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
October 31, 2017 History Ghost Club: Yeats’s and Dickens’s Secret Society of Spirits By Peter Hoskin Still from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922). When it comes to ghosts, belief and outright disbelief are not the only options—or at least they weren’t in nineteenth-century Britain. The Victorians didn’t stick to simple arguments about the existence of ghosts; they also argued about how, when, and why they might exist. Spiritualists attacked spiritualists over whether the supernatural should be classed as natural. Scientists discussed whether psychological or physiological factors were at play. Inventors, politicians, journalists, and madmen joined in, too. Indeed, it was such a popular, multidisciplinary pursuit that its practitioners needed new places to meet, outside of their existing societies, and various organizations were established to debate the boundaries of the immaterial. One of these exploratory committees was the Ghost Club. It was founded in 1862 and lasted about a decade, although its history stretches back to a group of Cambridge academics in the 1850s, and it stretches forward, through several resurrections, to now. The earliest days of the club are not well recorded, but we do know that it was small, populated by male intellectuals, and it concentrated on investigating supposed supernatural encounters, with the intention of exposing frauds. Charles Dickens is said to have been a founding member; the first in a procession of writers—including William Butler Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon—who joined its ranks. Read More
October 31, 2017 Arts & Culture Hillbilly Horror: B Movies of the Undead South By Chantel Tattoli Still from Two Thousand Maniacs! Years ago, my boyfriend and I drove from New York City, where he was from, to Orlando, where I was from and where we were both attending an old liberal-arts college rich in bats and mossy oaks. South, past the Mason–Dixon Line and into the Carolinas, we went. We were speeding on a forsaken stretch of I-95 late one night when the rearview mirror glinted blue and red. I would have pulled over immediately. But I was not behind the wheel. Nick did not want to stop until there were witnesses. I didn’t grasp his fear: we were a couple of law-abiding white kids en route to school at the end of summer. What did he imagine was going to happen to us? But he drove for more than five minutes—ignoring my advice (so that I pondered whether to phone my dad or his when we went to jail)—before halting in a semi-bright parking lot, switching the radio to country music, and dropping the window. Nick recalls the state trooper as a seven-footer with a gravelly voice and leathery face. What is indisputable is that Nick—a full-blooded Manhattanite—addressed this officer with a syrupy accent and managed to get away with a mere stern warning. Nick looked at me afterward. “This is why I put Florida license plates on the Xterra,” he said. “If that cop knew I was from New York, who knows!” I thought he was nuts then; and I still think he is nuts. But Nick continues to protest: “You didn’t get it. That was the stuff of horror films.” Recently, I have seen his point. There is a robust subgenre of horror that mistrusts the custom of Southern hospitality. It turns on the premise that the American South is a danger zone for Northerners, who remain persona non grata and venture into Dixie at the risk of life and limb. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)—by the director Tobe Hooper, dead of natural causes this August—is the marquee example. Deliverance (1972), Motel Hell (1980, tagged, “It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent Fritters”), and House of 1000 Corpses (2003) are some others. In this category, known as “hillbilly horror,” one film stands out at the get: a low-budget, semi-professional 1964 splatter flick titled Two Thousand Maniacs! Read More