October 25, 2017 Our Correspondents The Seventy-Four Best Entries in The Devil’s Dictionary By Anthony Madrid From the cover of the University of Georgia Press edition of The Devil’s Dictionary. In my village, we have an idiom. “When’s last time you looked in on [X]—?” “X” is always some acknowledged literary classic everybody reads early in life and then forgets. For example, More’s Utopia. I did read it, but I might as well not have. I was nineteen. Anyone today who had just read the back cover of a copy of Utopia would, in a knowledge contest, smoke me like a cheap cigar. About the book’s narrative I remember … well, nothing. Wait. They didn’t think gold was valuable. I forget why. Their toilets were gold. Or the chains that they loaded prisoners with. Or something. Not toilets; chamberpots. And the narrator had some cross-eyed name like Holofernes Hwum-buppa-zipplebibble or something. Read More
October 24, 2017 Redux Redux: Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) 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. Photo: Vincent Tolentino This week, we celebrate the late Richard Wilbur, whose poems have a way of turning up where we might not expect them—in an essay on threesomes by Kristin Dombek, for example, or a poem about lying by Robert Hahn. Richard Wilbur, The Art of Poetry No. 22 Issue no. 72 (Winter 1977) I often don’t write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let’s say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia. “Letter from Williamsburg,” by Kristin Dombek Issue no. 205 (Summer 2013) After I stopped believing in God, I would sometimes wake in a panic at being alone without supernatural support. So I memorized Richard Wilbur’s poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” to say to myself in the morning. When I woke with someone in my bed, I would recite it to him or her: The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels … “Tell the Truth,” by Robert Hahn Issue no. 127 (Summer 1993) To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm. Your reputation for saying things of interest Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics, Nor will the delicate web of human trust Be ruptured by that airy fabrication. —Richard Wilbur, “Lying” You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific at dawn, running for miles over the quick blossom-and-fade of an image, on the glassy sand, when the mist and the lightly stippled sea were a single tone of gray. A simple invention. Meanwhile, far below, the trackless beach and the green, heaving ocean are beginning, only now, to be disclosed in the wide panes of your room … If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published. Order now, and get a copy of our upcoming Women at Work for only $10.
October 24, 2017 Look Art and Biology: Ernst Haeckel’s Masterpieces By The Paris Review Ernst Haeckel, the turn-of-the-century biologist, naturalist, professor, and artist, was an ardent Darwinist, a denouncer of religious doctrine, and a writer of philosophical treatises. He coined terms still in common use today, such as phylum, stem cell, and ecology. He discovered, described, and named thousands of new species, depicting them in sketches and watercolors as notable for their artistic mastery as they are for their celebration of nature’s symmetry and diversity. Of course, some of his theories have aged more poorly: his passionate Darwinism bled into the rising fascist doctrine in his native Germany, and he became a leading proponent of scientifically justified racism. But, at a moment when the planet’s biodiversity is dwindling, allow us to focus on the beauty of his images and the lasting legacy of his contributions to science. Here is a peek into Taschen’s forthcoming The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel (out December, too big for a stocking but still perfect for the burgeoning biologist in your life). Mollusca-Cephalopoda, plate 54. Copyright: © TASCHEN Köln/Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Read More
October 24, 2017 On Books Anita Brookner Was No Latter-Day Jane Austen By Emma Garman Anita Brookner. Photo: Rex Features The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. Over the course of several decades and an astonishing twenty-four novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Hotel du Lac, the prevailing myth held that Brookner wrote conservative, middlebrow stories about dull and repressed women. The novelist Tessa Hadley admitted in the Guardian that before reading her, “I’d expected something ladylike, lavender-scented, prissy and precious; I knew as soon as I opened my eyes to her words that this writing was everything opposite to that.” On a recent episode of the Backlisted podcast, the literary critic and Brookner convert Lucy Scholes said, “For many years, I labored under that rather stupid impression that she wrote novels about spinsters in the worst possible shape and form a spinster can take.” It didn’t help that Publishers Weekly, in 1990, described Brookner as “a latter-day Jane Austen,” a label oft repeated despite its almost comical inaccuracy. If Austen popularized the marriage plot, Brookner upended it, immersing us in the emotionally clandestine lives of mistresses and other romantic misfits. Literature from the point of view of “the other woman” is rare, and she is the genre’s subversive maestro. Cheated-on wives, in her portrayal, are too self-centered, ruthless, and confident to warrant our compassion. In any case, their marriages and invariably privileged lives are never in jeopardy. Read More
