June 20, 2017 On History From Vienna with Love (and Other Mixed Emotions) By Peter Wortsman Maybe it’s the wine, two glasses of crisp white Grüner Veltliner, downed on an empty stomach to still the flutters at the start of my stay. I flew into Vienna a day early and am waiting for my wife Claudie to join me. She’s French, and for her Austria is primarily a European neighbor nation steeped, like Paris, in culture and history, its capital a jewel of a city with grand boulevards, resplendent palaces, world-class museums and concert halls, and cozy cafés. Maybe it’s my mood and where I am in life: sixty-four, my parents long gone, and the tingle of time nipping at my heels. Dare I let go and indulge in the city’s abundant delights? A looming anniversary brings the past too close for comfort. On March 12, 2018, it will be eighty years since the Anschluß, when German soldiers crossed the border unresisted, jubilant masses mobbed Vienna’s sprawling Heldenplatz to welcome the invaders with a native Austrian at their helm, and my parents fled for their lives. That was then, this is now, I try to tell myself, as if Vienna is just another popular destination and I am just another tourist. Read More
June 20, 2017 Look Once I Had This Dream By Dan Piepenbring “Once I Had This Dream,” an exhibition of paintings by Gretchen Scherer, is at Art 3 Gallery through June 24. Scherer, who lives and works in Brooklyn, paints rambling manses and crumbling chateaux as seen through a fun-house mirror—their staircases swerving, their portraits multiplying, their baroque furnishings collapsing into a labyrinth of distorted decor. “I often think about the way I imagine spaces before I see them and how my ideas differ vastly from the way those spaces actually appear,” she says. “It’s these places we create in our minds that inform my paintings … The images I use to collage are mostly from homes in the Victorian era. These pictures hold a fascination for me and cause me to wonder if there is something lurking under the surface. As I’m collaging I imagine the people that lived in those spaces; I begin to catch glimpses of their former lives.” Gretchen Scherer, Philosopher with an Open Book, 2017, oil on panel, 18″ x 24″. Read More
June 20, 2017 On the Shelf Still Baffled by the Brain, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A reproduction of a portrait of Charcot holding a brain, 1898. It’s time for our annual check-in on the mystery of human consciousness—have the scientists figured it out yet? Reader: No. No, they have not. The upper echelons of neuroscience remain baffled; the philosophers, also baffled; the unkempt man at the train station holding a cardboard sign that says MICROWAVES ARE BRAINWAVES, perhaps less baffled but still not terribly convincing. As the neuroscientist Robert A. Burton writes, every era gets the theory of consciousness it deserves—by using science to explain what philosophy and religion could not, we’re essentially just passing the buck, and soon it will pass again: “As an intellectual challenge, there is no equal to wondering how subatomic particles, mindless cells, synapses, and neurotransmitters create the experience of red, the beauty of a sunset, the euphoria of lust, the transcendence of music, or in this case, intractable paranoia … It’s dawned on me that the pursuit of the nature of consciousness, no matter how cleverly couched in scientific language, is more like metaphysics and theology. It is driven by the same urges that made us dream up gods and demons, souls and afterlife. The human urge to understand ourselves is eternal, and how we frame our musings always depends upon prevailing cultural mythology. In a scientific era, we should expect philosophical and theological ruminations to be couched in the language of physical processes. We argue by inference and analogy, dragging explanations from other areas of science such as quantum physics, complexity, information theory, and math into a subjective domain. Theories of consciousness are how we wish to see ourselves in the world, and how we wish the world might be.” Danuta Kean explores one of the lesser-discussed joys of reading: discovering typos. In a survey of literature’s biggest typographical blunders, she writes, “One of the best literary malapropisms in print appears in Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 classic, An American Tragedy … Two characters dance ‘harmoniously abandoning themselves to the rhythm of the music—like two small chips being tossed about on a rough but friendly sea’ … But the king of all typo-riddled books is Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom. HarperCollins wound up pulping the entire first print run of 80,000 copies after it emerged that an early version of the book was sent to the printers by mistake. As a result, the book teemed with hundreds of mistakes in grammar, spelling and even characterization … The Corrections author discovered the catastrophe surrounding his eagerly anticipated book in a brutally public way. Recording a reading for the BBC current affairs show Newsnight, Franzen came to an abrupt halt and said: ‘Sorry, I’m realizing to my horror that there’s a mistake here that was corrected early in the galleys and it’s still in the fucking hardcover of the book.’ ” Read More
June 19, 2017 Bulletin The Case of the Purloined Portrait By Dan Piepenbring The portrait, now recovered. The Paris Review is renowned for our parties, and we take pride in that. But sometimes things get carried away. Literally. As Page Six reports, a party to launch our Summer issue last week was marred by petty larceny: someone absconded with a portrait of Günter Grass drawn by Tomi Ungerer in 1965. Our digital director, Jeffery Gleaves, discovered the theft the next morning, when he noticed a Grass-shaped hole on the bathroom wall. (The portrait, like most of the Review’s valuables, was hanging near the toilet.) If you were here, reader, you may have noticed a single tear roll down Jeff’s cheek, as he vowed to “hunt the vermin down.” Read More
