December 4, 2017 On Language On Making Oneself Less Unreadable By Hernan Diaz A photograph of H. W. Fowler in sporting attire from his biography The Warden of English. Grammar enthusiasts either love Henry Watson Fowler or they have yet to encounter his work. It is possible to read his Dictionary of Modern Usage (1926) from cover to cover as a weird, wonderful essay; it is impossible to do so without laughing out loud. A few entries from the second edition, revised by Ernest Gowers: avoidance of the obvious is very well, provided that it is not itself obvious; but, if it is, all is spoilt. [If the reader believes] that you are attitudinizing as an epicure of words for whom nothing but the rare is good enough, or, worse still, that you are painfully endeavouring to impart some much needed unfamiliarity to a platitude, his feelings towards you will be something that is not admiration. The obvious is better than obvious avoidance of it … Frankenstein. … A sentence written by the creatress of the creator of the creature may save some of those whose acquaintance with all three is indirect from betraying the fact: “Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation; but on this point he was impenetrable” (Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley). Frankenstein is the creator-victim; the creature-despot and fatal creation is Frankenstein’s monster … The blunder is very common indeed—almost, but surely not quite, sanctioned by custom: If they went on strengthening this power they would create a F. they could not resist … if and when. Any writer who uses this formula lays himself open to entirely reasonable suspicions on the part of his readers. There is the suspicion that he is a mere parrot, who cannot say part of what he has often heard without saying the rest also. There is the suspicion that he likes verbiage for its own sake. There is the suspicion that he is a timid swordsman who thinks he will be safer with a second sword in his left hand. There is the suspicion that he has merely been too lazy to make up his mind between if and when … soccer, -cker. Soccer did not deserve its victory in the competition between these alternative spellings … Read More
December 4, 2017 Arts & Culture Reimagining Female Identity in a Ukrainian Orphanage By Rebecca Bengal From the book Internat, Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos More than a decade ago, on a Fulbright fellowship in Ukraine, the artist Carolyn Drake found herself outside Ternopil, a small city on the banks of the Seret River. Her hosts led her to a forest on the edge of a suburb, where a large, half-century-old building stood bearing a small nondescript sign, which translated to “Petrykhiv Children’s Home,” or Internat, the title of her just-published photo book. Away from society at large, among a staff of women and one male director, the orphaned girls who lived there formed their own community, an all-female family engaged in the routine of daily life and chores, and an instinctive, if naive, curiosity about the outside world. In the intervening decade, Drake traveled to Central Asia for her project Two Rivers, and to the western frontier of China to make the photographs, drawings, and embroidery that comprise Wild Pigeons. When she returned to Ukraine, in 2014, she expected that the girls she had met would have left the orphanage. But they were still there, suddenly grown up. “They were little bouncy energetic girls and then they were private, snarky, opinionated, complicated adults. I started thinking a lot about change,” Drake told me recently. “I was interested in how girls develop in an environment void of men, especially in Ukraine, where women seemed to me a lot of times to be defined either as objects of the male gaze or through their purity.” Over a series of visits from 2014 to 2016, she took photographs with the Internat residents that compose a subversive fairy tale—a story of modern cloistering, of isolation and escapism, and an evocative reimagining of what it means to be female. Read More
December 1, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Nerds, Necromancers, and New Wave Poetry By The Paris Review From the cover of American Nerd. In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Benjamin Nugent weaves a web of surprising cultural connections—from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to nativism, to the use and abuse of Morse code—to explain the advent of the nerd in the late twentieth century. As the subtitle suggests, Nugent also reports firsthand on the connections that hold nerds together: “It was no coincidence, I think, that we generally came to D&D from home lives that tended toward the unpredictable and confounding … In the fantasies we made together, you weren’t always king, but you could always point to him.” Ten years after it was first published, American Nerd remains absorbing, touching, entertaining and, to this reader, enlightening even at its most offhand (e.g., “A pretty good definition of sci-fi … is fiction that focuses exclusively on monumental events: plagues, comets, interspecies wars, the return of the dinosaurs.”) Highly recommended for fans of Stranger Things. —Lorin Stein Ah, yes. It’s that time of year once again. Say it with me now: it’s black-metal season. When the sky is gray and the cold claws at my flesh, I bundle myself in layers of distortion. Ash Borer’s self-titled album, which thunders and howls, is my go-to November music. Nothing better reflects this miserable, wonderful weather. —Brian Ransom Read More
December 1, 2017 Bulletin An Alternate Recipe for Chestnuts By The Paris Review Brian Ransom, our beloved digital intern, is not from the East Coast, and so we occasionally amuse ourselves by making him try, for the first time, things like burrata, korean pears, and smoked salmon. Yesterday, he told us that he had bought himself a chestnut, but that it had been very difficult to peel. We asked if he had … eaten it raw? He had. Read More
December 1, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Sybille Bedford By Valerie Stivers This is the fifth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. The decline of the continental European aristocracy just before World War I doesn’t sound like a promising period for food … until you read Sybille Bedford (1911–2006). Bedford was the daughter of a German baron (part of the anti-Prussian aristocracy) and a wealthy Jewish German woman from Hamburg. She had Jewish blood and glamorous friends, and she escaped the Nazis with the help of Aldous Huxley. Her greatest novel, A Legacy, first published in 1956 and reprinted by New York Review Books Classics in 2015, is the story of two German families, one based on her father’s family, the other on Berlin’s rich Jews. These beautiful and inflexible characters collect objets d’art, gamble, eat sumptuous feasts, and unwittingly play their parts in the rise of fascism in Germany. It’s one of the book’s many pleasurable sophistications that the narrator is barely a character; once you’ve seen her parents—seen her legacy—you’ve seen it all. Read More
December 1, 2017 The Lives of Others A Mother’s Ninth-Century Manual on How to Be a Man By Edward White Albert Edelfelt, Queen Blanche of Norway and Sweden with Prince (later King) Hacon, 1877. Being a red-blooded, blue-blooded male in the Carolingian Empire was a risky business. Those who grew up in Western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries were frequently exposed to extreme violence. One adolescent royal from the period was struck so hard in a play fight that, in the words of a contemporary account, his playmate’s sword “penetrated almost as far as the brain, reaching from his left temple to his right cheekbone.” The only thing the Carolingians valued as much as ruthlessness on the battlefield was proficiency with Biblical text. William of Septimania appears to have had a thorough education in both. He was barely in his twenties when he seized control of Barcelona in 848, but he had already spent four years warring against the crown. The city had been the old stomping ground of his father, Bernard. Bernard was an important figure in the reign of Louis the Pious, the Carolingian emperor who ruled a great swathe of territory from what is now northern Spain to the Czech Republic. But in recent times Bernard had endured a spectacular fall, toppled by intrigue and machination that ended in his death and devastated his family. When still in his teens, William became determined to win the battles his father couldn’t. He joined a rebellion against the ruling dynasty that had once been as close as kin. Read More