July 2, 2010 On Music The Gospel According to Gospel By Lorin Stein It won’t be news to aficionados, but this spring the gospel historian and producer Anthony Heilbut released a new compilation, How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel’s Golden Age. A copy arrived last week at White Street. The CD contains some knockout live performances: Brother Joe May, Mahalia Jackson at her best, Dorothy Love Coates “groaning and even barking” onstage with the Swan Silvertones. But it’s the companion DVD that I can’t get out of my head. It contains twenty-seven kinescope clips from the early sixties, most from a half-hour syndicated program called TV Gospel Time, nearly all of them rare and hard to find. Plug in your earphones, close your door—do what you need to do—and brace yourself for the download. You just can’t watch Marion Williams sing “It Is Well With My Soul” without laughing and crying. At least I can’t, and I’ve seen it a dozen times. Ditto J. Robert Bradley’s “Amazing Grace.” Mahalia Jackson once said, “Nobody need mess with ‘Amazing Grace’ once Bradley gets through with it.” This performance bears her out. As Heilbut writes in his liner notes: You’ll hear a few members of the choir, and Rosetta Tharpe herself, hollering out as he sings. This was not the usual practice on TV Gospel Time, where songs rarely lasted long enough to get people happy. But Bradley could move the coldest church. In its classic form, gospel was music designed to kill—to slay the congregation in spirit, moving them not just to laughter, tears, and hollers, but to screams and even seizures. The first woman who started shrieking was known, in the parlance of the gospel quartets, as “Sister Flute.” Big churches had volunteers in nurses’ uniforms to tend to the stricken. Later these forces were unleashed on white teenagers, to memorable effect. Little Richard, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, Al Green—two whole generations of soul singers got their start and their sound in church. You know what they can do. And you know the idioms too: You set me free. You set my soul on fire. Have mercy. Help me now. I need you early in the morning/in the midnight hour/in the evening/to hold my hand. Not to mention that rock and roll standby: I feel all right. Read More
July 2, 2010 World Cup 2010 Don’t Doubt Diego By Will Frears Over the past year, Diego Maradona has had Argentinians scratching their heads. Why wouldn’t he pick a settled team for the qualification campaign? Instead he chopped and changed his lineup, running through seventy-five players. For a time, it looked like they wouldn’t qualify and when they did, Maradona faced the doubting press corps and told them “they could suck it and keep on sucking it.” Even then there were doubts. Messi and Maradona were said not to get on, and Diego was thought to prefer his son-in-law, the pint-sized and prolific Sergio Aguero. His final squad did not include Esteban Cambiasso and Javier Zanetti, who had both just orchestrated Inter Milan’s Champions League victory. He had too many strikers, not enough midfielders—in short, the Albicelestes were in big trouble. All of these concerns have turned out to be irrelevant. Argentina is one of the teams of the tournament. They have scored loads of goals, including this monster from Tevez. Messi has been utterly mesmeric, not scoring yet, but regularly drawing not just a double- or triple-team but what quite often looks like the massed ranks of the Napoleonic Guard to defend him, opening up acres of space for his teammates. On the sidelines, looking like Tony Montana’s best friend, with his diamond earrings, shiny suit, and mullet, has been Diego. He is fantastic to watch, not as potent as when he sliced England apart single-handedly in 1986, but still so involved, kicking every ball alongside his players, and then when forced to substitute them, consoling them with a hug and a kiss. Read More
July 2, 2010 From the Archive Congratulations to Barbara Demick By Christopher Cox Barbara Demick wrote an excellent book about North Korea, Nothing To Envy, that has just won the BBC’s Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. Demick interviewed dozens of defectors from the North during the years she spent living in Seoul, and the book follows the lives of six of them as they struggle to survive in Kim Jong Il’s crumbling police state. In our fall issue last year, Demick told the story of two of those defectors, Mi-ran and Jun-sang, who fell in love in North Korea but defected south without telling each other. Here’s how she sets the scene for their love affair: The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. And no electrical glow competes with the intensity of the stars there. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Now when the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of Pyongyang, the capital, you can stroll down the middle of a street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side. Such darkness is a curse, of course, but it also has its advantages. If you are a teenager dating somebody you can’t be seen with, invisibility confers measures of privacy and freedom that are hard to come by in North Korea. You can do what you like without worrying about the eyes of parents, neighbors, or the secret police. You can read a little bit more here, but you have to either buy the book or the Fall 2009 issue to get the full story.
July 2, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Teenage Literature, Wet Brains By Lorin Stein I need to buy a present for a thirteen-year-old boy. His parents suggested “a good book.” This thirteen year-old is not that interested in literature, so I want this book to be a gateway to good, weird literature for him. Suggestions? —James in Providence This is such an excellent—and delicate—question, we decided to call in some experts. Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time magazine. He is also the author of the novels Warp, Codex, and The Magicians, the last of which is centrally concerned with teenagers and gateway reading. Lev recommends: Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. I read and reread this book constantly from ages thirteen through sixteen. Vonnegut seamlessly merges (sorry for the cliché) the basic existential challenges of life with that early-adolescent sense of generalized grievance against the world of which thirteen year-olds are the chosen curators. Plus, it’s impossible to read Cat’s Cradle as a grownup, so it’s now or never. If that doesn’t work, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. After that I give up. Laura Miller is a staff writer at Salon, which she helped found. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, the editor of The Salon Guide to Contemporary Fiction, and the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. Laura writes: The Maze Runner by James Dashner is not exactly a literary triumph, but it’s accessible and action-packed (important to many young male nonreaders) yet also features just enough of that good, Vonnegutesque mind-blowing to show him that books can take you to places no other medium can. Read More
July 1, 2010 The Revel Spring Revel, 2010 By The Paris Review The Paris Review‘s Spring Revel, April 13, 2010 honoring Philip Roth. Photographs by Lucas Stoffel and Patrick McMullan.
July 1, 2010 Arts & Culture W. S. Merwin Named Poet Laureate By Lorin Stein We congratulate W. S. Merwin on being named Poet Laureate of the United States. Merwin published his first poem with the Review in 1955, and we have been proud to publish him ever since. Herewith, to celebrate his appointment (and for the pleasure of retyping it) one of his more recent contributions: To the Long Table The sun was touching the wet black shoulders of olives in a chipped dish descended from another century on that day I remember more than half my life ago and you had been covered with a tablecloth of worn damask for lunch out on the balcony overhanging the stream with the grapes still small among the vine leaves above us and near the olives a pitcher of thin black acrid wine from the cellar just below and an omelette on a cracked white platter a wheel of bread goat cheeses salad I forgot what else the ducks were asleep down on the far side of the green pond Jacques came and went babbling fussing making his bad jokes boasting about old days that nobody else remembered the lacquered carriages the plumes on the horses and what his mother had replied to the admiral whose attentions amused her all the castles they had lost before he had grown up and when the meal was over he said you too were for sale he had discovered you in a carpenter’s shop where you had been used as a workbench without regard for your true worth and the scars on you came from there your history without words upon which words have gathered