May 9, 2018 On Books Selected Sentences from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi By Anthony Madrid A few words about an underappreciated piece of reading technology. Talking about underlining in books. Nobody shows you how to do this, and it’s a pity. You find out quick that if you do it wrong, you ruin the book. If you do it right, though, you create a precious heirloom. How do you do it right? Use a ruler, for starters. They make little stubby ones for this purpose. Then there’s the question of where exactly the line should go. Should it touch the bottom of the letters on the line, or should you give it a little space there? Depends. And then there’s the ink. When I was first underlining, I didn’t understand. You can’t use inks that are gonna show through. Also, you probably don’t want the ink’s color to dominate the page. Bloodred ballpoints are usually too much. The effect can be as bad as that of a highlighter. And you can’t use pens with runny noses that are gonna form solid droplets at their tips. You can’t, unless you like big ol’ gobs and smears of ink at the end of each stroke. Heaven knows not every book asks to be underlined. But heaven is founded on the idea that some books really do demand it. Reading any of these nineteenth-century supremo-supremo novelists without marking the best bits is insanity. You’re going to need those sentences later. Read More
May 9, 2018 Hue's Hue Lilac, the Color of Half Mourning, Doomed Hotels, and Fashionable Feelings By Katy Kelleher Lorde at the MTV Video Music Awards. In 1960, the architect John Macsai cracked open a book of brick samples to show his employer, A. N. Pritzker. Pritzker was, according to the Chicago Reader, an “incomprehensibly wealthy” man who wanted Mascai to build him a hotel. The building would be the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. Mascai had already drafted up the shape of the structure. It was going to be a subtly striking building, a fine example of mid-century modern style perched on short stilts in downtown Lincolnwood, Illinois. Mascai’s plans called for a long low-slung building with the main structural elements, like the supporting steel beams, placed on the outside, allowing for extra-large rooms on the inside. Like most design of the era, it emphasized function and comfort equally, with few decorative touches (and certainly no Morris-esque flourishes). Macsai wanted to use gray bricks and white painted steel for the hotel’s facade. But Pritzker had other ideas. The gray, he said, was dull. He was a man with more dollars than sense, and he didn’t want something tasteful or subdued. He wanted to build something that would stand out, that would trumpet its existence to pedestrians from a mile away. And so, after pawing through the sample book, Pritzker picked out a purple glazed brick. He didn’t pick a deep purple or one of those obscure dark maroons that can read as brown in the right light, and he didn’t choose a soft gray-leaning mauve either. He picked lilac, a shade darker than thistle and lighter than mulberry, a shade that is undeniably purple, even at dusk, even at dawn. Read More
May 9, 2018 On Music This Feels Like Never-Ending By Alexander Lumans The Dillinger Escape Plan in concert. Photo: Stefan Raduta. And I was every question that never had an answer I see right through you And never even noticed that there always was a reason That we were never meant to be left alone. —The Dillinger Escape Plan, “Milk Lizard” 1. “Low Feels Blvd” I am not what you picture when you think of a metalhead; I have no tattoos, no wide ear gauges, no long hair with which to head bang. There are teenagers who are twice as metal as I will ever be. But I do listen to metal—have done so for years—on both the brightest days and the grayest. I do have a pierced septum; it’s relatively new and more an accessorized front. And I do want a tattoo, though I’ve only committed to the temporary kind. However, skin accessories and a darkly monochromatic wardrobe do not alone a metalhead make. One might assume this crowd to be full of fearless counterculture anarchists who give zero fucks about what anyone thinks. I am not so confident. I am afraid of letting people get too close because I don’t trust others to understand me on a basic emotional level; I rarely trust my own judgment in the myriad of easy and difficult situations that daily life presents; and what little remaining self-esteem I have lies buried beneath a high-rise of self-hatred that manifests in destructive impulses—all of which leads me, on the worst days, to wish I weren’t alive. In other words, I live with major depression. What does my depression look like? More often than not, I sleep too late; I’m sad and angry at myself for sleeping in; my whole day is thrown off course. With no established routine or foundation, I become sadder and