November 18, 2016 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Month By The Paris Review In place of our staff picks this week, we’ve asked five contributors from our Fall issue to write about what they’re reading. From Dispatches. Alexander Kluge, the German writer-philosopher-filmmaker, was in town last month, and his visit prompted me to pick up Dispatches from Moments of Calm, a collaboration with the artist Gerhard Richter. It’s a book of short stories, essays, and parables, each about the length of a newspaper article, many paired with photographs. Indeed, that was how they first appeared, in Die Welt on October 12, 2012, on a day when the editors traded their thirty pages of news for whatever Kluge and Richter would give them. The resulting dispatches are various. There is a story about a five-year-old boy who just misses striking his head on the pool ladder when he leaps into the water, just misses concussion, and drowning, and never knows it; a story about a couple that sets up their projectors outdoors, after the Lebanese Civil War has reduced their theater to rubble, and shows movies with sound tracks that mix with the sound of battle; a story about the Italian waiters who died on the Titanic and the fiancées they left behind in the Abruzzi, whom local custom forbids seeking husbands in an adjacent town. There are meditations on cities and photographs and species extinction and survival. When I read it, I didn’t foresee my present traumatic relation to the newspapers, and today is no moment of calm. But Kluge’s mosaic doesn’t feel like a refuge so much as a reminder of the real world, the whole real world, surprisingly connected to itself, as full of thought as of accident, all of it worth living in, and worth (though Kluge is patient and irenical) a fight. —Jeff Dolven (“The Art of Poetry No. 101: J. H. Prynne”) I’ve been reading Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil. The recent election is just the latest example of how our algorithm-driven media world—from faulty polling to fake news on social media—has become a threat to democracy. But O’Neil, a former hedge-fund quant turned Occupy activist, shows how pervasive and powerful and ultimately unaccountable misused data is across our lives. The book is not math heavy, but written in an exceedingly accessible, almost literary style; her fascinating case studies of WMDs—ranging from teacher evaluations to fast-food-staff scheduling to crime prediction to global-financial crises—fit neatly into the genre of dystopian literature. There’s a little Philip K. Dick, a little Orwell, a little Kafka in her portrait of powerful bureaucracies ceding control of the most intimate decisions of our lives to hyper-empowered computer models riddled with all of our unresolved, atavistic human biases. It’s a little terrifying to read her accounts of the human costs of Big Data improperly deployed—jobs lost, lives damaged, insurance denied, opportunities foreclosed—but also frightening to see how deeply our society has already invested in this pseudoscience, what she calls “digital phrenology.” Seemingly abstract and benign mathematical models might be the powerful tool ever for reifying and exacerbating existing structures of inequality—but there’s some power in knowing how to spot a WMD and defuse it before it explodes. And it turns out they’re everywhere. —Chris Jackson (“The Art of Poetry No. 100: Ishmael Reed”) Read More
November 18, 2016 On Music Gotham Lullaby By Adam Shatz Meredith Monk at the National Sawdust Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes Maybe it’s a post–11/9 condition, a porousness to emotion, but whatever it is (or isn’t), Meredith Monk, who performed last night at the National Sawdust Theatre in Williamsburg, spoke to me as no other performer has in a while. By the simplest of means: made-up words (from the Monkian lexicon) and a handful of minor chords at the piano. I guess this is what the critics mean when they talk about the “transfiguration of the commonplace.” She faced us at audience level, on a stage barely larger than a living room. “I think we’re all in need of lullabies now,” she said as she sat at the piano, and played her “Gotham Lullaby” from Dolmen Music: her cries, hesitations, and pauses nearly brought me to tears. I was not alone. Read More
