July 26, 2018 Arts & Culture Reopening the Case Files of Leopold and Loeb By Jeremy Lybarger Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. It wasn’t America’s worst murder, even at the time. The June 1912 massacre of six members of the Moore family and their two houseguests, all of them bludgeoned to death as they slept in Villisca, Iowa, was arguably worse. That case was never solved, though a recent book, The Man from the Train (2017), names a plausible suspect. And worse than that was in 1893, when the physician and amateur hotelier H. H. Holmes built a jerry-rigged murder castle in Chicago in which he killed and cremated potentially dozens of women—a case that inspired that staple of used-book sales, The Devil in the White City (2003). Or maybe the worst was in 1892, when Lizzie Borden, from Falls River, Massachusetts, was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother with an axe. In 1924, the murder of the fourteen-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks should have seemed mild by comparison. What was most shocking about Franks’s murder, of course, was who killed him: two young University of Chicago students named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Both came from wealthy families. Leopold’s father was a prominent businessman; Loeb’s was an attorney and vice president of Sears, Roebuck. The families’ combined fortunes would now total more than a hundred fifty million dollars, adjusted for inflation. From today’s vantage, the boys seem like prototypes for a figure that has since become cliché: the intellectual, nihilistic, remorseless killer who has a hailstone where his heart should be—sociopaths, in other words, real-world precursors of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. When asked to identify the “original nucleus” of the idea to kill Bobby Franks, Leopold mentioned the “pure love of excitement, or the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different.” Read More
July 26, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: There Is a Line That Could Make You Love Me Really By Kaveh Akbar 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, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, My little sister is in the throes of an eating disorder. She is quite literally wasting away in front of me, and she has always looked to me for advice. I feel like I should be able to be supportive and strong for her, especially since I have been dealing with an eating disorder for more than five years now, but I find myself obsessing even more over my own issues and am a little afraid to spend time with her. Is there any poetic advice that might give me courage to help my sister fight back the same demons that threaten me? Sincerely, Skinny and Scared Dear S & S, I want to begin by saying that if you or anyone is struggling with an eating disorder, you should be talking to a professional, not a poet. The National Eating Disorders Association help line is 1-800-931-2237, and I encourage you to use it—it’s available 24-7. I don’t think I can give you a poem that will offer practical advice about how to move forward—or through or around your or your sister’s illness. What I can give you is one that might offer a flicker of recognition, a moment of “there we are.” Lo Kwa Mei-en’s “Pinnochia On Fire” is a fugue of searing language, a speaker’s meditation on compulsion, embodiment, and hunger. One section reads: Read More
July 25, 2018 Look Sadism Illustrated By Marquis de Sade Everyone knows what sadism is, but few have actually read Marquis de Sade. Now you don’t have to. At the end of the eighteenth century, de Sade commissioned an anonymous artist to illustrate his collected writings. The resulting edition, originally published in 1797, contained 101 copper engravings of sex scenes, mostly set in dungeons. A compilation of these images was reprinted and published by Goliath Books this week. A selection is presented below. Read More
July 25, 2018 Arts & Culture Where the Voice of Alejandra Pizarnik Was Queen By Patricio Ferrari Hay, madre, un sitio en el mundo, que se llama París. Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande. (There is, mother, a place in the world called Paris. A very big place and far and very big again.) – César Vallejo In a diary entry of May 1959, while still living with her parents in Buenos Aires, shortly after the publication of her third poetry collection, the twenty-three-year-old Alejandra Pizarnik wrote: Je voudrais vivre pour écrire. Non penser à autre chose qu’à écrire. Je ne prétend [sic] pas l’amour ni l’argent. Je ne veux pas penser, ni construire décemment ma vie. Je veux de la paix: lire, étudier, gagner un peu d’argent pour m’independiser [sic] de ma famille, et écrire. (I would like to live in order to write. Not to think of anything else other than to write. I am not after love nor money. I don’t want to think nor decently build my life. I want peace: to read, to study, to earn some money so that I become independent from my family, and to write.) Bold and assertive in tone, these words are less of a confession than a daring conviction, a resolution, a literary plan. Circumstantial? Purposely stylized? Perhaps the more essential question here is: Why did the Argentinian-born poet turn to a foreign language that, until then, she’d almost exclusively employed just to read French literature? Read More
July 24, 2018 Redux Redux: Writers at Play 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 J. D. McClatchy’s 2002 Writers at Work interview, Nancy Lemann’s short story “Sportsman’s Paradise,” and Mark Halliday’s poem “Ballplayer at Midnight.” Read More
July 24, 2018 At Work The Vocabulary of Tourism: An Interview with Laura van den Berg By Andrew Ervin In The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg’s phantasmagoric fourth book, a recently widowed woman named Clare travels alone to Havana to attend the Festival of New Latin American Cinema. There, she sees her deceased husband Richard and everything she knew—or thought she knew—about their marriage is thrown into turmoil. It’s the perfect premise for a novel that, in van den Berg’s hands, is both emotionally nuanced and philosophically profound. Part of the book’s appeal is the way van den Berg shines a light on the casual misogyny of some of our once-revered artists. “Torture the women, Hitchcock was reported to have said when a young director asked him for advice,” she writes. And, “If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her, Hemingway had once written in a letter.” The novel’s clear-eyed scrutiny of the treatment of women in horror films made me rethink a lot of my own viewing habits as a kid. Though I’ve admired van den Berg’s fiction for about a decade now, we first met in 2015, when we were on a panel together at the Brooklyn Book Festival. This interview was conducted via email, this spring. INTERVIEWER How did you begin to write this novel? What questions did you seek to raise or what did you want to know more about? VAN DEN BERG Ah, so many things were on the brain! Ghosts. Death. Accidents. Violence. Sick parents. Marriage. Florida. Tourism. Planes. Hotels. Cameras. Horror films. Misogyny. Secrets. More specifically, I wrote much of the first draft while living on the campus of Bard College, in a house that I’m fairly sure was haunted. I was only at Bard for a semester. I had been bouncing around between various campuses for a few years and that winter I was on the road a lot because I had just put out my first book and my husband and I were spending too much time apart and my father was ill—life felt so transient, as if everything was moving too quickly for me to absorb anything. So the book sprung from a tangle of chaotic feelings—plus an attic ceiling that would unfold itself in the middle of the night. I would come out of my bedroom in the morning and the stairs would be out and waiting like an invitation. There’s a line from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing that goes, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I’ve long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we’re traveling. And, of course, the gap between what we see and what we know has much resonance for horror films too. Read More