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
July 3, 2018 Arts & Culture A Summer Reading List for Misfits By Yelena Moskovich The sun is out, the shoes are off, the legs are sprawled upon the color-blocked terry cloth, and your vacation book is open. It’s not my intention to be the black spider crawling across your beach towel. Every summer, seasonal reading lists hail the “fun” page-turner and use their ease to jeer at the “challenging” read—how dare a book do something freaky with language, structure, or content in the midst of so much natural light? Listen, I know the stakes: to denounce a plot-driven summertime read is to announce oneself too loudly as a serious person. In my case, a serious Slavic, lesbian, now-French woman with—way to ruin the vibe—short hair. All right, I partake in recreational seriousness in the warm climate (my favorite melon is melancholia), but I will not apologize. I crave untraditional texts for my leisure, and I have a feeling (despite my existential leanings) that I am not alone. A pleasure read is there to help us take pleasure, and the pleasures of summertime include: the lushness of loneliness, the daze of our flesh, the ease of nature, the horniness of an afternoon, the carefree blur of warming temperatures, the rhythm that slows and flirts with the long hours. I understand that some prefer their seasonal delights within the undemanding pages of a well-cued story line, where love is closer than you think, journeys are life lessons, the murderer is one you should have guessed, and good defeats evil with magical accessories. Blessed be your joy, but it is not mine. The books that bring me true pleasure are the weirdly formatted ones, the rhythmic ones, the ones that feel too much, that behave oddly within the chapters, that are soft-spoken or stutter and have an accent—and whose stories feel like other ways of being. Read More
July 2, 2018 Look City Dreams By Bodys Isek Kingelez Bodys Isek Kingelex with Étoile Rouge Congolaise in Nantes, 1993. Photo: André Magnin. In the thirty-minute documentary that accompanies the first U.S. retrospective of his work, Bodys Isek Kingelez notes that “a building without color is like a person without clothes.” Kingelez, who began his artistic career restoring tribal masks at the National Museum in Kinshasa, designed buildings of a multitude of colors. When then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) won independence from Belgium in 1960, Kingelez began imagining the rehabilitative possibilities of architecture. With colored paper, commercial packaging, plastic, soda cans, and bottle caps, he built models of individual buildings and then, eventually, entire African megacities. From now through January 1, the Museum of Modern Art is showing work spanning his full career, from early single-building sculptures to his futuristic late works, which incorporate increasingly unorthodox materials. “Thanks to my deep hope for a happy tomorrow,” Kingelez said, “I strive to better my quality, and the better becomes the wonderful.” Read More