May 31, 2017 On the Shelf We’re All Molded by the Pizza Gods, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From a seventies-era ad for Straw Hat Pizza. You may want pizza. I grant you that. But it may be that pizza wants you. It may be that the pizza gods have shaped the very essence of your desire, pulling you aside at every possible moment to whisper pizza, pizza, pizza. You want pizza because you can order pizza from a pull-down menu full of fun customizable pizza options. David Rudin argues that our computers and phones, with their machine logic, are an ideal vehicle for pizza, which is widely understood and easy to assemble. After all, he explains, Domino’s “now offers a series of apps, chatbots, and even the option of tweeting an order using the pizza emoji. Some of these ordering options may exist primarily as marketing gimmicks, but their aggregate effect remains notable: any interface to which you have access can likely be used to order pizza. This in part stems from pizza’s popularity, but taste is only a small part of the story: the delivery pizza is highly adaptable to the logic and formatted language of communication interfaces. The typical consumer’s mental model of a pizza—dough with sauce, cheese, and toppings baked in an oven—is quite similar to a machine’s conception of pizza, which is quite similar to how a pizza is actually made. The algorithm for pizza is not complex … All parties in the transaction are imagining the same simple process and speaking from the same restricted phrase book.” Toni Morrison remembers a childhood job cleaning another woman’s house and the lessons it taught her about separating work and identity: “A larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike … I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet … ” Read More
May 30, 2017 In Memoriam David Lewiston, 1929–2017 By Brian Cullman From the cover of Nonesuch’s reissue of Music from the Morning of the World. Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought; carrying a small (but not that small) portable tape recorder, twenty or thirty reels of quarter-inch tape, a couple of microphones, cables, a week’s supply of batteries, a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts. The shirts have been lost to time and forgotten laundries—but the tapes, the recordings from those travels, still circulate fifty years on, filling listeners with pleasure and astonishment. David Lewiston was born in London in 1929 and graduated from Trinity College of Music in 1953. Already interested in the spiritual teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Lewiston moved to New York City to study piano and composition with Thomas DeHartmann, Gurdjieff’s aide-de-camp and musical collaborator, and an esteemed composer in his own right. From the Gurdjieff work, Lewiston learned about the many uses of solitude; from his studies with DeHartmann, who had helped Gurdjieff transcribe and notate Eastern hymns and dervish melodies, he learned to hear and appreciate music outside of the Western canon. These proved useful as Lewiston began traveling, but neither talent helped him support himself as a young musician in New York, and he reinvented himself as a financial journalist, working on staff for Forbes and then for an in-house journal of the American Bankers Association, a magazine so dull it practically walked to the trash bin and threw itself away. Read More
May 30, 2017 At Work The Hipster Pyramid: An Interview with Francesco Pacifico By Adam Thirlwell Francesco Pacifico. Photo: Riccardo Musacchio and Flavio Ianniello The last time I interviewed Francesco Pacifico for The Paris Review Daily was back in 2013, when he published The Story of My Purity. That novel, whose slacker narrator was unusually both Catholic and celibate, was an examination of a certain hipster atmosphere—and in his new novel, Class, Pacifico continues his malicious analysis of that global condition. Class tells the story of an Italian couple in New York, Lorenzo and Ludovica, and the fresco they inhabit: filmmakers, literary scouts, total wastrels … The more I thought about this novel and its dark concerns, I began to realize how Pacifico’s look so beautifully matches his writing’s contradictions. The first time you meet him, with his beard and his smile, you have this sense of a charming bohemian happiness, a man never far from recreational drugs. But as I have come to know him, I’ve learned that his beard is a disguise: it might look like the absolute genial hipster accoutrement, but really it’s the beard of a savage second-century prophet. And in his novels, too, the apparently comical surface will suddenly rupture, revealing its ethical precision, its melancholy soul. INTERVIEWER We finished our last conversation talking about translation. You said, “I loved changing things in the translation … I don’t like the unnatural effort of conveying everything in translation. Choices have to be made.” And now here we have you seemingly translating this new novel on your own. How did you go about it? PACIFICO My editor Mark Krotov and I used the method you and I used when we rewrote an Emilio Gadda story in English for Multiples, the translations issue you guest-edited for McSweeney’s. I would turn up a version where I would convey everything I’d thought of the registers, the way people talked in my novel. It was of course much simpler than Gadda’s. While translating it, I really rewrote it—for two reasons. One is that Class is a book about the way Italian bourgeois are influenced by American culture and language. So I had to turn every conceptual joke on its head. There’s a lot of English in the Italian version, plus an assorted slang of Angloitalian. And there’s a lot of Italian in this English version. The other reason was, I’d gained enough distance from Class to realize the Italian version hadn’t been properly edited—there were a lot of moral asperities that I had to tone down because it was a crazily bleak book. Now my Italian editor and I think we should publish the new version as a paperback. Read More
