December 16, 2016 On the Shelf Show Me the Money (Over and Over), and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s Jerry Maguire Man! It’s Friday! Let’s watch a movie. How about Jerry Maguire? I love Jerry Maguire. I could watch it every day for the rest of my life and I’d be happy as a clam. Oh please can we please watch Jerry Maguire? I have the videocassette. I have dozens, hundreds of copies of the videocassette. Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, a modern classic, please can we please … my walls are lined with copies of the videocassette. And now: “A Los Angeles art gallery will play host early next year to an exhibit in the form of a videotape rental store with nothing but thousands of VHS copies of the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire. ‘Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste and existence as a whole,’ the collective said in a statement. ‘The Jerrys are a beautiful thing’ … The event is merely a precursor to a planned Jerry Maguire pyramid that the collective hopes to build ‘in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.’ ” Reading Samuel Beckett’s last letters, Robert Fay is heartened by the vision of him as a doddering old man, his health failing but his spirit strong: “‘Might have damaged myself beyond repair last night in the bathroom,’ Beckett writes at the age of sixty-nine to his life-long mistress Barbara Bray in 1975. ‘Had got out of the bath & was drying myself with my back to it when my feet slipped & I fell in backward.’ Two years later he writes, ‘I slipped & fell in the street yesterday, but could pick myself up & go on cursing God & man’ … In 1988 Beckett’s life took its most severe turn when he entered a nursing home in Paris. He understood this was his final home. He writes, ‘Still here with the old crocks [Beckett’s slang for old people], it sometimes feels for keeps.’ A year later, during his final year, his letters become shorter, terser, more like e-mails than epistles. In one of the more touching lines, he ends a letter to his friend Rick Cluchey by writing: ‘Silence is my cloister.’ ” Read More
December 15, 2016 Sleep Aid The Art of Bread Making By Dan Piepenbring It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: a chapter from The Bread and Biscuit Baker’s and Sugar-Boiler’s Assistant, an 1890 book by Robert Wells. When we reflect upon the present conditions under which the bread-making industry is carried on in most of the large cities and towns of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and remember the importance of that industry to mankind, we cannot but be impressed by the little progress that has been made in the art of bread-making. Whilst other industries have been marked by important improvements, we find bread being made in much the same manner as it was five hundred years ago. The mystery is how—by accident, it would seem—we get such well-made bread as we do. There are very few even now who have the slightest conception of what yeast really is, and fewer still who know how or why it makes bread light. But it will surprise me if the trade does not undergo, in the course of the next ten years, a complete and beneficial change. Read More
December 15, 2016 Arts & Culture One Devil Too Many By Ed Simon Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at four hundred. The Devil and Dr. Faustus Meet, ca. 1825. Via Wellcome Images. Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus premiered in 1594. Nearly forty years later, people were still talking about those earliest performances. The Puritan pamphleteer and ideologue William Prynne, in his massive 1633 antitheatrical tome Histriomastix, recounted diabolical legends surrounding this most infernal of plays. The spectators and actors “prophanely playing” in that first production, he reported, had a “visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage.” The good Puritan—soon to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he would have his ears cropped for having implied that the queen was a whore—assures us that though he was not himself familiar with such theatrical dens of iniquity, he can confirm the event’s veracity as “the truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it.” Similarly, a monograph by someone identified only as “G.J.R” recounts that during a performance of the scene where Dr. Faustus begins his conjurations, there suddenly “was one devil too many amongst them.” It seems that the hocus pocus nonsense magic of Marlowe’s immense Latin learning had accidentally triggered an actual occult transaction, pulling one of Lucifer’s servants from hell into our own realm. On that stage in Exeter—there among conjuring circles, chanted invocations, and the adjuring of God’s love—the extras playing stock devils with caked-on red makeup and fake horns strapped to their heads found themselves with the chance to meet the real thing. G.J.R. informs us that “after a little pause… every man hastened to be first out of doors.” The actors (“contrary to their custom,” he duly informs us) spent the night in “reading and in prayer,” making sure to get “out of the town the next morning.” Read More
December 15, 2016 From the Archive Rapid Fire By Taylor Lannamann Olive Cotton, Teacup Ballet (detail), 1935. 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. We’ll use this space to feature recommendations from our staff. This week, our intern Taylor Lannamann recommends Colum McCann. Read More
December 15, 2016 On the Shelf Wilfrid Blunt Hates Your Gift, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Hope you kept the receipt … Sometimes, when you’re in dear need of advice, and there’s nowhere left to turn, and no shoulder to cry on, and the sky is dark and all your food tastes like ash, and you’re just, like, super, super bummed … you’ve got to read the stoics. Elif Batuman picked up the Enchiridion, Epictetus’s manual of ethical advice, and found herself the better for it: “Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided. Wasn’t it my fault that I lived in such isolation, that meaning continued to elude me, that my love life was a shambles? When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. Epictetus’s advice: when alone, ‘call it peace and liberty, and consider yourself the gods’ equal’; in a crowd, think of yourself as a guest at an enormous party, and celebrate the best you can.” But maybe you don’t need Epictetus. Maybe you don’t need anyone’s advice at all, ever! Maybe you don’t even need people! Because here’s the thing: you could just watch slime videos instead. It oozes, it goops, it does a million things, and most of them are active verbs with oo in them. The Instagram slime-video community is booming, Isabel Slone reports, and its pleasures are myriad: “The origins of the slime community are murky, but the practice appears to have begun in Indonesia and Thailand and then spread to North America, where it’s been growing exponentially since June 2016 … Part of slime’s appeal is that it is endlessly customizable. Slime can resemble a pastel blue puff of cotton candy or a tub of crude oil. There is fairy princess slime containing beads and glitter, frothy slime with a surface covered in bubbles, and crunchy slime called floam, which contains tiny Styrofoam beads … When you watch a slime video, just for a moment, the outside world ceases to exist; when everything feels overwhelmingly bad, it’s good to have something foolproof you can turn to, to soften the blow. Slime yields to the human touch.” Read More
December 14, 2016 Inside the Issue Mario Carreño and Concrete Cuba By Caitlin Love The story behind our Winter cover. The cover of our Winter 2016 issue features Sin título, composición (Untitled, composition), a muted, geometric painting from 1956 by the Cuban artist Mario Carreño. Its quiet oranges, somber reds, and deep-sea blues are held within measured rectangles, triangles, and squares. In the top right, a red curve rests on an ocher block like an accent. Sin título hearkens back to the abstract covers the Review favored through the sixties and into the seventies, featuring the work of artists such as Günter Fruhtrunk and Geneviève Claisse. Sin título was on display last February in David Zwirner’s exhibition “Concrete Cuba,” which showcased eleven artists from 1950s Havana. The artists, formally known as Los Diez Pintores Concretos, converged to articulate historical “concrete art within a Cuban context,” as Abigail McEwan writes in the show’s catalogue. The form favored “a mathematical, mechanical construction.” Some paintings, like Loló Soldevilla’s, look like planetary studies, with globular shapes snaking after one another. Mario Carreño held an outsize position in this community. He positioned himself as an early theorist of the movement by working on the magazine Noticias de arte, writing articles such as “Morality in Abstract Painting,” in which he introduced Cuban Concretism as “an aesthetic corollary of the historical and spiritual needs of our time.” Read More