March 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Null und Eins: Aphorisms By Hans Abendroth Hans Abendroth was the eldest of three children born to an upper-middle class family in Frankfurt in 1909. Against the wishes of his parents, who hoped he would go into law, he studied classical philology at the University of Freiburg. There he was among the students of Martin Heidegger, a famous cohort that included Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, and Hans Jonas. Written under Heidegger’s supervision, Abendroth’s “Habilitation Thesis,” which analyzed the developing conception of the psyche in the literature and philosophy of classical and Hellenistic Greece, is regarded as a seminal document in the field. In 1935, Abendroth moved to Berlin, where, as a member of a research group at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he was responsible for translating and preparing a German edition of the Akhmim Codex, a recently discovered Gnostic manuscript dating to the fifth century A.D. Until his early retirement in 1949, he taught courses on Greek philosophy, early Christian theology, and Hellenistic literature at the University of Berlin. Read More
March 14, 2017 On the Shelf Carry Your White Rag with Pride, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Alice Neel, Self Portrait (detail), 1980. Nothing like a blizzard to get you thinking about death. As I write this, New York is being engulfed in snow, as one day all of us will be taken by the icy grip of eternal slumber. So let’s look at how Alice Neel handled it, with a striking act of self-portraiture that, as Bridget Quinn writes, is unflinching in its gaze without losing any sympathy: “She lived long enough to capture one of the most knowing takes on aging ever made, up there with Rembrandt in its cold-eyed view of the sagging self. Eighty years old in this painting, made in 1980, the master portraitist has turned her unsparing scrutiny upon her own still-formidable self. Her fluffy white grandma updo—incongruous on a nude, to say the least—rhymes with the bright white rag dangling from her left hand. Meant for dabbing paint, according to some commentators, the rag is also a flag of surrender. But surrender to what? I expect they mean surrender to aging and the decline of the flesh. But what about the fact that after five decades of dedicated portraiture, this was Neel’s first real self-portrait? That after cajoling dozens of sitters—men, women, and children—to doff their duds, she at last joins them. She has surrendered to her own inspection at long last, there on the same blue-striped love seat upon which so many others sat for her. Here, finally, Neel sits for herself.” At last, courtesy of Eric Benson, we know what it’s like to listen to Top 40 radio with Terrence Malick: “He’ll make these wild associations that really surprise me … You’ll hear him say something like, ‘I just heard this Jason Derulo song, “Talk Dirty.” I haven’t heard a love song like this before.’ And you’ll think to yourself, ‘That’s so weird, that’s such a shitty pop song.’ And then you’ll listen to it again and you’ll hear this Turkish lick, and you’ll say, ‘Actually, that seemingly innocuous pop song has something really cool to it.’ ” Read More
March 13, 2017 From the Archive Why Did They Resist Her? By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief. Our complete digital archive is available now. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941; he died in 2008. A few years before, facing a nightly curfew as Israeli tanks rumbled through his streets, Darwish spoke to BOMB about the genesis of his interest in poetry: Read More
March 13, 2017 First Person High Fade By Bryan Washington At his barber shop in Paterson, New Jersey, Louis McDowell gives Michael Young a haircut. Photo: Martha Cooper, 1994. My barber in New Orleans works a few blocks from Preservation Hall. His building sits across from the French Quarter, tucked inside the Tremé. He’s got this fat painting of Louis Armstrong sitting by the door, above a replica of that photo featuring Harlem Renaissance authors posted on a stoop; and, just under that frame, there’s a deed for the property, which my barber calls the remnant of a black neighborhood turned blue. Faubourg Tremé was the first town of free black people in the States. It was founded at the close of the eighteenth century, back when New Orleans held most of Louisiana’s emancipated people of color. The city then was a smoothy of black and Latin influence, and the Tremé testifies to that tradition—but you can only notice its history, my barber swears, if you knew about it before you got here. Read More
March 13, 2017 Our Correspondents Daylight Saving Hell By Jane Stern I shouldn’t be obsessed with daylight saving time, but I am. Like a pregnancy due date, a college graduation, or an income-tax payment, I have DST circled in red on my calendar and amplified with exclamation marks. A few years ago, it meant nothing to me. I work at home—I can sleep or rise anytime I want, and I don’t get melancholy when the days get shorter. But here’s what I’ve come to anticipate with dread: changing the time on the clock in my car. It’s nothing fancy: a 2015 Subaru Forester that I bought used. Although I don’t consider myself a dimwit, I absolutely cannot figure out how to set the clock. Twice a year, when the time changes, I find myself sitting in the car reading the Forester manual or at my desk watching YouTube videos on this subject and still, setting the clock is unfathomable. Read More
March 13, 2017 On the Shelf Arsenic and Old Austen, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sort of looks like someone who was poisoned by arsenic, doesn’t it? Look, I want to believe it, too; I want to run through the streets shouting it until I’m blue in the face: Jane Austen was poisoned by arsenic! Janey Goddamn Austen, poisoned! Sandra Tuppen, a curator at the British Library, has purported that three pairs of Austen’s eyeglasses—one of which is strong enough to suggest that she suddenly went very nearly blind—could indicate that she suffered from arsenic poisoning, among the symptoms of which is a decline in visual acuity. It would be neat, wouldn’t it? Jane Austen, poisoned. It would spice things up a bit around here. But even though Austen died when she was only forty-one, this arsenic theory doesn’t hold much water, some say: “According to Dr. Cheryl Kinney, a national board member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, many things contained arsenic during the author’s lifetime: ‘Water, the soil, homemade wine (which Jane Austen refers to in her letters), wallpaper, clothing that had green pigment, glue, and medicines … People would often take arsenic on their own as they were convinced that arsenic in controlled quantities could improve energy, make you plumper, and more vital. Pots and jars of skin creams also could contain arsenic … There are many other more likely causes of cataracts than arsenic poisoning.’” In the midsixties, as America and the USSR were locked in a race to the moon, another contender quietly threw his hat in the ring: Edward Makuka Nkoloso, of Zambia. His methods were unorthodox; his students, untested; his uniforms, unprofessional. But the guy had moxie. Namwali Serpell writes, “Nkoloso wore a standard-issue combat helmet, a khaki military uniform, and a flowing cape—multicolored silk or heliotrope velvet, with an embroidered neck and festooned with medals. His astronauts sometimes wore green satin jackets with yellow trousers. (They were quick to explain that these were not space suits: ‘No, we are the Dynamite Rock Music Group when we are not space cadets.’) … He rolled his cadets down a hill in a forty-gallon oil drum to simulate the weightless conditions of the moon. ‘I also make them swing from the end of a long rope,’ he told a reporter. ‘When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope. This produces the feeling of freefall.’ ” Read More