March 30, 2017 On the Shelf This Is the Concourse to Hell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Train to eternal damnation, now boarding at gate four. Photo: Kevin Harber If someone published an anthology called Hellscape: Thirty Writers on Why Penn Station Sucks, I would buy that thing in hardcover and pay list price for it. I would buy a whole carton and stand at Penn Station’s Amtrak gates, forcing them on beleaguered travelers. Because: everyone hates Penn Station—I’m talking about the New York one—but good writing on the hatred of Penn Station is hard to find. One must be diligent. Julian Rose, in his review of Wendy Lesser’s new book, You Say to Brick, has made a great discovery: hidden among the pages of this biography of Louis Kahn is an evisceration of Penn. “In a tour de force of architectural criticism, Lesser excoriates this building as ‘something like a living hell,’ using an extended comparison to another major East Coast transit hub, Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, to underscore Penn Station’s many failures: urban (the elegant approach to Thirtieth Street along one of Philadelphia’s main arteries versus the ignominious midblock descent into the chasm yawning below Madison Square Garden that constitutes Penn’s main entrance); environmental (the flood of warm natural light that fills Thirtieth Street versus the harsh fluorescent glare of Penn’s underground expanse); spatial (the high ceilings and symmetrical plan of Thirtieth Street, so helpful for visitors to orient themselves, versus Penn’s befuddling catacombs); and even social (the implicit democracy of the benches that limn Thirtieth Street’s main concourse versus the explicit hierarchy of Penn’s isolated waiting rooms, which are reserved for ticket holders and divided by class).” Some books have indexes, indices, whatever. No one knows why. But there they are, long lists of words with page numbers after them. In my book, the index will be a single page with the words “Just fucking Google it.” But I’m being churlish. Sam Leith argues, convincingly, that indexers—who somehow write indexes for a living—are doing the Lord’s work: “It would be a cliché to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs. A good index is, as Harold Macmillan wrote when inaugurating the society sixty years ago, ‘much more than a guide to the contents of a book. It can often give a far clearer glimpse of its spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do.’ ” Read More
March 29, 2017 In Memoriam Bob Silvers’s Vision By Adam Thirlwell Bob Silvers made his writers want to be equal to a possible image he had of a possible you. Robert B. Silvers I was thirty when Bob Silvers first sent me a book for review—a collection of Nabokov’s translations of Russian poetry into English. This was toward the end of 2008. I revered The New York Review of Books; it was an ideal supranational habitat. The unexpected FedEx package, with its accompanying modest note making the proposal, as if continuing a permanent—if ineffable—conversation, made me dazzlingly anxious. A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed—on New Year’s Eve, which was also, I would discover, his birthday—to say that while reading “with admiration” a book I had written, he had noticed an error in it that might be corrected in a paperback edition. I had quoted the duc de Saint-Simon’s portrait of “Madame” from his Memoirs and glossed this as a portrait of Madame de Maintenon. “Saint-Simon was referring not to Madame de Maintenon,” wrote Bob—or, as I was to find out, dictated Bob, “but to ‘Madame,’ i.e. Elizabeth Charlotte, Palatine of Bavaria, second wife of ‘Monsieur,’ duc d’Orleans. She was in fact German.” I felt a rush of total love. Read More
March 29, 2017 The Revel An Oral History of Richard Howard By Daniel Johnson Richard Howard. This Tuesday, at our annual Spring Revel, The Paris Review will honor Richard Howard with our lifetime-achievement award, the Hadada, for a strong and unique contribution to literature. Long esteemed among poets for his verve and intellect, Howard received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award seven times. His translations from the French helped introduce contemporary masters, such as Roland Barthes and Michel Leiris, to American readers and breathed new life into classics like The Charterhouse of Parma; his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal won the 1983 National Book Award. He’s the author of sixteen collections and three books of essays; his translations number in the dozens. But Howard has also had a distinguished career as a nurturer of young poets. From 1989 to 2011, he was the poetry editor of the Western Humanities Review, during which time he also held the same station at The Paris Review, from 1992 to 2005. As a teacher, he’s influenced several generations of poets. We invited friends of the Review to share their stories of Howard—of working with him, learning from him, and, in several cases, surveying his elaborately decorated bathroom, adorned with the photos of dozens of poets. A portrait began to emerge: of a curious, polymathic reader; a generous mentor; and a zealous, sure-footed practitioner of his form. Read More
