January 20, 2017 On the Shelf I Buy All My Golf Balls at Costco, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Andrea Benetti, Golf, 2010. The man entering the White House today is many dubious things, and here is one: he’s an avid golfer, so much so that he’s just appeared on the cover of Golf Digest as our “golfer-in-chief.” Let me be clear: I don’t trust golfers. They have an almost coagulated aura of excess leisure about them, like pet beds or angina. If your idea of a good time involves puttering around manicured country-club greens in an ill-fitting polo shirt, teeing off with the rich and idle while the hired help lugs your heavy bags of long metal rods, then, brother, you are no friend of mine. The Wall Street Journal has cut to the golfer’s rubberized core with a report on their collective obsession with Kirkland-brand golf balls—you know, from Costco. Such balls are so ideally plotted on the affordability-quality matrix (unit price $1.25) that they’re the envy of every Palm Beach–dwelling retired partner from Deloitte. Brian Costa writes, “What made the balls a hot item among fanatical golfers is the revelation that, by some accounts, they perform like rivals that sell for more than twice as much … That idea sent shock waves through a billion-dollar industry, left Costco out of stock for weeks at a time and caused secondary-market prices for the ball to soar. Its popularity is threatening one of the sport’s long-held consumer beliefs: when it comes to the quality of golf balls, you generally get what you pay for … The ball was such a curiosity to one major equipment company that employees there cut one in half to study its interior, hoping to discern more about its origin and composition.” Relatedly, if you find yourself dwelling, for some reason, on notions of vulgarity these days, seek refuge at the Barbican, where an exhibition called “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined” aims to rehabilitate the concept. Hilary Reid writes, “The show takes shape around eleven categories of vulgarity conceived by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, like ‘Puritan,’ ‘Impossible Ambition,’ and ‘Showing Off.’ Each is explored through clothing, shoes, and texts spanning the eighteenth century through the present … To call something vulgar may say more about oneself than the thing in question, Phillips argues. One employs the word, he writes, to ‘reassure oneself of one’s own good taste’ and to reaffirm ‘the fact that there is such a thing as good taste, and that it protects us’ … Through humor and style, the exhibition hints at what might be gained if we loosen our grip on good taste. Strolling through the rooms of the Barbican, one can’t help but feel a kind of optimism that vulgarity, when carefully applied, can rattle the existing order.” Read More
January 19, 2017 From the Archive The Business of Power By Dan Piepenbring Rembrandt’s Trumpeter—emphasize the first syllable, if you wish. 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. I don’t need to come right out and say why Peter Leight’s poem “The Business of Power,” from our Spring–Summer 1978 issue, appeals to me at present. Just to see the words “business” and “power” sharing a line is probably more than enough for you to get the gist. I’m not going to raise an eyebrow at the “lumps, muffs, stomach folds, pendant chins” that comprise the bodies of the ruling class, as Leight describes them; nor am I going to note that a phrase like “showcasing girth” is so sickeningly relevant right now as to make one wince; nor will I sally forth and deliver my long thesis on the lines “they mask their puissance and assume a cheapness that ensures / acceptability,” because you know what that thesis is—we’re all living it. So here, then, just read the poem: it may as well have been written two minutes ago, and I fear we’ll be saying the same after another thirty-nine years have passed. It begins, Read More
January 19, 2017 Look Ideas and a New Hat By James McWilliams Francesca Woodman’s playful darkness. Francesca Woodman, Space 2, 1976. Francesca Woodman died on this day in 1981. Digital subscribers can see a portfolio of her early work in our Spring 2014 issue. In 1912, the essayist Randolph Bourne wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the ability to think “was given us for use in emergencies, and no man can be justly blamed if he reserves it for emergencies.” If the photography of Francesca Woodman can be reduced to one defining feature, it’s that she provides emergencies. Woodman’s emergencies are not loud or particularly dangerous; they don’t require alarms or intervention. But they do ask us to think, to ponder the urgency of an unorthodox kind of desire—a desire that insists, I am here, naked and soft, on one side of a wall, and I want to be over there, on the other side, where an equally naked and soft orchid flirts with me. This situation is serious. Read More
January 19, 2017 Our Correspondents Some “Ozbervatims” on Edward Lear By Anthony Madrid I just finished reading my review copy of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry. The book consists of seventeen scholarly essays, many of which got their starts as papers delivered at an Edward Lear bicentennial conference at Oxford in 2012. I found the book admirable, valuable, and annoying as hell. The present note will not be a review, but only a few stray thoughts. Read More
January 19, 2017 On the Shelf Works of Simple Witnessing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An 1861 lithograph of the Great Fire of London. The “Art Under Trump” essays have been coming fast and loose all week. Today, Margaret Atwood weighs in, sounding a bit leery, a bit tired of wondering what will come of it all. Even as she endorses certain creative forms over others (sorry, satirists), Atwood suggests that artists might be powerless to curb their own suppression. Keep your eyes open, write down what you see, and maybe take out a safe-deposit box: “Some will produce ‘witness art,’ like those artists who have responded to great catastrophes: wars, earthquakes, genocides. Surely the journal-keepers are already at work, inscribing events and their responses to them, like those who kept accounts of the Black Death until they themselves succumbed to it; or like Anne Frank, writing her diary from her attic hiding place; or like Samuel Pepys, who wrote down what happened during the Great Fire of London. Works of simple witnessing can be intensely powerful … American artists and writers have seldom been shy about exploring the fissures and cracks in their own country. Let’s hope that if democracy implodes and free speech is suppressed, someone will record the process as it unfolds.” The fourth and final volume of Beckett’s letters is here, covering 1966 to 1989, which means it contains Beckett’s musings on 1968 (“was ever such rightness joined to such foolishness?”), surviving tragedy (“don’t give up that bottle, whatever you do”) and, naturally, death. David Wheatley writes, “As the light dwindles, however, the real pleasure lies in the ‘black diamonds of pessimism,’ to borrow a phrase from the early work Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in which much that is moving and memorable about these letters crystallizes. ‘Dans vos ruines je me sens à mon aise,’ he tells Cioran in 1969, acknowledging receipt of Le mauvais démiurge. To Lawrence Shainberg in 1979, Beckett confesses the ‘preposterous conviction’ that ‘here in the end is the last & by far best chance for the writer.’ ‘I work on, with failing mind, in other words improved possibilities,’ he tells Herbert Myron in 1980, relishing his receding prospects. ‘I try to think,’ he writes in Watt-like cadences to Franz Wurm, also in 1980, ‘with what mind remains, that now is the time at last, the chance at last, in these remains, with those remains, though think is not the word, at last not the word.’ ” Read More
January 18, 2017 On Film Let’s Get Ready to Crumble By Dan Piepenbring Andy Griffith, looking unhinged and awfully familiar. That slogan comes from a 2005 commercial for Kraft Crumbles, “intense nuggets of real Kraft Cheese” that give your food “that big cheese taste that blows you away.” (You might remember that these crumbles were “crumbelievable,” and that America learned about them to the tune of EMF’s 1990 dance-pop classic, “Unbelievable.”) As the inauguration nears, the phrase has come to mind almost hourly: let’s get ready to crumble. Let us watch as the Thick Man, with his processed-cheese-product glow, assumes the mantle of power and crumbelievable rubble rains down from on high. But you don’t simply wake up all ready to crumble. Crumbling preparedness takes time and effort. It begins by going to the movies. Read More