March 16, 2017 Arts & Culture The Library at Grey Gardens By Lesley M.M. Blume Photo: Lesley M. M. Blume A few years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that Grey Gardens was up for rent, I thought it had to be a bizarre joke: What kind of a sick twist would pay to spend time in the notorious cat-and-rot-scented squalor so memorably depicted in the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens? I knew Jackie O had paid to rehabilitate the place after Long Island authorities had nearly condemned it and ousted its inhabitants, Jackie’s aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and cousin Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie). After that embarrassment-driven overhaul, the place seemed briefly, passably pâté-worthy again—but still, it would have to be classified as “for niche tastes only.” It turned out Grey Gardens had long since been renovated back into a glistening private playground for the intelligentsia A-list. (My ignorance of this fact confirmed me as an intelligentsia C-lister, at best.) After the demise of Big Edie, the Washington journalist and social doyenne Sally Quinn bought the house with her husband, Ben Bradlee, the Watergate-era executive editor at the Washington Post. The capital’s quintessential power couple paid a mere $225,000 for the house and grounds, and lovingly restored the estate to its 1930s glory; there, amid the rose bushes and chintz chaise lounges, they entertained the gods and goddesses of the film and political worlds. More recently, they offered to share Grey Gardens by renting it to those willing to pay $150,000 a month for the privilege. (It’s now on the market for nearly $20 million.) Read More
March 16, 2017 On the Shelf Hi, I’m Being Sarcastic, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Just joking around, drinking milk in the sun. How about irony, huh? It’s complicated! On the Internet, any ironic message broadcast beyond certain narrow parameters has the irony sucked out of it like bone marrow: blockheads and buffoons get ahold of your words and are all like, Is that some kind of joke? Do you think that’s funny? We’re a post-joke society, and the situation is dire. Amelia Tait has diagnosed our cultural disease, and she proposes a radical solution: a full-time sarcasm font. “We now live in a time where people are being divided right down the middle on social media into camps called ‘Yes, Enlightened’ and ‘No, Very Bad.’ In the world of woke, one misunderstood joke runs the risk of ruining someone’s reputation. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I must suggest an immediate worldwide implementation of a sarcasm font … I want everything sarcastic to henceforth be written in that one WordArt that is all wavey and blue and great for GCSE Geography projects on the Savanna. Any time a satirical article is written, the whole thing will be bright and blue so that no one need pop over to the Facebook comment section to wish the author would be forcibly taken from their bed at dawn and shot in the face. The future of our fragmented society relies on this, more than anything else.” Maybe it’s best if we just abandon language altogether—certainly it doesn’t seem to help us talk clearly about sex and desire, which means, what’s the point? Grindr, the gay meetup app, is leading the charge to forgo words, in all their uselessness. Guy Trebay writes, “Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji—500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.” But will this allow for unfettered sexual expression, as Grindr claims it would—or are users just trading the shackles of language for the shackles of top-down corporate fascism? Doug Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, told the Times: “ ‘One problem is, you have this common language that’s not being organically created by marginalized people,’ as were secret hankie or hatband codes once used to signal identity in the era of the closet … ‘The corporate element is a new part of this. Having a common corporate language created to benefit a business ends up excluding a lot of people and creating very particular and normative ways of thinking about sex.’ ” Read More
March 16, 2017 Bulletin Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Selected for Inaugural One Book, One New York Program By The Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/obony-winner_1-minute.mp4 We’re delighted to announce that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah is the winner of the first-ever One Book, One New York program. This February, the mayor’s office invited New Yorkers to pick a book they’d like the city to read together: the other finalists were Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Online and at kiosks in the subway, readers throughout the city cast some fifty thousand votes. In the months to come, Americanah will feature in a series of free events throughout the city. As part of these proceedings, on May 11, The Paris Review will open our doors for a salon in Adichie’s honor at our loft. Watch this space; we’ll share more details about the event as soon as they’re available. In the meantime, we congratulate Adichie, and look forward to seeing Americanah on the subway and buses and park benches, on rooftops and fire escapes, in libraries and bars and coffee shops and the DMV—and everywhere else New Yorkers read. Read more about One Book, One New York here.
