March 12, 2018 Arts & Culture Listening to Harold Bloom’s Laugh and DeLillo’s Bronx Accent By Matt Levin On listening to the archival audio of the Writers at Work interviews in the Morgan Library. The Morgan Library. Every week for the past four months, I have made the multistage journey to the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at the Morgan Library, the home of the archives of The Paris Review, in the aim of gathering audio for The Paris Review Podcast. I approach the library obliquely, around the corner from the main entrance, through the glass staff doors. I can see the guards, wave to them even, but each time, I must state my business through a small intercom at about the height of my belly button. When I am let in and signed in, I pass through a glass door that leads immediately to another glass door, which can only be opened by another security guard. Often, I am stranded for a few minutes in this transparent, soundproof vestibule, trying to get the attention of the guard. I can see perfectly into the open, mellow, well-lit blond-wood cube lobby of the library, which looks like something out of a Scandinavian modern Lego set. Then the door opens, and sound pours in—spoons tinkling on porcelain saucers, voices faintly echoing under the high ceiling, the tonic buzz of the HVAC system. The space changes. The sounds of footfalls or a cough or a machine whirr, I realize each time, constitute a room as much as the shape of a window, the sunlight slanting in, the style of a vase. I trail behind the security guard to the elevators (all glass), a special key is inserted, and I rise to the third floor, where another glass-ended anteroom awaits. I can see through a glass door into the reading room itself, can see the employees moving in a shuffle that is itself a whisper, can see the researchers in their blue latex gloves gripping the corners of translucent manuscript pages with the delicacy used to pick up a strand of hair. I stuff everything I have except for my laptop, a notebook, and a number-two pencil (no ink allowed) in a locker and wash my hands, per regulation. Then the heavy glass door with a scratchy brass latch bolt clicks open, and I’m finally inside, and the room becomes the scent of aging books—stale glue, starchy paper, faint notes of smoked cigarettes and palms and rainwater—mingling with bright lemon cleaning products. In the reading room, I sit and listen to archival audio of The Paris Review Writers at Work interviews, which I have read and know the words to but only imagine I’ve heard, have been guessing at from across the transparency of the page. Read More
March 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Berger, Brock-Broido, and Beauman By The Paris Review John Berger When asked to describe my literary interests, I used to say that John Berger was the first white man I loved, and also the last. Now he’s dead, but his final book is forthcoming. In May, Notting Hill Editions will publish Smoke, Berger’s illustrated elegy to cigarettes. If “collaborative consumption”— a lifestyle whose transactions include co-working, co-living, and ride sharing—is a poorly disguised marketing campaign designed to sell old habits of communal living to millennials with new income, Smoke imagines a reciprocity that’s for real. In fable-like prose, Berger describes a community of men, women, and children who pass around cigarettes, lights, and worldviews. When their habits are declared deadly, and they themselves are declared murderers, they retreat into the shadows. Though their love is illicit, they meander toward old haunts, where they are “happy,” in Berger’s words, “to encounter one another as outlaws.” —Maya Binyam On the site of a newly discovered temple deep in the jungle of Honduras, two groups of Americans enter a standoff that lasts nearly two decades. The first group, arriving from Hollywood to shoot a film, finds the second, sent by a Rockefeller-like tycoon character to dismantle the temple and bring it stateside piece by piece, camped out by the half-deconstructed ruin. Both groups have hired the same locals to help them. The characters in Ned Beauman’s Madness Is Better Than Defeat are, to the reader’s delight, haplessly out of place, and, it would seem, doomed. Take Jervis Welt, a film-theory teacher from Southern California who’s been sent on this mission by an enigmatic, Howard Hughes–like, Hollywood mogul (he has never directed a movie before). Before long, both groups become entangled with black-hat CIA operatives out to use them for their own geopolitical purposes and an ex–Nazi officer on the run. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Beauman’s layered treatment of familiar archetypes surges at you like a Pynchonesque detective novel with the slow-building surreality of Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now. Madness is a thrilling, dark, comedic romp through the jungle. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More
