May 5, 2020 Dice Roll The Fascinating Origins of Greyhound Racing By Michael LaPointe Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time. ©Ellis Rosen In the late nineteenth century, at least according to legend, a fight to the death between a greyhound and a timber wolf was the most popular sport on the Native American reservations of South Dakota. Greyhounds had been brought to the region to help white settlers eradicate crop-eating jackrabbits, and it was said that the farmers would pit their animals against wolves captured by the local indigenous people. Hobbling Homeward was the white man’s champion, a sixty-pound greyhound descended from a famous Irish hound named Master McGrath, whose heart was allegedly twice the size of a normal dog’s. “The Indians couldn’t believe the smaller animal could kill the fierce timber wolf,” it was said, and yet fight after fight, Hobbling Homeward prevailed. One day, the men from the reservation claimed to have finally found a wolf who could defeat him. They staked $1,000, and “whites and Indians came for miles to see the fight,” including a young sports promoter named Owen Patrick Smith. When the wolf’s cage opened, a hideous, eighty-pound beast, “growling and snapping savagely,” leaped into the ring. A frenzy of gore ensued, “both animals scoring with their knifelike teeth,” but Hobbling Homeward managed to evade the wolf’s death-grip jaws and tore into his belly. “In less than two minutes,” the author wrote, “the great wolf lay in the arena gasping his last breath.” The greyhound was triumphant. The settlers roared. The story, written by a sportswriter at the Miami Daily News some fifty years after the supposed event, has all the trappings of mythological etiology, like the Aeneid: the clash of civilizations, the triumph of the “civilized” bred animal, with his pristine bloodline, over the wild native—and the founding of an empire. By placing Owen Patrick Smith in the crowd that day, the author joined the writhing wolf and the blood-drenched dog to the origin of a multi-billion-dollar gambling phenomenon: greyhound racing. Read More
May 5, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with Giovanni Boccaccio By Valerie Stivers Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, May 15, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, click here, or scroll to the bottom of the page. My hands smell like strawberries and chicken liver, and I’m drinking a Vernaccia, the “good white wine” of The Decameron. In the middle of cooking, I flip through my phone, scrolling through the orange banners announcing death tolls. It’s incongruous and heartbreaking. As a schoolchild, I used to thrill myself with the horror of the World Wars and spent hours in the library daydreaming over what epoch-defining disaster would happen to me. Vietnam was over. Nuclear fears were easing. It was the Reagan eighties and then the Clinton nineties, and it seemed impossible anything could change. But now the epoch-defining disaster is here, and I’m worrying about the health of my friends and family members, and worrying, too, about all the people grieving or suffering, and I feel uneasy about cooking and eating well under the circumstances. It’s possible that the relative abundance of Vernaccia and tasty giblets could soon dwindle in my household as well. Like everyone else, I’m wondering what changes will come next. The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), is a book that sits squarely on one of history’s great pivots. It was completed in 1353, four years after the black death wiped out an estimated 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population, an event that scholars in the book The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? argue was catalyst for massive change, though they note that the plague also served as a crucible for shifts that were already underway but as yet unseen. Boccaccio, who lived in Florence, probably wasn’t an eyewitness to the plague, but his father was the city’s minister of supply, and The Decameron contains one of history’s best accounts by a contemporary of “the late mortal pestilence,” an occasion of “not merely sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death,” which mysteriously seemed to spread not just by contact with the sick but by touching their things or even looking at them. (Does that sound familiar?) Boccaccio chronicles how “divers apprehensions and imaginations were engendered in the minds of such as were left alive,” with some deciding to “shun and abhor all contact with the sick and all that belonged to them” and wait in temperate isolation, while others maintained “that to drink freely, frequent places of public resort, and take their pleasure with song and revel” was the way to go. Nonetheless, “in this extremity of our city’s suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved.” This horror, though, is only the book’s frame. A group of wealthy young nobles, seven women and three men, flee the plague-ridden city for a country estate, where they occupy themselves at “tables covered with the whitest of cloths” and picnic in idyllic glades. The aristocrats eat “dishes, daintily prepared,” drink “the finest wines,” and tell raunchy stories, ten per day for ten days, which are the main contents of the book. Read More
