November 8, 2017 At Work Our Town: An Interview with Adam Gopnik By Lesley M.M. Blume Adam Gopnik and Martha Parker, 1985. Earlier this fall, I got an amusing call from the writer Adam Gopnik. He’d come to Los Angeles as part of the tour for his new book, At the Strangers’ Gate, and was making his way down the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. I was stunned: first of all, it was high noon on a hundred-degree day—the town was absolutely baking—and second of all, he was walking, a rare activity among Angelenos. Luckily, he happened across Greenblatt’s, an old-fashioned deli on Sunset, and sought solace in some chicken soup and a corned-beef sandwich. All of these activities seemed to me evidence that Gopnik was a quintessential, incurable Manhattanite, far away from his natural habitat and relying on his New Yorker instincts for survival. Gopnik is a virtuosic writer; since joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1986, he has written nine books and covered a myriad of topics for the magazine, from the emigration of the European Roma to the complicated legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald to gun control in America. For many readers, he is synonymous with the pleasures of Paris: he was the magazine’s correspondent there between 1995 and 2000 and wrote the best seller Paris to the Moon, about his young family’s triumphs and travails as modern American expats. (The French Republic even bestowed upon him the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.) Yet New York City—where he lives with his filmmaker wife, Martha, and their two children—has been an endless source of fascination and material for him. When he first started at The New Yorker, he dispatched himself all over the city, covering table-hockey tournaments in Flatbush, slack-rope walkers who dwelled in boats on the Hudson River, and a community of rivalrous fresco painters. In Strangers’ Gate, a blend of memoir and social observation in which Gopnik specializes, he revisits his arrival in New York from Canada in the early 1980s. The book is a love letter to that vanished town, then an eccentric metropolis of all-powerful magazine editors, landlines, Kodak film, artists’ lofts in SoHo, and bookstores on every block. At the Strangers’ Gate also seems, at first glance, a whimsical counterpoint to Gopnik’s recent writings about America’s fraught political landscape. Although he once told me that he had never wanted to be any sort of pundit, he was an early whistleblower in the pages of The New Yorker about the threat to democracy posited by Trump, and has been unrelenting in his criticism since. “I feel a sense of emergency every morning,” he says. “We have to bear witness, even if we can’t change minds.” (He is already working on his next book, a political essay defending liberalism). Yet, he maintains, the seeds of today’s landscape had already been planted by the era he documents in the book; the eighties were “the first domino in a line of dominos that have fallen,” he says, leading to the post-9/11, post–financial collapse, Internet-and-social-media-driven realm in which we dwell today. Gopnik and I spoke about the New York of his salad days, the attributes that make the city uniquely (and peculiarly) alluring, and how New Yorkers seem innately equipped to handle these unstable times. INTERVIEWER Why did you feel that this was the moment you wanted to revisit and document 1980s New York? GOPNIK Two reasons, I think. There’s that beautiful opening line of a novel—what is it? The Go-Between. “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” And for the first time, the eighties seemed like another place—remote enough that you could write and talk about how differently things were done without it seeming too minute to matter. The idea that I could now explain the decade where I came of age to the youngsters who were now coming of age—that was one motive. Also, romantic comedies about young couples in cities are an evergreen form, and I realized that I was remote enough from my own experience to write one about myself, or at least with someone not completely unlike myself, and my wife, at the center. Read More
November 8, 2017 Our Correspondents On Edward Lear’s “The Scroobious Pip” By Anthony Madrid The piece below was originally published on February 8, 2014, on Anthony Opal’s old website, the Weekly (since kaput). In reprinting it, we have only changed the very end of the “Afterword,” so that now you can simply click on a hyperlink to access additional (and extremely precious) information. A detail of Nancy Ekholm Burkert’s illustration for Edward Lear’s “The Scroobious Pip.” In early 1872, Edward Lear left a poem unfinished. It was very nearly complete: all it lacked of its intended five rhyming subsections were two lines and two words (not at the end). Lear left blanks in the manuscript, and it’s clear he intended to supply the missing bits at some later time. No one knows why he never did so. The piece is called “The Scroobious Pip,” and it is good. It’s right up there with the best material Lear included in Laughable Lyrics, which came out roughly five years later (December 1876). But, because he never finished it, it remained unpublished during his lifetime. Indeed, the piece first saw the light of day in 1935, in the back of what was essentially a small collectors’ edition—950 copies, each one numbered. (My copy is #237.) In 1954, Harvard University Press published a thin (sixty-four-page) book called Teapots and Quails, a very valuable document for Lear enthusiasts insofar as it made many previously uncollected or very hard-to-get pieces available—including ten limericks with accompanying illustrations. “The Scroobious Pip” appears on pages 60 through 62. The lacunæ in the manuscript are rendered either as blanks or as strings of dots. Read More
