September 14, 2017

Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a few of his own.

William Blake, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (detail), 1808.

The serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field, had observed with interest the humans’ sexual intercourse in Paradise. He saw that Adam calmly willed his penis to stiffen and then gently inserted it into Eve’s vulva. The act caught his attention in part because he thought that Eve was extraordinarily beautiful and in part because he had already noted a certain resemblance between Adam’s penis and his own body, which he could also harden or soften at will. One day, he approached Eve—Adam was away surveying a different part of the garden—and proposed that he stiffen his body and enter her, as Adam did. Lacking any knowledge of good or evil, Eve gladly consented. The snake made himself hard and penetrated the woman, moving his head this way and that to see what might be of interest. But it was dark inside and, after a while, concluding that Eve was more beautiful without than within, he withdrew. Eve, however, had experienced something intensely pleasurable, and she determined that when Adam returned she would teach him how to imitate what the snake had done. (Williams 57–58; Slavonic Enoch) Read More

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September 13, 2017

In Memoriam

A List of the Columns Michael Friedman Never Wrote

By Robert P. Baird

Courtesy of New York City Center.

In their post this Monday about the death of the composer and librettist Michael Friedman, Lorin and Sadie Stein mentioned their surprise that Michael had published just a single piece on the Daily. “Over the years we’d talked about his doing so many different things, on so many different subjects,” they recalled, “from a column on new music at Le Poisson Rouge to an online version of an informal seminar he held known as Michael Friedman’s Drunk Music Appreciation Class.” The reminiscence brought to mind another near miss, from just last summer.

Though I’d known Michael for several years, our editorial dealings were infrequent, and always ad hoc. An early note I wrote myself reads, in its entirety, “Ask Michael Friedman for his porn-lawyer contact.” (Dated six years ago yesterday, it seems only partially explicable by the fact that Michael was then writing songs for Pretty Filthy, a musical about the porn industry.) It never seemed quite fair to ask him to confine himself to something so limiting as silent pixels in two dimensions, especially when he was having such obvious fun—and such evident success—with a piano and a stage. Still, in June of last year, not knowing much about his previous dealings with the magazine, I asked him, “What would it take to get you to write/sing/dance for The Paris Review?”

A few days later he sent me a list of column ideas, which I reprint here verbatim:

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September 13, 2017

Look

Karl Wirsum’s Casting Call

By Nicole Rudick

Karl Wirsum, Mr. Dry Iced “T”, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 38 1/2″ x 56 1/2″.

In the margin of the drawing Study for Looking at a Curve Ball in Cuernavaca are notes written by the artist, Karl Wirsum:

Batter up
9 at Bats
Last Bats
Lost Summer
Robert Catcher
Umbrella
Umpiro
Manic
Sword Fight Thrust Position

He seems to be trying out titles, and given Wirsum’s other titling efforts (for instance, the superlative Study for Drop a Lozenge Ferret Attitude on the Way to the Letter Drop), I wonder if he wasn’t considering something along the lines of “Umbrella Umpiro Manic Sword Fight Thrust Position.” Wirsum’s titles don’t give many hints, if any, about what’s going on in the paintings, but in their agglomerations of words and punning (Shower Girl Taking a Curtain Call), they, like the works they represent, suggest the potential for ample and adventurous meaning. Read More

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September 13, 2017

On Film

How the Unflappable Fred Astaire Survived the Fifties

By Henry Giardina

Still from The Band Wagon (1953).

The first half of the fifties were a pivotal moment for Hollywood musicals. The genteel tux-and-tie choreography of the thirties had given way to Gene Kelly’s scrappier, more athletic brand of drawn-out (and often pretentious) modern ballets. Kelly’s vision, in the form of musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris, and On the Town, was bubbly, bright, and middle-class. And it left Fred Astaire, the movie musical’s first bona fide superstar, out in the cold.

