November 28, 2016 Look Bombed Out of Their Gourds By Dan Piepenbring This week, Taschen is publishing a new, photographic edition of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, for which he embedded with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for their transcontinental (and very psychotropically enhanced) bus tour. Printed in a limited run of 1,968 copies, the new edition features never-before-seen facsimile reproductions of Wolfe’s manuscript pages; excerpts from Ken Kesey’s jailhouse journals; handbills and ephemera from the period; and photo-essays from Lawrence Schiller and Ted Streshinsky, who covered “the acid scene” for Life magazine and the New York Herald Tribune, respectively. Below are a few of the photos and documents from the book. Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, November 29, Wolfe will appear in conversation with Paul Holdengräber at the New York Public Library. Original manuscript page for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, complete with Tom Wolfe’s doodles and corrections, ca. 1967. The author’s never-before-published manuscript pages appear as tip-ins throughout the book. Copyright: © 2016 and courtesy of Tom Wolfe. Read More
November 28, 2016 Bulletin New Paris Review Look, Same Great Paris Review Taste! By Dan Piepenbring Do not adjust your sets: theparisreview.org has been fully redesigned and beautified. If you fear change, you’ll be horrified to learn that this new site is more than just a cosmetic improvement: it also marks the debut of our complete digital archive, making available each and 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. Now you can read every short story and poem, every portfolio, every hastily doodled authorial self-portrait, and every introductory notice from the unassailable George Plimpton, who used to use the front of the magazine to brag about its ever-longer masthead. (“It is extremely difficult to extricate oneself—rather like being stuck in a bramble bush.”) As always, our full Writers at Work interview series, which dates back to 1953, is freely available. This week, watch this space to get a sample of some of our favorite writing from the magazine’s past. We’ll start today with “The Paris Review Sketchbook,” an illuminating history of the magazine by George Plimpton and Norman Mailer from our seventy-ninth issue, published in 1981: Read More
November 28, 2016 On the Shelf The Boston Molasses Plot Thickens, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The aftermath of the Boston Molasses Disaster. In January 1919, a freak molasses accident claimed the lives of twenty-one people in Boston: a steel holding tank burst open, flooding the streets (and the nation’s nightmares) with 2.3 million gallons of treacle. Scientists have never really figured out why the spill was so deadly, but a team of researchers from the American Physical Society have an idea, writes Erin McCann: “By studying the effects of cold weather on molasses, the researchers determined that the disaster was more fatal in the winter than it would have been during a warmer season. The syrup moved quickly enough to cover several blocks within seconds and thickened into a harder goo as it cooled, slowing down the wave but also hindering rescue efforts … The cooler temperature of the outside air raised the viscosity of the molasses, essentially trapping people who had not been able to escape the wave. About half the people who were killed ‘died basically because they were stuck.’ ” Forrest Gander has translated some never-before-seen Neruda poems, and while he’s not ready to quote them, he’s willing to offer a few tantalizing descriptions, because that is his right: “There’s a love poem that turned my solar plexus into a cavern. There’s an ode to Neruda’s wife’s ear that depends upon a conceit that most Chileans today wouldn’t fathom, since few remember the 1940s vernacular for abalone: ‘little ears of the sea.’ There’s a poem in which Neruda recalls his arrival at the age of seventeen in Santiago. He’d come hoping to cut his teeth on big-city poetry, but when he stepped off the train, he walked into squadrons of mounted police swinging batons at protesters in a widespread violence organized by the ruling elite, the nitrate barons, in a period that came to be called the ‘White Terror.’ There are inclusive Whitmanesque paeans to working men and women, and there’s a hilarious tirade against the depredations of the telephone.” Read More
November 25, 2016 Bulletin Save 30 Percent on Our Favorite Classics By The Paris Review For the holidays, we’re offering 30 percent off the subscription to our monthly book club with New York Review Books, the imprint known for “rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works … by writers renowned and obscure” (the New York Times). Sign up and you’ll get a one-year subscription to The Paris Review plus one new book from NYRB Classics every month. That’s four issues of the best new fiction, poetry, and interviews, plus twelve books, bringing you the best new and rediscovered classics: a $260 value, for just $140. It makes a great gift, yes—but take it from us, these are books you’ll want to read yourself, too. Subscribe now and give yourself a year of great reading.
November 25, 2016 Our Correspondents Setting Boundaries By Amy Gentry Sleeping with the Enemy cozies right up to the hard truth that abusers are everywhere. A still from Sleeping with the Enemy. Every domestic thriller is the sequel to a romantic comedy. Romantic comedies reward impulsive, boundary-smashing gestures and unflagging perseverance; thrillers check in on the kinds of couples created by such careless disregard for personal space. With just a little tweaking, it’s easy to imagine Julia Roberts’s abusive millionaire husband in 1991’s Sleeping with the Enemy as the same character played by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman a year earlier, climbing toward Roberts up the fire escape, a bouquet of roses clenched in his teeth. Pretty Woman did for romantic comedies what Fatal Attraction did for domestic thrillers, and it made a star of Roberts; her way of, as Janet Maslin put it, “smiling shyly with every particle of her being” spun the most cynical meet-cute of the nineties into something as fresh and naive as a Downy ad. Sleeping with the Enemy, a grim and purposeful little film, positively warps around her radiant vulnerability. Directed by Joseph Ruben from a much flimsier script than his 1987 domestic horror film The Stepfather, Sleeping with the Enemy opens on Laura Burney (Roberts) and her aforementioned rich, violent husband Martin (Patrick Bergin) in their chilly modernist vacation home in Cape Cod. Laura fakes her death to escape his brutal beatings and coercive intimacy, starting a new life under an alias in small-town Iowa; Martin discovers the fraud and tracks her down to the inevitable confrontation. Read More
November 25, 2016 Arts & Culture The Eye of Baudelaire By Madison Mainwaring A new exhibition looks at the upheaval in the visual culture of Baudelaire’s Paris. François Biard, Four Hours at the Salon, 1847. In puritanical America, the intellectual tradition is in exile from the luxury of the senses: Americans hold steadfast to the idea that the right kind of knowledge comes from the Word of books. Harold Bloom’s omnipresent theory of the anxiety of influence would have you think that writers did nothing else but read the work of their forefathers in Oedipal distress, ignoring the sensual theater which makes a part of any lived life. In post-revolutionary Paris, where the optic regime underwent a series of explosive changes as the Romantics and post-Romantics pressed against all limits of language, to ignore the visual influence on literature is to misread it. Images flooded homes in books, keepsake albums, lithographs, small paintings, and photographs; they plastered the streets with, as Baudelaire described it, a “monstrous nausea of posters,” and crowded shop-windows and studios. They covered museums like doilies covered the bourgeois interior; they were in the dark rooms of stereoscopes, erotic printers, and panoramic theaters. It comes as no surprise that the theories of literature of the era made metaphoric use of mirrors (Stendhal), decals (Sand), and screens (Zola). At the Museum of Romantic Life, in Paris, curators have set about trying to capture this flurry of imagery. “The Eye of Baudelaire,” commemorating the 150th anniversary of his death, recreates the visual culture in which he was immersed with a collection of paintings, photographs, sketches, and frontispieces. The museum, a stone’s throw from Pigalle, occupies the house where George Sand lived, wrote, and wore her men’s clothes. The rooms, painted in rich, warm colors of burgundy and deep red, replicate the look of an old salon; the architecture, virtually untouched, requires that you cross the courtyard and climb several spiral staircases to enter. Read More