June 18, 2010 World Cup 2010 The Zombie Cup—It Lives! By David Wallace-Wells It seemed for about a week that this would be a tactical tournament—a dullish Cup, shadowed by Inter’s Champions League triumph, marked by negative play and cautious counterattacking lineups, and ultimately crowning, perhaps more decisively than a champion, the incisive geeksite ZonalMarking.net. German efficiency seemed the closest we’d get to actual electricity. How quickly things change—and how high a German defeat lifts the hearts of fans the world over. For my money, Joachim Löw can still boast the tournament’s top performing side, as well as its top performing cashmere: Germany looked as dangerous a man down against Serbia as any team this side of Argentina, and, having gone down to that inferior squad, may no longer be plagued by the panic of preeminence that seemed to trip them up in a lackluster first half. Ghana, beware. The true maestros of today’s early-game tournament resurrection were, of course, the referees. There will surely be howls of outrage in the coming hours and days over the nine yellow cards (six in the first thirty-six minutes) in Serbia’s defeat of Germany, and over the preposterously disallowed U.S. goal against Slovenia, which would have delivered three points to the Americans and made them the first team in the tournament’s history to recover from a 2-0 halftime deficit and actually win. But as fans of the game, we shouldn’t be howling—or howling too long, anyway. However erratic, those decisions are not injustices, they are refereeing, and a happy reminder that soccer is not a game of numbers, like poker, mastered by biding one’s time, but a game, beneath the tactics, of chance. You buy your ticket and you take the ride.
June 18, 2010 World Cup 2010 The Most Unpredictable World Cup Ever? By Will Frears Spain lost. France was (I feel quietly confident in using the past tense) awful. Brazil struggled to break down the obdurate North Koreans. As I write this, Germany just lost to Serbia who already lost to Ghana making Group D impossible to predict. Japan beat Cameroon. England is running a you-be-the-goalkeeper campaign for the World Cup lottery. Chile and Uruguay both look pretty tasty. Italy isn’t looking unshaky. Only Argentina is fulfilling their historical imperative and they haven’t had to defend yet. Obviously, it’s been low scoring and the ball is a disaster but this is delightful chaos. FIFA had arranged it so that if Brazil and Spain won their groups, they would not meet until the final. Now, if Spain finishes second, which is quite likely, the two will meet in the next round. And if Switzerland can hold on for two draws, they will have the easiest route to the finals. This could be the most unpredictable World Cup ever.
June 18, 2010 In Memoriam José Saramago (1922–2010) By The Paris Review Click here to read the Art of Fiction interview with José Saramago from the Winter 1998 issue.
June 18, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Assholes Revisited, Milton’s Sonnets By Lorin Stein Boy Reading, by Thomas Pollack Anshutz.You answered how to be an asshole. But how about what to do when you’ve been dealt one? In other words: I got dumped. Quick: where’s the revenge section of the bookshop? —Greta, New York City In Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, a middle-aged Englishwoman embarks on her first love affair and—after many heartbreaking and cringe-inducing misadventures—discovers that the best revenge is a night alone in a fancy hotel. As Rita Konig would say, J’AGREE. If nights alone are not your idea of poetic justice (or if you want to work on your French), I suggest the libertine novella No Tomorrow, by Vivant Denon. Here a jilted young nobleman takes revenge on his mistress the other way—by going to bed with her friend. (Who, needless to say, has her own agenda.) The New York Review Classics has bulked out this slim bagatelle (newly translated by Lydia Davis) with the original text. So you can compare as you set your vendetta out to chill. Read More
June 18, 2010 Terry Southern Month Grand Guy Grand By Lorin Stein Photograph by Pud GadiotIn the Spring 1959 issue, readers were introduced to “grand Guy Grand,” a billionaire trickster who sows confusion wherever he goes. The story was adapted from Terry Southern’s novel The Magic Christian, published later that year. In the late sixties the novel was made into a movie starring Peter Sellers, and it continues (on the evidence of Monday’s paper) to cast its nefarious spell on impressionable young minds. When not tending New York holdings, Guy Grand was generally, as he expressed it, “on the go.” He took cross-country trips by train: New York to Miami, Miami to Seattle—that sort of thing—always on a slow train, one that makes frequent stops. Accommodation on these trains is limited and, though he did engage the best, Grand often had to be satisfied with scarcely more than the essentials of comfort. But he didn’t mind, and on this particular summer afternoon, at precisely 2:05, he stepped onto the first Pullman of the Portland Plougher, found his compartment, and began the pleasant routine of settling in for the long slow trip to New York. As was his habit, he immediately rang the porter to bring round a large bottle of Campari and a thermos of finely-iced water; then he sat down at his desk to write business letters. It was known that for any personal service Grand was inclined to tip generously, and because of this there were usually three or four porters loitering in the corridor near his compartment. They kept a sharp eye on the compartment-door, in case Grand should signal some need or other; and, as the train pulled out of the station, they could hear him moving about inside, humming to himself, and shuffling papers to and fro on his desk. Before the train made its first stop, however, they would have to scurry, for Grand’s orders were that the porters should not be seen when he came out of his compartment; and he did come out, at every stop. Read More
June 17, 2010 Letter from Our Southern Editor Snuck Redux By John Jeremiah Sullivan Dear Lorin, I’m told a publication calling itself The Awl has blogged about our use of snuck for sneaked, calling out the whole Paris Review masthead for this “transgression of English.” Transgression against English, they undoubtedly mean. If English had been transgressed by us, we would have stepped across it and begun writing in a foreign language. However solid an ambition that remains, no one will accuse us of it here. I suppose there’s no pausing to get basic prepositions correct when you’re on your way to obsessing over arcane questions of the irregular preterit. But let’s not be pedantic. Actually, let’s be pedantic as hell. It ought to go against any writer’s grain when people try to pass off schoolmarmish grammarianism as a concern for style. Style is about getting the maximum effect out of words, eliminating unwanted ambiguities, and writing in such a way that readers see things better—in short, it’s about meaning. Grammarianism, which is to say, an out-of-control prescriptivism, is about doing things “the right way,” or more often, about giving others grief for not having done so. I’m not an antiprescriptivist. Trying to keep your mother tongue honest is noble and even necessary. But a person needs to be objecting to a word on some grounds—that it’s inexact or obscure, that it’s confusing or unbeautiful. What is The Awl’s problem with snuck? As far as one can tell, somebody told them at some point that it was preferable to use sneaked. Why, though? We’ve been saying and writing snuck for at least a hundred and twenty-five years now, in high and low contexts. Everybody knows exactly what it means. Indeed, a big-deal British linguist has theorized that the reason snuck emerged as a form to begin with is that it sounds more like what it says. It’s shorter, faster, more final—it’s sneakier. To my ear, sneaked has lost the war, and even smells a bit of the lamp. Admittedly, I come from a place where people still say y’uns (oldest surviving usage of ye, according to some scholars), which may disqualify me from pronouncing on such matters. I wish The Awl the joy of its style sheet, and strongly urge the excellent Mr. Cox and the rest of you to stick to your guns. Devotedly, JJS