June 18, 2018 Nineties Movies In the Nineties, No One Cared About Getting a Job By Nafkote Tamirat Still from Pulp Fiction. “So what then, day jobs?” “Not in this life.” “What then?” —Pulp Fiction When I was a child and Americans asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them, “Famous.” This was enough to elicit laughter from the interrogating adult before they moved on to the next would-be astronaut or dancer in the room. Ethiopians never asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up because they already knew: a lawyer. Everyone in my family told everyone else in my family, Nafkote is going to be a lawyer. I heard it so many times that I believed it. Later, when either Americans or Ethiopians asked me what I was going to be, I’d repeat, “Lawyer,” and everyone (including me) would feel enormously satisfied. In my third year of university, a teacher accused me of plagiarism. The allegations were untrue (every member of the executive committee agreed that the paper in question was so awful that only an idiot would think it worth copying), and I was declared innocent and allowed to continue my studies. Despite my name being cleared, I was given an F, I guess in case I got any funny ideas. “Can I still go to law school?” I asked my college dean. His doubt was tangible, as were his good intentions. “The important thing is, if you really want to be a lawyer, no one can stop you.” For the first time, I understood two things: 1. I did not actually want to be a lawyer, and 2. if I did not want to be a lawyer, I had to find something else to be. Read More
June 16, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be a Mad Scientist? By Hernan Diaz Photograph from the soundstage of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus Theatrical as it is, the cliché of the mad scientist—a wild-haired, goggle-eyed maniac pacing around a laboratory, operating buzzing contraptions with the help of a hunchbacked assistant—reveals something important about our relationship to knowledge. At least since Aeschylus, science and technology have been bound to madness and criminality: when Prometheus rebels against Zeus, steals the “fire that makes all skills attainable” from the gods, and gives it to the humans—together with tools, technical and scientific knowledge, language, and reason itself—he “is mentally straying, robbed of [his] wits, like a bad doctor who has fallen sick.” Some two thousand years later, a different incarnation of this paradox helped give birth to modern science. Descartes, one of the founding figures of our scientific method, started out by imagining a “malicious demon of the utmost power” that deceived him and confounded his mind so that he doubted everything that presented itself to his senses and his mind. “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement,” he writes in his first Meditation. “I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.” Descartes’s radical skepticism, a deliberate form of madness, is the cornerstone of his method: the demon makes him doubt everything—except that he doubts and therefore thinks and therefore exists. Rationalism is, then, the product of an evil genius. To this day, metaphors of insanity and normalcy are ingrained in the philosophy of science: epistemologists like Thomas Kuhn call “normal science” all work that is done within an accepted paradigm. This, of course, implies that all revolutionary science is, at first, abnormal—or “Abby Normal,” as Igor calls the brain he gets for the creature in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Read More
June 15, 2018 This Week’s Reading The Paris Review Recommends Anti-Beach Reads By The Paris Review This summer, we’re going long and hard. In anticipation of the solstice, the staff of The Paris Review has pulled together a list of anti-beach reads: doorstopper books, dense books, books that will tear a hole in your flimsy beach tote, flip over your canoe, and ground your propeller plane. You can’t hold them up to block the sun—you can barely hold them up at all. These are books that will empty the pool if they fall in. Books to swat a mosquito with and accidentally break a limb. Books worth the forty-euro heavy-baggage surcharge. Below is the final list, presented in order of page count, from fairly slim to downright menacing. Happy reading! Read More
