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
March 17, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Codes, Contracts, Coffee Stains By The Paris Review From Terms and Conditions. In his new book, the pop-conceptual curiosity Terms and Conditions, R. Sikoryak reproduces the styles of more than a hundred other cartoonists—including Marjane Satrapi, Steve Ditko, Raina Telgemeier, Edward Gorey, and Peyo—one per page, to adapt the text of iTunes’ Terms and Conditions, “the contract everyone agrees to but no one reads.” I can’t say I read it in this form either, but it does make the text occasionally more intriguing, if not readable, highlighting certain phrases in the document that would otherwise remain a haze of letters. Given its own caption box, the line “To agree to these terms, click ‘agree.’ If you do not agree to these terms, do not click ‘agree,’ and do not use these services” reads like a middle finger to the (potential) user. A turtlenecked Steve Jobs populates each comic in the style of the page (as Popeye, Homer Simpson, Ziggy, Wolverine); Sikoryak, too, disappears into these other idioms, and though the parody is impressive, each style remains a simulacrum, lacking the soul of the original. But maybe this is partly the point. Even if it were Ernie Bushmiller at the pen, is it still Sluggo if he tells Nancy, “You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, transfer, redistribute, or sublicense the Licensed Application”? Sikoryak hasn’t attempted to match the action in the panels to the language, so the legalese can’t leech significance from the art. The text becomes a lorem ipsum—placeholder copy that is seen but never read. —Nicole Rudick After reading Fleur Jaeggy’s “Agnes” in our current issue, I got ahold of her collection I am the Brother of XX, out in July. Gini Alhadeff, who translates it from the Italian, does a wonderful job binding these twenty-one fictions about family life into a cohesive psychology: each offers a dark, uncompromising perspective on the covenants of mother-, brother-, and sisterhoods. In the title story, a young brother claims his sister’s concern for his academic well-being is the work of obsessive espionage; in “The Heir,” an old woman adopts a homeless girl and redrafts her will so that her daughter will receive her entire estate, only to be burned alive by this new heiress: “She wanted the destruction of that woman who was good to her. To destroy for the blasted glory of it. She doesn’t want money. But to destroy. Should she have to answer to a ridiculous why?” And that’s only the first time we see a daughter burn down her parents’ house in XX. This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over. —Daniel Johnson Read More
March 17, 2017 From the Archive The Light of the World By Dan Piepenbring I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life—about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened—is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the “I” not being important. That is the ecstasy. —Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37, 1986 Derek Walcott has died at eighty-seven. In the days to come, we’ll say more about his life and legacy—for now, I wanted to share the last three stanzas from his poem “The Light of the World,” which appeared in our Winter 1986 issue, and invite you to share in the “ecstasy” of his art, as he describes in his Writers at Work interview. He will be missed. Read More