December 6, 2017 Our Correspondents Eight Public Cases By Anthony Madrid Norman Rockwell, Russian Schoolroom, 1967. 1. Our teacher (young, malevolent, witty) was holding forth about the “curlicues and inefficiency” of Derek Walcott’s poetic style. Our teacher said, “It’s like he wants to go to the kitchen to get a banana. So, he dresses up like Henry James, striped pants, fresh pressed—tails, top hat—and stands with supreme dignity on the curb next to his bed. A Rolls-Royce pulls up silently. It is dazzling, five hundred pounds of chrome front and back, and a chauffeur jumps out—white gloves—opens the passenger door for Walcott. Walcott glides into the seat, frowning deeply and nodding toward the kitchen. He is now sitting bolt upright. The chauffeur closes the door, takes his own place, and drives six feet to the kitchen. He hops out, assists Walcott toward the kitchen counter, where the bananas—somber yellow with coffee-colored freckles—are situated in an animated rhombus of light, rain seeded, coming from the kitchen window. At which point we are doomed. Those bananas will turn to baby food before Walcott is finished describing them … ” We all laughed, but one of the students said, “Yes, but doesn’t that description apply to the first three quarters of the Norton Anthology—?” Comment. It does if you think Shakespeare and all those people were just describing bananas. The real question isn’t whether the description applies to the Norton; it’s whether it applies to Walcott. And here is an aphorism: Every laugh—deflects. Read More
December 5, 2017 Redux Redux: P. D. James, Walter Mosley, Georges Simenon 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. Read More
December 5, 2017 Document If I Had a Sense of Beauty By H. W. Fowler H. W. Fowler and his dog. “He is merely shallow and—oh! so banal and trite.” —Pall Mall Gazette) “This group of self-conscious, verbose essays.” —Yorkshire Observer “A true autobiography of a second-rate soul.” —Morning Post These are some of the “Extracts from Press Notices” at the beginning of If Wishes Were Horses (1929). They refer to the 1907 edition, published under another title. They are the very first thing we find in the book, before even the author’s name. Only Henry Watson Fowler—who by this time had authored two of Oxford’s all-time classics, The King’s English and A Dictionary of Modern Usage (see my other post on this subject)—could have had the humility and the sense of humor to begin a book by citing the most acerbic sneers he could find on it. If voluntarily quoting those scalding blurbs were not enough, Fowler further proved his humility by publishing many of his books anonymously or under pseudonyms, one of which was Quillet, as in “little quill”—literally, a diminutive pen name. In addition to his work as a linguist, he wrote several books that defy classification. One of them, for instance, is a collection of “lay sermons” for boys (Fowler’s atheism cost him his teaching position), signed as Quilibet (Latin for “anyone” or “no matter who.”) Another was an attack on popular fallacies (“Childhood Is the Happiest Time,” “Time Is Money,” et cetera), much in the vein of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues or Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, only with essay-length entries. Read More
December 5, 2017 Arts & Culture Opera in a Post-Weinstein World By Daniel Foster From the Welsh National Opera’s staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. These days, we hear soloists, ensembles, and choruses of women singing out against abusers. But the courage expressed by these female choirs has made me question my enjoyment of another kind of music. I’m talking, of course, about opera. In this modern moment, it’s difficult not to hear opera as the highly aestheticized echo of our deeply sordid reality, a harmonization of voices wrung from women’s suffering. Louder and clearer than ever, I’m hearing opera as critics like Catherine Clément long have: as the undoing of women by men. From an early age, my daughter (let’s call her O. to protect her privacy until she’s ready to tell her own story in the way she wants to) also recognized that there was something seriously wrong going on between men and women in opera. Carmen is her favorite opera. It used to serenade us on our daily commute to her nursery. She especially loved the children’s chorus—“Taratata, taratata!”—as they imitated the marching soldiers bugling and fifing out the old guard for the new. We even watched Francesco Rosi’s cinematic montage of bullfighting and lust in the dust of Seville. Then, one day, she asked me, “If Don Jose loves Carmen so much, why does he kill her?” Read More
December 5, 2017 Bulletin Joy Williams Will Receive Our 2018 Hadada Award By The Paris Review Joy Williams, 1990. Photo by Reg Innell Save the date: The Paris Review will honor Joy Williams with the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement at our annual gala, the Spring Revel. Williams is the author of five short-story collections, four novels, a book of essays, and a guidebook to the Florida Keys (which Condé Nast Traveler described as “one of the best guidebooks ever written”). Williams’s writing first appeared in our Fall 1968 issue with the short story “The Retreat.” In 1973, George Plimpton decided to published her first novel, State of Grace, under the Paris Review Editions imprint; the novel was nominated for the National Book Award when Williams was only thirty. Over the decades, the Review has published nine of her stories (and will publish a tenth this spring). In our Summer 2014 issue, we interviewed Williams for the Art of Fiction series. Her interviewer, Paul Winner, noted that Williams used a flip phone, typed postcards in lieu of email, had never owned a computer, and wore prescription sunglasses, indoors and out, night and day. She told him that she didn’t have a TV or Internet or air-conditioning at her home in Arizona, and that she owned seven Smith Corona portable typewriters for writing while traveling. She is particularly noted for her writing on the environment. As she said, “Cultural diversity can never replace biodiversity, though we’re being prompted to think it can. We live and spawn and want—always there is this ghastly wanting—and we have done irredeemable harm to so much. Perhaps the novel will die and even the short story because we’ll become so damn sick of talking about ourselves.” We, however, refuse to be sick of talking about Joy Williams. Her work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. We’re thrilled to add the Hadada to that list: it’s presented annually to a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature. Last year’s honoree was Richard Howard; previous recipients are John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton (posthumously), Barney Rosset, Philip Roth, Norman Rush, James Salter, Frederick Seidel, Robert Silvers, and William Styron. John Waters—writer, director, “counterculture demigod” (the New York Times)—will present the award. Please join us in April to celebrate Williams’s extraordinary career.
December 4, 2017 Look Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Artists with the Shovels By Molly Crabapple In November, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple spent a week in Puerto Rico documenting grassroots efforts by communities to rebuild after Hurricane Maria. Here are excerpts from her sketchbook. Molly Crabapple, Bridge, 2017. Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi has lost track of how many times he’s been to Barrio Paloma Abajo since the hurricane hit. As he drove up the vertiginous roads of the Cordillera Central, he ticked off what he and his colleagues at Defend PR have accomplished so far. They were working with an architect to rebuild houses wrecked by Maria. They brought seeds and water filters and set up a solar-powered cinema. Solar lights, mosquito nets, batteries, bug spray, rat traps. They drove kids to a local comedy show. They installed tarps on roofs and brought chain saws to cut down the dangling tree branches and shoveled debris from the broken bridge. They organized themselves into brigades to clean wrecked farms. Jacobs-Fantauzzi rolled up his sleeve and showed me a trail of red welts. Ants, he suspected. Read More