May 4, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 7 By The Paris Review In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “These past few weeks, even as I’ve relished the extra time to read, I’ve missed sports acutely. Just a few innings of baseball before bed! Oh, what I’d do for the swish of a three-pointer! So, as the Paris Review softball team’s permit application is stalled at NYC Parks and Rec, as the only basketball being played is me throwing laundry into the hamper, as MLB comes up with more and stranger ideas for how to restart the stalled-out season, I went back to the archive to find some interesting moments in the magazine’s sports literature. I hope it’s a balm for those among us missing sports. For those who stay far from even the sidelines, I’d encourage giving these pieces a shot. You’ll see that literary sportswriting rarely keeps to the bounds of the baseline—it is about character development as much as athletic performance, about linguistic craft as much as physical form. Let us not forget Robert Frost’s outlook on poetry, from his Art of Poetry interview: ‘I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete.’ In that, perhaps we’re all in it for sport.” —EN The Paris Review has had the good fortune to serialize a handful of novels over the past decade, among them Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special. A group of retired footballers meet up every November to reenact a historic play: the premise is straightforward enough, but the complexity of this group portrait will knock the breath out of you like an encounter with a very solid offensive lineman. Here are part 1 and part 2. Subscribers can read the whole book now, or you can order a copy in our Bookshop.org store. At the opening of her essay “What I Did Last Summer,” Betty Eppes admits, “I was a pretty good tennis player—fluctuating between No. 1 and No. 3 at my tennis club in Baton Rouge.” Betty drops the racket for another adventure. Admittedly, The Basketball Diaries is more about sex and drugs in sixties NYC (be forewarned, some observations have aged less than gracefully) than about basketball, but this early version of Jim Carroll’s memoir does talk about pickup games, his high school’s jock culture, and hitting an “incredible amounts of jump shots” while stoned. Read More
May 4, 2020 Arts & Culture A Dandy’s Guide to Decadent Self-Isolation By Samuel Rutter Frantisek Kupka, The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait), 1907 I’m not ashamed to say that I bought Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature because of the cover: Frantisek Kupka’s The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait) from 1907 is an exhilarating study of the color yellow. Its human subject, slouched in a wicker armchair, a cigarette dangling from one hand while a single, louche finger marks the page of a book, could be the perfect image of Des Esseintes, the dissolute antihero of Huysmans’s novel. Strictly speaking, the painting is a self-portrait of the habitually mustached Kupka, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to Charles Baudelaire, who haunts almost every page of Against Nature. This novel, about a dyspeptic aesthete who “took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude,” spends some two hundred pages luxuriating in excess and opulence while the hero cuts himself off from the rest of society. An old idea that persists about the novel is that it ought to be morally instructive in some way, that it should teach us the correct way to live. Certainly, when Against Nature was published in French in 1884, much of the resultant hand-wringing was because Huysmans’s hero learns nothing new from his misadventures in self-isolation. The problem, according to Émile Zola, was “that Des Esseintes is as mad at the start as he is at the end, that there is no form of progression.” Barbey d’Aurevilly, who, depending on your point of view, was either a minor dandy in the Baudelaire coterie or just a nasty little pornographer, agreed: “Undertaken in despair, the book ends with a despair that is greater than that with which it began.” The reader is informed that in the flower of his youth, Des Esseintes often indulged in the pleasures of the flesh and the card table with his peers, but by the time we meet him in the first chapter, he has already begun dreaming of “a desert hermitage equipped with all the modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.” Page after page, chapter after chapter, Des Esseintes throws more and more money after his ennui and deviant tastes. He flees the crowds of Paris for the country, cuts himself off from outsiders, and attempts to swaddle himself only in objects and experiences that meet his particular aesthetic principles. Decadent literature had its heyday in France in the nineteenth century when the poètes maudits sought to overthrow nature, replacing with it human genius and the pursuit of pleasure, no matter how perverted. But for all Des Esseintes’s extravagance, there is nothing that can stop the rot, there is no escaping his malaise. Eventually, he is ordered back to the city by a pragmatic doctor, where he must abandon his solitary existence and at least try to enjoy the same pleasures as other people. All Des Esseintes can manage, before the doctor strides out the door, is a petulant “But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy!” The novel ends with our hero slumped in a chair. So, what, if anything, do we stand to learn about self-isolation from an ailing aristocrat at the tail end of the nineteenth