September 5, 2024 On Philosophy Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog: Kafka’s Philosophical Investigations By Aaron Schuster Nicolas Gosse and Auguste Vinchon, Cynic philosopher with his dog, 1827. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and unfinished. It was Max Brod who named it Forschungen eines Hundes, which could also be translated as “Researches of a dog,” to give it a more academic ring. But the term investigations has its fortuitous resonances in the history of modern philosophy. The dog’s investigations belong to a great line of theoretical endeavors, like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, with its retinue of animals, dogs included; or Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which launched his new science of consciousness, phenomenology; or Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, even more to the point since this is how the dog’s investigations end, with the question of freedom, and the prospect of a new science of freedom. The word translated as “investigations” in these titles, Untersuchungen, is also used by Kafka’s dog, who speaks of his “hopeless” but “indispensable little investigations,” which, like so many momentous undertakings, began with the “simplest things.” Read More
September 4, 2024 Bulletin Javier Fuentes Will Be the Paris Review Visiting Professor at the Bard Prison Initiative By The Paris Review Javier Fuentes in the offices of The Paris Review. Last year, The Paris Review joined forces with the Bard Prison Initiative, which for twenty-five years has provided a full-time, tuition-free, degree-granting liberal arts education to students in unconventional settings, including several Upstate New York prisons and BPI’s microcolleges in New York City, one of which is located at the Brooklyn Public Library. In March, we announced the Paris Review Visiting Professorship—a position for a creative writer to teach the literature that has inspired them to BPI students—and were heartened to receive a great number of nominations from the community. We are now delighted to announce that the inaugural Paris Review Visiting Professor is Javier Fuentes, who will be teaching three semester-long courses at NYSDOC Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York. Fuentes, who was born in Madrid, is the author of Countries of Origin, a novel about an undocumented pastry chef who is forced to leave New York and start life over in Spain—and his love affair with a young man named Jacobo, whom he meets on the plane. Fuentes’s first course, called Physical and Psychological Spaces in Literature, will explore the way time and place structure narrative; his syllabus includes Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Also Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—“Not a book that you usually think of in terms of space,” Fuentes said. “But if you read it closely, the house that Gregor finds himself in and the objects around him really are the main characters.” Class starts on September 5 and will meet twice a week. We want to congratulate Javi, and to wish the best of luck to him and his students as they embark on the new semester!
September 4, 2024 Rereading Against Rereading By Oscar Schwartz Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I was ten years old when I forgot how to sleep. I’d get into bed and focus very hard on trying to switch my conscious mind off, but the effort was self-defeating. I didn’t like spending so many hours alone, so I started waking my older sister up in the middle of the night to play the Game of Life, a board game in which you traverse a one-way highway leading from graduation to retirement in a tiny plastic car, amassing capital as you go. My sister enjoyed the game, too, but didn’t want to be woken up at 1 A.M. to play it. The solution my parents came up with was to allow me to read with the lights on for as long as I wanted. I didn’t like reading, at the time, but I pretended I did, to receive praise, like my sisters, who were known as “voracious readers.” My sister, who was fourteen, had just finished reading a novel called The Power of One by a South African Australian author named Bryce Courtenay. I told my sister that I wanted to read this book. She said it was not a good choice. The book was for adults. I was too young. I wouldn’t get it. That night, I took the book upstairs with me, without telling my sister, and started reading. This is what I remember. There was a boy named Peekay. He lived in South Africa. He was sent to a boarding school somewhere in the desert where he was bullied. He met a Zulu man who taught him how to fight back. One evening, the man was beaten to death by a white prison guard. He battered the man’s face with a blunt object and then penetrated him with that same object until he hemorrhaged to death. I didn’t know what the word hemorrhaged meant. I was mostly ignorant of the political context within which the murder took place. I lay in bed trying to figure it all out and by the time I came close to finishing The Power of One, I felt like I had been through some major ordeal and come out the other side a new person. I didn’t want the novel to end. I worried, as I approached the final pages, that I was going to lose everything I had experienced while reading it. I was anxious that, without The Power of One, my life would return to how it was before. One obvious solution was to immediately reread the novel and relive it all over. But there was something about rereading The Power of One that struck me as wrong or even perverse. I intuited that rereading this book would in some way ruin what had made the first time so profound and transformative. To my ten-year-old mind, reading the book once was a sign of love and reverence for the life force that seemed to animate its pages. I thought I had discovered how real reading worked: once, intensely, and then never again. Read More
