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
December 14, 2016 Our Correspondents A Good Whipping By Anthony Madrid On the “Mrs Thrale” bit in Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hester and Queeney Thrale, 1777–1778. Frank O’Hara composed the piece that he later called “Meditations in an Emergency” on or around June 25, 1954—anyhow, that is the date on the manuscript. At that time, the title was “Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions,” which makes O’Hara’s debt to John Donne’s 1624 text Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions much more obvious. O’Hara’s piece, retitled at the suggestion of Kenneth Koch, was published in Poetry about four months later, which is an excellent turn-around time. This was during the five years when Karl Shapiro was editor. You can have a look at the original page layout of “Meditations in an Emergency” here. Clickers who know the text will find no surprises. Read More
December 14, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Jane Mai The latest entry in the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novel The Return of Münchausen, translated into English for the first time by Joanne Turnbull. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime (he died in 1950). “A fantastical plot is my method,” he once wrote. “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.” In Münchausen, Krzhizhanovsky borrows from the life—both real and legendary—of Baron Münchausen to spin his own absurd tale involving the baron’s post–World War I perambulations in Berlin, London, and Moscow on a diplomatic mission. Bizarre and fantastic, Münchausen (or is it Krzhizhanovky?) defends imagination above all else. The Daily is featuring a trio of adaptations of short excerpts from the novel. In our latest installment, Jane Mai finds the baron pondering the subject on love and marriage and remembering “a mild flirtation with a pair of charming eyes.” Read More