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The Daily

July 8, 2019
Arts & Culture

Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage

By Lina Mounzer

When we speak of translation in these end-of-days, it is often in the loftiest of tones, as though it were a sacred duty undertaken by devoted adepts prostrating themselves before the altar of language. The self is renounced, the greed for authorship forsworn in service of a greater calling, which is no less than bridging the gaps between the peoples and cultures of the world.

This is certainly true if you’re translating, say, Don Quixote, or Heian-period Japanese poetry, or a new novel by Senegal’s latest rising star. But only a small minority of translators have the skill, opportunity, and financial security required to take on such labors of love. The rest of us, to earn a living wage, will have to make do with whatever garbage we can get. By garbage I mean any or all of the following: corporate-speak, brand manifestos, NGO reports, think tank reports, letters from government agencies replying to American oil companies, letters from government agencies replying to human rights organizations, prose written by self-professed wunderkinds whose trust funds and unearned self-confidence are paying for the translation, and that vilest genre of all, the art text. Read More

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July 8, 2019
The Big Picture

What’s the Use of Beauty?

By Cody Delistraty

Édouard Manet. Woman Reading, 1880 or 1881. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.

The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which your initial superficial assessment of a person influences your perception of their other, more ambiguous traits. In the name of cultural journalism, I conducted an informal experiment to test this. I posted five different photographs of myself to a website called Photofeeler, which people mostly use for their acting headshots, company photographs, and online dating profiles. Strangers vote on your attractiveness, trustworthiness, and intelligence, and, using a weighted algorithm, the website tells you the percentile you’re in compared with the rest of the people on the website so you can choose the best photograph. The photo of mine that was voted the most attractive—my fingers awkwardly crinkled around a wineglass on a terrasse—was the one in which I was voted smartest and most trustworthy. The photograph in which I was deemed ugliest—sitting in a cab—was the one in which I was voted dumbest and least trustworthy. In every photograph, my perceived attractiveness determined my perceived trustworthiness and intelligence, traits that, of course, are impossible for anyone to actually know from a picture.

The notion of the halo effect and the idea that “beauty is good”—meaning that we assume people who are prettier must also be cleverer, kinder, more moral than uglier people—were first tested in 1972 by the psychologists Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster. They found that people almost uniformly believed that those who they found more attractive on the basis of three small photographs were also more generous and more stable and had better marriages, better jobs, and better families than less attractive people. A similar study from just a few years ago found that people trust those they consider more attractive significantly more quickly than those they consider less attractive.

Is beauty, therefore, the most useful trait one might have? Read More

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July 5, 2019
This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Fathers, Fleabag, and the French Toast of Agony

By The Paris Review

Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann.

I knew I was going to appreciate Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 cult classic Malina before I even picked it up—not only have I enjoyed reading her poetry in the past (some of which has been published in the pages of this very magazine), she’s also a major influence on one of my favorite writers, Elfriede Jelinek. And so I sat down this past weekend to finally read Malina, recently reissued by New Directions, with a great eagerness—but I didn’t realize just how profoundly it would affect me. The novel is almost impossible to describe—dense and experimental, it’s essentially a portrait of one woman’s psychological unraveling. The narrator, a nameless writer in Vienna, is torn between obsessive relationships with two different men: Ivan and the mysterious Malina, who may or may not be real. But the book is also about trauma and shame and the implicit violence that lurks in the relationships between women and men. Many pages are dedicated to a series of nightmarish visions the narrator has about her father, seemingly based on Bachmann’s hatred of her own Nazi father. Like Jelinek after her, Bachmann delineates the relationship between patriarchy and fascism to extraordinary effect, and though her vision may be bleak, it is one of profound, disquieting importance. —Rhian Sasseen Read More

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July 5, 2019
Eat Your Words

Eat This Book: A Food-Centric Interview with Amber Scorah

By Valerie Stivers

I met the Canadian writer Amber Scorah at a party last winter. She was introduced by a mutual friend as the author of an upcoming memoir, Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life. I tried but failed to bite my tongue (a frequent failure), and asked, “What terrible thing happened to you?” Scorah, it turned out, was a former Jehovah’s Witness who’d escaped the church while working as a missionary in China. Fortunately, she had a sense of humor.

The hard-knocks memoir is nothing new, but Scorah’s struck me as a story relevant to today’s cultural moment, and to my mission as the Eat Your Words columnist for The Paris Review, where I re-create meals from the pages of books, not just for fun (though it is fun) but because approaching a beloved book through its food is an estranging and fertile way to connect to the story.

What field of human endeavor is more estranging than being a missionary? You go, bearing the ultimate truth (as you see it), to a place where you know nothing, to a people you know nothing about, where you are a stranger and everything is strange to you. You’re there to teach, not to learn; to talk, not to listen; to show, not to see. Many people in this position gird themselves with disdain for those they’ve come to convert—it helps to keep up the conviction that you are right and everyone else is wrong. But for those who approach their potential converts with respect, the way Scorah did despite her training, the missionary relationship can become inverted. Of learning Chinese, Scorah writes, “It was a different way of being in the world. I was in a mild state of disorientation for a number of years, and one of the unexpected effects was that I was slowly made a little less sure that the world was in fact as I had always seen it.”

I’ve always been attracted to learning from experience. You sit down, you share food, if you’re paying attention, you’ll learn something. Being a missionary in a foreign country is all unfamiliar foods and new dining companions. And while the history of religious expansionism is littered with human tragedy, there are many inspiring individual stories. Shortly before meeting Scorah, I’d written a column on Pearl S. Buck, the author of a thirties U.S. best seller set in China, The Good Earth. Buck was a daughter of missionaries to China. Like Scorah, she renounced her church after gaining perspective from her contact with Chinese culture. And though her legacy is tarnished with accusations of racism (a 1937 movie version of The Good Earth in which the Chinese characters were portrayed by white actors is partially responsible), in her own time she was responsible for the first realistic depiction of the everyman Chinese farmer in either Chinese or American literature.

