May 20, 2019 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Franny By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik © Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author. I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk. Reopening Franny and Zooey in your thirties is just like opening the diary your mother thoughtfully mailed to you after she found it in the box she’s been trying to get out of the basement. You almost can’t bear to look, but you can’t bear not to look, either. My most love-worn of J.D. Salinger’s novels, Franny and Zooey, is a story in two chapters. The first chronicles Franny’s emotional breakdown as she visits her boyfriend, Lane Coutell, during the “big Yale game.” The second follows the efforts of one of Franny’s older brothers to bring her out of her depression, which, he believes, was brought on by the overly precious environment of the Glass household: seven children of two vaudeville actors who have spent their lives winning fame on a radio show and pursuing enlightenment. As fables for the twenty-first century go, Franny and Zooey has aged just fine. All over New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A., children are downing turmeric milk and meditation apps, buying salt lamps by the cave-full. But the difference is that Franny and Zooey was written in a moment when questioning the pursuit of the American dream was still novel and risqué, and there was no Buddhist mantra emanating from every set of AirPods. Salinger’s characters have died for their want of salvation and everyone’s apartment is prewar. Franny exists in the painful, beautiful first blush of adolescence. Read More
May 20, 2019 YA of Yore Francesca Lia Block and Nineties Nostalgia By James Frankie Thomas Has there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence than Weetzie Bat? Francesca Lia Block’s 1989 debut begins: The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. On the basis of that sentence alone—its stale familiarity, its clunky syntax (“the reason was because”), its pandering parents-just-don’t-understand gloss on adolescent alienation—you’d expect the most formulaic of young adult fiction. On the basis of that sentence alone, you probably wouldn’t keep reading. Certainly you would never guess what follows: They didn’t even realize where they were living. They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Grauman’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers. Surprise! Weetzie Bat is not a novel of teen angst but a novel of teen delight. It’s a novel whose heroine makes a wish to a magic genie to meet “my secret agent lover man” and pages later meets the love of her life—whose actual name, with no explanation, is My Secret Agent Lover Man. It’s a novel that, halfway through, contains this sentence: “And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.” Weetzie isn’t too cool for school, or too deep or too smart, but simply too happy. She’s bursting with joy to be alive, right here, right now. Even the English language can hardly contain her exuberance. Read More
May 17, 2019 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Spring By The Paris Review Paul Beatty. Photo: Hannah Assouline. No American novelist riffs like Paul Beatty. His superlative novel Slumberland established his comic mastery years before he won the Man Booker Prize in 2016. Set in Berlin just before (and after) the fall of the Wall, Slumberland is the picaresque tale of Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, a Los Angeles native on a quest to find the Schwa, a mysterious East Berlin Schallplattenunterhalter who can “ratify” our narrator’s perfect beat. True to the genre of expatriate lit, DJ Darky leverages the wisdom afforded an outsider’s perspective, as Germany’s multikulti breeziness becomes a lens on race relations in the U.S., and on othering more generally. The novel exploits the tragicomic potential of the reversals, slurs, and embarrassments that might befall a black man in Berlin—a “jukebox sommelier” with a penchant for tanning booths, our narrator eventually endeavors to rebuild the Wall—but the boldest joke might be subtly, cheekily metafictional: forget dancing about architecture, Beatty’s written a syncopated novel about sound. I picked up Slumberland after finishing the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book-length essay The Agony of Eros. Though very different in tone, together the two make a kind of contrapuntal harmony. Like Slumberland, The Agony of Eros is rife with asides on Heidegger and porn. But where DJ Darky eventually aims to make otherness “passé,” Eros takes the opposite tack. Han is concerned with preserving the idea of the Other as a check on contemporary narcissism, according to which “everything is flattened out into an object of consumption.” In other words, by acknowledging the sovereignty of another person as other, not mine—by resisting the temptation to translate difference into familiar, “consumable” terms—we delineate a limit on the Self. It’s as earnest and compelling a diagnosis for social malaise, romantic or otherwise, as any I’ve come across. But as we search for a cure, I’m reminded of another impulse behind Slumberland: often it’s in the face of despair that we reach for the joke. —J. Jezewska Stevens Read More