June 15, 2018 On Books Need a Father’s Day Gift? A Novel Proposal By David McGlynn If Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, Father’s Day is surely the hardest. What do you get for the member of the family—at least if your dad is anything like mine—who claims to never want anything? Peruse the mall in early June and the choices appear to fall into three categories: 1. yawningly boring shirt-and-tie combos, 2. assorted World’s Greatest Dad paraphernalia, and 3. gadgets. So many gadgets. Bluetooth-enabled titanium-alloy grilling spatulas. Bottle openers made from machine-gun rounds. Star Wars waffle makers. There are, of course, messages encoded in each category. A shirt and tie says, Keep working, Pops. Anything labeled World’s Greatest Dad is an overcompensation, either on your part or his. And the gadgets, no matter how futuristic or flashy, tell Dad he’s basically a child in want of a toy. For the last several years, my own father and I have sent each other cards with a one-dollar bill inside (basically a handshake by mail) and called it even. But the best Father’s Day gifts might be the most novel. I’m not talking about the Apple Watch or robot vacuum cleaners. I’m talking about actual novels. Books. Read More
June 15, 2018 Arts & Culture Autobiography of a Professor, Tattoo Artist, Gay Pornographer, and Sexual Record Keeper By Jeremy Mulderig Courtesy of the estate of Samuel M. Steward. When I pick up a biography, I have certain expectations about how the book I am holding came to be. I assume, for example, that the biographer has a broad and deep knowledge of his or her subject’s life and has approached the task of representing that life in narrative form with professional objectivity. My expectations for an autobiography, however, are quite different. Knowing from experience that all lives are shaped by a subjectivity that filters and orders our perceptions of ourselves, I can’t demand objectivity from the autobiographer. Nor do I wish to, for it is the very subjectivity of autobiography—that inevitably self-conscious construction of the self for an imagined reader—that draws me to autobiographies in the first place. But when an autobiographer writes two versions of his or her life—two narratives in which elements are selected and arranged and considered differently—how is the reader to regard the disparate selves encountered in the texts? Which account of a given incident should one accept, and on what basis? These are the questions that I faced in editing and blending the published and unpublished autobiographies of Samuel Steward (1909–1993), the English professor, tattoo artist, pornographer, and sexual record keeper whose important place in twentieth-century gay history and literature was established in 2010 by Justin Spring’s landmark biography, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward. The life that Steward sought to present in his autobiography was by any measure a remarkable one. When he sat down at his typewriter on August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, to compose it, no one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: he had been a popular university professor of English for more than twenty years; a close friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas as well as Alfred Kinsey and Thornton Wilder; an accomplished tattoo artist using the name Phil Sparrow; an essayist and short-story writer who published prolifically in European gay magazines under a variety of pseudonyms; and the author, as Phil Andros, of a series of widely circulated pornographic gay novels in the sixties and seventies. He was also a compulsive record keeper who maintained a massive journal and meticulous card-file index documenting his forty-five hundred sexual encounters with more than eight hundred men, including all the members of his high school basketball team, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, Roy Fitzgerald (later known to the world as Rock Hudson), a number of his university students, and many sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago. His books late in life included an edition of Gertrude Stein’s and Alice Toklas’s letters to him, a novel based on the life of the painter Sir Francis Rose, a book about the tattoo business, another on gay hustlers, and two murder mysteries featuring Stein and Toklas as sleuths. Read More
June 14, 2018 Look Illustrated Maps of New York Through the Ages By The Paris Review Since their inception, maps have been embellished with illustrations. Through July 16, a selection of illustrated maps of New York spanning six centuries is on view at the New York Public Library. A preview of the exhibition—along with captions written by its curator Katharine Harmon—is presented below. James Wolcott Adams, Redraft of the Castello Plan, 1916. The famed Castello Plan offers a rare view of New Amsterdam—located at the southern tip of what is now known as Manhattan—during the forty year period of Dutch rule. Surveyor General Jacques Cortelyou made a map of the Dutch settlement in 1660, which was subsequently lost, but an unknown artist happily made another copy. This is the earliest map of the city existing today. It was sold to Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, around 1667, and “rediscovered” 233 years later at the Villa di Castello near Florence. The American illustrator James Wolcott Adams redrafted the map in 1916; this hand-drawn copy of the original Castello Plan is housed in the library’s print collection. Read More