Scorah and I talked about Leaving the Witness, the parallels between her life and Buck’s, and of course, Chinese food.

INTERVIEWER

Where did this story begin? How did you become a Jehovah’s Witness?

SCORAH

I was born on the prairies of Canada as a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness on both sides. From a young age, I heard what was preached from the platform at our meetings, and internalized its message of apocalypse and destruction in a deep way. When you’re a young girl from a family that has some problems, and you are offered clear guidelines about how to protect yourself from a violent end, you listen.

Our children’s books from the organization couldn’t have helped—they depicted children in the paradise God had promised would come after Armageddon, but also had graphic illustrations of the world’s end, with fire raining down on children from the sky, destroying them. It was a strong motivator. Plus, the people in the congregation were so kind and nice to me, it felt like a safe place to be. I’ve since come to understand that this is one tactic that groups like this use to control people: creating unresolvable fear and balancing it out with generous doses of love. The love, however, is conditional on your staying in the group.

When I was entering secondary school, my family moved to Vancouver. After I graduated from high school, I ended up becoming a “pioneer,” which is a Jehovah’s Witness who commits to at least seventy hours per month preaching, a missionary of sorts, except that we support ourselves in the work. It was in Vancouver that I first encountered Chinese people in my preaching work.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve told me that for a smart, ambitious person, being a Jehovah’s Witness was boring, and your solution to that was to go to China. Is that right?

SCORAH

Yes, especially as a woman. Women are not allowed to teach in the congregation, or to have positions of authority in the organization. Careers are forbidden, education is off limits, even getting too into any kind of hobby or sport is discouraged—because they are all a distraction. For a woman who liked to do things, there was only one acceptable place to focus her energies: preaching.

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July 4, 2019
Document

George Plimpton’s Illegal Fireworks Display

By The Paris Review

The Paris Review’s founding editor George Plimpton was a man of many enthusiasms, but fireworks were chief among them. His lifelong affair with pyrotechnic explosives began when he served as a demolitions expert in the U.S. Army. He even wrote a book on the subject—Fireworks: A History and Celebration. Needless to say, he loved the Fourth of July.

George could be counted upon to supply and launch fireworks for all manner of occasions: weddings, celebrations, and, of course, Fourth of July parties, such as one held in the late sixties on Martha’s Vineyard, which Rose Styron—poet, activist, wife of founding editor William Styron, and member of The Paris Review’s extended family—recalls as particularly full of misadventure. In celebration of this year’s Independence Day, we called her up to hear the story. Read More

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July 3, 2019
Brush Strokes

On Wingspan: Joan Mitchell’s Reach

By John Vincler

John Vincler’s new column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world.

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-1991 ©Estate of Joan Mitchell, Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, Courtesy David Zwirner

Standing before a Joan Mitchell painting, as I tried to bring language to her colors and gestures, the first word that came to me was wingspan. As I walked past the nine paintings spread across two rooms at her recent exhibition, “I carry my landscapes around with me” at David Zwirner, I looked for the grand, arching strokes that regularly mark the oversize scale of her work. The term wingspan suggests a great bird or angel, but it occurs to me simply as shorthand for reach, like that of a star athlete: a tennis player’s serve, a baseball player’s windup, a basketball center’s blocking ability. (Almost every consideration of her work mentions the seemingly requisite detail that she was an accomplished figure skater in her youth.) Joan Mitchell was not unusually proportioned or exceptionally tall (a patient archivist from the foundation points me to a mid-60’s driver’s license that places her at 5’6”), but she brought an enormity to her painting, whether in individual gestures—juxtaposing the large and sweeping, with the small and delicate—or in the size of the canvases themselves. Most works in the Zwirner show measure between eight and ten feet in height. In my mind, the paintings are always linked to a series of images included with Linda Nochlin’s essay in the 2003 Whitney Museum Joan Mitchell catalog, which were meant to illustrate the woman artist as subject, not object: the famous 1950 Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm in his East Hampton studio, with Pollock like a dancer leaning forward, brush in one hand, paint can in the other, arcing drips across his unstretched canvas on the floor; Cecil Beaton’s photograph for Vogue from the following year titled blankly Model in front of Jackson Pollock painting, showing a model in a strapless couture dress holding a pair of black gloves standing stiffly with a Pollock painting serving as the backdrop; and finally Rudy Burckhardt’s 1957 photograph of Joan Mitchell, feet planted firmly, facing her canvas Bridge, back to the viewer, her right arm stretched to its limit as she slashes horizontally at a height almost certainly exceeding six feet tall. This photograph of Mitchell documents a body’s limit from rootedness to extension. Standing there in a room surrounded by her work, I see clearly that through her painting, Mitchell made herself a giant.

I’ve been struggling with a question: why are Joan Mitchell’s paintings important now? Is it ahistorical to look at paintings from the last century with landscape as their subject and wonder if they portend something ominous? To closely examine a visual artist’s recorded view of a landscape from a half century, or even a few decades, ago is to begin looking for signs of change, degradation, hints of potential impending collapse. Joan Mitchell’s paintings are primarily documents of expression, capturing a memory or a feeling of a place, rather than depicting a specific landscape itself. Her method of painting channels the dynamic and fraught relationship between human making and the natural world, maintaining an element of struggle, even violence, underneath. Here in the paintings, a persistent force struggles against a threat of impending collapse, often culminating in an ecstatic result.

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