February 3, 2017 The Lives of Others The Great Crime By Edward White How a forgotten American diplomat resisted the Armenian Genocide. An Armenian looking at the human remains at Deir el-Zor, 1916. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Brief though it was, Henry Morgenthau’s career as U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire marked one of the most astonishing chapters in American overseas diplomacy. In January 1916, he left Constantinople having served for little more than two years and headed home to New York, determined to help Woodrow Wilson win a second term. “I could imagine no greater calamity,” he later recollected, “for the U.S. and the world than that the American nation should fail to heartily endorse this great statesman.” Morgenthau was convinced that Wilson was the best candidate to reshape an international order that had descended into savagery. In the preceding nine months, he had seen it with his own eyes, as the Ottoman government carried out an unspeakable offense against its people, slaughtering more than a million ethnic Armenians. Protected by American neutrality during the first three years of World War I, Morgenthau was the fulcrum of a network of American diplomats, missionaries, and businesspeople who gained an eyewitness perspective of the massacres. Their testimony constitutes a compelling body of evidence about what happened to the Armenians: an outrage for which the term genocide was invented. News of the massacres reached Washington through Morgenthau, but it was U.S. consulate officials in more remote regions who saw up close what’s known in Armenian as Medz Yeghern, “the Great Crime.” Leslie Davis was U.S. consul in the province of Harput, an area of Turkey in which Armenians accounted for about a third of the population. Seated amid the Anatolian highlands, Harput was roughly seven hundred miles from the capital, necessitating a twenty-one-day journey: eighteen on horseback to a railway station, then three on a train. Davis himself described the Harput consulate as “one of the most remote and inaccessible in the world”; the urban splendor of Constantinople seemed as distant as the moon. Read More
February 3, 2017 On the Shelf The Ascending Strings, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Augusta Savage presents a model of “The Harp” to Grover Whalen, the organizer of the World’s Fair. Photo: New York Public Library Are you tired of fellow feeling? Have you had it up to here with all this talk about “walking a mile in another person’s shoes” and “understanding the suffering of others”? You probably don’t have many friends, do you? And yet there’s a place in this world for you. A new book by the psychologist Paul Bloom argues so steadfastly against empathy that its title is Against Empathy. And his theory is not so uncaring as that title suggests: “People are bingeing on a sentiment that does not, on balance, make the world a better place. Empathy is ‘sugary soda, tempting and delicious and bad for us.’ In its stead, Mr. Bloom prescribes a nutritious diet of reason, compassion, and self-control … His complaint is with empathy defined as feeling what someone else feels. Though philosophers at least as far back as Adam Smith have held it up as a virtue, Mr. Bloom says it is a dubious moral guide. Empathy is biased: people tend to feel for those who look like themselves. It is limited in scope, often focusing attention on the one at the expense of the many, or on short-term rather than long-term consequences. It can incite hatred and violence … It is innumerate, blind to statistics and to the costs of saccharine indulgence.” Augusta Savage was the most important black woman sculptor of the twentieth century, Keisha N. Blain writes, but she’s tragically uncelebrated now: “Like other key figures of the 1920s such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Savage skillfully challenged negative images and stereotypical depictions of black people. One of her largest commissions, for instance, was a sculpture for the World’s Fair of 1939, inspired by ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ a song often described as the black national anthem. Also known as the ‘The Harp,’ it depicted black singers as the ascending strings of that instrument. Regrettably, it was destroyed when the fairgrounds were torn down … The racial climate at the time hampered wider recognition of her work. Savage won a prestigious scholarship at a summer arts program at the Fontainebleau School of the Fine Arts outside of Paris in 1923, for instance, but the offer was withdrawn when the school discovered that she was black. Despite her efforts — she filed a complaint with the Ethical Culture Committee — and public outcry from several well-known black leaders at the time, the organizers upheld the decision.” Read More