June 19, 2017 On Music A World of Shared Ecstasy By Adam Shatz A new suite for string quartet weds Western and Arabic music with intelligence, integrity, and feeling. Photo: captain.orange, via Flickr. Mathias Énard’s novel Compass, which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, has been hailed for its elegiac, meandering portrait of Western scholars of the Islamic world. Few critics have noticed that it’s also a novel about European musicians and composers enchanted by the sounds of the Middle East and North Africa. The narrator, Franz Ritter, is an Austrian musicologist, or, in his words, “a poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about.” His thesis, which Énard obviously cares about, is that modern European concert music “owed everything to the Orient”: All over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Orient to modify the self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony. Ritter’s compass invariably points east, and delirious exaggeration is his rhetorical signature, but the novel offers a suggestive account of Western music’s encounter with its Eastern other. Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt all wrote Turkish-style marches; Debussy, Bartók, and Hindemith were fascinated by Arabic and Asian scales. The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was so besotted by North Africa that he wrote “Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin,” whose lyrics at one point cry out “Allah Akbar!” Some Western musicians reinvented themselves as Arabic musicians, notably the late Swiss qanun master (and Muslim convert) Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss. Music, Énard suggests, has proven a uniquely fertile ground for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, “a world of shared ecstasy, of a possibility for change, of participation in alterity.” It has rejected the “violence of imposed identities” in favor of “the dual, the ambiguous.” Read More
June 19, 2017 On the Shelf Leave Willy Alone, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Why you gotta be so mean? As a thought experiment, Virginia Woolf once imagined the life of Judith Shakespeare, William’s hypothetical sister—just as artistically gifted, but constrained, as a woman, by every form of harassment and prejudice. A creative person in Judith’s position, Woolf thought, would’ve suffered ‘nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her.’ Rachel Bowlby argues that times have changed: Woolf’s reputation has grown by such leaps and bounds since her death that she is, now, essentially Judith Shakespeare, sitting beside the bard in the pantheon of English letters. Bowlby writes, “Woolf acquired a prime position, becoming something like a queen in the widening world of women and literature. There had been a more doubtful period when her writings were sometimes disparaged or downgraded, and her Bloomsbury associations might detract from her status as a thinker. But by the time she came out of copyright for the first time in 1992, she was all set for the long canonical haul: ripe for instant endowment with the footnotes of scholarly and studently editions. She could be called on at any time and in most contexts for a challenging, memorable quotation—not just about women or literature, but about any topic of current or universal interest, from war to love to money to colonialism to class. Alongside Shakespeare, Woolf is a literary celebrity, to be found in every corner of cultural consciousness and public or private space: from mugs to T-shirts to films and plays … No other non-male writer has received anything like this degree of recognition and attention. It is not clear whether this is more of a consummation or an irony, but without a doubt Woolf has herself become Shakespeare’s sister.” But it’s actually a shitty time to be Shakespeare, let alone Shakespeare’s sister, I’m sad to say. In the wake of the Trumped-up Julius Caesar debacle, protestors have attempted to interrupt Shakespeare in the Park’s production—and other, even more ignorant people have revealed an antipathy for Shakespeare that runs deeper than I’d ever thought possible. Many of them don’t seem to know who the playwright is at all; others may believe he’s still alive; all of them have a disdain for his entire canon. Whatever the case, as Malcolm Gay writes, Shakespeare troupes around the nation—all of whom have nothing to do whatsoever with the disputed Caesar production—are getting loads of hate mail from Trump supporters. Like: “Hope you all who did this play about Trump are the first do [sic] die when ISIS COMES TO YOU [expletive] sumbags [sic].” Another writer wished the thespians “the worst possible life you could have and hope you all get sick and die.” Gay reports, “At Shakespeare Dallas, executive and artistic director Raphael Parry says his company has received about eighty messages, including threats of rape, death, and wishes that the theater’s staff is ‘sent to ISIS to be killed with real knives’ … ‘You have to understand, we work primarily with a 400-year-old playwright: There’s been a lot of water over the dam,’ said Shakespeare & Company artistic director Allyn Burrows. ‘I don’t know that it’s ever been this acute’ … ‘What might be gurgling up for them is their ire around having to do Shakespeare in high school,’ he quipped. ‘They’re like, you know what? I never realized I hated my English teacher as much as I did.’ ” Read More