October 26, 2017 Life Sentence The Complete Sentence 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. Image © Tom Toro What is a sentence? But that is such a formal question. How about, what is a sentence for? Less formal, perhaps, but obviously impossible to answer, for sheer variety. There may be some human purposes that don’t find their way into sentences, but writers keep trying, and for any limit we experience there may be a sentence in waiting and a writer to try it. Nonetheless, embarking on what will be a set of eight meditations on the sentence—what it is, what it can be for or about—I’ll propose one purpose that all sentences have in common. The purpose of a sentence is to end. If this is a property of all sentences, any ought to do for an example, but here is one particularly determined to be done with itself: 1 The world is everything that is the case. It comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as translated from German into English by C. K. Ogden in 1922. Beginning, as it does, with a capital letter (let’s ignore the number for the moment), and ending with a period, it advertises its own completeness. The completeness is grammatical: there is a subject and a verb, the minimum conditions, then a predicate nominative, and then a simple relative clause. It is also complete rhetorically, with the double “is” almost suggesting a palindrome, folding neatly in the middle. You could just about read it backward as well as forward. That wouldn’t be a good idea logically, but it asserts a certain self-containedness, a certain autonomy, which a sentence is supposed to have. Read More
October 25, 2017 In Memoriam Playing Boogie-Woogie with Fats Domino By Tom Piazza So now it’s Fats Domino’s turn. I guess you could say he was eighty-nine and had had a full life. And, yeah, he did. But it doesn’t matter. It’s like hearing that lilacs won’t exist from now on. Or mockingbirds. They’ve been around for a long time, too. You sort of had to see him perform live to really get it, although there’s plenty of video on YouTube and elsewhere that can give you a good hint. When he was playing, he was the music, he was all of the music. He looked as if he was having at least as much fun as the audience. He radiated commitment to the hilt, humor, total musicianship at the piano, and some other unquantifiable thing, some alchemy that made you want to continue to live. He could steer what the band was doing with a glance or at most a quick, whispered word to the guitarist standing just behind his left shoulder. Fats Domino was one of the indisputable rock and roll pioneers, of course, half a decade before Chuck Berry and Elvis and the rest of the gang, and his recordings (most of them arranged by R & B pioneer Dave Bartholomew) like “I’m Walkin’,” “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blue Monday,” and “The Fat Man,” along with the better-known hits like “Blueberry Hill” and “Walkin’ to New Orleans,” are indelible. His piano style, deeply rooted in blues and boogie-woogie, was infectious and widely imitated, his voice was instantly recognizable, and he expressed all the essentials of the New Orleans spirit in three-minute holograms of recorded sound. Read More
October 25, 2017 Arts & Culture Mark Twain’s Get-Rich-Quick Schemes By Alan Pell Crawford From the cover of How Not to Get Rich. Like most of us, Mark Twain hated writing checks to other people. But there were times when he happily paid out large sums. Issuing a check for $200,000 drawn on the United States Bank of New York on February 27, 1886, for example, made him almost giddy. The check was made out to Julia Dent Grant, the widow of Ulysses S. Grant, the former president of the United States and commanding general of the Union Army, who had died of cancer the summer before, just after completing his remembrances of the Civil War. That payment represented the first profits from sales of volume one of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published only a few months earlier by Charles L. Webster and Company, a start-up publishing house Twain had established two years before. He had installed a nephew, Charles “Charley” Webster, as its business manager. Webster got his name on the letterhead and a salary, but that’s about all he got out of the position, besides aggravation. Twain made all the business and financial decisions, except when he didn’t feel like it. Twain would have been pleased to have published Grant’s memoir even if it had not broken all American publishing records for sheer profitability. Just landing the contract had required Twain to persuade General Grant to break a handshake deal with another publisher. The other publisher had offered Grant a 10 percent royalty. Twain countered by offering a royalty share unheard of then, or since: 75 percent. The other publisher offered no advance against royalties. Twain said he would pay $25,000 upfront. Read More
October 25, 2017 Arts & Culture On Learning to Understand (and Love) British Culture By Jennifer Schaffer It was the kind of story that enchants me, it seems so unlikely, and so often happens. —Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year The night I met my husband, I should have been in Paris. I had made the necessary plans. But you know how these things happen: a misread date in the calendar, the late realization of a prior commitment—in this case, a ball with a ticket too expensive to write off as a loss, and of course I know how ridiculous that sounds. I spent the week prior trying to sell my spot; no one would have it. So Paris was cancelled—delayed, I thought—and we met, and all the rest, and now I live in England, a country I thought I knew well, but which, it turns out, is as foreign to me as Bolivia or Slovenia or Mars. When I decided to move here three years ago, I had assumed London would be much the same as New York, perhaps just slightly better-read and more anaemic. But when I arrived, I found that comparing New York to London is like comparing a corset to a straitjacket. England and America may be kin, but they are not kindred spirits. I felt so dislocated that there were days I wished we didn’t even have language in common. Then I could track my progress through Duolingo and assign the shortcomings of my assimilation to a trick of grammar, instead of what I knew was to blame: my stubborn, unmistakeable, unfailing Americanness, which hung over every interaction like a bold neon diner sign. Read More
October 25, 2017 Our Correspondents The Seventy-Four Best Entries in The Devil’s Dictionary By Anthony Madrid From the cover of the University of Georgia Press edition of The Devil’s Dictionary. In my village, we have an idiom. “When’s last time you looked in on [X]—?” “X” is always some acknowledged literary classic everybody reads early in life and then forgets. For example, More’s Utopia. I did read it, but I might as well not have. I was nineteen. Anyone today who had just read the back cover of a copy of Utopia would, in a knowledge contest, smoke me like a cheap cigar. About the book’s narrative I remember … well, nothing. Wait. They didn’t think gold was valuable. I forget why. Their toilets were gold. Or the chains that they loaded prisoners with. Or something. Not toilets; chamberpots. And the narrator had some cross-eyed name like Holofernes Hwum-buppa-zipplebibble or something. Read More
October 24, 2017 Redux Redux: Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) 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. Photo: Vincent Tolentino This week, we celebrate the late Richard Wilbur, whose poems have a way of turning up where we might not expect them—in an essay on threesomes by Kristin Dombek, for example, or a poem about lying by Robert Hahn. Richard Wilbur, The Art of Poetry No. 22 Issue no. 72 (Winter 1977) I often don’t write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let’s say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia. “Letter from Williamsburg,” by Kristin Dombek Issue no. 205 (Summer 2013) After I stopped believing in God, I would sometimes wake in a panic at being alone without supernatural support. So I memorized Richard Wilbur’s poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” to say to myself in the morning. When I woke with someone in my bed, I would recite it to him or her: The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels … “Tell the Truth,” by Robert Hahn Issue no. 127 (Summer 1993) To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm. Your reputation for saying things of interest Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics, Nor will the delicate web of human trust Be ruptured by that airy fabrication. —Richard Wilbur, “Lying” You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific at dawn, running for miles over the quick blossom-and-fade of an image, on the glassy sand, when the mist and the lightly stippled sea were a single tone of gray. A simple invention. Meanwhile, far below, the trackless beach and the green, heaving ocean are beginning, only now, to be disclosed in the wide panes of your room … If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published. Order now, and get a copy of our upcoming Women at Work for only $10.