July 5, 2018 Out of Print The Rare Women in the Rare-Book Trade By Diane Mehta From left: Belle da Costa Greene, Heather O’Donnell, and Bryn Hoffman. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway picks up the phone and receives a solo lunch-party invite intended for her husband, from another woman. Clarissa puts down the phone and reels over “the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered.” Mrs. Dalloway, a book about an aging woman who is no longer valued by society, has increased in value as it has aged. The corrected 1928 typescript, with Woolf’s musings scribbled on its pages, now sells for £27,500. What is a woman worth as she ages? What is a book by a woman worth as it ages? The answers are braided into the realities of the book trade, which is still an old boys’ club. As you’d expect, the expensive books are by men: Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. “No twentieth-century women command those prices,” said Heather O’Donnell, owner of Honey & Wax Booksellers. “Woolf tops out in the mid five figures, and Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston are relatively cheap.” Although it’s true that old white men have always run the large, moneyed, century-old rare-book trade—buying and selling books for a living—women have made enormous inroads as private and institutional collectors. Things started shifting in the seventies. Second-wave feminism gave women a voice, and female collectors started patching the historical holes by seeing value and relevance in objects that men had ignored. When you put your gaze on a manuscript and call attention to it, you create value in the eyes of others. Curiosity creates a market. Read More
July 5, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: There Will Never Be More of Summer Than There Is Now By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, I am still thinking of spring and the way rains wash away the neighborhood children’s chalk drawings. Do you have a poem for that never-ending spring? For the new opportunities I can almost taste in these upcoming months? My partner finally moving to the city where I live, a trip to Europe, a new job—is there a poem that holds all the hope I hold for the future? Yours, Spring Things Dear Spring Things, I love that you are still thinking of spring when summer is so muggy! Personally, I can’t stop sweating, and spring couldn’t feel further away. And yet I think I understand what you are looking for. I like that it is an inappropriate season to be thinking of spring. I want to give you “June,” by Alex Dimitrov, which is also inappropriate, since now we are sitting squarely in July’s armpit. No matter. Alex writes, There will never be more of summer than there is now. Walking alone through Union Square I am carrying flowers and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected. It’s Sunday and the trains run on time but today death feels so far, it’s impossible to go underground. I would like to say something to everyone I see (an entire city) but I’m unsure what it is yet. Read More
July 4, 2018 Eat Your Words Grilling with Homer By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. I’ve been reading the Iliad recently, the world’s first war classic, concurrently with Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, which uses the epic poem’s central plot line to cast light on modern war trauma. (We will get to why this makes sense for grilling, I promise.) The Iliad, attributed to Homer (seventh or eighth century B.C., possibly), tells of a dispute during the Trojan War between Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces, and Achilles, his star warrior. The fight is ostensibly over a girl, but really, Shay says, is over Achilles’s sense of being sold out by the top brass. The terrifying killing rampage that Achilles subsequently goes on, in which he breaks all of his culture’s social and moral rules, is, Shay says, our first recorded instance of war crimes. Shay is a psychologist who works with veterans, and it’s partially his project to explore how ordinary men, even good men, can commit atrocities, how, as he puts it, “war can destroy the social contract binding soldiers to each other, to their commanders, and to the society that raised them.” Shay says that the Iliad’s great tragedy is not the one the marauding Greeks inflict on the Trojans but is the undoing of human character, the destruction of a person’s social ties. Read More
July 4, 2018 History The Philosopher of the Firework By Skye C. Cleary and John Kaag He was looking for a chemical mixture—a potion or tonic perhaps—that would give him eternal youth. Instead, when it caught fire, the ninth-century Chinese alchemist discovered gunpowder. From there, our global obsession with fireworks was sparked. From then on, fireworks were used in celebrations to bring happiness and luck, and also to ward off evil spirits. Almost a thousand years later, upon signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his wife that the day “ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” The first anniversary of Independence Day, in 1777, was indeed full of pomp and parade and illuminations. The fireworks were slightly more subdued than the ones that are used today, since colored fireworks, mixed with strontium or barium, would only be discovered in Italy fifty years later. For the first American Independence Day, orange would have to do. Fireworks, hypnotic and sublime, are used to celebrate national independence around the globe, as signs of sovereignty or political autonomy. They are the window dressing of the modern state. The exploding rainbows are a tribute to the bloody wars that made the celebration possible. They are a reminder that—under that same sky and upon that same land to which the ashes float—we are kinfolk. Read More
July 3, 2018 Redux Redux: Greetings from America By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you John Irving’s 1986 Writers at Work interview, where he advises American writers on how to be political in the face of lying presidents; the artist Olav Westphalen’s portfolio “Greetings from America,” which explores our country’s clichéd myths; and Robert Bly’s “Five American Poems.” Read More
July 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Katherine Mansfield Would Approve By Ashleigh Young On Katherine Mansfield’s birthday, I walked up the edge of a long driveway in gale-force winds. I walked for a long time, with cars passing me. “The wind—the wind.” I was walking to Government House, which is at the top of a hill, where there would be a party. Katherine Mansfield was 125 years old today. The driveway to Government House has bushes and trees on either side, and these were beaten and pushed about by the wind. I thought about turning around and just going home, but that would mean walking past the guard at the entrance again. Every time someone drove past me, I felt more self-conscious. Finally, a hybrid car stopped, and a woman wound down the window. “Are you going to the Katherine Mansfield party?” I was. “That’s a long way, dear. Do you want to hop in?” As we zoomed up the hill between the trees, we should’ve talked about the end of Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party,” in which a big dog runs by like a shadow and Laura walks down that smoky dark lane, because that driveway recalled it to us. But instead, we talked about whether we’d been to Government House before. The woman had been many times. I hadn’t been. Read More