March 9, 2018 Look The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga By The Paris Review Jake Verzosa, Abo Nao Sicdawag, b. 1924, Lubo, Tanudan, 2011. When Whang-Od was twenty-five, the man she loved was killed in a logging accident. She had never married, nor did she have children. After the death of her boyfriend, she dedicated herself to her role as mamababatok, or tattoo artist. Whang-Od is now 101, and in the Cordillera mountains of the northern Philippines, where she lives among the Kalinga people, she is a legend. Between 2009 and 2013, the Manila-based photographer Jake Verzosa traveled to the Cordillera mountains and photographed Kalinga women whose bodies bear these tattoos, known as batok. Whang-Od is the last mamabatok, and The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga, a collection of Verzosa’s photographs, documents her work. Alternately described as “dead,” “dying,” “extinct,” or “endangered,” batok is a practice that lives on in Versoza’s images, and also in the Kalinga, who are, Verzosa emphasizes, still here. “When I pass on,” says Whang-Od, “I will bring my tattoos with me in the afterlife. Everything else is left behind.” Read More
March 9, 2018 Out of Print Eight Unexpected Highlights from the Antiquarian Book Fair By Sarah Funke Butler The fifty-eighth New York Antiquarian Book Fair, organized by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), opened March 8 at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through Sunday. Some of the items on display include Shakespeare folios and quartos and ephemera, Einstein’s Bible and his letter on “God’s secrets,” a manuscript poem by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s copy of the Odyssey, and the four-million-dollar Hamilton Collection, complete with a lock of his hair. There are also far stranger items, such as the “first salad monograph,” an instructional needlepoint from Shakespeare, and a shooting script from the Kurosawa classic Yojimbo. Here is a deeper look at some of the unique items on view at the fair: Read More
March 8, 2018 In Memoriam To the Future Readers of Lucie Brock-Broido By Stephanie Burt Lucie Brock-Broido, New York City, 2004. (photo: W.T. Pfefferle) In the far future, when the only readers who cherish and puzzle over Lucie Brock-Broido’s poems are those who never met her, those readers will surely try to imagine what she must have been like in person. Perhaps they will know that she was a charismatic teacher, that she made such an impression in the lives of her students that everybody who knew her (at Harvard, in Cambridge, at Columbia University School of Arts) said there was no one like her. And those readers of the future will try to compile her personal manner from her verse style: gorgeous, elaborate, allusive, sometimes Gothic or haunted, at other times able to revel in beauty, all of it driven by her “propensity for lavish / Order in certain seasons of the year.” She must have been (these readers will assume) an authority figure in an unusual way, a way that drew into itself so many styles—lacy, bejeweled, able to hide at whim, aware of mascara, given to ornament, catlike. She chose rhetoric, chose devices that much of the literary past (the parts of the past run by dudes) believed could not hold power. Those readers will be right. The past, the patriarchal past, was very wrong, and Lucie was right about it. The future readers will quote her sentences to one another, smiling at their discoveries, and realizing how long the sentences continue, unraveling and reknitting themselves into the big closures that her poems so often find. Just to read the poetry is to see—in its hypermetric lines, its cliff-face line breaks, its “gathering / Of foxes oddly standing still in the milk broth of oblivion”—how there was more to her and more in the poetry, more to consider (before reflecting) beautiful, and more to gather into the self for reflection than most poets, and most poetry, have in store. Read More
March 8, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Lost Work, Paralysis, and Gun Laws By Claire Schwartz 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, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, My best friend lost something he has been working on his whole life. Could you send me a poem that he could use right now? Signed, Caring Friend Dear Caring Friend, When you work on a project for a long time, that project can become your companion, confidante, sanctuary, challenge. I’m sorry about your friend’s loss. Still, how gorgeous your friend’s lifetime of making: that practice of sustained attention extends far beyond any finished product. There’s a tree I love that, in its growing, encountered a rock and grew around it. Now the rock is part of the tree. Sometimes I imagine what the tree would look like if the rock were removed. What else might that space be? Respite for a squirrel? Hiding place for a child’s toy? A space for a teenager to cast her mind onto as she imagines the tree’s long and wild histories? The shape of the tree’s growth has been forever shifted by the way it’s held that rock, whether the rock is there or not. What your friend has made is lost, and he deserves to grieve that loss. As the grief settles, I hope he will find sustenance in exploring what his making has made of him. I would love to offer him Nicole Sealey’s poem “In Igboland,” from her extraordinary book Ordinary Beast. In it, the speaker beholds an elaborate mansion Igbo townspeople have built as an offering to a god. The speaker, suspended between her Western want and her African knowing, recommits to her own desire. The poem ends: The West in me wants the mansion to last. The African knows it cannot Every thing aspires to one degradation or another. I want to learn how to make something holy, then walk away. Holy the making, holy the letting go. I hope your friend will walk toward the possibilities of new creation fortified by the knowledge that the work he has done on the project he has lost will serve whatever comes next. —CS Read More