July 20, 2017 Humor Great Moments in Literacy: The American Library Association By Sara Lautman Look for a new cartoon by Sara each morning this week.Sara Lautman is a cartoonist who lives in Baltimore. Her sketchbooks are on Instagram and her most recent collection is Ghost Sex.
July 19, 2017 Arts & Culture Odd Jobs By Tony Duvert Niko Pirosmani, Threshing Floor, 1916, oil on cardboard. The French writer and philosopher Tony Duvert published the slim volume Les petits métiers in 1978. A satirical, caustic, and yet delightfully light collection of fables, the book comprises twenty-three narratives from an imaginary village where denizens perform the strangest—and dirtiest—traditions and professions. A new translation, by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press this fall. We’ve excerpted a handful of these very odd jobs below. —Ed. The Snot-Remover He’d set up his pump at the entrance of the school, and knew each child by name. My grandfather told me that in his time, the snot-remover had no pump: he only had a small reed pipe with which to suck up the mucus with his mouth. Also, to completely clean out the nostrils without swallowing anything, he’d put such flair into it that the scamps would have preferred having two boogers instead of one, to endure the delicious service longer. The work of the pump had less charm. I remember that at some point, certain schoolmates would even snub the snot-remover and blow into their fingers, sweeping down their hands to smear the sidewalks and their clean uniforms. Read More
July 19, 2017 On Film Where the Farts Come In By Annie Julia Wyman In Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning, well-placed farts stand in for the limits of language. Still from Good Morning. In 1953, two years after my mother was born in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was released. I remember watching it sometime in the early 2000s, alone, just after my grandmother’s death and thirty years after the film’s eventual American premiere. (It was long assumed to have been “too Japanese” for foreign audiences.) Watching it again a few weeks ago, I realized that on the first go I had absorbed almost none of the plot. Only on second viewing did I remember anything—and then only because I recognized the speech patterns of a certain character, a grandfather who comes with his wife to visit his children. His verbal tics brought not just the plot but the film’s patient and peculiar beauty back to me in a rush. Tokyo Story is laden with nonspeech; it punctuates the conversation of the grandparents, rendering their observations and questions melancholic, tentative. The grandfather in particular indulges in almost incessant hmms and sighs, each seeming to remark, worryingly, on the fragility and formality of the space in which parents and their adult children must meet. How exactly do our lives emerge from the lives of the people who made us and from the lives of the people who made them? And when do we break from them? And what if new ways of life—new cultures and socioeconomic organization and forms of modernity—intercede, as they always do? I’ve never learned Japanese, nor has my mother. The expectation that she would, today, visit me in my home for more than an hour strikes me as faintly ridiculous. When she was alive, my grandmother never saw the inside of one of my apartments—perhaps a good thing, given the company I kept. Read More
July 19, 2017 Humor Great Moments in Literacy: Braille By Sara Lautman Look for a new cartoon by Sara each morning this week. Sara Lautman is a cartoonist who lives in Baltimore. Her sketchbooks are on Instagram and her most recent collection is Ghost Sex.
July 18, 2017 On Politics The Origins of Hunter S. Thompson’s Loathing and Fear By Timothy Denevi Hunter S. Thompson, Self Portrait, in Striped Chair, ca. 1960. Hunter Stockton Thompson began writing about politics in the early sixties while working as a roving freelance contributor, in South America, for the Dow Jones–owned newspaper the National Observer. “Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing” is one of the more than a dozen pieces he’d eventually publish on South American politics, but a specific moment, in 1964, at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, seems to have crystalized his broader political perspective. Read More
July 18, 2017 From the Archive It Was a Year of Pirates By Lorin Stein We’re going down! A couple of weeks ago, before the president attacked the show on Twitter, I was asked to appear on Morning Joe. This surprised me. I was under the impression that Morning Joe was a political program. It seemed to me the producers had made a mistake. Maybe they’d mixed us up with the New York Review? With the London Review? Or, could it be … the Partisan Review? After I found the studio in Rockefeller Center and was deposited in the empty green room, my anxiety continued to mount. Howard Dean bounded in, looking for a piece of fruit among the battered doughnut boxes, and bounded out. In the corridor outside, I heard producers discussing the Senate health bill. As I was led onto the set, the previous guest, Al Franken, gave me a vague, encouraging pat. I must have looked as nervous as I felt. Not just nervous—disoriented, as if I’d wandered into somebody else’s dream. The hosts nodded hello, then, just before the commercial ended and we went on air, Joe Scarborough mentioned a poem, one we’d published in the Review. “You know when you read something that makes you want to drop what you’re doing and run upstairs and find a highlighter?” he asked the others. “That’s how I felt when I read that poem that begins with the pirates.” So the penny dropped. I had been invited as the editor who’d published “Historically Speaking,” by Stephen Dunn, the same poem that haunted me all through the election—and the opening piece in our Winter issue. It was a better reason than any I could have dreamt up. It was a year of pirates in speedboats, anonymous bullies spreading privacies on the Internet, and the worst of them doing worse than that and wishing to be known for what they’d done, their perfidy an advertisement for a cause … Subscribe now to read the whole poem—and everything else we’ve published over sixty-four years of grappling with piracy, anonymous bullies, and other current events.