May 23, 2017 From the Archive Another Passionless Day By Dan Piepenbring Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. “The mere has always been a useful category,” Donald Barthelme said in his 1981 Art of Fiction interview. And he’s right. I love the mere. To be merely this, merely that, merely the other—this is the mark of someone who eschews the limelight, who moves in the margins, who rejects the all-consuming ethos of fullness. To be mere is very close to being entirely irrelevant, and that’s the grand prize. And yet there are days, and this may well be one of them, when we find ourselves afflicted by all that’s mere in the world: when constellations of objects conspire to trip you up. When current events draw you into the mire. When something is as good as anything. Between skimming the headlines and making phlegmatic trips to the refrigerator for more seltzer, I’ve been admiring Sidney Wade’s poem “Another Passionless Day,” from our Summer 1998 issue, which nails the sensation of “mereness”; in lines that are somehow full of momentum, Wade describes exactly how it feels not to have any. And as her nouns begin to accrue (in that stochastic way that is the hallmark of the mere; find another poem that has hockey pucks, clarinets, and giant pastries within spitting distance of one another), Wade puts her finger on what’s always been to me the scariest part of apathy, and the hardest to shake: the sense that it will settle over everything you see like a fine layer of dust, that it is contagious and terminal. I won’t spoil the second half—which I haven’t included here; the idea is to get you to pay for it, see—except to say that it won’t turn on you. That is, it won’t swerve to offer some undeserved, bullshit, inspirational pick-me-up in the end. This is, after all, a mere poem. And I say that as the highest praise. Read More
May 23, 2017 On the Shelf The President Is a Computer, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring President Donald J. Trump, right, with boyhood friend. Does the president pass the Turing test? I’m afraid not. When I listen to his answers to basic questions and compare those answers to a real human’s, it’s plain to see that he’s a computer—most likely, my research suggests, a Tandy 1000 EX purchased from a RadioShack in Secaucus, New Jersey, sometime in December 1986. If this is the case, it explains a lot of his more mystifying decision-making procedures. The neurologist Robert A. Burton sees plenty of evidence that the president uses machine learning, making him a rudimentary artificial intelligence: “Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense. Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google’s DeepMind or IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson. In the beginning, each network analyzes a number of previously recorded games, and then, through trial and error, the network tests out various strategies. Connections for winning moves are enhanced; losing connections are pruned away. The network has no idea what it is doing or why one play is better than another. It isn’t saddled with any confounding principles such as what constitutes socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior or which decisions might result in negative downstream consequences … As there are no lines of reasoning driving the network’s actions, it is not possible to reverse engineer the network to reveal the ‘why’ of any decision.” There’s a new Haruki Murakami book out, and, as Christian Lorentzen notes, you can pretty much guess how it’s gonna go: “In the novels there will always be cats, mundane kitchen activities, dingy barrooms, pop and/or classical theme tunes set against a surreal, Manichaean danger zone into which the humble yet increasingly resourceful hero must plunge in search of what he’s missing, most likely to find something else. The hero will spend some time at the bottom of a well, or some other deep and lonely space. His mind and heart will be tugged between desire for an ethereal, spiritual woman (usually the one who’s gone missing) and attraction to a sassy, sexy, down-to-earth gal (who at first seems more like a sidekick on his vision quest but may turn out to be just what he needed all along) … There’s always a bit of Chandler, Kafka, and Salinger mixed into Murakami’s fiction, and it’s tempting to say that the Salinger quotient has been growing too pronounced. But for all the dark elements at play in Murakami’s book—rape, murder, suicide, incest, mental illness, war trauma, etc.—Salinger’s vision of adolescence and arrested development in the Glass family stories is ultimately darker.” Read More