May 30, 2017 On the Shelf The Nazis Are Still Ruining Art, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Michele Marieschi, La Punta Della Dogana e San Giorgio Maggiore. Even now, more than seventy years after the end of World War II, the Nazis have found new ways to ruin things. Art, for example. In July, Sotheby’s will sell Michele Marieschi’s eighteenth-century painting La Punta Della Dogana e San Giorgio Maggiore. You might wish to buy it—it’s a nice painting, on the face of it, containing boats, water, the sky, and other attractive things often found in paintings. But read the fine print. The painting was looted by the Nazis decades ago, and the Jewish family who’d originally owned it has fought for generations to get it back. Now that it’s been recovered, you’d think the family could simply reclaim it. But the art market has other ideas, and the painting’s market value has escalated; rather than return it, Sotheby’s has brokered an uneasy settlement with the family. Nina Siegal has the story in detail: “It was 1937, Vienna, when a Jewish couple named Heinrich and Anna Maria Graf bought a vibrant eighteenth-century oil painting of the Grand Canal in Venice with the Punta Della Dogana in the background. The work held pride of place in their living room, the highlight of their small but treasured art collection. One year later, Germany annexed Austria, and the Grafs and their twin six-year-old daughters, Erika and Eva, had to flee the country. They put their art into storage … By the time they settled in Forest Hills, Queens, it was 1942, and all their possessions had been looted by the Nazis … Looted artworks that have been in private hands for decades are coming to market after settlement agreements with the rightful owners, in a way that tries to address their tainted past. These agreements may not result in the return of the paintings to the heirs, but the compromise does provide at least a form of resolution and some compensation to the heirs, and brings the artworks out of hiding.” Philip Gourevitch, a former editor of The Paris Review, remembers reading Denis Johnson’s debut novel, Angels, in an ecstatic single sitting when he was twenty-one. He liked it so much that he decided he had to speak to Johnson—immediately. Gourevitch writes, “Who was this guy? Who wrote this language that carried traces of many writers I’d read before but was its own world entirely? If this was his first book, he must want to hear how good it is. The bio beneath his photo said he lived on Cape Cod. I picked up the phone and called information. I dialed the number the operator gave me, a woman answered, and when I said his name, she asked who was calling, and I said, ‘A reader’ … The only thing that he said that I remember exactly was when I asked him how long it had taken to write the book. He asked me if I was a writer, and I said that that remained to be seen. Then he answered my question: ‘Twelve years,’ he said. Later that night, I told a friend about my strange phone call, and when I got to the bit about twelve years, I said, ‘You see, it’s hopeless.’ But that wasn’t really what I felt, and I knew it. What I had felt when I hung up the phone was that I had got what I wanted. What I felt was: it was worth it.” Read More
May 26, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Panjandrums, Poets, Power Struggles By The Paris Review Still from David Lynch’s The Cowboy and the Frenchman. I’ve had a thing for reptilian monsters lately, and this week’s no different: I ducked into a theater to see Nacho Vigalondo’s kaiju film, Colossal, and was agape from start to finish. It follows an entitled fuck-up millennial named Gloria who’s seemingly spent much of her adult life running her mouth, partying too hard, and doing it all without consequence. But when her dreamy yet insufferable boyfriend dumps her and she’s forced to move into her unfurnished (and unoccupied) childhood home in upstate New York, things take a turn for the peculiar: a giant lizardlike creature materializes in Seoul—and Gloria somehow controls it. Monster as metaphor is an all-too-familiar trope, but this film—with its mix of dark hilarity, stunning cinematography, and gripping take on the self-infatuation that plagues many of us—is brilliant. What I love most, though, is that it’s a revival of what A. O. Scott once memorialized as “the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut-rate genre entertainment,” which was nearly driven to extinction in the early aughts. With Colossal’s low-budget sci-fi feel, it’s wacky, outrageous plot, and its unwavering look at the monsters we harbor inside us, B flicks are back and better than ever. —Caitlin Youngquist An elderly civil servant comes home from work one evening and finds a young man waiting to see him. This person turns out to be a fan—in fact, the representative of a small fan club—devoted to the old man’s only book of poems, published thirty years before. That’s the premise of Arthur Schnitzler’s chillingly ironic novella Late Fame. Written in the early 1890s, then lost for a century, the story of poor Eduard Saxberger, a washed-up writer lionized for reasons he doesn’t quite understand, has aged much better than its hero, for the power struggle between an artist and his or her admirers is rarely captured with such bitter economy. —Lorin Stein Read More
May 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Rules for Consciousness in Mammals By J. D. Daniels Clarice Lispector. Anyone who talks about Clarice Lispector and psychoanalysis is likely to say something foolish, not least because psychoanalysis is a discipline of listening, not talking. And, in fact, this is a tempting place to stop. # “Coherence,” says Lispector, “I don’t want it any more. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder. I can only guess at it through a vehement incoherence.” Let’s talk about this single aspect of Lispector. I’m going to tell you not just why her work is so important, why I think she is so important, but how I think it, the way in which I think that thought. Read More