December 5, 2016 Department of Tomfoolery Krushing on Krampus By Laren Stover He wasn’t handsome or well-dressed. In fact, he wasn’t dressed. He was the size of an elf, made of fuzzy red chenille. But most striking—considering he arrived in a box of gifts from Vienna in December—was that he had a devilish head with horns and clutched, not a gift, but a bundle of ominous twigs. Why was my Austrian friend Susanne sending me a pipe-cleaner devil? “That’s the Krampus,” she told me when we spoke. “Before Christmas, on December 5, the Krampus shows up at houses where children have misbehaved.” “Why is he holding sticks?” “Birch switches to beat the bad children.” Whoa. And then she told me the Krampus drags the really bad ones down to the underworld! It was love. Read More
December 5, 2016 Bulletin Our Winter Issue: Rankine, Gray, Murray, and More By Dan Piepenbring The interviews in our new Winter issue feature three writers who have defied received wisdom—writers who have expanded art’s role in the national conversation. The first is one of the most politically engaged poets of our time; the second is a novelist whose experimental forms have made him a hero in his native Scotland, though he remains underread in the U.S.; and the third is with a critic who devoted his career to asserting and celebrating the centrality of the black experience to American culture. First, there’s Claudia Rankine on the art of poetry, finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces, and reaching as wide an American audience as possible: Read More
December 5, 2016 Arts & Culture Little Books, Big Books By Cynthia Payne A glimpse of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia. Charlotte Brontë, Lycidas, watercolor drawing, March 4, 1835. Copied from a print after painting by Henry Fuseli. Brontë Parsonage Museum. To attempt to pry into the juvenilia—or “hidden works,” as the biographer Claire Harman terms them—of Charlotte Brontë is to encounter a gentle but undeniable refusal. The current exhibition devoted to Brontë’s life and work at the Morgan Library & Museum, drawn largely from its own collections and that of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, allows a few tantalizing glimpses of Brontë’s early writing. Most touching and accessible is her very first extant work, a small book made for her youngest sister “Ane,” who was motherless by her second year and motherless again at age five after the deaths of the family’s two eldest daughters. Open to a page illustrated by a beguiling tiny watercolor of a sailing ship, the book makes clear how early Brontë, then age twelve or so, understood the power of imaginary travel. That travel was very soon denied to adults, for the books that followed are, even when examined with a magnifying glass, virtually unreadable, despite their careful script and wonderfully exact illustrations; they’re simply too tiny for the middle-aged eye, and perhaps for any eye other than that of a Brontë sibling. The four surviving Brontë children—three sisters and a brother—all wrote, but their intent was never to have their manuscripts read by others, most especially perhaps their father and aunt. Charlotte once promised a boarding-school friend a glimpse and then reneged. It seems that Monsieur Heger, her teacher, muse, maître, and great unrequited love, was the first to be entrusted with a few of her most cherished early works. Read More
December 5, 2016 On the Shelf Only You Can Justify the Humanities, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Reading, 1892. In 2013, two social scientists from the New School announced that reading literary fiction seemed to make people more empathetic, according to their research. The literary community, more desperate than ever for the imprimatur of the sciences, latched on to their study like a thirsty deer tick: here, at last, was proof of our value. But it was not meant to be, friends. New researchers have failed to replicate the results of the original study, leaving the humanities to wander alone again in this cold, dark, fiercely utilitarian nightmare we call “life.” Joseph Frankel writes, “It’s still an open question why psychologists, the media, and laypeople alike are so interested in the possible benefits of reading fiction … Those both in and outside of the humanities have ascribed moral benefits to literature and art as ‘a rescue operation’ for these disciplines at a time when their worth is under scrutiny. It’s hard not to see arguments that literature might make people more empathetic, more moral, or more socially adept as a corrective to the perceived lack of ‘return of investment’ when it comes to the arts. ‘I don’t hope or believe that social psychology is needed to justify the humanities,’ [the social scientist] Kidd told me. But in a culture where science is sometimes treated with more gravity than the humanities, this research can be used to do exactly that.” Linguists, on the other hand, are looking like world-historical heroes right now. I mean, haven’t you seen Arrival? A linguist saves the fucking planet. And Ben Zimmer (a linguist) is pretty excited about that message: “Academic linguists like myself should be overjoyed for this confirmation of what I’ve long suspected: we are absolutely crucial to the survival of humanity … This is the first science-fiction film I have seen that puts a great effort into representing a detailed scientific approach to an alien encounter. With a few caveats, linguists and linguistics were portrayed in a very true to life manner.” Read More
December 2, 2016 From the Archive Grace Paley’s Most Shocking Story By Dan Piepenbring Today, read Grace Paley’s story “The Little Girl,” from our Spring 1974 issue. Without spoiling too much, it’s the most shocking of her stories—and she told the Guardian in 2004 that it’s true. The narrator is a friend of hers she met in the fifties, through the Southern Conference for Human Welfare: “There were a lot of runaways then … and sometimes he would bring these girls to me and say, ‘Put some sense in her head.’ ” Paley, who died in 2007, refused to read the story aloud. It begins: Carter stop by the cafe early. I just done waxing. He said, I believe I’m having company later on. Let me use your place, Charley, hear? I told him, door is open, go ahead. Man coming for the meter, (why I took the lock off.) I told him Angie, my lodger could be home but he strung out most the time. He don’t even know when someone practicing the horn in the next room. Carter, you got hours and hours. There ain’t no wine there, nothing like it. He said he had some other stuff would keep him on top. That was a joke. Thank you, brother, he said. I told him I believe I have tried anything, but to this day, I like whiskey. If you have whiskey, you drunk, but if you pumped up with drugs, you just crazy. Yeah hear that man, he said. Then his eyeballs start walking away. Read “The Little Girl” in full here; and subscribe now for digital access to every short story, poem, portfolio, and essay from The Paris Review.
December 2, 2016 Our Correspondents Notes on Camp By Megan Mayhew Bergman Using Susan Sontag to consider the American devotion to lawn culture. Peter Alfred Hess, untitled, watercolor on cold press Arches paper, 30″ x 22″. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty … My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. —Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying This year’s growing season was longer than expected, and gave my family tomatoes, copious greens, pale peonies, and Russian sage that grew with a fury, reaching over the beds, shaking a flush of tiny purple blossoms onto the paths. I was too busy to tend these plants and edibles in spring, so they bloomed into something wild and tangled, potentially man-eating. Only when there were novel edits to make or difficult phone conversations to endure did I go to the garden to weed on my knees, bare-handed, desperate for the distraction of physical labor. Working with one’s hands feels meditative and purposeful when the mind is overheated. It is therefore not unusual to find a connection between writer and gardener; we have more need than most to find balance between what Hannah Arendt called the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Emily Dickinson claimed she was “reared in the garden.” Virginia Woolf warned friends that her expansive garden at her country home, Monk’s House, was “the pride of our hearts.” In a 1911 letter, Edith Wharton claimed she was “a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth.” Read More