October 13, 2017 Comics Jonathan Franzen Says No By Tom Gauld From Baking with Kafka, by Tom Gauld. Printed with the permission of Drawn & Quarterly.
October 12, 2017 Arts & Culture Henry Green Is As Good As His Word By Michael Gorra Dean Cornwell, Options, 1917, oil on canvas. Evelyn Waugh could push a joke to the outer edge of our ability to bear it, stopping just when laughter turns to tears, and he’s had his imitators for the better part of a century now. So has Graham Greene, who blanched despair into a weary disillusionment; the contemporary thriller is inconceivable without him. Each of them added to the novelist’s grab bag of tricks. Their contemporary Henry Green didn’t quite manage that. In such early novels as Living (1929) and Party Going (1939) he experimented with dropping out the definite articles in a way that gave his language a tense angularity, the nouns and prepositions grating on each other, uncushioned: “Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water.” Nobody followed him and he left no codifiable body of technique. But Green may have had something better—not followers but admirers, and admirers among all writers. Very little connects such disparate figures as Eudora Welty, John Ashbery, and John Updike, or indeed those who have introduced Green’s other books in this series: little beyond their fondness for this strange elusive figure, not a model but an inspiration. Welty probably put it best. His work was ever changing and yet always the same, his books “to an unusual degree unlike one another … yet there could be no mistaking the hand … [with its] power to feel both what can and what never can be said.” Green’s peers recognized his originality; that’s achievement enough. For a long time, though, it seemed as if only other writers had spotted him. In the early fifties, he was often described as the most innovative novelist in England; by the eighties, he looked always in need of introduction. His American editions went in and out of print, and I had to order his 1940 autobiography, Pack My Bag, from abroad; those of us who read him got a lot of practice in explaining who he was, the Green without an e. Or maybe not Green at all. He was born Henry Yorke, and rich, the younger son of a Gloucestershire landowner turned industrialist; the family’s Birmingham foundry made both plumbing fixtures and equipment for the brewing industry. The boy’s parents sent him to Eton as a matter of course, and then Oxford. He left without a degree but had already finished his first novel, a Künstlerroman called Blindness (1926), and published it under the pen name of Henry Green when he was just twenty-one. Read More
October 12, 2017 On Music The Duration of “Vexations” By Hermione Hoby Erik Satie Those who have undergone weeks-long silent-meditation retreats can attest to the power of durational focus. Stay with one thing long enough and miracles might occur. In mid-September, at East London’s Café Oto, a venue known for avant-garde performances, the musician Charles Hayward presented “30 Minute Snare Drum Roll.” The piece could not be more functional or self-explanatory in its title. What happened, however, in those eighteen thousand seconds of continuous drumming was the opposite of readily explicable. A drumroll is a sonic metonym for anticipation, so much so that we use it verbally more often than we hear it literally. The phrase drumroll, please is an ironizing indication that what follows may fall short of spectacular but that it should nonetheless be eagerly awaited and greeted. Hayward’s feat subverted this notion. The preliminary, introductory flourish became the event itself. At Café Oto, Hayward stood hunched over a single, spotlit drum as the seated audience was held rapt by the speed and precision and, most of all, duration of his playing. Read More
October 12, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: I Want to Eat My Boyfriend’s Pets By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, My boyfriend has been keeping pet shrimp. They’re not terrible pets; they’re low-maintenance and clean their own tank, but honestly they just make me crave seafood. I’ve developed a proclivity for shrimp tempura, shrimp cocktail, fried prawn … and he looks at me like I’m straight up eating puppies. Should I give up shrimp to be a supportive girlfriend? Sincerely, A Crustacean Curmudgeon Dear CC, Well, if it were me, what I’d do is this: I’d get really high and kneel by the shrimp tank with my face really, really close, and on my back I’d wear a sign that said DO NOT INTERRUPT ME, and then I’d watch the shrimp and start to imagine them as musicians, with hats and tiny instruments, like a marching band or an orchestra or, maybe if there are only two or three, as a jazz combo. It depends on how many shrimp there are. And also the weed. If it’s the right weed, and if your heart is open, you will develop the empathy necessary to solve the whole problem for you. But what could also happen is this: you might slowly realize that the shrimp are watching you, too. In fact, they have been watching all along, watching you and listening to your jokey tone, and they know exactly what you are about. And sometimes they imagine you breaded, sometimes you are in a state of sudden tempura, and sometimes you are just curled naked and above the cocktail sauce. And all of them are willing this to be. It is never wise to chew on the animal your mate loves. Sincerely, Lynda B. Read More
October 12, 2017 Comics Samuel Beckett’s Sitcom Pitches By Tom Gauld From Baking with Kafka, by Tom Gauld. Printed with the permission of Drawn & Quarterly.
October 11, 2017 Redux REDUX: Kazuo Ishiguro, and Other Nobel Laureates 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 bring you our interview with our newest Nobel Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro, plus work by his fellow laureates Svetlana Alexievich and Alice Munro. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196 Issue no. 184 (Spring 2008) “Idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for meaning of the good. You shouldn’t get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you’ve discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.” Read More