November 2, 2017 Life Sentence The Laws of Simple Sentences By Jeff Dolven In our new eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven will take apart and put back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro will illustrate each sentence Dolven chooses. Read earlier installments of Life Sentence here. Image © Tom Toro A sentence has to be complete to be a sentence. It also has to be correct. “The trees wave.” That will certainly do: it has a subject and a predicate, a simple arrangement and a simple image. The grammarians’ demand for formal completeness dates back only to the middle of the seventeenth century, and so it is much younger than the ancient idea of a complete thought. The syntactic pattern underneath is older than both, and most linguists today take it to be the activation of a language faculty that has evolved over tens of thousands of years. That there is a law in this sentence, wherever it lies, is apparent any time we try to break it. “The trees”: is that a sentence? No. We are left hanging, wondering what the trees are or do or suffer. How about “Wave”? No, if it is supposed to be an indicative verb, what the trees do. (Yes, however, if it is an imperative, predicate to the implied subject “you.” No again, if it is a noun.) Read More
November 1, 2017 Novemberance On the First of November, the Ghosts Arrive By Nina MacLaughlin This is the first installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month. All Saints’ Day in Stockholm November is a hinge in the year, and the door gets opened to ghosts. It was a late fall weekend some years ago and lunch had gone long. A Spanish tortilla sat in the center of the table like a golden sun eclipsed as slices were put onto plates. A fire, lit that morning, threw heat from the other room. There was wine, maybe more than usual. Conversation rolled. After the meal, by the fire, the sun well into its descent, time moved at a different pace, a slower throb in the cheek-warmed flush from the wine, in the dimming light and hearth-warmed room. The fire glowed and spit, released its quiet hiss, and made that quieter high hum: the sound of the tree not in pain but in shift from one state to another. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked the man who stood by the fire. He came from the rainy, witchy gloom of Galicia in northwest Spain, a place in climate and culture closer to the bagpipe-y mists of the British Isles than to, say, the thumping island atmosphere of Ibiza. He was narrow framed, wiry, with a coiled sort of energy, and gray-black hair in his rich, thick mustache. He had heat behind his eyes and there are few people I’d rather have a conversation with. He was somewhere over seventy, though his blazing vitality belied it. Read More
November 1, 2017 Our Correspondents Goodbye to the Gem Room By Sadie Stein The Hall of Gems after its 1976 opening. © AMNH Library Many years ago, I brought an old boyfriend to the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Natural History Museum. I’d told him all about it: how many hours of my childhood had been spent roaming the dun-carpeted halls under the flourescent lights, gazing at the geode cave and the rainbow of precious stones; occasionally sliding down that one irresistible slanted slab of petrified wood when the guard’s back was turned. I’d told him about how my best friend, Elaine, and I would beg to visit the dark little screening room where they showed a film called Forever Gold on a ten-minute loop, and how we’d watch it over and over and over, shrieking with laughter and shouting along with the dialogue. I’m not sure why I loved the gem room. I never much cared about science, and jewelry has always left me cold. And yet, it felt like the friendliest and most reassuring place in the world. And that film! Years later, I could still remember the triumphant cries of the prospectors, and the bits of 1980s footage in which a scientist in a short-sleeved button-down demonstrated the incredible tensility of a sheet of gold leaf. At one point a reenactor, playing a Medieval merchant, bit down on a gold coin; this started us on several weeks of hilarious and unhygienic coin biting. The narrator—whom I would later realize was George Plimpton—explains at one point that if all the gold ever mined were made into a cube, a football game could still be played around it. This is still the one salient fact I know about football. Read More
November 1, 2017 Arts & Culture The Podcasting Way of Death By Sylvie McNamara The futuristic Aeternal hearse, designed by Abhishek Roy. I discovered funeral-industry trade podcasts during a dark night of the soul. I’m allergic to wine, but I’d been drinking it anyway, and as I lay in bed feeling my heart thrash and my sinuses cloud, I contemplated the fact that I now have a circulatory system but someday won’t. This is a fixation of mine that arises with inexplicable and alarming frequency—I’m twenty-five and healthy; I haven’t experienced tremendous loss. My abstract anxieties about death tend to coalesce around my most concrete repulsion: embalming. That night, in a desperate ploy to overwhelm the circuitry of my fear, I searched for a podcast that would explain the process with clinical precision. That’s how I stumbled across the embalming episode of Deathcast, in which the former body remover Kelsey Eriksson describes draining the body of blood and pumping it full of preservatives. Her voice was lilting and reedy, the sugary pitch of Kristen Bell narrating Gossip Girl, which did not make her description of my grisliest nightmares easier to swallow. In fact, as I learned about “eye caps”—thick, barbed contacts that close eyelids and lend shape to postmortem shrunken eyeballs—my dread clotted into a neurotic fixation. I downloaded podcast after podcast of “death professionals” trading industry tips, promoting hair-raising products and telling one another stories of the trade that are as startling and macabre as urban legends. Read More
October 31, 2017 Redux Redux: Joan Didion, William Faulkner, and Matthew Zapruder 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. Photograph by Mary Lloyd Estrin, 1977. To celebrate the release of the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, we bring you our 1978 Art of Fiction interview with the writer—plus a Halloween ghost story from William Faulkner and a haunted poem by Matthew Zapruder. Read More
October 31, 2017 Look Mother Mold: Keith Edmier’s Frozen Faces By The Paris Review “Mother Mold,” an exhibition of sculptural portraiture by Keith Edmier, is running at the Petzel Gallery, on Sixty-Seventh Street, until November 4. The fifty masks draw inspiration from imagines, a type of wax casting that aristocratic families made of their male members’ faces and displayed in their homes during the Roman Republic. “In an age before photography, imagines were considered the truest, most objective representation of a person.” Unlike the Romans, Edmier makes his masks from plaster, and includes female faces. “Some of these people are famous, some are not. Some casts were made by me, others were not. Some people I knew intimately, others I knew casually or never met. Edmier’s imagines is a lifeline or, possibly, a dysfunctional family tree of my own.” The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of the imagines as a boxed set of fifty postcards, written by Edmier himself, shown below. Barack Obama, recto. Barack Obama, verso. Read More