Astaire had tried to adapt himself to the new style with varying success (see Ziegfeld Follies and Yolanda and the Thief.) But Astaire’s fate in the early fifties was something one suspects he’d never accounted for: his age was beginning to show. Of course, this was a time when elderly men still courted young women on-screen with stunning regularity, and had Astaire been a normal romantic lead, this might not have been a problem. But he was a dancer.

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September 13, 2017

Legends of the Fall

The Tree of Knowledge, Good, and Evil

By Stephen Greenblatt

Over the centuries, there have been innumerable interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve. This week on the Daily, Stephen Greenblatt, the author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, retells some of these legends in modern idiom, and invents a few of his own.

William Blake, Raphael Warns Adam and Eve (detail), 1808.

The newly created humans were not only physically beautiful but also supremely wise. They understood, without being told explicitly, that the tree whose fruit God had forbidden them to eat was in itself neither particularly beneficial nor particularly harmful. There are no magical trees, except in fairy tales, and God did not place poisonous fruits in the Garden that He himself had planted. No, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which Adam and Eve were commanded to abstain, was indistinguishable from the other trees in Paradise in all respects save one. That one respect was the prohibition itself, as a sign of human obedience. If God had chosen some other object in the Garden on which to establish this sign, then the fruit would have been perfectly fine to eat. Why then was it called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Not to refer to any inherent quality in the fruit but only to refer to the result of transgression: the knowledge of the good that would have followed from obedience and the knowledge of the evil that resulted from the failure to obey. (Augustine)

*

There were many trees in the garden, each lovely to look at and good for food, but two trees at its midst were particularly notable: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, good, and evil. God told the human that he could eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, but He commanded him not to eat of the tree of knowledge, good, and evil: “For on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” The human listened and grasped that something very important was being told to him, but it was only after the divine words had faded away that he realized he had no idea what the words “doomed to die” meant. He told himself to ask God for a proper explanation the next time he saw Him. Read More

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September 12, 2017

At Work

Mouths Full of Earth: An Interview with Kapka Kassabova

By Jeffery Gleaves

Left: Kassabova. Photo: Marti Friedlander. Right: the cover of Border.

Borders, both physical and metaphoric, are reductive; you can be on one side of a boundary or the other, under this jurisdiction or that. The Balkan Peninsula has seen it’s fair share of imposed binaries; since antiquity, lines have been drawn and redrawn, separating Latin from Greek, East from West, and Communist from Capitalist.

In her new book, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, Kapka Kassabova is less concerned about which side of the border her subjects fall than she is with how they fall. Beginning on a Black Sea beach, Kassabova travels westward to small villages along the triple border of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, meeting lonely shepherds, forest rangers, former border guards, refugees, and human traffickers. The places she visits have been tragic and busy in recent decades—and all have deep ancient histories. Border features a myriad of characters and locations, but the situations stack up and echo, like a Greek chorus, into an unflinching portrait of those who exist in the liminal spaces between cultures, identities, and epochs.

Our conversation took place over Skype; Kassabova was in a beautiful, lakeside town in Macedonia, researching her next book, and I was sitting on the floor in the hallway outside The Paris Review’s office. Kassabova was eager to answer questions but hesitant to pass judgment, which put me, a poor student of Balkan history, at ease.

INTERVIEWER

What did you have in mind when you started Border?

KASSABOVA

As I started on this pilgrimage, I didn’t know what I was going to find. I started from a position of relative emptiness and ignorance, with a gut sense that there was something rich to tell. As soon as I started hearing people’s stories, it became obvious to me that this book was also going to be about how people narrate their lives, about how we all narrate our lives. In a place like that border, where extreme things have happened and there’s a great saturation of human experience, it’s particularly interesting to see how people survive their story. Read More

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Legends of the Fall

Sex in the Garden

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In Memoriam

A List of the Columns Michael Friedman Never Wrote

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Look

Karl Wirsum’s Casting Call

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On Film

How the Unflappable Fred Astaire Survived the Fifties

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Legends of the Fall

The Tree of Knowledge, Good, and Evil

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At Work

Mouths Full of Earth: An Interview with Kapka Kassabova

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