September 3, 2024 Arts & Culture The Black Madonna By Aaron Robertson Glanton Dowdell. Photograph from the Albert B. Cleage Jr. Papers, courtesy of Kristin Cleage. In 1959, at sixteen, Rose Percita Brooks had two choices: the navy or the nunnery. The way her grandmother Rosie beat her for kissing a boy on a couch in her home made the girl want to run into a convent. At least there she would be far from the old woman’s wrath. Whatever inspired Rosie’s cruel beatings may have been a holdover from an ancestor’s pain during slavery times, some ghost haunting the old woman. Rosie was not yet born when slavery existed in Memphis, but she would always moan joyfully in church, as though she had witnessed the first Juneteenth. It was clear when the spirit possessed her. She grunted more loudly than anyone else. Oh, that’s Grandma, Rose thought. She’s happy now. She’s got the Holy Spirit. It was Rose’s grandfather who told his wife that the girl was in the living room with a stranger. They had flirted from opposite ends of the sofa until Rose accepted the boy’s slow departing kiss. That same evening, Rosie surprised the girl when she was changing for bed. As she recoiled from her grandmother’s blows, Rose thought of herself as an abused housewife, so wholly bound to her captor that she started to feel indistinguishable from Rosie. Would she ever escape her grandmother’s orbit? Rose bathed the woman, laid out her church clothes, and had nearly the same damn name. “What are you doing with that man?” Rosie demanded. The worst thing the girl could do was lift her arms to protect her face. Rosie’s force increased each time the girl tried to shield herself from the blows. Read More
August 30, 2024 On Things Toys in the TV By Isabelle Rea There is another kind of television. It’s not quite live action, nor purely animated. It exists in three-dimensional space, yet people, in their conventional forms, are absent, and the stories and characters don’t fit neatly into our practical world. It makes sense that we find this kind of television in the children’s category, because that’s where we leave most irrational things. Toys, especially ones designed for make-believe play, occupy a similar middle ground. Toys are real objects that you can touch, but they don’t work in the way nontoys work. You have a toy elephant, but you don’t have an elephant. You have a toy vacuum, but not a vacuum. If toys are soft, plush, rounded, and malleable, with holes and faulty parts, so are the worlds we create for them. We might watch this happen on TV. Read More
August 29, 2024 Dispatch Le Bloc: An Account of a Squat in Paris By Jacqueline Feldman The squat. Photograph courtesy of Benoit Méry. People stood out front as if waiting: smoking, talking. Of consecutive sets of doors, the first one bore a monogram in stenciled capitals: B-L-O-C. A grille resisted lifting, sticking. Just inside was a foyer, at the back of which stretched a crescent-shaped desk referred to by squatters as the Accueil, “reception.” Watch was kept. Behind that desk a crank could operate the grille. “This is a building of the people,” the squatter Dominique, who had worked construction, told me, referring to its history as a public health agency and its suitability for heavy use. Hard floors swept clean. Banks of cabinets, their material a blond composite, lined the halls, which at rhythms of their own let onto rooms that had been government workers’ offices. These doors, green frosted glass, shut with a clang. They kept in the warmth of space heaters. Open, they let smoke and music circulate; they aired disputes. A squatter who was a woman—women were a minority at Le Bloc—drew my attention to gaps in the fabric or paper stuck up to cover certain doors. People liked to see feet coming in the hallway, company, warning. Each door wore a padlock. Living quarters in this way took up the aboveground stories, thirty to thirty-five offices a floor. Into bathrooms, which variously came with pairs or rows of sinks, sitting or squat toilets, and mirrors, squatters had built showers. At least one room per floor served as a kitchen, but all did not have kitchen fixtures. The kitchen on the second floor, though it was much used, lacked a sink. A squatter who lived on the third floor told me they’d had, on that floor, to padlock the kitchen. Reputedly clean, it attracted the messier residents of other floors. After they finished making messes on their floors, they came and made a mess on the third floor. Though he characterized the padlock as a necessity, it embarrassed him, as the proper role for a squat, by which he seemed to mean its default action, the direction of motion within, was to open, he said, not close. Read More