March 21, 2017 Poetry Now By Frederick Seidel Photo: Arun Kulshreshtha For Robert Silvers And you could say we’ve been living in clover From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama. Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes We the people voted in has taken over. Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover, From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times. It’s over. Read More
March 21, 2017 On the Shelf Leave Jane Austen Alone, You Nazi Scum, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Lily James and Bella Heathcote in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. First the white nationalists took that haircut—you know the one, an arty variant on the Marine’s high-and-tight buzz, endemic to white guys in gentrifying neighborhoods circa 2013. Then the white nationalists took Barbour field jackets, depriving a whole generation of the joys of waxed canvas. Now the white nationalists have come for Jane Austen, in whom they mistakenly see a love of tradition, and it is up to us to say: enough. Let them claim some other, lesser Regency writer—an E. T. A. Hoffmann, maybe, or even a Sir Walter Scott—and leave us to read Persuasion in peace, the animals. Jennifer Schuessler writes, “Some alt-right admirers hail Austen’s novels as blueprints for a white nationalist ‘ethno-state.’ Others cite her as a rare example of female greatness … A post on the website Counter Currents called ‘The Woman Question in White Nationalism,’ for example, includes a string of comments debating how the vision of marriage in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice fit with the ‘racial dictatorship’ necessary to preserve Western civilization. ‘If traditional marriage à la P&P is going to be imposed, again, in an ethnostate, we must behave like gentlemen,’ one commenter wrote.” Kay Redfield Jamison’s new book, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, aims to rehabilitate our understanding of the poet’s mental illness, which tends to be shrouded in the clichés of the eccentric artist. Dan Chiasson writes, “From his thirties on, Lowell suffered the relentless cycles of bipolar disorder, the ‘irritable enthusiasm’ that lurched him upward before landing him in despair … The poet’s cycles of illness and recovery have been judged in scolding moral terms, or, worse, viewed as a kind of lifelong-mishap GIF, with Lowell stuck in a permanent loop. When he was manic, Lowell smashed wineglasses and schemed to marry near-strangers. In recovery, his depressions were severe, his remorse profound, the work of repairing the relationships he’d damaged unrelenting. But the metaphors that came so quickly to hand could again be tamed and put to use. ‘Gracelessly,’ he wrote, ‘like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon. I am part of my family again.’ ” Read More
March 20, 2017 In Memoriam Robert Silvers, 1929–2017 By Lorin Stein Robert Silvers (left), with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, The Paris Review’s first publisher (center), and George Plimpton (right). We’re sad to learn that Robert Silvers has died, after a brief illness, at the age of eighty-seven. It is hard—both painful and disorienting—to imagine the world without him. The New York Review of Books, which he founded with the late Barbara Epstein during the newspaper strike of 1962, and which he continued to edit until his death, was an experiment whose like we will never see again. And it has remained exactly what it was from the beginning: a journal of criticism and ideas that can speak on equal terms to scientists, poets, philosophers, novelists, and politicians, but in prose the common reader can understand. Read More
March 20, 2017 Our Correspondents Second First Date By Jane Stern I had my first date when I was fourteen: a boy named Bobby Dublin asked me to go to a movie. My second first date was last year, and though I’ve had almost half a century to work on my romance skills, the second was possibly worst than the first. At least the first one came with popcorn and a Nestlé Crunch bar. Between these two landmark occasions, I was married for forty years. I met my ex-husband at grad school in the late sixties, and people then didn’t date; they “hung out.” We “hung out” for two years before we got married, at which time I assumed I’d never be called upon to do this again. Read More
March 20, 2017 Arts & Culture Muscle, Smoke, Mirrors By Oliver Lee Bateman What self-truths are bodybuilders hiding under all that muscle? A scrawny teenage boy sat on the beach with a girl. They were friends, but he wanted more: to hold her hand, to go steady. Then a bully, 220 pounds of brawny masculinity, appeared on the scene. He behaved as any toxic alpha male would: he walked past them and kicked sand in their faces. The boy stood to challenge him, but he grabbed the boy’s thin forearm and squeezed. “I’d smash your face … only you’re so skinny, you might dry up and blow away,” the bully said. By now, the girl had sidled up to the bully, and the boy was shaking with anger. “Oh, don’t let it bother you, little boy,” she told him, her voice dripping with contempt. The chastened boy went home, gambled a stamp on a free pamphlet about isometric exercise, and waited. After the pamphlet arrived, he performed the exercises, each push-up and handstand bringing him closer to precious manhood. Read More
March 20, 2017 On the Shelf He Just Ate a Pastrami Sandwich, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Ilya Repin, Duel Between Onegin and Lenski, from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 1899. I went to a party this weekend. It was boring. People talked about books all night, and no one threw a punch—or even a low kick to the shins. I wanted to stand on a chair and yell, People, people, we’ve got important work to do! Our forebears would be disappointed in us! In a new profile, Norman Podhoretz, the eighty-seven-year-old former editor of Commentary, sets an example when he remembers the adversarial literary culture of yore. Podhoretz tells John Leland: “It was a really passionate intellectual life. It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements … In the case of The Adventures of Augie March, I was the one who nearly came to blows … [After my review,] Bellow wouldn’t speak to me for years. It was only when he decided he couldn’t stand Alfred Kazin anymore that we became sort of friendly. We were sitting together in a meeting, Saul and I, and Kazin was over there, and he said, ‘Look at him, he looks like he just ate a pastrami sandwich out of a stained brown piece of paper’ … John Berryman, who was a friend of Bellow’s, came up to me—I didn’t know who he was, this drunken guy—and he said, ‘We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years.’ I was twenty-three years old. I go, What?” Alex Abramovich, eulogizing the late Chuck Berry, remembers his way with words: “Smart and systematic, he plugged every possible variable into the equations at hand and wrote anthems that were reverse engineered to appeal to rock and roll’s core constituency of disaffected teenagers. The songs were ‘intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few’, Berry said. But the lyrics were fine-grained and cinematic … Berry is celebrated for his neologisms: ‘botherations’ and ‘coolerators’ (in ‘Memphis, Tennessee,’ tears are ‘hurry home drops’). But his images and similes are just as impressive, and his sense of control is startling: when Berry shouts to the city bus driver—‘Hey conductor, you must … slow down!’—the song slows with him.” Read More