April 28, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Anatomy of Melancholy By Dustin Illingworth In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it. COVID-19 has prevented the indolence melancholy requires, even as its variants—anxiety, panic, vertigo—have bloomed in quarantine. If one is not already longing for melancholy, surely one has begun longing for the conditions in which it was once possible. Perhaps this is why I’ve finally chosen to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy after many years of owning it. (I’ve not yet finished it; I’m not sure to what extent anyone can be said to have finished such a book.) “If you will describe melancholy,” Burton writes, “describe a phantasticall conceipt, a corrupt imagination, vaine thoughts and different, which who can doe?” The book sets this pessimism spinning like a top, whirling delightedly over local resentments and cosmic griefs alike. It is a labyrinth of arcane scholarship, obscure quotation, medical ephemera, and earthy shrewdness, all of it tied up with determining the root causes of melancholy. It is not hyperbole to call it one of the primary documents of European culture. This greatest of medical treatises was written not by a doctor but a reclusive Oxford clergyman. As with Shakespeare, little is known about Burton outside his chief occupation. His contemporary, Anthony Wood, called him “an exact Mathematician, a curious calculator of Nativities, a general read Scholar, a thro’-pac’d Philologist.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is presented as a frayed patchwork of texts, is the obvious work of a bibliophile, less original conception than inspired collage. (“Tis all mine, and none mine,” Burton wrote. “Only the method is myne owne.”) It proved a remarkable popular success, going through six printings in Burton’s lifetime. After falling out of print for over a century, it was rediscovered by the Romantic poets—John Keats called it his favorite book—and quickly enshrined as a classic: the tract resurrected as literature. Read More
April 28, 2020 Comics The Scientific Erotica Book Club By Tom Gauld For the rest of the week, we’ll publish a strip each day from Tom Gauld’s new collection Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, in which the acclaimed cartoonist and illustrator trains his trademark wit on the wonderful world of science. Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the Guardian, The New Yorker, and New Scientist. His comic books—Baking with Kafka, Mooncop, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, and Goliath—are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family. From Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.
April 27, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 6 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. “In celebration of the warmer days soon to come, this installment of The Art of Distance is devoted to spring—to stories, poems, and other pieces that put us in mind of the season’s hope, bounty, and optimism. Spring has sprung in these pages, at least.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Photo: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma. I’m watching spring blossom through the window of my sister’s childhood bedroom; the sun is bright, the breeze is cold, and the birds are louder here than in Manhattan. Reading William Styron’s “Letter to an Editor,” the preface to issue no. 1, I imagine that the spring of 1953 was as crisp and as bright as this one. Styron’s letter is an anti-manifesto manifesto, a critique of criticism itself, its very syntax exuding a biting and springlike energy. He admits that all ideas fall subject to scrutiny when put to paper. He writes, “It’s inevitable that what Truth I mumble to you at Lipp’s over a beer, or that Ideal we are perfectly agreed upon at the casual hour of 2 A.M. becomes powerfully open to criticism as soon as it’s cast in a printed form which, like a piece of sculpture, allows us to walk all around that Truth or Ideal and examine it front, side, and behind, and for minutes on end.” Styron asks, however, that we try to put all that aside, resisting intellectual exercise and simply enjoying the patient work of writing and reading. —Elinor Hitt, Intern Read More
April 27, 2020 Arts & Culture What Rousseau Knew about Solitude By Gavin McCrea Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1766 In his last unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, composed in the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set forth his vision for a writing life lived beyond the confines of community: “So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own… [D]etached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.” After a scandal erupted in 1762 about the unorthodox religion in one of his books, Rousseau spent the next eight years in exile from Paris, wandering around Switzerland, England, and the French provinces. Having previously occupied a place at the center of civilized society—secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, friend of the philosopher Diderot, protected by rich patrons, “acclaimed, made much of, and welcomed with open arms”—Rousseau became gripped by the paranoid belief that he was an object of universal derision. “The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest. With all the ingenuity of hate they have sought out the cruellest torture for my sensitive soul, and have violently broken all the threads that bound me to them.” By the time he returned to Paris in 1770, Rousseau was one of the most famous men in Europe, known popularly by his first name and revered by many of his contemporaries. In spite of this celebrity, he chose to live quietly with his companion Thérèse in a modest flat near the Palais-Royal, occupying his time with music, botany, and country walks. “Alone for the rest of my life”—in Rousseau’s eyes, female companionship did not obviate his own special class of solitude—“since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is towards myself and this is all I desire… Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me.” Claiming to be no longer concerned about his reputation—“the desire to be better known to men has died in my heart”—Rousseau decided that his next project would be a simple one: he would walk, he would think, he would write down the thoughts that came to him. His Reveries would be nothing less than a faithful record of his friendless perambulations and the daydreams which occupied them. “I will give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder me, the only ones when I can truly say that I am what nature meant me to be.” In Rousseau’s scheme of things, solitude was the natural human state. By stepping outside of society, by distancing oneself from other voices, one was facilitating a return to oneself. But being with oneself is one thing; writing about the state of being with oneself, another. There are ten walks in the Reveries (“First Walk,” “Second Walk,” et cetera), and although some of them may well record the thoughts that occurred to Rousseau as he ambled around Paris, what they amount to are carefully crafted reflections on his life and earlier writing. The Reveries are not the spontaneous jottings of a dreamer, nor do they attempt to mount an illusion of such spontaneity. Rather, they are the work of a stationary body—a bent back, a cramped wrist, a strained eye, an aching temple—as it worked to broaden and deepen certain fleeting images, particular flashes of insight, into a sustained, intelligible vision. Read More
April 24, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Kentuckis, Kerchiefs, and Choreography By The Paris Review Samanta Schweblin. Photo: © Alejandra López. There has always been art that appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient—Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction of “fifteen minutes of fame,” say, or Umberto Romano’s 1937 painting of a figure checking their smartphone. Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, published in the original Spanish in 2018 and due out from Riverhead in Megan McDowell’s translation May 5, is this kind of visionary: a novel of a near-future dystopia that has suddenly, in the months before its U.S. publication, become nearer still. Unraveling the premise is the pleasure of this book, but in briefest summary: a new toy called a kentuki appears on the market. Consumers can choose to own these stuffed animals, who move around on wheels and have cameras for eyes, or to “dwell” in them—purchasing a connection that allows users, from their computers or tablets, to control the toy’s movements and see what it sees. Each kentuki can form only a single connection, randomly assigned to people around the world, and when it is disconnected, the object becomes disposable. Indeed, the entire pleasure of the toy is built not on its possibilities but on its limitations: the dwellers cannot speak to the owners, though they can hear what is said to them. From within these confines, a global obsession emerges. Dwellers remain at home in front of their screens for days, hypnotized by their kentukis’ quotidian lives on the other side of the planet. Society divides into watchers and those who desire to be watched. The seemingly simple technology is inevitably bent to hold all of human nature—it becomes a cure against modern loneliness, a political tool, an entrepreneurial possibility (an industry of kentuki accessories springs up), a tool for blackmail, and, of course, a way to fulfill our basest desires (on the black market, pedophiles purchase connections to kentukis that dwell in homes with children). Each chapter is headed by the name of a city—Oaxaca, Zagreb, Vancouver, Lima—and the reader flits in and out of lives around the world, forced to confront the voyeurism that is the essence of fiction. At a time when most of us are indoors, reaching for one another through our screens, I can think of no book that more clearly illustrates how close, yet far, that still leaves us. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
April 24, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Major Jackson By Major Jackson 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. “Coral” by Kamau Brathwaite Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019) Read More