October 23, 2017 At Work Reappearing Women: A Conversation Between Marie Darrieussecq and Kate Zambreno By The Paris Review Paula Modersohn-Becker, Liegende Mutter mit Kind II (Reclining Mother with Child II), 1906, oil on canvas, 32 1/2 in. × 49 1/10 in. The novelist Marie Darrieussecq’s slim, enigmatic biography of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, opens with the author’s visit to the house in which Paula lived with her husband, Otto. “She was here,” Darrieussecq writes. “On Earth and in her house.” It is a statement of fact that conjures Modersohn-Becker, who died in 1907 at age thirty-one, into being once more. That opening sentence sits in counterpoint to the book’s epigraph, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Being here is wondrous.” Rilke’s claim arrives with easy certitude; Darrieussecq’s with authorial entreaty. In Being Here, Darrieussecq has drawn a complete, if elliptical, portrait of Modersohn-Becker’s short life—her close friendship with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and with Rilke, her marriage to the painter Otto Modersohn, her lifelong insistence on the ability to paint and to have a corner of solitude in which to do it. “I try to see where her strength resides,” Darrieussecq thinks while looking at a photograph of Paula. “She is staring into space. Open and thoughtful. It is the photograph of a woman who paints, alone, whose paintings are not seen.” In reconstituting Modersohn-Becker’s life, Darrieussecq also illuminates a broader problem for women artists. Later in the book, she visits the Museum Folkwang, in Essen, Germany, to see Modersohn-Becker’s self-portrait and is taken to a “temporary display” in the museum’s basement. “Upstairs,” she recalls, “well lit: Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee. Downstairs, in the shadows: a mess of statues from antiquity mixed up with contemporary videos. Goddesses, mother-and-child paintings, queens: the only connecting thread is that these works are by women or represent women.” The neat separation of modernist masters from the full historical sweep of women’s art—a literal high and low—encapsulates centuries of thwarted ambition. Being Here was published in France last year and was released last month in an English translation by Penny Hueston. Darrieussecq spoke with the writer Kate Zambreno over the phone earlier this fall. Zambreno recently published Book of Mutter, a meditation on writing, grief, and motherhood. She also became a mother some nine months ago; her baby’s cries punctuated their conversation about the process of reviving Modersohn-Becker’s reputation, motherhood and art, and women’s friendships. —Nicole Rudick ZAMBRENO What was your first encounter with Paula? DARRIEUSSECQ It was on the Internet, actually. I received a spam email for a colloquium about psychoanalysis and motherhood. There was a stamp-size painting of a woman nursing but lying on her side. That was the best position—for me, at least—to nurse, but I never had seen that position in a painting. I discovered that it was by Paula Modersohn-Becker, and I wondered why she is so unknown. ZAMBRENO I encountered her through Adrienne Rich’s poem about the friendship between Paula and Clara Westhoff, Rich’s answer to Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend.” DARRIEUSSECQ And Rilke dedicated his “Requiem” to Paula. ZAMBRENO But she’s unnamed in it. Read More
October 23, 2017 On Film Life After Empathy: On Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner 2049 By Paul Youngquist Still from Blade Runner 2049. Driving cross-country some years ago, I pulled off Interstate 76, among the arroyos and tumbleweed at Fort Morgan, Colorado. Philip K. Dick lay buried somewhere in the cemetery there. But where? At the public library, a sweet old lady volunteer flipped the pages of a bound burial record until she found the grave’s location. I wrote it down, thanked her, and wandered around until I found a double tombstone, about a foot high, bearing the names Philip and Jane, Dick’s twin sister, dead in infancy. (Before he died in 1982, Dick purchased the plot next to hers.) Standing only a few feet above his moldering corpse gave me the willies. His books produce in me a sort of psychotic break with everyday reality, revealing a hidden life behind it, ominous and possibly sacred. On top of the low tombstone, an earlier pilgrim had placed an array of small plastic sheep. An offering! I sensed something sacred about them, so I stole one. Returning to my car, I stuck it into the heater grid on the dash. To this day, it guides my travels, a holy relic reminding me to dream of electric sheep. When bioengineering produces androids indistinguishable from humans (probably soon), will they share the sanctity of human life? That’s a typically weird Philip K. Dick question, played out in his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The two movies it has inspired, Blade Runner (1982, directed by Ridley Scott) and now its sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve), take up that question, too, but avoid Dick’s fateful claim that what makes human life sacred is a quality androids don’t have and never will: empathy. Read More