October 4, 2016 On the Shelf Discovering Your Sonic Brand, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That’s your own personal sound, man. I’ve spent thirty painstaking years building my personal brand from the ground up: a signature blend of synthetic microfibers and dried-out pipe tobacco, shot through with the bashfulness of the Coppertone girl. But I forgot the sounds. Whether you’re a corporation, an individual, or just an abstraction, you’ve got to brand yourself aurally to stand out, Jack Hitt writes: “Sonic branding involves stand-alone sounds, like NBC’s three-note signature or United Airlines’ use of the most familiar measures of ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ These distilled riffs are meant to build an aural association with a product to create a Pavlovian sense of loyalty and expectation … Fajitas, [Joel] Beckerman writes, were merely a decent-selling dish that went supernova as a middle-class entrée after Chili’s focused its presentation on the loud sizzle of the dish emerging from the kitchen, a sound that figured into all its key advertising. Spend enough time pondering the nuances of sonic branding, and you come to appreciate the pure genius of the letter z in the word Prozac.” Hey, gang, there’s a new restaurant in London called Bronte! They left the umlaut off, but still, you’d be forgiven for assuming there’s something literary about it. No such luck, though. Tanya Gold paid the place a visit, and: “I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs. Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be … It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte … So Bronte is named for a man no one calls Bronte. It could have been called Nelson, decorated with eye patches and plastic parrots, like a Padshow hell shack; or it could have been called Gaskell, an angry and flouncy tearoom that wrote bad novels and one marvelous, vicious and dishonest biography called The Life of Charlotte Brontë; or it could have been called—and this is my wish—Brunty: Pens, Sex and Potatoes.” Read More
October 3, 2016 Look Woman Power By Dan Piepenbring The Austrian painter Maria Lassnig moved to New York in 1968, leaving behind a thriving career to explore what she called “the land of strong women.” She lived in the city virtually unknown for twelve years, keeping a low profile and producing a protean body of paintings, drawings, watercolors, silkscreens, and animations. “Woman Power: Maria Lassnig in New York 1968–1980,” at Petzel Gallery through October 29, exhibits her work from this period. Lassnig, who died in 2014, is remembered for her self-portraiture and “body-awareness paintings”: her effort to translate physical sensations to the canvas. “The only true reality is my feelings,” she said, “played out within the confines of my body.” Maria Lassnig, Woman Power, 1979, oil on canvas, 71.65″ x 49.61″. © Maria Lassnig Foundation / The Essl Collection, Klosterneuburg / Vienna. Read More
October 3, 2016 Arts & Culture Questions About Questionnaires By Evan Kindley & Joanna Neborsky All images from A Proust Questionnaire by Joanna Neborsky, TarcherPerigee, 2016. Evan Kindley and Joanna Neborsky both happen to have new books dealing with questionnaires. Kindley’s Questionnaire, part of the Object Lessons series, charts the history of “the form as form” from its inception in the late nineteenth century to its current apotheosis in our data-crazy present. Neborsky’s A Proust Questionnaire, meanwhile, revives one of the earliest examples of quiz mania—the questionnaire filled out by a teenaged Marcel Proust in the 1880s—for a new generation of confessors. Neborsky is an illustrator and animator who has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review Daily, and has illustrated books by Félix Fénéon and Daniil Kharms; Kindley is a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Both live in Los Angeles. Earlier this month the two corresponded about questionnaires, using the Proust Questionnaire’s famous prompts as a basic framework. NEBORSKY I’ve long wondered—since we met that one time, at that party, next to the pretzel mix in a dark office courtyard—what do you consider the lowest form of misery? And why did you write this book? Read More
October 3, 2016 Bulletin Introducing the NYRB Classics + Paris Review Book Club By The Paris Review Get twelve books and four issues for $140. It’s no secret that we at The Paris Review admire New York Review Books, the imprint known for “rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works … by writers renowned and obscure” (the New York Times). We’ve interviewed their founder, Edwin Frank. We’ve published their insightful introductions and raved about their translations. We’ve offered to wash their cars, pick up their dry cleaning, and house-sit for them. Now we’ve decided to formalize the arrangement with a new book club. Sign up and you’ll get a one-year subscription to The Paris Review plus one new book from NYRB Classics every month. That’s four issues of the best new fiction, poetry, and interviews, plus twelve books, bringing you the best new and rediscovered classics: a $260 value, for just $140. The book club kicks off this month with Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, a Chinese novel about a fortysomething loser in contemporary Beijing: He’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while he gets by, just, by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. He has contempt for his clients and contempt for himself. The only things he really likes are Beethoven and vintage speakers. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job—a little risky but just don’t ask too many questions—and can it really be that this hopeless loser wins? We’ll be discussing these titles and more here on the Daily in the months to come. We hope you’ll join us in reading along. Subscribe now!
October 3, 2016 On the Shelf That Was Not a Very Nice Thing to Do, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From the cover of My Brilliant Friend. It’s possible you survived the whole weekend without hearing about the unmasking of Elena Ferrante, whose “true identity” (like those exist!) was revealed yesterday by some Italian guy behaving Italianly in The New York Review of Books. If you missed this story, reader—lucky you! I won’t harsh your buzz. You can keep on not knowing Ferrante’s “identity,” as she would’ve wanted it, and I can keep on thinking about which soup I’ll get for lunch today, as I can only assume she would want, too. Deal? Instead, read her Art of Fiction review from our Spring 2015 issue, where she discusses at some length the reasons behind her pseudonym. Or read Dayna Tortorici: “Even the stones know that Ferrante is Ferrante, and that’s the way her readers want it. More than Ferrante herself, her readers have benefited from her choice, spared so much extradiegetic noise. We are as invested in her anonymity—and her autonomy—as she is. It is a compact: she won’t tell us, we won’t ask, and she won’t change her mind and tell us anyway. In exchange, she’ll write books and we’ll read them. The feminist defense of Ferrante’s privacy was especially swift. It’s difficult to read a man’s attempt to ‘out’ a writer who has said she would stop writing if she were ever identified as anything but an attempt to make her stop writing.” Now, let’s divert our attention to a much less controversial story from the NYRB: Nathaniel Rich on George Plimpton. “The quintessential Plimptonian anecdote comes near the end of Paper Lion when, a year after leaving the team, he wistfully follows his old squad from afar. We find him in Bellagio, on Lake Como, chasing down a box score in a Paris Herald he has found at a waterside café. ‘When I read that the Lions had lost a game,’ he writes, ‘I rose in anguish out of my chair, absolutely stiff with grief, my knee catching the edge of the table as I came up, and toppling it over in a fine cascade of Perrier bottles’ … Philip Roth, in the extended appreciation of Plimpton that appears in Exit Ghost, identified the issue of social class as ‘the deepest inspiration for his writing so singularly about sports’ … But the technique only works because Plimpton hides this knowing quality from his readers. There is never a wink or nod in the direction of the premise’s artifice. A consummate straight man, he emphasizes how seriously he is taking matters.” Read More
September 30, 2016 Really Difficult Puzzles Netanyahu’s Ready for More Puzzling?: The Answers By Dylan Hicks Ed. Note: This week’s puzzle contest is officially over—thanks to all who entered. Our winner is Mark Clemens. He gets a free subscription to the Review. Congratulations, Mark! Below, the solutions. Read More