April 2, 2018 Arts & Culture Shakespeare’s Twitter Account By Kate Dwyer On February 13, just after midnight, the Daily Kerouac Twitter account tweeted, “As I’m writing this, the radio says there’s a foot of snow falling on Long Island.” A Twitter user named Susan replied, “Turn off the radio, go outside and listen to the snow.” As I read the exchange, I happened to be less than a mile from Kerouac’s home in Northport, New York, where, on February 13, it was not snowing. The conversation seemed suspended somewhere between now and the early 1960s, when Kerouac first wrote the lines in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. I couldn’t help but picture some version of Kerouac sitting at his typewriter receiving Susan’s reply on an iPhone. It was a bizarre sensation. Daily Kerouac is one of several literary tribute Twitter accounts devoted to tweeting quotes from authors. Sometimes these quotes are consecutive sentences from longer works, other times they’re non-sequitur snippets chopped off midsentence. Shakespeare has at least three tribute accounts, the largest of which, @Wwm_Shakespeare, boasts 158,000 followers. The most popular Oscar Wilde account has upward of 160,000 followers while Sylvia Plath has nearly 200,000 and @_harukimurakami clocks in at 235,000. I have a personal fondness for the Frank O’Hara account. There’s a Virginia Woolf bot that tweets quotes in Korean and a Lovecraft bot that tweets in French. And there are mash-up accounts like @WhitmanFML, which uses an algorithm to combine Whitman quotes with random tweets hashtagged #FML (short for f*ck my life), resulting in tweets such as, “When the psalm sings instead of the singer but i only have the ugly pieces left of the bread #fml.” Some of these accounts are run by living people who carefully select quotes that rhyme with the outside world, and some are run by bots programmed to spit out quotes using elegant Python code. Read More
April 2, 2018 Comics The Teddy Bear Effect By Pénélope Bagieu Pénélope Bagieu is a French illustrator and cartoonist. Her most recent book, Brazen, is out now from First Second.
March 30, 2018 Arts & Culture The Nationalist Roots of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary By Jess McHugh Amid the rancorous screaming matches of political discourse in 2016, a tempering voice emerged from an unlikely source: the dictionary. During the presidential election and its aftermath, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary mobilized its large social-media following to fact-check political figures who treated all language like fiction. From explaining the meaning of fact to differentiating between bigly and big league, the dictionary served as a biting challenge to the new regime, winning praise for its pithy critiques. Merriam-Webster’s resistance to an administration steeped in nativism, however, is complicated by the dictionary’s original goal to create and preserve a monolithic American culture. Noah Webster Jr., the dictionary’s founding author, was one of the first American nationalists, and he wrote his reference books with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English—one that often existed at the expense of regional and cultural variation of any kind. Read More
March 30, 2018 Celebrating Joy Williams Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Illustrated: Part Five By The Paris Review On April 3, The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. In anticipation, we’ve asked the renowned artist Brad Holland to illustrate five stories from her 2013 collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God. Take a look at the other stories and illustrations that appeared this week. An original illustration by Brad Holland. Read More
March 29, 2018 On Sports Why the French Love Horses By Chantel Tattoli Years ago, the German photographer Jaroslav Poncar told me about running into the legendary French anthropologist Dr. Michel Peissel in Himalaya in the seventies. “People were saying, ‘Peissel is coming! It’s Peissel.’ So I went out to meet them—Peissel and his nice blonde companion,” Poncar added with a grin. Later, in Paris, Peissel and Poncar ended up living on the same street, and Peissel would hang around Poncar’s studio. He was, Poncar said, “a braggart.” Peissel would do things like forget to mention the two mathematicians he met during his seminal travels on the steppes—as if he were the only European to venture so far afield. “And! Michel did not discover that horse,” Poncar had sniffed, referring to an archaic Tibetan breed called the Nangchen, which Peissel is credited with bringing to light. “But the French love horses,” Poncar offered by way of explanation. I didn’t quite absorb his meaning. What he seemed to suggest was that Peissel could be forgiven because the French simply love horses so much. Recently, I attended the ninth edition of the equestrian competition Saut Hermès in Paris. There, people again and again recounted this fact: “The French love horses.” In France, riding is the top outdoor sport, one enjoyed, according to the French Equestrian Federation, by two million men, women, and children. I had heard there are some five thousand equestrian centers here, a remarkable figure, but when I reached the federation to confirm, I was told, “In fact, we have 9,351.” A preponderance of France’s competitive horsemen and horsewomen came out of the pony clubs—France hosts more international equestrian competitions than any other nation and is home to Equidia, Europe’s only television channel dedicated to horse sports. (Not to mention, here in the capital, beyond carousels, all the major parks from the Luxembourg Gardens to Buttes-Chaumont tender pony rides.) Horse country is up in Normandy. It is where, for example, most of France’s national stud farms, created in 1665 for the benefit of the nation’s cavalry, are located, including le Pin, the very best one, and where Thierry Hermès, a half-French, half-German orphan, went to learn the harness-making trade before founding a workshop in 1837 in the Grands Boulevards quarter of Paris. Read More
March 29, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: No Feeling Is Final By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, I met a boy my first semester of college, and I immediately liked him, but then I watched as he fell in love with another girl. They had everything in common, and he experienced many firsts with her. They dated all through freshman year, then broke up over the summer. Then he and I began dating. We love each other immensely, and we’re even planning a future together. I know bits and pieces of his past relationship, but I’m too nervous/insecure to ask him about it directly. I feel like it shouldn’t matter, but I also want to understand that part of his life. I am experiencing many of my own firsts with him, and his ex-girlfriend pops into my head. I find myself jealous and angry and hurt sometimes, even when I know I have no right to be. I guess I need help in understanding my jealousy. Is there a poem that will teach me how to accept that he had a previous love and life before we shared ours? Love, Abashedly Jealous Read More