December 2, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bitterness, Blindness, Backing Vocals By The Paris Review A still from Notes on Blindness. This week I read Teddy Wayne’s Loner, an impressively creepy novel of first love, specifically the unrequited, unwelcome, male dork variety. With a straight A student for his antihero—a Harvard freshman who connives his way into the life of a glamorous classmate—Wayne satirizes the teenage male gaze from within. And he does it without ingratiating himself to the reader. At a moment when so many young writers want to join the ranks of the angels, Wayne’s unfashionable wit, bitterness, and tight focus are a gift. —Lorin Stein This week I’ve been reading Terrance Hayes’s most recent collection, How to Be Drawn, which was published last year. Hayes is also a painter and has said that language is unrelated to the physical act of painting, but in this collection, he lets the two brush up against one another to see what comes of it. Some poems are formally adventurous and most are visually expressive in the way the words jostle and play—“The ladies wear wigs of nots, / knots of nots: would nots, do nots, cannots.” They are Mayakovskian in their gusto, though less extravagant and celebratory; on many occasions, his nimble wordplay and punning slow for moments of clear-eyed observation, as when he says of a friend, “A man can be / so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being, / a flavor indistinguishable from spit.” Many of Hayes’s artworks appear to be portraits, and I imagine that language isn’t absent from the act looking, even if it’s a deeply internal process. Perhaps the best argument for the overlap between poetry and painting comes when he writes, “I care less and less / about the shapes of shapes because forms / change and nothing is more durable than feeling.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
December 2, 2016 The Lives of Others Conservatism with Knobs On By Edward White How Rotha Lintorn-Orman became the unlikely founder of the British Fascisti. Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. When Britain had its brush with fascism in the 1930s, it came not in the form of some ugly, uncouth gate-crasher, as has been the case in many Western nations, but a suave establishment tyro: Sir Oswald Mosley, once a Labour MP tipped for Number 10 Downing Street before becoming the leader of the British Union of Fascists—colloquially known as the Blackshirts—in 1932. When the Blackshirts suddenly, and thankfully briefly, emerged as a political force, it was widely accepted that Mosley’s good looks and sexual charisma was at least partially responsible. “He has what is known as ‘magnetism’ … sex-appeal of a sort,” wrote Lionel Birch in his 1936 study Why They Join the Fascists. “For some people, his appearance resembles that of a traditional cavalry officer, for others that of a traditional gigolo.” Mosley’s contemporary, the former Labour cabinet minister Ellen Wilkinson, thought of him as one of the cads played by Rudolph Valentino, not “the nice kind of hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture, but the one who hisses, ‘At last … we meet.’ ” As the historian Robert Skidelsky explains, Mosley deliberately cultivated a public image of a “dark, passionate, Byronic gentleman-villain of the melodrama,” twirling his waxed mustache as he vanquished his enemies and ravished their daughters. Mosley considered his womanizing one of his great strengths, and in private took the business of treating women like dirt extremely seriously; he repeatedly cheated on his first wife, including with her sister and, so he once claimed, her stepmother. Publicly, he was “pledged to complete sex equality.” He maintained that nobody had more respect for women than he did, and that “my movement has been largely built by women.” The notion that the Blackshirts were seriously committed to furthering the collective and individual rights of women is as spurious and dishonest as most of what came out of Mosley’s mouth. Like his hero Mussolini, he considered fascism a bulwark of masculinity against women’s suffrage, consumerism, mass media, and the other emasculating assaults of the modern age. Yet, he was right that women played a more prominent role in building fascism in Britain than had been the case on mainland Europe. In fact, the first Briton to lead an avowedly fascist organization was a woman named Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the founder of the British Fascisti. Read More
December 2, 2016 On the Shelf At Least We Have Isabelle Huppert, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s December: time to roll out the Best Books of the Year lists, and with them the many perils of list making, with its sting of exclusion and its weird subtexts. Just bear in mind that the earliest book list was intended to ban them: “Books lists are one of the oldest and dodgiest forms of literary criticism. The most famous of them is, after all, probably the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, enforced for centuries, and surviving long enough to take in both The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. The impulse behind the modern, secular, ostensibly more pro-literary version of the book list remains disquieting: don’t read that, it would seem to say. Read this. There is an irresistible appeal in such simplicity—in being able to place your trust in the critical acumen that supposedly lies behind the making of such lists. Although one reader’s acumen often turns out to be another reader’s blind prejudice.” Jim Delligatti, the inventor of the Big Mac, has died at ninety-eight. His sandwich remains arguably America’s all-time greatest export, its calling card around the world; a heaping serving of savory corporate imperialism, smothered in special sauce. It’s fucking delicious. And it might’ve made Delligatti a household name, but Mickey D’s wasn’t about to give him a cut of the profits—or even of the glory: “Delligatti, who opened the first McDonald’s in western Pennsylvania in 1957, owned about a dozen franchises in the Pittsburgh area by the mid-1960s, but he struggled to compete with the Big Boy and Burger King chains. He proposed to company executives that they add a double-patty hamburger to the McDonald’s menu … It was introduced on April 22, 1967, with newspaper ads describing it as ‘made with two freshly ground patties, tangy melted cheese, crisp lettuce, pickle and our own Special Sauce’ … The sales remain huge, leading many to believe that Mr. Delligatti, as its inventor, must have reaped a windfall worth billions. Not so. ‘All I got was a plaque,’ he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2007.” Read More
December 1, 2016 From the Archive Marie Brings a Knife By Dan Piepenbring Edward P. Jones, California, 2004. Courtesy the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece 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. Read More
December 1, 2016 Books The Pleasures of Incomprehensibility By Michael LaPointe Why we don’t need to decode “the world’s most mysterious book.” Pages from the Voynich Manuscript. Medieval manuscripts are survivors—of Viking raids, of damp and decay—but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gold and silver, embellished with vegetal and animistic imagery, and sketched through with the marginalia of generations of owners. Even editions made from common calfskin can inspire the same awe as the upper reaches of cathedrals. The Voynich Manuscript, an early fifteenth-century volume housed in Yale’s Beinecke library, looks at first like any such edition, with its loopy text and colorful illustrations. Yet as soon as you try reading the book, it resists. There’s no author, no title. It isn’t written in a foreign language; rather, this language is totally unknown. And while the illustrations appear to be plants or stars or baths, in fact they have no analogue in the known world. It’s as outside of genre as dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, and indeed it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was composed by someone descending into madness. Scholars have tried to decode it for centuries. Some have suggested it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon, while others insist it must have been bestowed on humanity by aliens. More cynical thinkers believe that the manuscript is a hoax, probably created by medieval charlatans. But no matter how hard people search for answers, the book refuses to yield meaning—it’s totally incomprehensible. Read More
December 1, 2016 Our Correspondents In Comparison By Wei Tchou Asking Ma about life in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. My mother and I were decorating the Christmas tree during a quiet afternoon last week when I thought to ask her if the sorrow I have been inclined toward postelection is anything like what she experienced during the Cultural Revolution, when she was a teenager. I had flown home to Georgia for Thanksgiving feeling exhausted and emotionally volatile—still trapped in what felt and continues to feel like grief. “Some of it seems familiar,” she said, “but no, it’s nothing in comparison.” I asked her what felt the same, as I scooped up a handful of ornaments. Our collection neatly comprises my family’s entire United States’ life: here are a few mice knitted by my grandmother when my parents first arrived in America; a sand dollar tied with a red ribbon from the first church they joined in Kentucky; a bell cut from orange construction paper with a photograph of my pudgy face pasted on it, from 1991. Read More