century? Des Esseintes is based loosely on Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, the dandy par excellence who was also the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. Proust’s roman-fleuve, and Huysmans’s Against Nature, like so many great novels, are concerned with the twilight of a once-golden age. The dandy was an important figure in decadent literature, a visible manifestation of a society infected by its own opulence. Things rarely ended well for the dandy, whether fictional or historical: they tended to die in poverty and obscurity, their witticisms forgotten, their fashions surpassed. But for a few blazing decades of the nineteenth century, in fiction and in society, they were the absolute arbiters of taste, and Jean des Esseintes might just have been their high priest. Curated from the pages of Against Nature, the following is a decadent guide to staying home in style. Quarantine, but make it “fun”-de-siècle. VÊTEMENTS A disastrous place to start. The array of “iso-outfits” and work-from-home ensembles that have been bandied about the internet would surely have pushed Des Esseintes to the brink. It goes without saying that you should not be wearing sweats; you probably should not even own any. Your wardrobe should be seasonal and thematic; you may wear your tweeds to an English-style tavern, but not along the boulevards. A workaround for the effort of daily dressing is to invest in a silk dressing gown, or a velvet smoking jacket, and simply throw it over whatever you are or are not wearing. Remember, though, that for a dandy, the primary aim of dressing is one’s own pleasure; impressing the petite bourgeoisie at the opera is just a secondary thrill. In the current climate, the “quarantini” hour is probably your best opportunity to earn a reputation as an eccentric. Try wearing “suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats” or “sticking a bunch of Parma violets down [your] shirt-front in lieu of a cravat.” Read More
May 1, 2020 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Spring By The Paris Review Contributors from our Spring issue share their favorite recent finds. Spread from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, by Emil Ferris Very late on summer nights when I was a kid, I’d put our crappy pedestal fan on full blast, stick it right beside the couch so that it was refrigerating my face, and quite literally shiver my way through a spooky detective novel of choice. (Electricity was cheaper then.) Reading volume 1 of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters re-creates the goose-bumpy pleasure of an immersive mystery with horrors at every corner. The graphic novel is rendered in atmospheric detail by writer-artist Emil Ferris, using ballpoint pen to capture the fictional diary of Karen Reyes. Karen might be a ten-year-old girl or a budding werewolf—either way, the discomfort of living in an unfamiliar body is palpable on every page. The book is rarely formatted like a traditional multipanel comic. Instead, it spills out, free-form, with full-page panels and long text interludes. It has all the bizarro flotsam of an adolescent brain, too: sketches, taped-up photos, failed math tests, movie posters, covers of horror comics, and, of course, secrets aplenty. In a very different flavor of diary, Emily Raboteau’s article for The Cut, “This Is How We Live Now,” documents a year of conversations about climate change with friends and family. These small, deeply personal conversations take place at birthdays, dinner tables, housewarming parties; in church basements; and online, all across the span of 2019. Raboteau braids the intimate, humdrum details of these events with observations of a planet in a state of almost unimaginable change: “Carolyn warned me at the breakfast table, where I picked up my grapefruit spoon, that I may have to get used to an inhaler to be able to breathe in spring going forward.” I am in awe of the impossible grace of this project, which dials down the scope of global change to its small-scale vibrations. For someone who needs a cool five or ten years to gain an ounce of insight, the perceptiveness of Raboteau’s climate diaries verge on clairvoyance. —Senaa Ahmad Read More
May 1, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Tess Taylor By Tess Taylor In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Musical Interlude” by Eamon Grennan Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000) Through the voice, the soul’s work is done. Janet Baker Cragflower. Music of the sea. The flower still standing in its tormented place. Morning full of voices. Mourning too. Mahalia singing On My Way and making it to Cay-nen Land. On a rock, sit, listen to Bjorling sing Only a Rose over your friend’s ashes. Chaffinch on the clothesline— rosy biscuit breast aglow— will any minute confirm himself in song. And listen, the thin single note of the sandpiper in lakedusk: beige and bright white, precise bill opening, closing: only the one note but enough to cut across the whole valley as a nightwind shakes the stiff green reeds to whispering. Pain, even a single grain of it anywhere in the body is a kind of stop and focus, turning us to pure attention, as may happen with some small invisible winged thing singing in the thick of hedges. Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, The Forage House, and Work & Days. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press.