November 7, 2017 Redux Redux: Emily Wilson, Robert Fitzgerald, and Robert Fagles 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 salute Emily Wilson, whose new English-language translation of the Odyssey is (incredibly enough) the first ever published by a woman. We bring you the opening pages of her translation, plus interviews with two of her most famous modern precursors, Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles. Read More
November 7, 2017 Arts & Culture When Someone You Know Is Gay By James Frankie Thomas The author’s copy of When Someone You Know Is Gay. At the tail end of the Clinton administration, my school library had a miniature gay section hidden in a corner. It took up half a shelf and consisted of maybe four books—half a dozen, tops. As far as I know, no one else was aware of this; I never saw another soul in that section of the library. Perhaps it appeared, like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement, only to those who needed it. I needed it desperately. I was thirteen, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I liked girls in the way that I was expected to like boys. After a disastrous game of Truth or Dare, during which I committed the socially suicidal error of asking “Truth: Which girl in our class would you most like to kiss?”—“Ew, Frankie, that’s a gay question!”—I understood that these feelings were classifiable under (a) “ew” and (b) “gay.” It was the memory of that seventh-grade slumber party that primed me to notice, in the corner of the library, a bright turquoise hardcover titled When Someone You Know Is Gay. Read More
November 7, 2017 On Music Liner Notes: A Way into the Invisible By Renee Gladman Eric Dolphy in Copenhagen, 1961. Photo courtesy JP Jazz Archive/Redferns. In the midnineties, I was a jazz head. I was a poet and I was a jazz head. I loved to read and I loved listening to music. I collected vinyl but also CDs. I shopped at Amoeba Records on Haight Street in San Francisco and brought home records by the bandleaders Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, my favorite at the time, and others. And I read the covers of these albums as if they were books, lured in by the various frames commentators employed to situate a given recording, like Leonard Feather opening his notes for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else with “WHAT manner of album is this?” At the same time, as a graduate student in poetics, I was deeply immersed in the works of Henry James, Nathaniel Mackey, and Leslie Scalapino, and, although I didn’t know this then, or knew it only slightly, converging in the field between these producers and their various disciplines was a way of thinking about “the invisible” that would shape my life in music and language and art for the next two decades. As I think of it now, the invisible refers to all these inner energies, maps, and syntaxes I’m trying to make present in my drawings and in the unfolding of my sentences, but, in 1995, the idea of it had only just landed in me, and I had little language around it. I felt it most present when I witnessed forms crossing into other forms: sound into thought (in the case of jazz) and poetry into prose (in the case of the books I was reading). I was drawn to jazz because it felt like mind music to me. It was a way to experience thought without thinking (that is, to experience bodily the map of someone else’s thinking without needing to write my own story on top of it to comprehend it). I found atmospheres compelling. Similarly, to read a Henry James novel was to be in an atmosphere of manners, where action and emotional response were embedded in an elaborate orchestration of adjacency: to read was to wander next to. And to listen to jazz was to enter a space inside the space in which I was living, one that lifted the top off the day or stretched the day beyond itself. I wanted to know what was happening—how this was happening—so I often turned to the liner notes of my LPs for answers. I saw them as a sort of foyer to the music: preparatory time for listening, a way of sublimating. You had to drop down into something to hear jazz, to be there for it—not having it as your background music but rather as a force carving lines into your brain. Jazz asked something of me that was like writing. To listen was to write, I had at some point concluded, and for a few years I tried to figure out the nature of that relationship. I wanted to know how listening was like making something, and what that something might look like. Read More
November 6, 2017 Stolen The Mexican American Bandit By Myriam Gurba Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our new series, Stolen, writers share stories of theft. Still from the animated short Zimbo by the Guadalajaran directors Rita Basulto and Juan José Medina. My ex-wife stared as she watched my maternal grandmother slide a chicken into her purse. When she noticed she was being watched, my grandmother locked eyes with my ex-wife. In her thick Guadalajara accent, my grandmother bellowed, “For the dogs.” Her dogs were waiting outside of the buffet, in her truck. It was Mother’s Day and they were her most beloved. On our way home, my ex-wife asked, “Have you seen your grandmother steal meat before?” I looked at her with a deadpan expression meant to approximate the one my grandmother had given her. “She’s Mexican,” I answered. My grandmother’s habit of filling her purse with meat reinforces an American stereotype: that Mexicans are thieves. Consider the now-retired chip mascot Frito Bandito. And Speedy Gonzales, the cheese snatcher. But Mexicans invert this trope. “You live in California,” my paternal grandfather would remind me when we’d visit Mexico at Christmas. “You live there because of a robbery! The United States stole that land! Americans are thieves.” My grandfather’s indictment was supposed to make me, a gringa, ashamed. Instead, it made me secretly relish America. My family lived on stolen land and stolen fruit always tastes better. Its ill-gotten nature emboldens its umami, glazes it with immoral MSG. When I went on my first stealing spree, I became a Mexican bandit, and a practitioner of Manifest Destiny. Read More