March 29, 2017 On the Shelf Painting Is the New Shouting, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Detail from a painting by Kaya Mar reprinted in Satire Magazine. We live in a golden age for clever protest signs. As bodies in the streets have proliferated, so, too, have canny shows of devastating wit. (Also, pussy hats.) If you go to a protest with an unfunny sign, or just kind of a meh sign, or a small index card with potential slogan ideas that you focus group on the fly, you could end up the laughingstock of the resistance. Kaya Mar will never suffer such a fate. He carries around stately protest paintings—elaborate political cartoons in oil on canvas. And the effort he puts into them functions as a kind of megaphone: people are too impressed not to take pictures. Sam Kinchin-Smith spoke with Mar, who lives in England: “The trick, he explained, is to ‘get your disappointment, anger, rage onto the canvas’ with a quick and simple story. ‘Everybody has to recognize what I’m trying to say, not just in England, all over the world … When you try to force meaning, you lose the plot. When you are tribal, you censor yourself, and you won’t produce something good’ … Mar finds out that rallies are taking place because photo agencies call to ask if they can stage some shots with him and his paintings: ‘Normally they give me two days’ notice, because they like to have me there. I have every one of my pictures on Getty.’ This isn’t a sham; it’s a strategy. Protests ‘haven’t changed anything in all the time I’ve lived here,’ Mar said. ‘Politicians love them because they are a valve. But to have your voice heard, you need television and print media.’ And Mar has infiltrated those more effectively than any other satirist I can think of, by feeding the agencies that fuel so much of the media’s output. He can paint whatever he likes, however weird or angry, and Alamy and Shutterstock, the PA and the AP, will guarantee it gets the national platform denied to the protesters he stands alongside.” Fan fiction is great, but who has the time? Sarah Engeler-Young has married the art of fanfic to the art of compression; an aficionado of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she “writes fiction that retells Spike-centric episodes via haiku. She calls them Spaiku.” And she says: “Buffy’s is a hero’s journey for the ages, and it has been a wonderful show to watch again and again with my daughter as she navigates adolescence … My desire to interact with other people who love Buffy eventually led me to a very supportive online community at LiveJournal. I read (and commented on) tons of fan fiction, made fabulous new friends, and wished that I could contribute something as well. Alas, the plotting requirements of long fiction are completely beyond me. I thought, ‘Well, maybe if I made something very small … ’ ” Read More
March 28, 2017 At Work Dream a Little Dream of Me: An Interview with Pénélope Bagieu By Meg Lemke All images from California Dreamin’ by Pénélope Baigu. “I could live at MoPOP,” the French cartoonist Pénélope Bagieu tells me. She has just returned from Seattle, where she debuted her new biography, California Dreamin’, at the Emerald City Comicon. While there, she took in the Museum of Pop Culture: “My fascination is triggered by all the relationship drama, the rock ’n’ roll anecdotes where everyone takes the stage angry, fighting behind the curtains.” As a child, in Paris, she and her sister drew comics about Freddie Mercury, her “childhood icon,” hand-making dozens of booklets about the members of Queen living in a fantasy communal house. Mike Dawson got to Mercury first—his graphic memoir, Freddie and Me, was published in 2008—but there’s something of a recent trend of French comic books about dead American musicians, with Nicolas Otero’s broody vision of Cobain, Mezzo and J. M. Dupont’s woodcut rendering of Robert Johnson, Philippe Chanoinat and Fabrice Le Henanff’s ode to Elvis, and now Bagieu’s energetic portrait of Cass Elliot. In California Dreamin’, Cass is imagined in her formative years, as Ellen Cohen, before she became Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas (who really did live in a communal house and were consumed by intergroup romance and betrayal). The book closes before the birth of the daughter or her untimely death. I offer Bagieu my notion of Cass as yet another “tragic figure” of rock fame, but she dismisses it. Her Cass is unapologetic; the book is bursting with her talent, ambition, and drive—and her unrequited loves, which help propel the plot. The book is also very much a celebration of Cass’s beauty and her music, which often intertwine visually by way of Bagieu’s curlicue lines and handwritten text, as when the familiar lyrics “Allll the leaves are brown … ” swirl together with cigarette smoke. Bagieu’s drawings are superlative: soft pencil lines that convey detail without constraining her figures and that animate the characters’ exuberant facial expressions. She is popular in France for her comics series “Les Culottées” in the newspaper Le Monde, charming portraits of women throughout history—Mae Jemison, Peggy Guggenheim, Hedy Lamarr, to name a few—whose accomplishments have been obscured. Cass Elliot’s story, Bagieu declares, likewise “needed to be told.” Read More
March 28, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 7: Zonies By Mike Powell This is Mike Powell’s final column about living in Arizona. Read the rest of “Zonies” here. Josef Hoflehner, Cactus, Phoenix, Arizona, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta. In July 1986, a DJ in San Diego named Randy Miller debuted a novelty song he had written called “Zoners.” The song, sung to the tune of “Rumors,” by the Timex Social Club, documented the peculiar habits of one of San Diego’s least-loved populations: tourists from Arizona. “Look at all these Zoners / surround me every day / They come up here from Phoenix and sometimes they want to stay,” Miller sings. “Look at all these Zoners / I can’t take it no more / They’re on the beach, two towels each / Stealing sand from shore.” The connection is well established. About 10 percent of San Diego’s tourism comes from Arizona; the longtime Arizona senator John McCain has joked that visiting San Diego gives him a great opportunity to connect with Arizona voters. And yet the Zonie—or the Zoner, or the Zona—is, to both the Arizonan and the San Diegan, strictly second class. Like a secret girlfriend into whose window one shamefully crawls under anonymous night, Arizona is necessary to the San Diegan’s machinery but expendable to its identity. Want plays no part—they need us. Read More