August 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Natalia Ginzburg’s Broken Mirror By Tim Parks Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni, 1841, oil on canvas, 46″ x 36″. Public domain. The Manzoni Family is a meeting between two authors who at first glance could hardly seem more different. Alessandro Manzoni is simply the most celebrated figure in modern Italian literature. His great novel The Betrothed, published in quite different editions in 1827 and 1840, is the first modern novel in Italian, the later edition marking a milestone in the consolidation of Tuscan Italian as the language for a potentially united Italy. Profoundly Catholic in inspiration, the book was placed at the core of the Italian school syllabus after the country achieved unification in 1861 and still offers a linguistic and moral example to generation after generation of Italian children. Natalia Ginzburg, on the other hand, was a Jewish novelist and a Communist, whose husband Leone Ginzburg died in a Fascist prison during World War II. While Manzoni’s prose now seems elaborate, sometimes magniloquent, Ginzburg’s is as spare, droll, and laconic as Italian writing ever gets. While he narrated grandiose drama in one eight-hundred-page tome, she chronicled the intimacy of the humdrum in eight rather slender novels and novellas. He was a lifelong phobic who suffered frequent panic attacks and found it impossible to leave the house without company and protection. She showed great courage and initiative during the war, saving her children and herself from the Nazi round-ups of the Jews in Rome after her husband’s death. But perhaps most of all, Manzoni was a profoundly religious man whose faith is very much at the center of his writing. Ginzburg was not religious at all and had nothing to say on the matter. Read More
August 27, 2019 At Work Dark Thread: An Interview with Kimberly King Parsons By Lauren Kane Kimberly King Parsons is a writer who lives in the wilderness. When we spoke on the phone, we were interrupted by the cawing of a large bird outside the window of her Oregon home, which sits on a hill surrounded by a forest populated with “loud squirrels, loud birds, and voles.” She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with generations of ancestors rooted in the nearby cities of Quitaque and Turkey, where unsettled land stretches endlessly. She would pass the time by walking miles in any direction. Wildness is in her fiction as well; the story “Fiddlebacks” begins with three children shaking out their shoes before putting them on, expelling poisonous insects hidden in the toes. There is also something untamed in her deeply flawed characters, who are constantly caught between reining themselves in and indulging their feral darkness. However, Parsons’s true gift is couching the savage in the great beauty of her prose. Her story “Foxes” appears in The Paris Review’s Summer 2019 issue, and her debut collection, Black Light, was published this month. Our conversation revealed her to be an exacting craftswoman, someone for whom the articulation of each sentence is an act of listening to the character and knowing just when to leave a story. INTERVIEWER Have you always known you would be a writer? PARSONS I grew up an only child, so I used to really love going to birthday parties or hanging out with groups, and at a certain point my role became designated scary-story teller. I don’t know why they chose me, but I loved it. There’s something about having a captive audience and having a room full of terrified people listening to you. I remember knowing that I wanted to be a storyteller or a writer in some way. INTERVIEWER Do you remember some of the scary stories you used to tell? Read More
August 26, 2019 Conspiracy More UFOs Than Ever Before By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. This month, he explores the sudden rise in UFO sightings after World War II. America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America? Dreamers have seen things in the heavens since time out of mind. You can go back to 228 B.C., when the Roman historian Livy recognized portents of doom in the “phantom ships” he saw “gleaming in the sky.” Or when Pliny the Elder, an ancient scribe, recorded something that sounds like a Steven Spielberg UFO: a spark that “fell from a star and grew as it descended until it appeared to be the size of the Moon.” Such visions, which usually came in times of stress, were taken as a sign from God. Ezekiel’s fiery wheel, witnessed on the road to Babylon, was possibly a flying saucer. People have always had visions, but the language changed. In the religious age, it was angels and demons. In the scientific age, it’s intergalactic dream machines, hot rods cooked up by gearheads from across the inky vacuum. As the holy book says, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” The Germans put the first jet plane in the air in 1939. The first rocket that could touch space went up in 1942. Called the V2, its target was not space but London. Chuck Yeager, flying the bullet-shaped Bell X-1, broke the speed of sound (767 mph) in October 1947. Ten years later, the Soviet’s launched the first artificial satellite. That was followed by the first man in space, the first man in orbit, the first man on the moon. One result of the aerospace boom was UFO mania. If we could do it, it was only logical to think aliens could do it, too. Roswell, New Mexico, where the air force was said to have recovered a flying saucer and a crew of dead aliens in 1946, was just the most famous encounter—there were hundreds of others during the Cold War. In 1949, government officials were said to have captured the crew of an alien craft that set down, in the cool of a desert evening, on a plateau in Aztec, New Mexico. What explains this sudden intergalactic traffic? Read More
