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
March 14, 2017 Look The Life of Paper By Dan Piepenbring Austin Thomas has an exhibition of new drawings and print work at Morgan Lehman Gallery through March 25. Her work marries layered collage techniques to printmaking processes, making prominent use of found paper: book covers, ledger pages, loose-leaf notebooks. Austin Thomas, Gray Blue Black X, 2016, monoprint with Akua intaglio ink on proofing paper, 37″ x 18″. Read More
March 14, 2017 From the Archive Groggy from Stolen Phenobarbs By Christian Kiefer James Leo Herlihy. In recent years, I’ve taken to buying the oldest issues of The Paris Review, despite the fact that the entire run is now available digitally right here on the website. There’s a certain joy in paging through the actual paper, the names within both familiar and unfamiliar, the styles waxing and waning with the years, sometimes bringing to them a level of obscurity that feels utterly lost. But other times, there might come a name I don’t recognize, and with it a story or poem that draws me toward something essential, something I didn’t know I needed. For me, James Leo Herlihy was just such a surprise. I still don’t really know how to say his last name without sounding like an idiot, and this alone may have provided reason enough for me to read the first piece of his I encountered in a crumbling physical copy of The Paris Review’s ninth issue, Summer 1955, and titled, perhaps fittingly (or not), “A Summer for the Dead.” Read More
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