January 26, 2017 On the Shelf Mr. Coffee Mansplains, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “This is how a man makes coffee … ” The churlish “alternative facts” coming out of the Oval Office have led to an uptick in sales of 1984, which remains America’s go-to dystopian fiction: whenever our liberties are trampled on, someone’s reaching for the Orwell. Yes, Orwell, Orwell, he’s our man, if he can’t articulate the all-consuming dread of the totalitarian surveillance state, no one can! But Josephine Livingstone argues that there are better metaphors for our times: “When we suspect that we are living in a dystopia characterized by clumsy propaganda, it’s the book we buy from Amazon.com … But there is no Amazon.com in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because it is not a novel about globalized capital. Not even slightly! Nineteen Eighty-Four does not pastiche a world ravaged by capitalism and ruled by celebrities—the kind of world that could lead to the election of someone like Trump. Instead, it depicts suffering inflicted by state control masquerading as socialism.” Better, Livingstone says, to pick up some Kafka, which is right on the money: “In The Trial, Josef K. wakes up on his thirtieth birthday and is arrested. He cannot really conceive of what is happening: ‘K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?’ ” But did you ever wonder about what the other side of the Iron Curtain was reading? Before we were oohing and ahhing over Orwell, the Soviet Union was gaga for Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly, an 1897 novel about “revolutionary zeal, religious devotion, clerical betrayal and romantic love.” Benjamin Ramm writes, “It was in the newly created Communist states of the Soviet Union and China that the book found its most dedicated readership. Arthur, the embodiment of a Romantic tragic hero, was repeatedly voted Russia’s most popular literary figure, and cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in space, credited its influence.” Read More
January 25, 2017 In Memoriam Harry Mathews, 1930–2017 By The Paris Review We’re sad to report that Harry Mathews has died, in Key West, at the age of eighty-six. In Harry, the Review has lost one of its most faithful and best-loved contributors, a writer we’ve worked with for more than fifty years—beginning in 1962, when we ran an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. Now, in our new Spring issue, we’ll publish an excerpt from the novel he just finished, The Solitary Twin. Our publisher, Susannah Hunnewell, interviewed Harry in 2007 for our Art of Fiction series. In her introduction she sketched his unique place in American fiction: He is usually identified as the sole American member of the Oulipo, a French writers’ group whose stated purpose is to devise mathematical structures that can be used to create literature. He has also been associated with the New York School of avant-garde writers, which included his friends John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh. Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic French readers, Mathews remains relatively unknown in his native land and language. “When I go into an English bookstore, I always ask the same question,” a Frenchman told me with the sly smile that infects all Mathews fans. “ ‘Do you have Tlooth?’ ” “I think what good writers do is rework sentences and paragraphs so that their prose works exactly the way they want it to work, whatever it may be saying,” Mathews says in the interview. “And for me that is a musical phenomenon … In America there’s a tradition that says that what literature should do is give you the real thing. But for me, the only real thing is the writing.”
January 25, 2017 Correspondence Shut up in the Dark By Dan Piepenbring Woolf, ca. 1902. In July 1910, after she had attempted to kill herself by defenestration, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) was institutionalized at Burley House, “a nursing home for women with nervous disorder.” She wrote the letter below to her sister, Vanessa Bell. Read more of Woolf’s correspondence in the five-volume Letters of Virginia Woolf. I meant to write several days ago, although you do say you dont care a damn. But in that too I was hoodwinked by Miss Thomas. I gather that some great conspiracy is going on behind my back. What a mercy we cant have at each other! or we should quarrel till midnight, and Clarissas (the coming ‘neice’) deformities, inherited from generations of hard drinking Bells, would be laid at my door. She-(Miss T.) wont read me or quote your letters. But I gather that you want me to stay on here. She is in a highly wrought state, as the lunatic upstairs has somehow brought her case into court; and I cant make her speak calmly. Do write and explain. Having read your last letter at least 10 times—so that Miss Bradbury (nurse) is sure it is a love letter and looks very arch—I cant find a word about my future … I really dont think I can stand much more of this. Miss T. is charming, and Miss Bradbury is a good woman, but you cant conceive how I want intelligent conversation—even yours. Religion seems to me to have ruined them all. Miss T. is always culminating in silent prayer. Miss Somerville (patient), the absent minded one with the deaf dog, wears two crucifixes. Miss B. says Church Bells are the sweetest sound on earth. She also says that the old Queen the Queen Mother and the present Queen represent the highest womanhood. They reverence my gifts, although God has left me in the dark. They are always wondering what God is up to. The religious mind is quite amazing. Read More
January 25, 2017 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 4: Lullaby By Mike Powell Mike Powell’s column is about living in Arizona. Bryan Olson, Dream Catcher, collage. Driving around for groceries one afternoon I encountered an interesting AM radio announcement for homeschooling. Not any particular method or approach to homeschooling, but for homeschooling in general. Curious about what other forms of isolation such a station might advertise, I listened further. Following the announcement came a string of foggy, sentimental music that the station, 690 KCEE, refers to as “pop classics.” On AM 690, you might hear a teen idol like Perry Como followed by early-seventies soft rock, or “Earth Angel” followed by a highly polished country ballad—Don Williams singing “I Believe in You” or “I’m Just a Country Boy,” maybe—music unified not by style or time but by the internal suggestion that hardship was over and the rest was dream. This was September or October, months that in most parts of the country signal the turn from summer to fall but in Southern Arizona mean continued triple-digit temperatures paired with the collective fatigue of things having been this way since May. I had recently moved to Arizona from New York, an interesting place I always hated. I was nesting, staying in more, reconciling myself happily to a city where there wasn’t much to do. Read More
January 25, 2017 Notes from a Biographer The Making of a Comics Biography, Part 2 By Joe Ollmann Read More
January 25, 2017 On the Shelf Stay Humble, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hans Memling, Vanité (detail), ca. 1490. Our contributor Ben Nugent appears on Selected Shorts’ “Too Hot for Radio” podcast this week to discuss his short story “God,” which appeared in our Fall 2013 issue. Here’s how it all started, he says: “One of my best creative-writing students, Megan Kidder, a well mannered girl from rural Maine with dyed black hair, a silver nose ring, and a studded belt dropped by my office and informed me, I wrote a poem about how this one guy prematurely ejaculated … ” Here’s Carina Chocano to remind you that you’re probably misusing the word humbled, you misinformed braggart, you duplicitous self-promoter, you smarmy pretender to humility: “To be humbled is to be brought low or somehow diminished in standing or stature. Sometimes we’re humbled by humiliation or failure or some other calamity. And sometimes we’re humbled by encountering something so grand, meaningful or sublime that our own small selves are thrown into stark contrast—things like history, or the cosmos, or the divine … To be humbled is to find yourself in the embarrassing position of having to shimmy awkwardly off your pedestal, or your high horse—or some other elevated place that would not have seemed so elevated had you not been so lowly to begin with—muttering apologies and cringing, with your skirt riding up past your granny pants.” Read More