May 22, 2017 Sleep Aid The Dates of Variously Shaped Shields By Dan Piepenbring Félix Vallotton, Femme couchée dormant, 1899, oil on canvas. It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “An Attempt to Classify and Date the Various Shapes Found in Heraldic Shields—Principally in England, with Incidental Datings,” the first chapter of George Grazebrook’s The Dates of Variously Shaped Shields, published in Liverpool in 1890. It seems necessary, by way of introduction, to say a few words on the circular convex shields used from very early times by our Saxon and Norman ancestors. These were of wood, with a central boss of bronze, and were sometimes of very large size; frequently, if we may judge from contemporaneous illuminations, as much as four feet in diameter. Across the inside of the boss a handle was fixed, and the shields, which were thus held out almost at arm’s length, as represented in many ancient MSS., must have been most cumbersome. It is hard to see how the sword or lance could have been conveniently used. The round shape must have interfered greatly with the view of one’s opponent, and a bungler would inevitably slice pieces from off his own shield while attacking his enemy. Moreover, such shields must have been lightly made: we know exactly how the bosses were fastened with rivets through the shield, for they are constantly found in Anglo-Saxon grave mounds, and the wood is thus known to have been of some thickness. But we can obtain from contemporary writings many more particulars. Read More
May 22, 2017 Arts & Culture Before a Million Universes By James McWilliams The pros and cons of the digitized Whitman and his “lost” novels. Walt Whitman with a butterfly, 1873. When I was a history graduate student in the waning days of the analog nineties, there were three kinds of researchers. Most impressive were the archive rats. These chain-smoking, type-A cranks entered an archival collection, knew precisely the evidence they needed, and did everything but ransack the place to find it. They chewed their nails to the nub and suffered insomnia, but their work showed a rare, if manic, evidentiary depth. Then there were the curious browsers: laid-back dreamers with a loosely generalized notion about what they sought. They limited themselves to documents that seemed interesting, floating among their sources with poetic insouciance. Their work, like cloud formations, drifted until it cohered into elegance. (They were also the only grad students I knew who smoked weed.) Finally, there were the surgical strikers. Soulless but engineered for accuracy, these students knew precisely which few documents to examine, did so with disinterested velocity, patched the holes in their dissertations, and then went to lunch. Prolific was how the rats and browsers praised the surgical strikers—faintly, of course. Read More
May 22, 2017 Look Subway Drawings By Dan Piepenbring In the 1940s, before he found acclaim as a painter, Alex Katz, now eighty-nine, was a student at Cooper Union. Uninterested in the models his teachers asked him to draw, Katz rode the subway for hours, often into the early hours of the morning, sketching the passengers who caught his eye. Through June 30, Timothy Taylor Gallery is hosting an exhibition of his subway drawings. Alex Katz, Crowd on Subway, ca. 1940s, pen, 4 7/8″ x 7 7/8″. Read More
May 22, 2017 On the Shelf Laura Palmer Is So Metatextual, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Well, Twin Peaks is back, and that means it’s time for you to have An Opinion™ about it. Are you ready? I’m not. I don’t have Showtime and I haven’t watched the original series in years—it’s all I can do to skate by with a few knowing jokes about the Log Lady. To buy myself some time, I’m trying to develop An Opinion™ about The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a strange 1990 tie-in novel written by David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer. As Lara Williams writes, the book foregrounded the show’s dark depiction of child abuse, which would be fine if it weren’t marketed toward teen girls: “The novel is surprisingly profound. It is unflinching in how it depicts a teenager’s powerlessness in the face of adult male sexuality, and how abuse shapes her burgeoning sexuality. It also contains a complex depiction of how the abuse shapes Laura’s life: her burgeoning addiction to cocaine, which she funds with sex work, the self-loathing she feels as she imagines she invited the attacks … For [professor Kirsty] Fairclough, one of the most unsettling things about the book is how it was marketed to and read primarily by teenage girls. ‘I was a kid when I read this,’ she says. ‘It was a status symbol, a sort of rebellion. I totally connected with Laura Palmer’ … Published before the second season had aired, the book came out just as Palmer’s diary was also being written into the narrative of the show—pre-empting the metatextual conceits of post-internet shows, such as Game of Thrones and Lost.” Cynthia Zarin considers Enda Walsh, an Irish playwright whose work is a study in fragility: “In almost all of Walsh’s dreamlike, darkly hilarious plays, the central character has been sent to his—or her—room. His work explores the liminal space between interior and exterior worlds by stringing up a cat’s cradle of language in which his characters swing between memories, dreams, and reflections—an act in which the audience colludes. It’s unclear exactly how this happens. Some of this may be due to Walsh’s exceptional ability to forge immediate connections, on and off the stage … Walsh says, ‘In my plays, each character reaches a point where something happened that led them to where they’ve ended up. As a child, I was obsessed with running away! I would get about four doors down and then be sent back by the neighbor.’ ” Read More