angrier. Hopelessness sets in like quick-dry cement. Feeling all but ruined, I just want to go back to sleep. Instead of pulling myself out of my emotional quagmire through self-care, I feel paralyzed. I sleep more. With any notion of a regular schedule long gone, once I’m finally awake, I recount every single way I’ve failed myself. Tomorrow feels so impossible I don’t even want to think about it. Then all this repeats the following morning because I’ve stayed up too late worrying about what I cannot control. When this becomes the norm, I tell myself that I simply want to disappear. This is, somehow, the best answer. I know that’s not healthy to think, but I’m still searching for what is healthy. What could make me want to stay here through today’s sadness, loneliness, and pain? Read More
May 8, 2018 Redux Redux: Emily’s Other Daffodil 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 help you usher in the month of May with a bouquet of archival reads. Learn about John Fowles’s wild-orchid hobby in his Art of Fiction interview; follow the hunt for a flatware pattern in Belle Boggs’s story “Imperial Chrysanthemum”; and read May Swenson’s Emily Dickinson–inspired poem “Daffodildo.” Read More
May 8, 2018 On Television A Gentler Reality Television By Lucas Mann A few weeks ago, my wife and I sat down to watch the reboot of Queer Eye. We were a bit skeptical. After all, the original debuted fifteen years ago, at the beginning of the reality-TV boom and also at a time when any queer representation on TV could be seen as edgy, fun, uncomplicatedly moving in the right direction. Now we’re thinking harder about the underlying messages in our popular culture, and crucially, the phrase reality TV has evolved in what it conveys—what was once novelty became a tired formula and has now become a ready-made explanation for everything that is wrong with American social and political culture. As reality-TV fans who consider ourselves to be thoughtful, politically progressive people, it’s become harder for us to like the shows we used to like. The pleasure is overridden by the angst about deriving pleasure from that. The constant manipulations, the hypersimplified worldview, the arbitrary episodic contests that end in someone’s spectacular fall from grace, the distracting appeal of gossipy intrigue—it all seems to have conspired to turn a reality-TV star into the world’s most powerful person. When Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker about how The Apprentice shaped the Trump character that played so explosively in the 2016 election, how could it not feel horrifying to be the kind of person susceptible to the characterization techniques of the genre? When Jennifer Weiner took to the New York Times to swear off The Bachelor now that the nasty distortions of reality TV were infecting actual reality, she was describing a lot of people’s inner turmoil. Read More
May 8, 2018 The Big Picture Inheriting a Legacy By Cody Delistraty In our new monthly column, The Big Picture, Cody Delistraty will travel across Europe—from Copenhagen to Dublin to Berlin to London—searching out essential artworks and exhibitions that speak to a wider cultural context, such as our desire for wanderlust or the complexities of artistic romances. In this first segment, he explores the complex burden placed upon the lovers, close friends, and heirs of famous artists after they die. Joan Punyet Miró, a grandson of the late artist Joan Miró. Photo: Kika Triay for Ultima Hora During a recent retrospective of Cy Twombly, Nicola del Roscio walked through the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, looking at “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000), a ten-panel series that depicts the ancient Egyptian myth of the sun’s movement from morning to night. The series is a mélange of disparate marks, Expressionist painting, and poetic quotes that begins with frenzied childlike scratch marks before ending on a somber, more formalist tableau that suggests a reflection on death. Del Roscio wore a green sweater with a dark, many-buttoned petticoat, and his hands were pushed deep into his pockets. He was quiet as he regarded the birth-to-death work of the man he’s spent his entire adult life assisting and advising, and—after the artist died in 2011 and del Roscio became the president of the Cy Twombly Foundation—celebrating and protecting. Del Roscio has small bags under his eyes, but his smile is genuine and his charm and vulnerability are that of someone much younger than his seventy-three years. “There’s something magic about Nicola,” said David Baum, the Cy Twombly Foundation’s secretary. “You want to pick him up and put him in your pocket.” And yet, charming as he is, del Roscio is a keeper of secrets. Twombly was a cipher even to close friends, but to del Roscio he was a confidant and an intimate. Read More