February 14, 2018 Arts & Culture Advice on Love from Nietzsche and Sartre By Skye C. Cleary A couple in front of the love locks in Paris. Locking lips and interlocking fingers are harmless enough, but locking into love is seductively dangerous—both figuratively and literally. Twenty-first-century lovers have become so captivated by the metaphor that, in 2015, the pont des arts in Paris had to be released from the crushing weight of forty-five tons of padlocks that lovers had secured to it. Keys, tossed over the rails, litter the Seine. While the Parisian love locks were auctioned to raise money for charities, padlocks still smother memorials around the world—from other bridges in Paris, to the Brooklyn Bridge, to fences in Hawaii and Australia. Urban planners have now become accidental heroes in the crusade against the obsession, although the phenomenon persists despite their best efforts to thwart it. On a Valentine’s Day that comes hot on the heels of #MeToo, it’s worth reflecting on some of our rituals and symbols of love. For example, while I hope chastity belts are a relic of the past, ironmongery such as wedding bands are still among our ultimate signifiers of commitment—perhaps even more so than the marriage certificate that binds us legally. In some ways, this makes sense. Steely icons are strong, stable, and durable. Metallic tokens outlive us to such an extent that they remind us of the possibility of everlasting love. Most of us want love, and we want it to stay, so no wonder we’re tempted to fetter it in chains. However, these exalted symbols are deeply troubling in other ways. Not only are they cold and hard and inflexible, but they’re also relics of a long tradition of possessiveness: wedding rings are a vestige of dowry traditions and signify being owned. Read More
February 13, 2018 Redux Redux: Pevear and Volokhonsky, Evan S. Connell, William Leo Coakley 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. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Happy Valentine’s Day! This week, we bring you our 2015 Art of Translation interview with the husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Evan S. Connell’s famous story “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge,” and William Leo Coakley’s poem “The Marriage of Dionysus and Apollo.” A subscription to The Paris Review makes a great gift for that special someone. They’ll receive full access to our sixty-four-year archive and four issues of new interviews, poetry, and fiction. Read More
February 13, 2018 Hue's Hue Eau de Nil, the Light-Green Color of Egypt-Obsessed Europe By Katy Kelleher Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds, 1963, still from a color film, 119 minutes. In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home decor of the upper classes. For Flaubert, like for many of his fellow Frenchmen, the Orient, as it was often called, was a source of endless fascination, but visiting wouldn’t be easy on his wallet or his waistline. It was an arduous journey: from mail coach to riverboat to railway then finally to a room aboard an ungainly and fragile boat named Le Nil, which was equipped with a sail, a tall funnel, and a pair of paddle wheels. “The ugly little ship staggered the length of the Mediterranean like a drunkard,” writes Geoffery Wall, author of Flaubert: A Life. After eleven days on board Le Nil, Flaubert arrived in Alexandria, where he found himself overwhelmed by the noise of the animals, the scents of the food, and, above all, the colors. “I gobbled up a bellyful of color, like a donkey filling himself with oats,” he writes. In another letter, dated 1850, he compares the country to being alive in “the middle of one of Beethoven’s symphonies … For the first few days, may the devil take me, it’s an astounding hubbub of color, and your poor old imagination, as if it were at a fireworks display, is perpetually dazzled.” Read More
February 13, 2018 Arts & Culture White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance By Ismail Muhammad A scene at the race disturbance in Wilmington, North Carolina. Originally published in Colliers Weekly, November 26, 1898. Watching Donald Trump speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville last summer was a surreal experience. Not the first press conference where he referred to neo-Nazi protestors as “very fine people.” I mean the second time, when he repudiated those fine people. “Racism,” he intoned, clearly reading from a teleprompter, “is evil … white supremacists and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” Nobody could mistake his droning boredom for actual investment in the words he was speaking: his attempt to embrace the decorous discourse of liberal tolerance was baldly hypocritical. As the summer ended and the fall semester began at U.C. Berkeley, where I study literature, far-right agitators descended along with the cool weather. A succession of activists and pundits—Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and their ilk—made their way to campus. They brought the far-right protestors and threats of violence along with them, all the while invoking the language of tolerance and free speech. Berkeley’s former chancellor Nicholas Dirks even cited the campus community’s “values of tolerance” in defending Yiannopoulos’s appearance. The myriad ways in which people were deploying the word tolerance managed to drain the already-insufficient term of its content. All that was left was am empty concept that could accommodate any agenda. It was more clear than ever that the language of tolerance had become ineffective, just a mask behind which antipluralist demagogues could hide. Read More
February 12, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia Absurdist Dialogues with Siri By Mariana Lin Nagg: Me sugar-plum! Clov: There’s a rat in the kitchen! Hamm: A rat! Are there still rats? Clov: In the kitchen there’s one. Hamm: And you haven’t exterminated him? Clov: Half. You disturbed us. Hamm: He can’t get away? Clov: No. Hamm: You’ll finish him later. Let us pray to God. Clov: Again! Nagg: Me sugar-plum! —Samuel Beckett, Endgame For many years now, I have sat down daily to script lines for AI characters such as Siri and Sophia. It’s an unusual task. First, it involves channeling the personality of a nonhuman living among humans. Then, even more confounding, one must trace the ideal conversation between human and robot. In voice interface design, this is called the “happy path.” And the existence of a happy path implies, of course, the existence of many more “unhappy paths.” Read More
February 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Hamburger: An American Lyric By Carol J. Adams Campaigning for president in 1992, William Jefferson Clinton proved himself to be the citizen’s candidate by his penchant for hamburgers. Burgher: citizen of the city. There he would be, according to the press, stopping in for hamburgers at local diners. Bill Clinton, not just the citizen’s candidate, he was the citizen candidate; he liked the average Joe’s kind of food (not the sloppy joe; though they use a burger bun, they are not burgers). “It’s the economy, stupid,” was the mantra of the Clinton campaign. The burger is the citizen’s economic food choice, the Everyman’s lowest common denominator. His opponent, President George H. W. Bush, on the other hand, scion of a prominent New England family with a banker father who became a senator, had been cast as out of touch with the average citizen of the United States. “Poor George,” the future Texas governor Ann Richards famously said in 1988, “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Not Bill Clinton: from the media reports, one got a sense he had been born with a hamburger in his mouth. And not a hamburger like President Lyndon Johnson’s favorite hamburger in the midsixties, made from thirty-five-dollar-per-pound ground-up aged sirloin. (Factoring in inflation that would be about $280 in 2017.) Read More