March 16, 2017 Our Correspondents Origin Story By Elena Passarello This is Elena Passarello’s final column about famous animals from history, featuring Little John, a coyote who made seventies art-world history. Design by Kristen Radtke. This was a typical performance by Joseph Beuys—mysterious, incomprehensible, in many ways absurd, yet strangely memorable. —London Telegraph I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote. —Joseph Beuys His back was never turned to the people watching from behind the barrier. Maybe he sensed that more danger would come from them than from the man in there with him, or maybe it was simply because he was a splendid showman. —Caroline Tisdall Name: Little John Species: Canis latrans var Years Active: 1974 Distinguishing Features: well-tended sable coat, toothy grin Skills: fetching leather gloves, urinating on newspapers of record, transforming humans into their mythic selves Habitat: 409 West Broadway, New York, NY 10012 Additional Notes: When Joseph Beuys was a teenage pilot stationed in Crimea, his plane was shot down, his copilot incinerated on impact. A band of nomadic Tartars dressed in coarse fur found the injured Beuys on the steppe; they salved his wounds with animal fat and swaddled him in felt. Then they dragged Beuys to their tents, where they healed him. The transforming powers of these natural substances—fur, flesh, and felt—made Beuys an artist. Or that’s the story Beuys told, at least. German military records show Beuys served as a radio operator, and though he was aboard a plane that crashed in 1941, it went down, not in the hinterlands, but on a Crimean airstrip, where a colleague pulled him from the wreckage. Read More
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