March 22, 2017 On the Shelf We’re a Nation of Smirking Persons, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Walt Whitman, famously unsmirking American. Here’s the problem with America, as Walt Whitman saw it: we’re “a nation of smirking persons” when we should be one “of sane and cleanfleshed men.” For this, we may blame the restive, costive decadence of city life, which has produced “a set of sickly milk-and-water men” who “bloat themselves with quantities of trash.” This was true in 1858, when, under a pseudonym, Whitman wrote a series of columns on “Manly Health.” And it’s still true now, friends. Just last night, I bloated myself with quantities of trash, and I plan to do it again immediately. But fear not. There are a few things we can do, Whitman says, to reclaim our vigor: grow a beard, eat exclusively beef, sleep with the window open. His advice, as I’ve written elsewhere, isn’t always stirring, but it’s hard to look away from the spectacle of masculine insecurity he presents: “Where Leaves of Grass celebrates a man sublimely comfortable in his own skin, Manly Health is more likely to warn that skin is ‘one of the great inlets of disease.’ Whitman’s column warns against potatoes, prostitutes, overthinking, hot beverages, and between-meal snacking, to name a few of his prohibitions. As for condiments: forget about them. Real men abjure catsup.” Christopher Benfey, writing on the German author Paul Scheerbart, has an important reminder: whatever you’re building, build it out of glass. What, you think you’re too good for glass? Get a clue! “To bring our culture to a higher level, Scheerbart argued in Glass Architecture (1914), his marvelous utopian novel in the form of an aesthetic manifesto, the heavy Wilhelmine buildings of brick and stone needed to be replaced with glass, ‘which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of colored glass.’ One of his rhyming aphorisms might be translated: ‘Without a palace of glass / Life is a pain in the ass.’ ” Read More
March 21, 2017 On Music Mr. Berry and Mrs. Blavatsky By Brian Cullman From the cover of Chuck Berry in Memphis, 1967. My first girlfriend grew up in Saint Louis and, as a young girl, would sneak over to Chuck Berry’s house and sit by his guitar-shaped swimming pool. There were always a few little blonde nymphets lounging by his pool, and if you were clever, you could get there by slipping around one of the hedges—you never had to go near the main house, which was, so I hear, out of bounds. But the pool was open, and this would’ve been in the late sixties, back when his songs were part of our national currency but no longer on the radio: before “My Ding-a-Ling” became a number one record, swelling his bank account but degrading his currency precipitously, turning a national treasure into a dirty joke. Imagine if the Beatles’ biggest hit was “Octopus’s Garden.” It’s worse than that. “Look, I ain’t no big shit, all right,” Berry told Rolling Stone in 2001: Read More
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