October 12, 2016 Our Correspondents Autumn Hours, Part 6 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of Vanessa Davis’s column. Read More
October 12, 2016 On the Shelf In the Kitchen with Salvador Dalí, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Taschen, via the Guardian This holiday season, the gourmand in your life will accept one gift and one gift only: Salvador Dalí’s cookbook, with its recipes for frog pasties and thousand-year-old eggs. Any kitchen without it is disappointingly ordinary and should be destroyed immediately. “Dalí’s lavish and erotic cookbook Les Diners de Gala was first published in 1973, featuring 136 recipes compiled by the painter and his wife Gala. Divided into twelve chapters with titles such as ‘Prime Lilliputian malaises’ (meat) and ‘Deoxyribonucleic Atavism’ (vegetables), the book also features sumptuous Dalí illustrations and photographs of the painter posing alongside tables loaded with a banquet’s worth of food. Chapter 10, entitled ‘The “I Eat GALA”,’ is devoted to aphrodisiacs. In one illustration, a disembodied head with biscuits for hair and a fringe made of a jar of jam sits on a platter alongside a large cube of blue cheese, the sides of which show a crowd in front of a mountain. Another shows a desert scene in which a telephone receiver is suspended on a twig over a melting plate holding two fried eggs and a razor blade.” I hadn’t known the comic novel was under attack—unless, maybe, its enemies have taken a page from Donald Trump’s book and refused to telegraph their strategies in advance—but here, nevertheless, is Howard Jacobson rising to its defense, and reaching deep back into the canon in search of its ancestry: “The novel is never more itself—certainly it never has more fun being itself—than when its heroes fall drastically short of that heroism whose function is to right wrongs, settle scores and put the fractured times back together again … Call this narrative the atheism of the real. It is the great achievement of the novel in prose. I mean no disrespect to those whose imaginations take them to fantasy in any of its forms. The novel can and should do anything. Yet there can be a bias among those of us who love novels nearly as much as we love life (and sometimes even more) in favor of the flight-of-fancy novel, the introspectively other-worldly, let us call it, as against this worldliness, except when what is of this world is to airy thinness beat, as luminescent as angels’ wings, so exquisite in its quiet dailiness that we can see right through it.” Read More
October 11, 2016 Weird Book Room These Penguins Won’t Baptize Themselves By Dan Piepenbring Frank Papé’s endpapers for Penguin Island. Image via the George Macy Imagery. Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921; the award committee, maybe taking a cue from his surname, lauded his “true Gallic temperament.” And there is no denying it: France was French. His celebrated temperament is maybe most visible in Penguin Island, his 1908 novel, which boasts one of the most singular premises in all of fiction. Pitched as a satirical history, it tells the story of Penguinia, an island civilization whose trajectory through the centuries is more or less the same as that of the real France. The difference is that this island is peopled by penguins. Read More
October 11, 2016 At Work The Uncanny I: An Interview with Kristin Dombek By Robert Polito Photo: Amy Touchett. Readers of The Paris Review will remember Kristin Dombek’s essay “Letter from Williamsburg,” one of our perennial favorites. In August, Dombek published her first book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, a diagnosis of our attention-starved culture and its fixation on self-absorption. The book covers everything from Bram Stoker to My Super Sweet 16; the New York Times calls it “sharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny cultural criticism.” Dombek spoke to Robert Polito, the poet, biographer, and critic, about “the mysteries of ethos, when and why we trust and distrust who we do, in life and in writing.” —The Editors INTERVIEWER When I talk to fellow nonfiction writers, I’m always interested in how they locate themselves along the prose or argument continuum. When you sit down to write an essay, are you primarily thinking prose—sentences, words, tone—or are you thinking argument, what you might wish to say about a subject? And are you the sort of nonfiction writer who plans, or even outlines, or is the writing more improvisatory and about discovery for you ? DOMBEK Usually an essay begins with an argument, for me. Not a linear argument, in the sense of a line of reasoning, but an argument as in two people or groups shouting at each other, but in my head. The dumber the disagreement, the more I want to kind of explode it and discover what it covers up, find better language for what life is really like. In this case, the disagreement was narcissism is the opposite of human—i.e., a total lack of warmth, empathy, “human” feeling—versus narcissism is everybody. Usually, what’s next is scene, where the language of the essay gets discovered, and the idea. Often an editor helps to lay bare the structure that will let the idea happen, rather than being told to the reader. But in this book, at least in its final version, I wasn’t working in scenes but rather channeling kinds of Internet and academic language that aren’t really my own, and kind of sculpting that language like material. So there is so much telling, summary, which is painful for me to read. There wasn’t a reasonable progression of ideas, but on one axis, a progression of kinds of language, and then on the other, a slow panning out from the trapped, limited perspective of fearful, solitary, listicle-fueled diagnosis to a broader view, and poetry. Read More
October 11, 2016 On History Night Doctors By Colin Dickey Nineteenth-century medical schools plundered the graves of African Americans. “I remember a colored lady was going to work early in the morning, about half past five o’clock. She was standing at Twelfth and Market Streets when an automobile came up. A man in the automobile spoke to her, ‘Mary, which way are you going? I’ll take you where you want to go in a hurry. The trolleys are all blocked.’ But the lady wouldn’t get in the automobile.” The story, collected in Tristram Potter Coffin and Henning Cohen’s 1966 Folklore in America, begins with a fair degree of menace but is otherwise unremarkable: a single woman harassed by a stranger in a car, the kind of danger women everywhere in America face. Only at the end does it become strange. “The man kept on insisting,” the unnamed respondent continues, “and the woman became frightened. Just then a colored man across the way saw her and started towards her. At that the man in the automobile left. He was a night doctor and was going to take the lady to the hospital.” Shadowy, elusive, terrifying—for well over a century after the Civil War the night doctors moved through the cities and through American folklore, looking for their victims. Read More
October 11, 2016 On the Shelf Bringing Back Brutalism, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: (c) Roberto Conte, www.robertoconte.net It’s back! The architectural movement you’ve been craving—with the ethics you can’t live without! It’s social democracy in building form! It’s an expression of the human desire to achieve! It’s Brutalism! Nikil Saval writes, “Despite two generations of abuse (and perhaps a little because of it), an enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings beyond the febrile, narrow precincts of architecture criticism has begun to take hold. Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness. For an aesthetic once praised for its ‘ruthless logic’ and ‘bloody-mindedness’—in the much-quoted phrasing of critic Reyner Banham—it is a surprising turn of events … In countries still reeling from the worldwide financial crisis, it’s a solace to look back to an era of muscular, public-minded development.” Henry Green’s novels are being reissued, and you should read them as soon as you can. Don’t even finish reading this post. Just get up and go buy them and read them. I’ll be here. If you’re not inclined to do what I tell you just because I told you to do it, Leo Robson can convince you more elegantly: “Green believed that well-groomed, well-behaved English was an obstacle to expression. But his style wasn’t a merely negative exercise, a winnowing or clearing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-bodied alternative. The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.” Read More