December 1, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Sybille Bedford By Valerie Stivers This is the fifth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. The decline of the continental European aristocracy just before World War I doesn’t sound like a promising period for food … until you read Sybille Bedford (1911–2006). Bedford was the daughter of a German baron (part of the anti-Prussian aristocracy) and a wealthy Jewish German woman from Hamburg. She had Jewish blood and glamorous friends, and she escaped the Nazis with the help of Aldous Huxley. Her greatest novel, A Legacy, first published in 1956 and reprinted by New York Review Books Classics in 2015, is the story of two German families, one based on her father’s family, the other on Berlin’s rich Jews. These beautiful and inflexible characters collect objets d’art, gamble, eat sumptuous feasts, and unwittingly play their parts in the rise of fascism in Germany. It’s one of the book’s many pleasurable sophistications that the narrator is barely a character; once you’ve seen her parents—seen her legacy—you’ve seen it all. Read More
December 1, 2017 The Lives of Others A Mother’s Ninth-Century Manual on How to Be a Man By Edward White Albert Edelfelt, Queen Blanche of Norway and Sweden with Prince (later King) Hacon, 1877. Being a red-blooded, blue-blooded male in the Carolingian Empire was a risky business. Those who grew up in Western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries were frequently exposed to extreme violence. One adolescent royal from the period was struck so hard in a play fight that, in the words of a contemporary account, his playmate’s sword “penetrated almost as far as the brain, reaching from his left temple to his right cheekbone.” The only thing the Carolingians valued as much as ruthlessness on the battlefield was proficiency with Biblical text. William of Septimania appears to have had a thorough education in both. He was barely in his twenties when he seized control of Barcelona in 848, but he had already spent four years warring against the crown. The city had been the old stomping ground of his father, Bernard. Bernard was an important figure in the reign of Louis the Pious, the Carolingian emperor who ruled a great swathe of territory from what is now northern Spain to the Czech Republic. But in recent times Bernard had endured a spectacular fall, toppled by intrigue and machination that ended in his death and devastated his family. When still in his teens, William became determined to win the battles his father couldn’t. He joined a rebellion against the ruling dynasty that had once been as close as kin. Read More
November 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Tuli Kupferberg’s Yeah!: The Tiny Magazine That Captured the 1960s By Alex Zafiris Interior spread from issue no. 4 of Yeah! It was 1961. Eisenhower had cut ties with Cuba, JFK was sworn in, the Berlin Wall went up, the Shirelles were in the top ten for “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and America fizzed with the unchartered sexual dynamics created by the newly introduced pill. Meanwhile, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the homegrown poet-anarchist Tuli Kupferberg—already immortalized as the figure who survived after leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge in Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “Howl”—put out the first issue of Yeah! The opening page presented the zine as “a satyric excursion published at will,” and it begins: I want to put the revolution at the service of poetry. I want Comrade Stalin to say Tuli, tell me how to revive the bodies of my dead Ukrainian peasants with your magic words Recently re-released in facsimile edition by the publishing non-profit Primary Information, the original ten issues of Yeah! were made at Kupferberg’s home on Tenth Street and Avenue B with the help of his wife, Sylvia Topp, and printed on a mimeograph. Kupferberg asked his friends to contribute. Many delivered poetry and art, such as Allan Sillitoe, Judson Crews, Brigid Murnaghan, Peter Schumann, Anita Steckel, William Wantling; others facilitated. Jonas Mekas submitted a poem from Der Spiegel by Yevgeny Yevtushenko; Ken Jacobs provided newspaper clip collages of absurd, tone-deaf reporting. Other sourced items—a misogynist cartoon from the Yale Record, a New York Times correction detailing the war injuries of a Vietnamese child, happy news of an anti-crossdressing electric shock treatment—are laid bare, their absurdity and cruelty thrown into sharp relief. Read More
November 30, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Is a Story By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro The first thing I want to do is give you the sentence, so here it is. I typed it, and now you read it, in that order: And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray. Read More
November 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Painting the American Dream at Guantánamo By Paige Laino Muhammad Ansi, Untitled (Field with Windmill). Thirty-six artworks made by detainees while at Guantánamo Bay are currently on display at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in midtown Manhattan. To view them, however, takes persistence. You must possess both a photo ID and enough patience to explain to the security guard that the college does indeed have an art gallery. You then have to navigate the building: down an escalator, up an elevator, past an indoor rifle range and a rooftop tennis court, until you finally reach the President’s Gallery, outside her offices. It’s hardly the Met. The exhibition opened in early October (my cocurator, Erin Thompson, wrote about it for The Paris Review.) On November 16, the Miami Herald reported that in response to the show, the Pentagon has stopped releasing security-screened prisoner art and has declared that, as the Herald wrote, “the art made by wartime captives is U.S. government property.” One attorney even told the Herald that the U.S. military intends to burn the art. Since then, the exhibition has gotten a new wave of media attention. Because it is so difficult to actually access the artwork, few of the people reporting and commenting on the art have actually seen it. The exhibition has become largely symbolic. Read More
November 30, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Diary Snoops and Ill-Advised Marriages By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, I am a bit of a snoop, though I’ve really been trying to be better about it. But lately, my new roommate has taken to leaving her diary in the bathroom. This is just curious behavior anyway. Is she documenting her bladder movements? I need to know! I must resist! Help me. All the very best, Nosy in Nashville Dear Nosy, Get your own diary and make sure it’s about the same size as hers and leave it in the bathroom beside hers. Write in your diary about how badly you want to read her diary but you know you must resist. And how you have resisted. And why you must continue to resist. Do a still-life drawing of her diary in your diary. If her diary is still in the bathroom in a week, write about that. At the end of the year, you may have a book on your hands. Sincerely, Lynda B. Read More