February 2, 2017 From the Archive The Engraver’s Delicate Hammer By Dan Piepenbring 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-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period. James Dickey, who would be ninety-four today, contributed a handful of poems to the Review throughout his career. In our Fall 1985 issue, he also published, most anomalously, a remembrance of Truman Capote, whom he’d only met once. “Indeed,” the editors wrote then, “his only firm recollection was a chance meeting in New York’s Gotham Book Mart at which—as Southerners tend to do—the two talked about relatives: Capote had an aunt ‘up ’round Buford way.’ ” Read More
February 2, 2017 Our Correspondents Finding the Light By Wei Tchou How studying the Enneagram can expand one’s empathy. Sufi Enneagram. Last month, right after the New Year, on a day I was feeling distracted and listless at work, my friend Ella mentioned a personality-typing system known as the Enneagram over G-chat. She described it as Myers-Briggs but better, and though I was skeptical, I clicked around the Internet until I discovered a test at the Enneagram Institute that would produce my “full personality profile.” It had been independently scientifically validated in El Paso, Texas. I didn’t take the test because it costs twelve dollars and consists of 140 questions. (It felt too early in the year for impulsive wastefulness.) But I became absorbed in learning about this theory of self-discovery anyway. I read the website, then I borrowed a book from Ella, then I gave in and ordered The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types, via overnight mail. Read More
February 2, 2017 Inside the Issue Angels and Administration: An Interview with Alexander Kluge By Ben Lerner Our Winter issue features fiction by Alexander Kluge: “In Medieval Angelology, There Are Nine Orders of Snow,” twenty-two stories on some lines from Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. Kluge made a rare trip to New York a few months ago, appearing in conversation with Lerner at the Goethe-Institut and at Princeton. Afterward, they talked over sushi. The interview below is excerpted from their conversation. They continue to send poems and prose back and forth to each other. LERNER The current issue of The Paris Review includes stories you wrote in response to The Lichtenberg Figures, my first book of poems. How did you encounter the book? KLUGE A coworker found the bilingual German translation. He said, Here’s a book you cannot buy anymore. The title is The Lichtenberg Figures. He knew that I was very interested in Lichtenberg, particularly The Waste Books. Your book costs seventy-eight euros because it’s out of print. German publishing houses always prefer fiction to poetry. Lyrics are concentrated forms. It’s a much better way to express yourself. In all these deserts of information we need some oasis, and that’s what the lyric is. LERNER And so how do you think about your short prose forms in relation to lyric poetry? KLUGE My language is not as beautiful as lyrics. This is something that you have to know how to do. Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds—I am a good archaeologist. Read More
February 2, 2017 On the Shelf Puppets Are Doing Just Fine, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Look at ’em go! One fun thing you can do with art is: use it to tell people what assholes they are. This is easy to try, but hard to master. Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German writer, has the knack for it; his “YOLOCAUST” project publically shames anyone who’s ignorant enough to take a selfie at the Holocaust memorial. Alicia Eler writes, “He simply manipulated the original selfies at the memorial to include actual photos of Nazi crimes, which range from piles of dead bodies to pictures of starving people jailed in concentration camp bunks. The seamless Photoshopping job was what really made this project click. Upon visiting Yolocaust.de, which launched mid-January, you’d find various people’s selfies at the Holocaust memorial. However, if you moved your mouse over them, the once-joyful images transformed into the Photoshopped ones of Nazi death camps. Within one week of launching, the page was visited by 2.5 million people, and all twelve people Shapira featured in the project had taken their photos off of social media and also apologized … The artist invited the people in the pictures to contact him asking that he take their pictures down, simply by e-mailing [email protected].” So many once-thriving art forms are headed for obscurity; so many robust traditions have been lost to the sands of time. But not puppetry. Puppetry is doing great. Laura Collins-Hughes writes, “It’s not so much that puppetry is having an evanescent moment as that it has reached critical mass and settled in, cherished by grown-up audiences raised on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show who have had their hunger stoked by landmark puppet productions on Broadway … Cheryl Henson—a daughter of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson, and the president of the Jim Henson Foundation, a major force in contemporary puppet theater—said that American puppeteers had caught up to the European standard of the craft.” (Or the Russian standard, if we’re talking about Putin the puppeteer—am I right? Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Hold your applause.) Read More