August 9, 2024 The Review’s Review On Fogwill By Will Vanderhyden Photograph by TBIT, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill “learned to use a gun at eleven, got his first motorcycle at twelve, his first sailboat at fifteen, started studying medicine at sixteen, by twenty-three he was a sociologist, by thirty-eight a millionaire adman, and by forty he was broke,” the Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero once wrote. Fogwill was born outside Buenos Aires in 1941 and lived until 2010; as Guerriero illustrates, he was precocious as a young man, but it wasn’t until 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, after he’d lost the fortune he made in advertising, that his story “Muchacha Punk” won a prestigious writing contest and his literary career took off. In 1982, he wrote his most famous novel, Los pichiciegos. Set during the Falklands War and published while the conflict was ongoing, this sardonic exploration of the absurdities of war, a kind of Slaughterhouse-Five for Argentina, was an immediate sensation, and it cemented Fogwill as a touchstone for the literary resistance to the military dictatorship. A writer of short stories, novels, poems, and cultural criticism, he went on to publish more than twenty books across a thirty-year career. Drawing on his background in advertising, Fogwill cultivated an iconoclastic public persona and turned his surname—Fogwill, just so, like Prince or Madonna—into a brand. He pursued controversy and manufactured scandal, relentlessly excoriating the sanctimony of the institutional and cultural elite. He wrote high-profile columns attacking and satirizing both the military dictatorship and what he called the “horror show” of Argentina’s transition to a neoliberal democracy. Described by contemporaries as “a holy terror,” with an “almost alien intelligence,” Fogwill’s exhibitionism belied, as Francisco Garamona writes, “an unassailable body of work, an idea, an inimitable way of being, and above all, an ethics.” Known as a generous friend and mentor, he guided younger writers and helped launch the careers of figures as notable as Osvaldo Lamborghini and César Aira. Read More
August 7, 2024 Letters Four Letters from Simone to André Weil By Simone Weil From Sample Trees, a portfolio by Ben Lerner and Thomas Demand in The Paris Review issue no. 212 (Spring 2015). When asked if there was “a close intimacy” between him and his sister, André Weil replied, “Very much so. My sister as a child always followed me, and my grandmother, who liked to drop into German occasionally, used to say that she was a veritable Kopiermaschine.” Biographers have emphasized—overly so, according to André Weil—the episode described by his sister in a May 1942 letter to Father Perrin, known as her “Spiritual Autobiography”: “At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair which come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me.” The largest part of the known correspondence between Simone and André Weil dates from the period when André was imprisoned for being absent without leave from his military duties; he was held first in Le Havre, then Rouen, from February to early May 1940. These circumstances gave Simone Weil an opportunity to explore scientific, and particularly mathematical, questions that were significant to her. In particular, one must note the importance given to the crisis of incommensurables in her correspondence. The reason this moment in the history of thought plays a central role at this point in Simone Weil’s reflection on science is well defined by André Weil in a letter dated March 28, 1940: “A proportion is what is named; the fact that there are relations that aren’t nameable (and nameable is a relation between whole numbers), that there have been λόγοι ἄλόγοι, the word itself is so deeply moving that I can’t believe that in a period so essentially dramatic … such an extraordinary event could have been seen as a mere scientific discovery … what you say about proportion suggests that, at the beginnings of Greek thought, there was such an intense feeling of the disproportion between thought and world (and, as you say, between man and God) that they had to build a bridge over this abyss at all costs. That they thought they found it … in mathematics is nothing if not credible.” Read More
August 5, 2024 On Religion Seven Adverbs That God Loveth By Simon Critchley British Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind. For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowdon; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless. Read More
August 2, 2024 On Books The Private Life: On James Baldwin By Colm Tóibín JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination. Read More
August 1, 2024 First Person I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy By Joseph Earl Thomas From Five Paintings, a portfolio by Olivier Mosset that appeared in The Paris Review issue no. 44 (Fall 1968). Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home. I got snipped anyway. Read More
July 31, 2024 Dispatch At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference By Jason Katz Skunk ape in costume against Miami skyline. Photograph by Josh Aronson. The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power. I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer. Read More