen girl character of the last few decades. “We remember ‘Daria’ fondly because it seemed to get that selfish, self-dramatizing, low self-esteem mindset of adolescence just right, but played it wittier than we ever were as teens,” Gary Susman wrote on TV Squad. No matter where one falls in the high school hierarchy, we have all felt like an outsider at one time or another. Such is the eternal appeal of teen culture to adults: we can watch all the drama and self-obsession from our adolescent years at a safe—and sage—vantage point. So I wonder why this archetype isn’t more prominent. Perhaps the question isn’t where have all the Darias gone, but why are we so afraid of them? Marisa Meltzer is the author of Girl Power and How Sassy Changed My Life.
July 29, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Angus Trumble, Curator, Part 2 By Angus Trumble This is the second installment of Trumble’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 5:30 A.M. I have been mining the poet, critic, journalist, playwright, sometime minor colonial official Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884). He was one of the most picturesque, occasionally lionized but accident-prone literary figures in Victorian Britain. According to his biographer Cyril Pearl, Horne “finished a wild and adventurous career as a rather pathetic, rather tiresome, very poor old man, living in two shabby rooms of a London apartment house, still determined, in his eighties, to be a distinguished man of letters. Forty year before, no one would have questioned his claim to the title. He had been extravagantly praised by Poe, who ranked him with Milton, and enthusiastically praised by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, by Carlyle and G. H. Lewes, by Leigh Hunt and Douglass Jerrold, and many other of his contemporaries. Critics spoke of him in the same breath as Browning or Tennyson. He was, for many years, one of Elizabeth Barrett’s most valued friends; Dickens, with whom he worked, had a warm regard for him; he was the patron, almost the discoverer, of Meredith…No writer ever affirmed the dignity of literature more, or himself behaved with less dignity.” Quite so. 1:30 P.M. The reason for my present interest in “Hengist” or “Orion” Horne is that I think he was the conduit through which the term “art for art’s sake” migrated from the neighborhood of French criticism in the 1830s (when in England “l’art pour l’art” was generally treated with disdain) and crash-landed in the circle of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rossetti et al. during the 1870s, thereby laying a sort of foundation of Aestheticism in British art and letters. Horne was obviously insane. In 1873 he entertained the idea of representing Her Brittanic Majesty as consul-general in Tokyo, and duly sent to Mr. Gladstone in Downing Street, and to the Meiji Emperor complimentary copies of his privately printed Ode to the Mikado of Japan. Even if your command of the English language is surefooted, the text is truly bonkers—so goodness knows what Emperor Mutsuhito made of it. There was a Dome, like midnight Lit up by blood-red lightning! And deep within A demon din, With many a sight Of ghastly horror whitening Faces and Forms, e’en while the flames were brightening! The screams of those wild massacres Long echoed down the shuddering years; And yet we know the self-same creed For which those proselyting [sic] martyrs died, Hath caused unnumbered victims thus to bleed Before its symbols deified!… To cover against the possibility that it might just be good, the Emperor sent back two lavish volumes of Japanese poetry. An invitation to tea with His Imperial Majesty’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was thrown in also. To His Excellency’s dismay Horne promptly accepted it. Read More
July 28, 2010 From the Archive Congratulations to Damon Galgut By Lorin Stein The Paris Review wishes to congratulate our contributor Damon Galgut, whose novel In a Strange Room has been nominated for the MAN Booker Prize. Click here to read the excerpt that ran in the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.