November 18, 2016 Our Correspondents At Sea By Merritt Tierce On the defunct language of nautical flags. Willem van de Velde II, Sea Flight, mid-1800s–early 1900s, pen and brush and brown and gray ink, 7″ x 11 1/8″. There are forty flags in a complete set of international maritime signal flags—one for each letter of the English alphabet, one for each number, and four flags called substitutes, which perform special operations. The flags are a way of raising a meaning to the eye, at a binoculared distance, and while most vessels still carry a set on board, the flags themselves—unfurled, unraised—now mainly signify that we are seafaring in the time of radio and digital and satellite and do not need to communicate so slowly or primitively, via material squares of color. To a ship’s crew, I imagine they signify something like what a drop-down oxygen mask signifies to the commercial air traveler: if you think about it, all you realize is you don’t want to think either about the situation in which you’d have to use it or exactly how unable it would be to fully remedy that situation. The ships carry the flags in case they lose all other means of communication, but what set of circumstances could cause that kind of outage and also be cured by flying some flimsy flapping message? Read More
November 18, 2016 On the Shelf “Painting Like a Man,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Grace Hartigan, The Massacre, 1952, oil on canvas. © Estate of Grace Hartigan; collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Image via The Atlantic. I always like to talk about The Paris Review’s shadowy CIA past. True, it all happened well before I was born, let alone before I was employed here, but I feel it lends my personal story an air of roguish midcentury intrigue. But I should knock it off, because the fact is this: the CIA’s alliance with belles lettres was quietly despicable, a mark on the magazine’s history. Rob Spillman spoke to Joel Whitney, the author of the new book Finks, about the broader, soft-power implications of the CIA in the early Review’s aesthetics: “[Review editors] interviewed Europeans and Americans who they put in a belles lettrist context. They basically were politicizing the apoliticization of art. They made it seem apolitical, and did so very effectively … There’s a de-emphasis on historical truth. You see that across all the CIA aesthetics that they championed. Abstract expressionism was depoliticized against the backdrop of social realism. You have new criticism, which was almost rabidly not interested in historical or the post-colonial context. The Paris Review pretended they didn’t do politics … If it looks apolitical, that doesn’t necessarily make it so.” Looking to the same period, Sarah Boxer renews a sixties-era argument about women and art: “Women artists have been put down in many ways over the years, but the basic technique boils down to this: A critic, a curator, a dealer, or an art historian describes how women paint differently from men, then declares this quality inferior. Women are pegged as controlled, tentative, personal … Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss. It is no accident that ‘painting like a man’ used to be dished out as a supremely delicious compliment. Irving Sandler once asked Grace Hartigan ‘if a male artist ever told her she painted as well as a man.’ She replied tartly, ‘Not twice.’ ” Read More
November 17, 2016 From the Archive Zebras Anything By James Tate From a 1938 WPA poster for the Brookfield Zoo. James Tate’s poem “Zebras Anything” appeared in our Fall 1975 issue. Read More
November 17, 2016 Our Correspondents In Step By Wei Tchou Taking to the streets for New York City’s Trump protests. Photo: Dustin Kirkpatrick. On Sunday evening, after four days of involuntarily clenching so badly that my jaw had started to ache too much to fully open, I dosed myself with painkillers and melatonin and finally got a full night of sleep. No bad dreams, only blackness. New York City has hummed with tension since the election—most people I know feel as though we’re in a nightmare we can’t wake from. The best I’ve been able to do so far is start at square one every day when I get up: turn on the kettle, read the headlines, jot a sentence in my diary, and remember to take a jacket on my way out the door. The protests that have roared up Fifth Avenue frightened me when they began last Wednesday evening; the pictures I saw on Twitter and Instagram captured a version of a city too unwieldy for me to comprehend. I flipped through countless posts of protesters’ faces, indistinct except for their anger. Their crudely made signs were chilling in their simplicity: FUCK TRUMP. I appreciated my peers’ passion and readiness to action, but I was still too numb to be moved. What was the point? Trump won the election fairly. Weren’t we flouting President Obama’s call to “go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens”? Weren’t we behaving like the faceless mob we’d spent this entire campaign decrying? These, and many other questions, rattled me. So on Saturday morning, I did what I am inclined to do when I don’t understand something: I grabbed a notebook and headed for the crowds. Read More