March 15, 2017 Our Correspondents Five Public Cases on Intelligence By Anthony Madrid Occasionally, our correspondent Anthony Madrid composes a set of quasi-koans; these are his latest. (Read his previous “public cases” here and here.) Public Case 1: Anxieties Our teacher said: “Anxieties about one’s intelligence are never anxieties about one’s intelligence. What’s actually at issue is whether we inspire envy in others (very acceptable), or whether we are ourselves obliged to feel envy (unacceptable). Those are the actual stakes. No one frets about whether her brain is adequate to the tasks of her life.” Comment. An old trick. Teacher boldly admits he is mean and vain; therefore he may call you mean and vain. But how much does he really want to enlighten his students, if his method for combating vanity is to humiliate it? He says, in effect: “You are conning yourself. You pretend to worry about how smart you are, so you may seem—to yourself—to be honest and humble. You know for a fact people think you’re smart, but that’s not good enough; you want ’em to suffer … ” Upshot: everyone walks away having exempted themselves from the criticism, and firmly identifying with the authority figure. In short, meaner and vainer than ever. Read More
March 15, 2017 On Translation The Swedish Gangster’s Wife’s Bag By Saskia Vogel On translating Karolina Ramqvist’s novel The White City. Vintage Louis Vuitton ad. It started with an editorial query about a bag. In Karolina Ramqvist’s novel The White City, a woman, Karin, has been left without resources after living a luxe life with her gangster husband, John, who is dead. Karin’s Swedish, middle-class family never approved of her decision to become a criminal’s housewife, so she can’t go to them for help. The “gangster family” that was supposed to have her back has turned on her. She has no one but her nursing infant, and she’s reluctant about motherhood. In the middle of a frozen Stockholm winter, Karin is being left out in the cold, figuratively and literally: the authorities are about to seize her grand suburban home. The reader meets her there, where signs of filth and decay abound. There’s no heating, no Internet. Desperate for cash, she’s selling off her luxury handbags. The doorbell rings; a prospective buyer who has seen Karin’s ad has come to have a look: Read More
March 15, 2017 On the Shelf The Pizza Is Poisoned, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A late sixties ad for Campbell’s Pizza. I’ve buried some things in my day—contraband candy, late family pets, the truth. But game recognize game, and I have to salute Mario Fabbrini, a Michigan-based frozen-pizza entrepreneur who once buried thirty thousand family-sized mushroom-topped pies on a farm in Ossineke. A motorcade of pickup trucks dumped the pizzas into a mass grave; Fabbrini marked it with a flower garland, featuring “red gladioli for sauce, white carnations for cheese.” Cara Giaimo has the full story of the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral: “In January of 1973, employees at United Canning in Ohio were checking their inventory when they noticed some of their tins of mushrooms had swelled up … When he got the news about the mushrooms, Fabbrini stopped his shipments and submitted his mushroom pizzas to a crude contamination test: slices were fed to a couple of FDA lab mice, who promptly died. So Fabbrini recalled his ’shroom-topped pies, rounding them up from local restaurants and grocery stores. In order to get rid of them, he decided to throw a funeral—partly for the grand optics, but, one suspects, partly as a display of accountability, too.” Literature loves a hoax—the Daily itself may have perpetrated one as recently as yesterday, though you didn’t hear it from me. Clifford Irving, who’s responsible for one of the great written ruses of the past fifty years, isn’t given the credit he deserves as a creative liar. Paul Elie tells his story: “Irving, while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving, a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, high-adrenaline stunt, a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to get away with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That ‘stunt’ turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, and Life magazine’s editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. ‘I was a writer, not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, testing what people will believe, and once you get going you say, They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this … ’ ” Read More