May 17, 2019 Look Something Always Remains By Trevor Paglen Some people collect rocks. Others collect stamps. Peter Merlin, a former NASA archivist who’s become a leading expert on military aircraft and Area 51, collects the physical remnants of government secrets. As he explains in the artist Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace—a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name. A selection of artifacts from Merlin’s collection, along with explanatory text from Paglen, appears below. Courtesy of Primary Information. Civil Defense pamphlets from the fifties and sixties offered helpful tips for surviving nuclear bombardment. Such gems included “Take a shower … to remove any radioactive contamination” and “Don’t spread rumors.” Government authors attempted to assure citizens that nuclear war was easily survivable, yet the cover of one booklet features the phrase “Avoid panic” beneath a terrifying image of a city engulfed in flames beneath an atomic mushroom cloud. Read More
May 16, 2019 Arts & Culture Visual Magicians in the Hills of Connecticut By Robert Pranzatelli On John Kane’s photography of Pilobolus and Momix. John Kane, Where landscape becomes dreamscape, 2008. (All images copyright John Kane. Used by permission.) In the hills of northwestern Connecticut there is a portion of the state, a rural and rural-suburban region, that I refer to as “Pilobo-land”: it includes Washington, New Milford, and other nearby towns, and has long been home to two of the world’s most celebrated dance-theater companies, Pilobolus and its sibling, Momix, as well as to a number of their most noteworthy friends, neighbors, and collaborators. It’s a community that tends to be on a first-name basis, even between individuals who have yet to meet directly. Pilobo-land, however, is more than a place; it’s also the overlapping worlds, on stages and in minds, that it creates. Just as Vladimir Nabokov dubbed his cherished intangible possessions “unreal estate” one might, in regard to Pilobolus and Momix, speak of “surreal estate.” It’s a place where landscape becomes dreamscape, where the rural and the theatrical are both strikingly pictorial, and no photographer has captured them more artfully or faithfully, through multiple decades, than resident John Kane. A selection of his work, a small number of images, dramatically enlarged, is now on display in the heart of the territory it documents, at the Judy Black Memorial Park and Gardens, in the village of Washington Depot. Read More
May 16, 2019 Pinakothek More Obscene than De Sade By Lucy Sante In his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past. “Maybe it would be better if we stopped seeing one another. Maybe there is no remedy to our solitude because … we don’t love each other enough.” Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction in the Anglo-Saxon realm. There is no word for it in English, exactly. You could say “photo-comics,” but you’d risk being misunderstood. These narratives, often but not always romantic, are conveyed by means of photographs arrayed in panels on a page, with running text often in talk balloons. Their impact has been almost entirely restricted to countries that speak Spanish, Italian, or French; their readership is overwhelmingly female, at least in Europe. Their history formally begins in 1947 in Italy, in the magazine Grand Hotel, soon followed by its French sibling, Nous Deux; both magazines still exist. Fotonovelas flourished in the fifties and early sixties (into the eighties in Latin America), then began a slow decline that still refuses to yield to extinction. Everything was all mixed up. She closed her eyes and thought she heard Daniel. “Your hair is so fine and aromatic!” The culprit of their near-demise, of course, was television, in combination with social anxiety. Fotonovelas were associated with the poor and unlettered (my mother aspirationally ignored their weekly appearance in Femme d’Aujourd’hui, to which she subscribed for almost fifty years), the naive and sheltered and perhaps delusional. Roland Barthes, having written that “love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual,” went on to call Nous Deux “more obscene than de Sade.” Some years earlier, in a less militant phase, he noted of the fotonovelas that “their stupidity touches me” and ranked them with other “pictographic” forms, such as stained-glass windows and Carpaccio’s Legend of St. Ursula. There are even more specific antecedents, although no record of actual influence: Nadar’s famous conversation with the centenarian chemist Michel Chevreul was published as sequential captioned photographs in Le Journal Illustré in 1886, and La Folle d’Itteville, the collaborative photo-novel by Germaine Krull and Georges Simenon, was published in 1931. Read More