August 26, 2019 First Person Lucky By Shannon Pufahl On luck, love, and desire in Las Vegas. Las Vegas in the nineties was a terrific place to be young. In few other places was this true. Steve Wynn and other developers had used their mountains of money to nearly, but not yet fully, transform the city from a seedy backwater into a sunny haven for the middle class. In the early nineties, downtown Las Vegas was still dirty and strange, not quite a mobster’s paradise but not for families, either. Fremont Street lay open to the sky above and to heavy traffic, which meant sidewalk hawkers and hookers and mean-looking hatted men smoking in doorways. A common sight: prostitutes on big cruiser bicycles, tall curving handlebars like Harleys, riding up and down the street while at each corner stood teenagers snapping thick cards against their palms and handing one to every passerby. Each card was printed with a photo of one of those very cyclists or some other beautiful woman, not cycling but posed in another kind of readiness, along with a phone number and an apothegm about companionship or temerity. Prostitution was not legal in Las Vegas and had not been for nearly fifty years, but no one seemed to care. Presumably, the hookers did, when a raid scattered them, or when they needed help, or when they were arrested or hurt or sometimes killed. But I did not think about any of that when I was fourteen and fifteen, out on Fremont Street alone while my mother and my grandmother gambled. I thought about what it would be like to touch a woman the way the pretty women on the cards invited me to touch them. Whenever a teenager snapped a card and held it out to me, I took it. I assembled a collection of hookers until I had a stack as thick as a poker deck, and with this I made my own game, matching the cards to the women on the street, and imaginatively to other women in other parts of the city, the showgirls outside the Glitter Gulch, cocktail waitresses in dark hose, young wives in the elevators, and sometimes to the girls at my high school, brunette farm girls with big white teeth. The cards were, like the decks at the blackjack tables, representative of value and possibility. Some afternoons, while my mother napped and my grandmother played video poker at the Fitzgerald’s bar, I picked up the phone and traced the numbers. Sometimes I had money in my pocket from sneaking the slots, or because Grandma hit a royal the night before. I could pay, and that meant it did not matter that I was a girl, or only fourteen. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to touch women whose job it was to be touched. I wanted real affection. But the price of real affection was set so high, in my other, daily economy. Read More
August 23, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Screen Tests, Souvenirs, and Sam Ospovat By The Paris Review Kate Zambreno. Photo: Tom Hines. When I was very, very young and very, very unhappy working in a bookstore, I read on my lunch breaks Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl, a novel about another very unhappy shopgirl, and felt as though I understood it on a cellular level. Zambreno’s books have a way of getting under your skin, and her willingness to write ugly, to approach the banal and the cliché as just another tool and subvert it into works of rage and oftentimes real beauty, is part of the appeal. Screen Tests, her latest, pairs a first half composed of very short, very funny pieces of fiction (some of which were published in the Spring 2019 issue) with a second half of longer essays, and the effect is that of a particularly devastating form of déjà vu. Sentences repeat themselves; nameless characters are named; consequences are experienced. The pernicious effects of class, money, and gender reoccur. Is there a way to break the cycle? Art seems like part of the answer—and in an era in which it feels as though we all constantly need to market ourselves, it’s refreshing to read a book that explicitly champions art that is raw, art that is messy, art that cannot be contained. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
August 23, 2019 Look Two Revolutions By Tobi Haslett Martin Puryear’s “Liberty/Libertà,” an exhibition featuring significant new sculptures in the artist’s oeuvre, is the United States’ official contribution to the ongoing 2019 Venice Biennale. The following essay appears in the catalogue accompanying Puryear’s presentation. Installation view, “Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà,” La Biennale di Venezia, U.S. Pavilion, Venice, Italy, 2019. Photo: Joshua White—JWPictures.com. “I like a little rebellion now and then,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. minister to France, to Abigail Adams. She’d sent him a letter denouncing Shays’s Rebellion, a movement of Massachusetts insurgents, many of whom had served in the Revolutionary War but were now militating openly against the state they’d fought to form. Farmers, unable to pay their debts, had been imprisoned and dispossessed; four thousand rebels blocked the courts and sprang their comrades out of jail. Jefferson’s words seem to smile at the events, expressing a kind of princely titillation at the sound and the fury, the thrill of the clash. But the Jefferson of 1787 believed that a regular challenge to government was vital to the exercise of public freedom: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” This was republicanism, this was popular will, this was liberty—the abstraction that fluttered prettily over all his writing and thought. Jefferson was a white, debt-free slave owner who, as he composed his letter to Adams, felt sure of Daniel Shays’s demise. So he wrote from the luxurious position of a philosopher and former revolutionary, flushed with a sense of fabulous drama. He, unlike Adams, was sitting safely in France. Two years passed before the events of 1789: the Tennis Court Oath, the formation of the Assemblée nationale, the storming of the Bastille, and the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by the abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and the Marquis de Lafayette, with help from Jefferson himself. So he stands at the origin of two declarations, two revolutions, two republics. He is a fantastically inflated icon, a gleaming national fetish. We live with his myth, his legacy, his image, and his contradictions. The contradictions are violent. He was a thinker of revolt and constitution, movement and stasis—and a humanist who owned humans he refused to see as such. Read More