January 3, 2018 Arts & Culture Curry Lit: Writing Authentically About India By Naben Ruthnum Cover illustration by Chloe Cushman. Even if the Indian subcontinent was never your home to begin with, it can serve—and has served—as a spiritual home in conversation, books, films, and pilgrimage-like trips. In her 1979 book Karma Cola, Gita Mehta observed these visitors and the industry of fake fakirs who sprang up around them to embrace their curiosity and take their money. As the vivid success of Eat Pray Love and Chip Wilson’s Lululemon empire have proven, the guru era is far from over. There are fraudulent ashrams and cultish inveiglers all over the subcontinent and in the islands where the disapora scattered: everyone has a cousin—or six—who gives 38 percent of their income to a leader who, in exchange, relieves them of their connections to family and friends. In the West, too, gurus proliferate in small local temples, Sai Baba megastructures, and the Bikram Yoga training camp. Karma Cola is history as reportage, a sardonic chronicle of minor vengeance for colonialism: the colonizers who just wouldn’t go away are now a source of capital for the country, a welcome variation on the one-way cash flow of the former empirical relationship. India can sell its wisdom, packaged for consumption by America and Europe’s young and directionless—or old and directionless, for that matter. Read More
January 3, 2018 Our Correspondents The Fuzz By Anthony Madrid and Coco Picard A few words about this presentation. The verbal part had a romantic beginning. I was obsessing over the rhythms of Korney Chukovsky’s poem “Telephone.” Suddenly—very suddenly—occurred to me the first rhymes of what I thought might be an existential masterpiece: “Long time ago there was … a fuzz.” Note the Russian accent. A great deal more came to me all at once. I was in the car. I felt frightened. I thought I might forget. So I uncapped a marker and wrote what I could on a box that was conveniently in the passenger seat. This is a true story. I kept writing more at stop lights, all the way to Chipotle. More came out on napkins there, but that stuff was trash and I cut it. Time I got to my office at school, I had “The Fuzz” that you see below, intact. And I was in a sweat to share it with the world. Over the next few days, I developed illustrations. These had no merit, but I sent ’em to people anyway. People all over the world: little kids, infirm persons. Part two of this story is where I turned to a real illustrator. I know her slightly. She is one of the good ones in Chicago. I had just read her graphic novel, Chronicles of Fortune, in transports of delight, on an airplane. I doubted she would be able to find time to do pictures for “The Fuzz,” as she was six or seven months pregnant and had plenty of other things to do, but voilà, she found the time. I should like to direct your attention to the panel where nobody knows why there was a fuzz. That image is a good meme. The whole thing is memes, all the way down. What else shall I tell you? I plan on writing another piece like “The Fuzz,” called “The Slime” (“Once upon a time … was a slime”). ’Til then, wishing everybody a happy 2018. Read More
January 2, 2018 Redux Redux: Eudora Welty, David Sedaris, Sharon Olds 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. Happy New Year, and welcome to your free weekly holiday in the archives of The Paris Review. This week, we bring you Eudora Welty’s Art of Fiction interview from our Fall 1972 issue; David Sedaris’s essay “Letter from Emerald Isle,” and Sharon Olds’s poem “The Beetle.” And why not ring in the New Year by listening to all three in the sixth episode of our podcast, “The Beetle and the Butterfly.” Read More
January 2, 2018 Best of 2017 Sex in the Garden By Stephen Greenblatt We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! William Blake, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (detail), 1808. The serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field, had observed with interest the humans’ sexual intercourse in Paradise. He saw that Adam calmly willed his penis to stiffen and then gently inserted it into Eve’s vulva. The act caught his attention in part because he thought that Eve was extraordinarily beautiful and in part because he had already noted a certain resemblance between Adam’s penis and his own body, which he could also harden or soften at will. One day, he approached Eve—Adam was away surveying a different part of the garden—and proposed that he stiffen his body and enter her, as Adam did. Lacking any knowledge of good or evil, Eve gladly consented. The snake made himself hard and penetrated the woman, moving his head this way and that to see what might be of interest. But it was dark inside and, after a while, concluding that Eve was more beautiful without than within, he withdrew. Eve, however, had experienced something intensely pleasurable, and she determined that when Adam returned she would teach him how to imitate what the snake had done. (Williams 57–58; Slavonic Enoch) Read More >>
January 2, 2018 Best of 2017 The Worst-Case Scenario By Tom Overton We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Still from Threads. The audience at the 1984 press screening of Barry Hines and Mick Jackson’s BBC TV film Threads apparently walked out in numbed silence. One of them, the novelist Russell Hoban, concluded in The Listener, This is not a film to be reviewed as a film; its art is that it cancels all aesthetic distance between our unthinking and the unthinkable: here is the death of our life and the birth of a new life for our children, a life … of slow death by radiation sickness and plagues and starvation and quick death by violence. Threads is a virtually faultless film, but as Hoban suggests, its unrelenting bleakness makes it all but impossible to recommend to someone one likes. That said, it has recently won a “Ten Films That Shook Our World” poll, and tonight, April 10, it’s showing at the Barbican Centre, in London. Spoiler alerts are irrelevant; the movie will spoil your day however you see it. In its harrowing vision of Britain after a nuclear war, pretty much everyone dies eventually, while rats, maggots, and the class system endure. As vividly as it defines the experience of living through the Cold War, we no longer have the luxury of viewing it as a historical document: in January 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists declared us closer to doomsday than we’ve been since the early eighties. Read More >>
January 1, 2018 Best of 2017 Master of Light By Noah Gallagher Shannon We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Roger Deakins, 2004, via Buena Vista. Sometime in the late nineties, the cinematographer Roger Deakins took a kind of pilgrimage to visit his friend and mentor Conrad “Connie” Hall, who was living in semiretirement on a tiny island off Tahiti. The timing found Deakins visiting the older Hall—a three-time Academy Award winner and sort of tribal elder to directors of photography—as the industry-wide shift toward digital cameras was being met by a renewed nostalgia for film, and Deakins was excited to share how he’d recently remodeled his LA home to include a darkroom. “My expectations were shattered,” Deakins later wrote, “when Conrad pronounced the photochemical process ‘antiquated.’ ” Hall praised the possibilities of digital, telling Deakins he was happy to indulge any “technique that might have helped him develop as a visual storyteller.” That was Hall’s guiding mantra, and one the younger artist soon took up: “Story! Story! Story!” Read More >>